marjorie smith

the day before marjorie smith died, her son had come to my Midtown apartment to talk about the nature of our flagging business. a pearly white face, long slender stature, tinted blue eyes and disheveled, dark brown hair, jonathan was my enemy in middle school, a rival in high school, a competitor in college and now, a business ally. it is incredibly funny to me how time and circumstance mold the nature of my untrue relationships; catered to, tailor-made, and characteristically assimilated to make a situation functional.

we own a sex shop at the corner of 19th Street, in the west side of Chelsea. it is called Lollie's Erotica and caters primarily to homosexual men. a 25 feet by 30 feet space with high ceilings in a pre-war enclave, the lack of hot water, anonymity and soap have been pressing issues for the past 14 months. there are always a few female customers, an estimated 7.5 per week, who come to our store; disappointed, dejected and frustrated with the dysfunctional nature of their sex lives. they introduce themselves as straight, jacketed and married or in a relationship. i do not have much in me to offer. and neither does jonathan. so they wait in the dingy, dark back room and spend fourteen dollars watching peep shows, leather sex, and live bondage and wait for hours, while texting, for a hetero- or a homo-sexual man to make them moan. in a public booth. so they can go back home, satisfied for the next few days. 

it usually does not work to their advantage, despite my praying for their sexual satisfaction and my aggressive business. lust is a serious, serious craving, i realize, and i sympathize with the addictive gratification of the 43 year old mother of three who comes in every Wednesday and leaves my shop with a wink and a suppressed half-smile. i feel disquieted, sometimes; marginally shady, embarrassed and out-of-place to give advice to a sex-hungry widow. but this is my business, and i am stern. i have learned to align my emotions, over the years, and treat every activity of the world around me as normal, plausible and acceptable. i never believed in conventions growing up, and that definitely worked to my benefit at the thought of dissolving my sense of morality. everything is moral is my motto, as long as no one is hurt. i realize that there are several obvious loopholes in this line of illogical thinking, but I'd suggest that you went with the flow. It makes life easier; for your sake and mine. it makes living more bearable, more fashionable and less concerning. 

the most difficult part of this years' autumn fallibility, perhaps, is that marjorie smith bled to death while listening to Harry Belafonte, wearing a pepper tweed dress, a charcoal Fedora and turquoise Yurman bangles. i read about it on the web link of the Chicago Tribune on a windy Saturday afternoon, uneasy from a massive hangover. an aluminum fist mold had been planted in her vagina. a foot-long dildo with incredible girth stitched to her anus and a leather dog muzzle strapped across her face. the muzzle pegs were painted bright orange, apparently, to signify her support for the No Kid Hungry campaign. and her breast tattoo was a figure-of-8. and her rainbow colored pigtail was completely undone, combed and gelled into the shape of a broken conical flask. a note, nailed to the north west post of her cherry wood bed frame at her private home in Glenview, IL., read i am a human ashtray. jonathan had never mentioned to me that his mother had developed smoking fetishism while in the military, serving abroad, which manifested in her consuming a clump of ash every night. the sensation of a sizzling esophagus, curling and charring in a span of hours, burrowing through the solidarity of defenseless epithelia and the numbness thereafter, was the advent of her asinine addiction. how this ever happened, and why, i do not know and possibly never will. 

i had seen marjorie at my store, twice, coordinated with times when jonathan was away, the year before her unusual death. she came up to me once and said in a frilly, shrill intonation; you know, thomas, sex is easy, but being held is hard. i smiled, without purpose, to keep her going. i meant business. and when you reach my age, and you've had a lot of sex, you feel lonely and used and unsettled to a point where you give in to whatever comes your way. but you're young at 46 and i am sure you could find love somewhere, i told her, almost impulsively. that is no consolation, i realize. when everyone around you says that you will be fine, that you will find love, a lover and 'settle down', the bar has been raised. they formulate a happiness for you, they are confident without any basis. that is what you are supposed to say to make someone happy, to be generous, to sound kind. what if, then, there is an unfair juxtaposition of desire, pressure and outcome from the 'well-wishers'? what if you couldn't live up to their narratives of optimism? what if you never knew the kind of love you wanted? what if your ideal life was a little different, a little violent? how would you explain? how would you find your niche in the world of ideologies to satisfy a crowd, to explain to yourself the origins of your immutable desires? 

she sighed and walked away that restless evening. i saw her unhappiness slip through my eyes, burrow her heart and nuzzle with her mind. and i didn't say anything, do anything or hear anything. it was just another business.