Chessie Maring is also River Song (musicalwater) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-11-02 13:46:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | beast, river song |
Who: Daniel Webster and Chessie Maring
What: In which Daniel invades Chessie's apartment for coffee.
When: A week ago!
Where: Chessie's unfurnished apartment.
The building could have been used to it. It was after all very tall and very expensive - from the back of the first cab-ride from the airport, her palms flat against the glass of the window and the hum of the air-conditioning competing with the fuzzy radio, Cesca had come swiftly to the conclusion that everyone in Vegas lived stacked on top of one another. The more expensive a place was, the higher up you lived and the less it cared what you did with it. The building possibly was too sound-proofed to worry that one resident was shifting boxes at half past one on a Wednesday morning. On the other hand -- perhaps it did. Cesca did not. The rattle of the truck parked outside belied its size; it was small as was the person who dipped and ducked inside, toted boxes with a cheerful, almost ruthless efficiency of energy. It could not possibly have contained such requirements as beds, or couches, or televisions -- instead what was produced and sat on the edge of the side-walk was a motley collection. Low, impossible tables that would require sitting on the floor to be useful at all. A screen, heavily carved, box after box marked neatly 'books' and then further boxes marked 'fragile'. Fragile was underlined, several times over and three exclamation marks added. It was not the set of possessions one would expect of an individual moving in -- but nor was it likely that they moved in at the hour this one had chosen to. The apartment was high up -- high enough to be expensive, but not so much that it made a dent in the trust fund that trickled forever-onward like a forgotten tap. It was dark, and the key was tough in the lock, it rasped as it turned, like it was new. Chessie stood for a minute on the threshold, and she stepped neatly out of her shoes -- flat, moccasin-type things -- very deliberately, as though it were ritual, before she pushed the door inside. The apartment had the dampened silence of empty places, of expectations and sad, unfulfilled things. The only thing in the place was the piano - it had come a week before she had, and the boxes were set down with a soft 'thump' and the piano inspected - walked round - as Chess ran fingertips across its scars and counted them for new ones. Two subsequent trips and the tremendous number of boxes appeared to reduce itself significantly, sitting stacked in the bare, bare space of the empty apartment. There was a brief interchange with the guy who had driven the truck -- he placed a palm against the wall, Chess laughed - a low, rough-sweet kind of sound that was unapologetic for being laughter in the early morning and she handed him a roll of notes, snapped around with elastic. She stood and she looked at the boxes with her bare feet on the new and shiny floor but it was the piano lid that creaked and the ripple of notes was a liquid sound, hung soft and clear in the empty space like snow. Daniel didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. If asked, he would have said he didn’t give a fuck what people thought, but that wasn’t true. He felt better when the things people thought were the things he thought; he didn’t like the idea of people out there thinking beautiful things about him when he was not a beautiful man. He could not tell such people that he was a truly terrible man, ugly in deep, dark ways, and so he had to settle with thwarting their opinion of him in the ways that seemed to him best, usually the easy, well-known vices that came so easily to him. He was always drunk, always overpaying, always gambling, always escaping things that were his responsibility when he had so few responsibilities to begin with. He liked best writing on the little journal, where the only people who wrote back were ink on the page, and so (he thought) limited from his real influence in some way. He could then take part in their lives without risk, and it suited his best vice, that of selfishness. Daniel’s awareness of his own black self didn’t not include self-deprivation. He still indulged in the things that were sweetest in life: writing where people couldn’t see, high places where people couldn’t reach, heavy clay chips on felt and whiskey so brown it was red. Music was honey to Daniel’s soul. Writing could sometimes hurt, and loneliness was constant. The drink and the gambling just made it all bearable since he wasn’t dead, but music, ah, music, music was never pain, never hurt. It always embraced and beguiled him, and he never turned it away. His own apartment was so high up that at a certain level he had his own elevator, but he had stopped at this hall when he’d heard the trickling, unmistakable sounds of the Romantic on struck wire. Now he settled in the open doorway as if a fixture that belonged, the thin white shirt sans logo and ruched up to the round of one shoulder where he’d set it against the doorframe, stained bare feet crossed, soft jeans loose. If he’d been filthier he could have been homeless, but he was too clean in the lofty glass box in the sky, and his blue eyes, though bloodshot, too clear. He waited, and listened, breathing quiet through his nose and thinking nothing at all. The music did not lend itself to interruption. It was a piece she’d listened to for the first time in the gray and soft quiet of a night not quite fully dark, the ripple of voices and warm, knowing laughter from the rooms beyond silenced by the music itself. It was music that had, once, been very full of the scent of her mother’s hair as she’d held her hands to the keys, and the timbre of her voice -- but Chessie had played it many times, had played it in Germany and Italy, Egypt and Greece, enough times to empty it out of memories. But the music did not lend itself to interruption. It demanded completion, to cut the phrases short would be to make the music ugly, abrupt. She had begun because she could, because the piano sat in the empty room like a promise, but she carried on because she must. In Israel she had lived with people who wandered through one another’s home, who walked in and asked for tea and whose gossip was its own music. On sites, the dust had licked its way past the temporary doors and walls and she had shared water and food and (in the dead of night, when the temperature sank low and the warmth drained from the cracked earth) blankets with others. Space, walls, doors - these were constructs that occasionally could be respected but rarely were in favor of practicalities. With the music running over her like water, Cesca could quite easily ignore (if, indeed, notice at all) the man in the doorway. Doors were new, lately. She liked them flung open, like windows -- she liked air and wide spaces and the appeal of living in a glass box would be entirely the novelty of doing so. The last time Vegas had been a stopping point, it had been a college apartment, tucked in at the side of the campus, and the stove had refused to switch on even once. Eventually the piece slid onto silence. The room, the apartment was redolent with it, heavy. Silence crept into its bare corners and curled there. Chessie sat at the piano a long moment, and patted the lid as she closed it with the fondness of long-loved pets. When she stood, it was a complication of clambering over the stool, long legs in jeans so faded they were almost white, with the knees almost entirely broken through. She stood there in the dark with her bare feet on her new floor, and she looked at the stranger in the door without blinking. “Tea? Or sugar?” Daniel was used to the dark more than the light, curtains always drawn, windows always covered, chandeliers always dim. His face was paler and his eyes were the lighter for it, but no man who wanders around without bothering with shoes was going to complain about a lack of tan. So too was he used to quiet, and her voice surprised him even more than the sound of the piano, and it took him a moment to adjust at the change. Her voice was not harsh, almost in tune with the piano, and he approved of things that were shorter and frank, even if they shook him out of quieter, more comfortable places. He seemed to wake, turning a dark head with hair curly as a cherub’s from a faraway dream and blinking several times rapidly for the both of them. “Coffee,” he corrected. “No sugar.” Daniel’s voice was harsh from second-hand smoke piped away in expensive casinos, not deep or beguiling but pragmatic, even clipped. He was more pleasant in different languages, but in English, his native tongue, he seemed exceptionally dedicated to cutting things off before they began. Without asking permission, he moved into the room, sniffing at stale air recently turned over and eying boxes and things yet to be discovered, looking for books (the tools of his trade), more indications of music, perhaps signs of character. He did not yet look to her for these things. There were books and music in abundance in boxes, crammed and jostled in beside their companions. The books were thick and leatherbound, and spoke of far-off places and ancient things, or they were tattered paperbacks and spoke of everything else. Music was tucked in alongside, paper copies of memories Chessie had inside her head, and if there were coffee stains or the deep red dust that clung to everything it brushed over, it hardly mattered. She could play it without looking, memory skimming over gaps without breaking the delicate patterns music made. Much of the boxes were books, or they were the fragile things her favorite books talked about, wrapped in silk or heavy cloth that kept them protected as they traveled from wherever they were. The boxes stood, silent and closed, with no markings to tell them apart and tape to fasten them up. Cesca’s voice had the musicality of weaving in and out of languages better suited to pitch and tone, of notes as liquid as the piano, of someone used to speaking a great deal and to many people but now she did not speak at all. The darkness, tinged with stolen light from the street beyond and the great glass windows, clung to her outline as though it were a friend. Chessie liked the dark; night was an old companion. She did not mind the exploration, what might have been invasion. It was just space. It was not even hers, yet. “I think I have coffee.” Her opening of boxes was enthusiastic, a great tearing of tape. “It is possibly from France, French coffee is not the same. I might have filters, do you use a coffee filter?” Several boxes were opened, exposing their contents, newspaper tucked around them, like jewels. A tin, smallish and stamped with the name of a popular place in Paris, was eventually found after noisy rummaging. Chessie held it out, cheerfully to the man who looked as though night would be his preference, sleep, not coffee at all. Daniel was curious, but not so curious that he was willing to expend the effort and risk his coffee tearing into taped boxes. When the cardboard didn’t confidently give up any secrets, Daniel let soft blunt fingertips drag over the dusty cubes as he moved forward into the dim apartment with no fear. There could have been an angry husband lurking somewhere just out of sight, and he would have moved in exactly the same way: with privilege, without worry. He continued forward when she started opening boxes, not to help, just to watch. “With French coffee you use machines or a press,” Daniel said, watching her as he neared to see if she knew this, and then