Subaru Soliloquies

Short Fiction

Welcome back to Bluezone,

Aside from my usual essays on artistic pursuit, expect to find some works of short fiction like the one below. I hope it stimulates your own creative curiosity.

Subaru Soliloquies

Where she’s supposed to be is some big country home in the Hidden Hills with flower arrangements and fancy art decor all over the place. This is Lora Lainey’s big moment. Lora is sitting right in front of me in my office, waxing poetic about what it all means to her, telling me what she wants her house to look like, and looking right through me, like I’m invisible, like we didn’t spend a decade of our life together.

I used to sleep in my car for Lora. I can’t tell her that, but those are the words that cascade in my skull like screams as she sits in front of me. Her eyes keep darting across my office as if to look anywhere but at me. I can’t figure out if she doesn’t recognise me or if it’s too painful to admit that she does. 

It’s all come down to this, her whole career has led to this moment where she can design her own home from scratch, on some barren plot of land where no plants grow and the wind hollows through. This is what I gather between the whistling elocution of her words. She has a gap tooth that used to make me laugh in the pool, she would come up to me as if to whisper in my ear and then spurt water in my face through the gap between her teeth. Then one day that gap was in vogue and she got swooped up by a modelling agency. When that happened she stopped spurting water at me and became high chinned and absent-minded. My point is, unless time is thinning and the photographer is yelling, ‘Give me glamour’ and then the flash of the strobe, she doesn’t know what to do. 

Give me lust.

Flash.

Give me blurry-eyed tragedy. 

Flash.

Give me compartmentalised anguish. 

Flash.

You get the point. When I used to think of Lora, I always thought of her in the water. I’d watch her across the pool during practice, eyes trailing along with the shuttering blur of her body streamlining beneath the surface, and we would lock eyes sometimes when she’d pause for a rest, and she’d smile at me. And even though it was freezing inside that pool, the way she looked at me always warmed me up.

“Can I smoke in here?” She asks and I wave a hand for approval, watching the way the stick sits between her lips as it burns. So I’m sitting here eating smoke and she asks me about the house, if it’s designed yet and how long it’ll take. I can’t tell you how bad I want to let her know that it’s me, that I’m me, but I can’t bring myself to and too much time has passed, so I pretend I don’t recognise her either even though I’m only playing myself. I show her the designs, trail my fingers across the blueprint and wonder if she recognises my hand, a man’s hands are very recognisable— but she keeps smoking and nodding and I wonder what deadbeat projector is lit up behind those eyes. 

When I met Lora Lainey I didn’t have much going for me. In fact, she may have been the only good thing in my life, and she didn’t even know it. I remembered Lora because she’d been my first friend, the first person who had no reason to care for me, like family did, but cared anyway. And even though she’d been popular and desirable and loved by many, she still made time to show me love. I’m not saying she loved me, she kissed a guy in front of me once like it was nothing and asked me about it walking home that night. I had to pretend to be excited for her even though there was a knife in my heart and I was haemorrhaging. I learnt to lie under the spell of her eyes which glittered even after sunset, like white light on black ice. So even though she didn’t love me, I couldn’t risk her losing interest in me, because even though it was never enough, it was something.

“I love the shape of the pool,” she says, and now I know for sure that she doesn’t recognise me. I don’t blame her. My face looks different, spectacles frame my eyes and a scraggly beard buries my cheeks. “Wait till you see it in person,” I say. 

She smiles and excuses herself for a call, probably her agent, and I watch her pacing in the hallway through the window. She still walks the same way she used to, with big, indulgent steps and a slight flick of the hips, as if she’s skating on the world’s catwalk. Twenty years ago, I saw her for the last time in the rear window of my mother’s Subaru, her one cheek dimpling and her sad eyes watering. I could’ve stopped the boys who cornered her in a cluster after school the week prior, I could’ve honked the horn or slammed into them as they thrashed her bag and cut up her skirt, but I didn’t. She’d home-wrecked a teen relationship and now it was revenge. Neck still sore from laying in my car waiting for her to appear the night before, tainted with rage, consumed with anger, I could’ve stopped those boys from traumatising a young girl but I only watched on, the worst thing I ever did. 

I used to scrunch up my face to look tough, and the result was this kind of constipated look, one which would make the girls rush passed me and the boys point at me. I could only relax when I had a pencil in my hand, the hexagonal shape calmed my psyche, I could lose myself in graphite scratching, in curves and shades, in chiaroscuro. Lora encouraged me and now she was here in my architectural office and I couldn’t do anything to open my mouth to hers with anything… real. 

The problem with lying is that to be good at it you have to kid yourself. The pros hardly ever keep their grip on reality, and because I wasn’t good at it, not even half-good at it, I found myself shaking at the breeches, as if my conscience was trying to iron itself out. I faltered for a while, and the next thing I knew I woke up from my daydream some months later, at the edge of her newly crafted Californian dream home, the click-clack of Lora Lainey’s heels puckering my eardrums. I looked up as the sound stopped. She’d sat by the edge of the pool, heels discarded on the grass, legs flailing in the fake-blue water, this long look on her face. 

“Are you okay?” I said, and she smiled a sad smile and said, “I don’t know. You tell yourself this story that where you’re supposed to be is some big country home in the Hidden Hills. That you could walk into any room, and that everyone should turn to look at you. What you really want is the next thing, the attention, the distraction, the stimulation. I don’t need that anymore, I don’t even need this house. What I need is a new story, something for myself, only for myself.”

She might’ve said that if I ever managed to connect with her. Instead, I thanked her for her business, shook her hand and watched as she cocked her head sideways through the cigarette smoke, her eyes clouded with something nameless, not saying a word, not saying a damn thing. 

I stepped into my car, my own Subaru, and I watched the house and her in it get smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror. I kept looking in that mirror for much too long, trying to hold back the barrage of tears that stung my eyes, watching the regret of my life flicker away until that too dissolved out of view, until the hum of the car was the only thing left.  

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Steve McQueen in his Jaguar XKSS

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