ECHOSIS

ECHOSIS - Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The coffee shop resonated with the cacophonous stirring of cups.


The orchestrated sips of black, dark, and weak java played out to the accompaniment of spoons, sugar sticks and lemon twists. Then...



"What if..." she said.



"You're asking me?" I blurted out, bumping the table and spilling my meal for the day. "Son of a..." I jumped back.

"Can I buy you another cup?" she asked in her usual analytical tone.

"No. Think I'll just stay on the ‘fast' I've grown accustomed to for the past few months."

She smiled confidently and sipped her own cappuccino. "Whatever works for you, Derek."

As I spread the Times classified section across the marble slab table and let the double espresso soak through, I avoided the eye contact she used so persuasively. That, together with her trim body topping out at five-foot-seven, made it almost impossible to win any debate, at least for this man, especially when she chose to focus her green eyes on my mouth. It wasn't as if I was in a seductive mood at the moment.

"At least leave me with some sense of identity. Ok?" I muttered.

She nodded and leaned on her elbows studying the dark brown Rorschach design seeping through the Lexus ad proclaiming the 2005 models "unrivaled. "After all this time, I don't think I've ever seen you so relaxed," she said.

"You're asking me again the same worn out stupid question that is so fucking rhetorical it's off the scale."

"Derek," she whispered, "your body may be tense, your words may be bitter, your language may be gutter-prone, but I don't believe it."

"Don't believe what?" I asked.

"That you are not the same blissful, relaxed man that arrived back from the Far East a week ago," she whispered once again, eyeing my six foot frame that she thought could use some extra meat and potatoes.

"Why must you whisper all the time," I asked her.

"It makes you listen, Derek. Makes you listen to the questions."

I stood up and motioned for the waitress. "Could I have a double espresso to go?"

"Double E coming at ya," the little waif of a blond shot back at me.

"I'm going now, Samara."

She sat motionless.

"Going. Do you hear me?"

Samara continued turning her head left and right gazing at the coffee stains. "I'll be finished with this little study before your take-out arrives."

"No, you don't understand. Going. Leaving here and you."

"Oh, is it that late already?" She looked at her watch and shook her head. "Nope... sure isn't. You must still be on Asia time, Derek."

I sat down, took a deep breath and leaned across the table. "If I answer the question, will you just let me leave without planting more guilt? OK?

"Not intended to stir guilt. I'm not that way."

I turned on my chair. God, could I get through this? Right now, at this very moment I wanted to just lose it. "Why are you all the same?"

"You mean the gender or the profession?" she quipped back.

"Both, all... OK. Here's the answer. The answer is as it's always been, as you've always known it for... Christ's sake, how long has it been... two years?"

"Two years? You mean our relationship?"

"I've not accepted it as a relationship yet, OK? You screw around with my head and..."

"At your request," she interrupted.

"...at my request, and I tell you what you want to hear, and we see each other every Tuesday night at this funky coffee house, and you always manage to get me pissed. That's a relationship?"

"Oh, Derek. The best. You pay me to get you upset, just like in a marriage."

"Husbands never pay their wives, for Christ's sake," I shot back.

"Oh... in more ways that one, darling."

"OK. OK. This is going nowhere."

"Right. You were going to give me the answer."

"Jesus. The answer. OK. I'm scared, Doctor. I'm fearful, and I'm lonely, Doctor. I'm a basket case, OK?"

"You forgot ‘I'm horny'."

"Shit," I said, "that's a given." I leaned forward as a young black house-painter tried to navigate the tables, carrying two empty five gallon cans in one hand and lugging a full can in the other.

"Excuse me," said the painter.

"It's important you say it," said Samara as she glanced at the painter. "You'd think he could go out the back way, wouldn't you?"

The painter continued toward the front, "Excuse me... sorry... thanks, oops... sorry." As he arrived at the entrance, he was met by the manager whose body and hand gestures left little for the imagination.

Derek leaned forward in an effort to get Samara's attention away from the disturbing painter. "I'm horny."

As she brought her eyes back to the table, "And what else, Derek?"

I didn't like this part. I didn't like it at all, but like a Twelve Step program, I had to admit certain things. "I'm not a normal person," I blurted out, turning the heads of several Village types, one giving me a thumbs-up.

Samara stood up just as the little blond waif handed me my coffee. The waitress surreptitiously leaned in. "Mr. Turrel, this is not the place to be so vocal, you know?"

"But it's OK to parade house-painters through while we're having coffee?"

"What? Oh, sorry. He's just working on the storeroom. Don't worry, my manager took care of it."

I reached in my pocket, threw a twenty on the table, and stood up, my eyes never leaving Samara's. "Patty, how long have you been serving me and Dr. Jennings, huh?"

Patty stuck the twenty in her pocket. "Long enough to know that your tips pay my rent every month. Five-forty for the coffee." She slipped the check under my hand with the pen. I signed my usual swoop and spear. "So, Samara, you want to do it, or not?"

Samara shared ever so slight a grin and hoisted her handbag onto her shoulder, leading the way to the front door. I followed, as usual.

This was always our foreplay. A little crazy, I know. But, it worked for us. Truth be told, neither of us were "normal." Oh, the romantic in me always stopped for a yellow rose for these Tuesday nights. Samara appreciated the gesture, but wouldn't let me buy her red roses. Don't know why. A quirk of hers.

