Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
Only as they were trudging up more concrete steps did it occur to him that he
should have asked her if she wanted to do something different. And yet when he
looked at her smile that was so radiant from being linked to art and linking it
to them he could tell that she would never find art museums boring let alone
cloying the soul. He was the deferential gentleman, and his inveterately shy
son tolerated the museums with little fidgetiness.
After they were inside for an hour she began to lean on him the way he liked
women to do even though he had not let them do it for many years. But he
detested how she was dressed. Like at the park, she was still wearing
sunglasses and a hat that coaxed upon itself and draped down as if it had been
thrown into the wash too many times. She would pull the glasses down to the tip
of her nose when they came to a work of art, talk about it and what she knew
about the artist (if anything), and then move them up her nose. He did not
understand this flagrant violation of femininity. It was as if she wanted to be
as inconspicuous and stealth as a bag lady for fear of being mistaken for
Michelangelo. He had avoided the subject in the taxi under the belief that she
would remove them once they were in the building.
"What is all this?" he at last asked as he pulled on the brim of her hat.
"Oh," she interjected and acquiesced wordlessly as she smoothed out her hair.
He was pleased. She was transforming from a sallow and destitute street person
back to an image more suited to be loved. Within the machinations of
self-centered man, each saw the other as an "opportunity" and each one
contemplated and re-contemplated what that opportunity was in vain.
He wanted to move about and change visual images as if he were in front of the
television with his remote control, but she wanted to stare for a few moments
at these portals into the entity.
When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these
feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark
labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own
obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet. For he was already
becoming a bit of an extension of her own little life and a medium for more
intense pleasures that she could not reach alone, and so she put on glasses
that he disapproved of so that she would not lose herself to him even in the
most miniscule way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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