Talmadge Fowler had a name that in turn had a history, though he concealed it as if it were a thing of value, when in fact it was determinedly without value but for its concealment, the equivalent of paste gems hidden in an office safe, mentioned now and again with rapid lightness but never described in any detail and certainly never brought to light, which is why it was so surprising that he woke early that morning, turned to look at the woman on his left, sleeping deeply across the large mattress and the expensive sheets, and resolved to come clean with her: how he had been born to modest means in a crooked house in a run-down corner of the state’s second-largest city, had excelled at school but felt with each passing year none of the movement upward that had been promised by the proponents of education, instead bowing under the weight of what he was certain was thickening irrelevance, all these verifiable facts and unverifiable theories, no melody to it, no rhythm, to the point where his own achievement came to feel like nothing so much as failure, how he had found a shred of victory in a succession of women and then a whole tapestry of meaning in one, how he had encountered her on a staircase at a party, he going down, she coming up, but felt once again that the directions were a fundamental misrepresentation of the truth, for it was he who was going up, propelled by his rapid and terrifying apprehension of her beauty, which he understood more fully than he had understood any subject in any stage of school, in part because he saw what it did for anything that contacted it, himself included, how he had stopped there on the stairs, mouth dry, voice a croak, barely able to form a word, and made his case to her, been stared upon with eyes that enlarged him, there on the stairs, later at the party, and for months following, months that he did not account as part of his life because they were so far superior to it, that in fact reduced the time around them, months that ended when, one morning, she had not stared at him but in fact looked away from him, erasing him, and how in the wake of that he had renounced everything that had occurred in his life up until that very moment, invented his new name, his new history, founded the Fowler Agency, began to collect, appraise, and resell artifacts that stood as proof of the glory of this society of that one, acquired wealth and a new vantage, a type of bridge over the world’s gains and losses that he felt certain would remain intact even if the wealth beneath it began to drain away, found himself once again in the company of a series of women who were so similar and were replaced each by the next so quickly that it felt as if he was living in a motion picture, bought a rich man’s house that had been bruised and defaced by time, relaxed into the legitimacy it afforded him, and then met a new woman who placed him not at the same elevation as the who had stared at him but who at least suggested that he could once again find himself at the foothills, who could not restore him but who began to draw him again surely as the other had erased him, a few strokes that indicated the possibility of hope, and from the moment he woke that morning after the night she stayed with him in his rich man’s house, in his expanse of a bed, from the moment the first shadows of the morning slid across it, slid across her and the sheet that covered her, as they negotiated flats and furrows, ridges and rises, turned these indentations and protruberances into a kind of music, he moved nervously to her side of the room, to a spot where he thought he might be best and most clearly heard, and he began to come to terms with the fact that the next words he spoke would be his real name.
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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