Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kusturica, 1998)
The Suspended Step of the Stork (Theo Angelopoulos, 1991)
This October is going to somehow mark the twentieth wedding anniversary of Bronwyn and myself, though at this point we’re almost like two people who just met and aren’t sure they like the cut of the other’s jib. We got married a few days short of Halloween 2006 and there is no ambiguity around the fact that Bronwyn wanted a spooky wedding and an even spookier marriage. Well, she’s a plenty spooky character alright. Has ever been and so shall be. Twenty years later and I’m still asking myself: what in the hell have you gotten yourself into, bud? The twins, Anton and Dani, are going to be sixteen in short order and aside from bringing in the only paycheck around here I’ve also been commanded with teaching the kids to drive. I’m teaching them on a standard transmission so they’ll be as prepared as humanly possible for the capricious and dangerous roads of this fallen and blighted land. I learned on a stick shift because my father believed it would cause me to be ever-and-actively-attentive to the mechanics of operating a motor vehicle whenever I was actively operating a motor vehicle. Anton is doing pretty good with the stick shift but Dani routinely breaks out in tears and that’s something I’ve never had the knack for countermanding effectively. There, there, girl, I say, and she stares daggers at me. It is then that she most resembles her mother.
My life got cozier and more agreeable starting with 2020 and the COVID-19 protocols, but it also got sloppier and moribund. The city sent all of us home to work remotely. A third of the office—the busybodies and workaday cops I very much won’t mind never seeing again—were heartbroken to leave behind their knickknack-covered desks and officious persecution of congenial slackers the likes of myself. I couldn’t gather my shit and get out of there fast enough. I am fortunate to continue my well-compensated work for the municipal government from home, but back in 2020 it very quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to pull it off for terribly long if I didn’t cut out alcohol altogether. I realized I probably would have been drinking heavily at work the whole while if there hadn’t been people around observing me. Perhaps the workaday cops have their function after all. Luckily for everybody, Bronwyn upped her game and started drinking enough for the both of us. Since we were now very often in the house together for the entire day, things periodically got grisly. I normally walk on eggshells around her when she’s good and soused, but the twins have grown to despise her outright and do not feel compelled to hide it from her. Does that sometimes wound her? Ha! Nothing a drink won’t fix.
Though it is an old cliché it is also perfectly true that Bronwyn will with some regularity tell us all that she’s going out briefly under some flimsy pretext only to return days or weeks later, not even the least bit sheepish respective of her truancy and/or any worry she may have caused. In a way I have myself grown to be sanguine and even a little grateful for these protracted absences, brief spells when the house is calm and comparatively navigable. I tear through my workload with harmonious ease and sometimes literally kick up my feet on my desk, a mild indulgence Bronwyn would never countenance were she around to make note of it and sneer. A few days had passed—not that I’d counted them!—when my longtime partner in corkscrew misadventure came in last night and sat on the edge of the bed grumbling to herself long enough to indicate that she wished to exchange words with me. Alright, I said, I’ll bite. What happened this time? Evidently grateful for the accommodating prompt, she began to tell the story of the severe but friendly German woman from Cologne with whom she had spent the past few days and nights and who she had initially met in some sordid online forum. The woman from Cologne had a thick accent, wore stylish and professional-looking pantsuits, worked in corporate finance, and was into BDSM and role-play. Bronwyn said she’d found herself for the first time in her life got up in leather bondage gear and wielding a cat o' nine tails like she’d been at it since adolescence, which was fun at first but ultimately grew fatiguing and confusing. How many variations can there possibly be to this stuff? Just this very evening she and the woman from Cologne had taken a break from kink and Netflix to go get a bite to eat in a nearby tavern. No matter how sick from overindulgence in the hooch, Bronwyn has always had a unique capacity to wolf down bar food. Apparently, the woman from Cologne had been totally sober during all the sex shenanigans but got tipsy over dinner and became emotional, crying audibly enough that everybody in the tavern could hear her. What was evidently getting at her was the culpability of all German people in the genocidal horrors perpetrated by the crazed, eugenicist Nazis, for which she herself, having not even been born back then, felt no small amount of personal responsibly for whatever reason. She cried even louder then, admitting that she had never been able even once to look her grandparents in the eyes. Bronwyn excused herself from the table saying that she needed to make use of the facilities and then slipped out a side door, commencing to embark upon the long, inebriated trek homeward. Why are people such simpering losers? she asked, probably rhetorically, having recounted the story as coherently as she could manage. My God, I thought, what the fuck is wrong with this person? What am I even doing with my life?
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