That's how my Tuesdays always started. I still like sleeping all day. Somehow, it's easier that way. The setting sun was my usual wake up time and Wednesday through Monday was my usual dreaded work week. Tuesday charged me. No, it wasn't the sex. And it sure as hell wasn't the therapy. It was a sense of recklessness, that feeling that I could break all the rules and still make it through the night.

The rest of the week was grind, grind and more grind. I hated the market, but I knew it well. I was extra lucky. My losses never caught up with my gains and I carried on "making a living" in the midst of my real passion with the dust and noise of my jackhammer and welding torch, a passion that was finally paying well, but not that well, compared to the market. I wondered many times what I'd do without the earplug, the clip-on PDA, and the glasses that let me weld and watch the MSN ticker tape screen in the corner of the lens at the same time. Next to Samara, electronics were the next best turn-on I had.

As usual, we didn't talk as we walked the short distance to the loft. Soho was just waking up at ten. Junkies, lookiloos, celebs, and wannabes cluttered the sidewalks like overgrown vegetation that needed pruning. Didn't matter that pockets were being picked, drug deals were going down, cops were cruising on bicycles shootin' the shit about the Mets or the Yankee games. Didn't matter. People just went their own way and paid no mind-just like Samara and me.



I leaned over and pulled the sheet up over her alabaster skin. I got off on just seeing the black sheet contrasting her color, especially when she'd fall into a deep sleep after making love. It was always me that lay awake, staring up at the seven hundred pound marble and iron mobile that hung from the twenty-two foot ceiling. The strange looking art piece I'd playfully named, "Family," had been a present to myself during the lean years when there was no one, either to buy my work or to sleep with. I flashed on the years earlier when I'd turned down ten thousand for it and a permanent spot at MOCA, in LA. That act of "craziness," as my agent had called it, left him speechless and me hungry for a bit longer. But, when it's your first-born, it's hard to give it up.

I glanced about the studio at the hanging plastic tents that surrounded the ladders, scaffolding and heavy stones barely removed from their mother's womb at the quarry. I still felt alone. Even with the pieces I placed about the floor like children of sorts, even-my eyes drifted back to Samara-even my lady, of sorts, couldn't remove the feeling of aloneness. But, that's how I wanted it. At least that's what Samara said to me on the last day I was formally a patient and the first day I formally became her lover. "You want to be alone, Derek. Just accept it. It's just part of your abnormality"

I never forgot her gesture that day. She pointed to my head and said, "One day your conscience will agree with your demanding friend inside there."

Oh, she tried to get me to continue with the therapy, but something rang true in her comment, and I opted to work on her suggestion. As had been the case so many times in my life, if I didn't work on a purpose, along, I was, well, not happy. As her purpose, professionally, was to help make me happy, one day I suggested we graduate to a new level in this happiness quest. She resisted, saying "I don't think it wise to change roles." But, I was insistent and... well, here we are. That's how we've been relating ever since, Samara and me. Now she provides the mental challenge of an intelligent woman, mixes in with a safe amount of "psychologist " game, and I remain right where I wish to stay-alone. She still loves playing the doctor role I've been paying her normal fee to carry out. That was the arrangement. I'd pay the money, and in exchange, she would give me the therapist thing, the mothering thing, the lover thing, and the artist's companion thing. At least, that's how it started.

I turned over and watched her slow breathing. Her calm face showed the occasional twitch, subtle smile, and raising of the eyebrows, all the usual sure signs she was in the final minutes before awakening. After all these months, I was beginning to think she loved our arrangement almost as much as she loved composing, which is what I suspected she did in her sleep, given the tight schedule of patients she had every day. But, however she made the time, she got everything done, including the finishing of her Third Symphony. As she started to awaken, I thought of Tanglewood next summer, the season her symphony would premier, and how it might effect our Tuesdays as the summer drew near. Fortunately for me, that was a few months away.

Suddenly, she turned and backed her body into me, her usual wake up routine. Then came the little whimpers, like now, until I put my arms around her-like now. These early morning habits usually exposed my back to the "elements," as she had labeled them. I never shared this part of my aloneness with her, though. Don't know why. I just never did. I always try to keep my mind calm, focused and loving, but this backside of mine, what's behind me now, you know, this is when I feel cold, really cold. Strange how no matter whether it's summer or winter, the "elements" grip my shoulders, like a cornice atop a mountain, and sometimes, just sometimes, buffet them with a curling, blowing.... I'm going off, again. Of course there are no winds. Of course. The air in the loft is always calm. I'm not crazy, you know. It's only in my mind, these howling winds, winds that Samara is still working on. Sometimes, she senses something is bothering me that professional experience can't calm. Those times, she addresses me with care and understanding, with mothering, with sex, whatever she feels will appropriately soothe me. I wonder many times if this isn't love.

I like the mornings-sometimes. She holds me to her breast like a mother; does her magic like a lover, and even subtly rocks me sometimes like I remember my grandmother doing. But then...

This morning was like many others. She stopped her little whimpers, suddenly. Now there was only the thirty to thirty-five breaths per minute she always took just before awakening. Soon, I would be in the arms of... what? I still didn't have a word for. Goddess? I'd be taken care of, gently held, and being asked the usual Wednesday morning question, the question that kept me awake all night Tuesdays anticipating, the words that always screamed at me, even though they were delivered in her usual whispered confidence. And, as usual, I could only stare at the ceiling with the dry throat that always followed on hearing the question once again, the question that was progressively becoming a demand.



"When are you going to do it, Derek?"