again at the boxes. He liked that there was little light; he noted that she didn’t trouble herself that much with what he looked like, nor had she asked why he was there. Daniel didn’t like questions about himself, even if he enjoyed evading them sometimes when he wasn’t hungover. When Daniel wasn’t hungover he was drunk, and even drunk few people who knew who they were talking to had managed to pry a true answer out of him. Chessie looked at the tin, woeful for a minute. It wrote itself into the lines of her face, into her eyes, across her mouth, weighted itself across her shoulders for a full minute. Emotion laid itself across her like spilled ink on paper, and she looked down and poked at the sides of the box as if it would give up a mystery or an answer in response to her prodding. “I don’t have one of those,” she said. She rolled the tin in her hands, ran a light fingertip over its embossed edges. She’d liked the coffee, the dark and earthy-pleasant flavor on her tongue and the tiny tassiete she’d been served with a napkin thick as a blanket. She’d liked how French bloomed and fluttered. Chess had bought the coffee like others might buy souvenirs, as if a little of the place would let them re-imagine it inside their own homes. “You know about it, though. You have one, yes?” She held out the tin again. “Keep it. I can’t make French coffee.” With the admission came a smile, not a question or a comment. If Chessie had noticed much of how he had walked inside, of how he neatly ignored the boundaries of American custom or courtesy, she didn’t say, she certainly wouldn’t care. She noticed, instead, how the tape of the boxes dented as he ran his fingers along it, how he didn’t pry them open but left them bound up. Daniel wasn’t a gentle or kind person, and if he’d really wanted what was in those boxes, he would not have had much care for her adhesive boundaries. He was more interested in the woman, and about equally, the music. He liked to think he owned no souvenirs, as when he had traveled in years past, it had not been on vacation, but with a month-at-a-time permanence that came from having no real home to return to. “Why do you have it, then?” He stepped forward to follow his own voice and take the tin, turning the label over on his palm, recognizing it, and then dropping his arm so it swung by his side. He didn’t ask about France, not yet, preferring to get her measure rather than betraying too much of his own interests. Drawing a little closer, but not so close that she could easily smell the whiskey on him, he glanced over to see what else he could make out in her box before retracing his steps in a rapid retreat in case she did something like put out a hand for him to shake. He didn’t see the signs of a gambler about her situation, and nothing about her suggested leisure without purpose. “What’s the desert got for you?” Chessie was not a hand-shaker. She was a woman who would step inside another’s space, smelling of desert dust and rosemary shampoo, of honey from her favorite baklava in the small, cramped places and tents of a dig, or the sharp scent of tequila in a bar. She was neither gentle nor especially kind - rather effusive and affectionate in the way of people who are used to creating affection rather than receiving it. She watched the tin spin inside the expanse of his hands, and watched his fingers rather than the man himself, his face. Hands told more stories, often, than faces did. His had none of the scars, the callouses and the weather-toughened skin of those who worked on excavations. They were not delicate, they touched because they could and without caution. She shrugged her shoulders. It was a large movement, and her thin camisole rippled. “Why do people have snow-globes?” The box -- this box -- was a muddle, like all the other boxes. This one was marked, like those that weren’t entirely books, as fragile. Almost nothing appeared to be. There was the requisite sheaf of black and white paper denoting some form of music, and a jar, sweet-smelling, that if handled, would make the slippery sound of oil within it. There was a jade Buddha, its silken covering slipping, and there was a painted, tiny wooden triptych, a Madonna so old she was almost rubbed away, as well as a statuette carefully muffled with newspaper. Chessie stepped around the box, and she looked at him as the little light from the street made gray outlines of them both. “Adventures,” she said, and she smiled as if it were a tease but she said it with the absolute finality of plain truth. Daniel had been a hand-shaker, but that was back when he had interest in meeting anyone, and now he was the kind of man that simply reacted, rather than pursuing. It was easier, and inherently less risk. When she stepped around the box, he mirrored the movement, shifting around her as if she had a cold that might catch. He was close enough to assess, and to see, but not so close that she could return the favor. If he’d been in the mood for a lover, it would have been different, but he wasn’t just then. He was feeling battered from the hotel’s Halloween treatment and the proverbial shouting match with Sam on the journals, and it all left him feeling far too vulnerable for his taste, even more than usual. He gave the woman a certain amount of cautious space, all the while making himself used to the place she was filling with her home. Daniel looked into her eyes with his keen blue ones, staring out past red-veined bars of his own making, and he said, “You won’t find them as pleasant as you think.” He glanced into the box once more. Antiques, real or treasured as real considering how well they were packed. Allowing his curiosity to show on his face, he eyed the smiling bald pate of the green Buddha without reaching to touch. Daniel had the soft hands of a man who did not know hard labor, and the swirling pads of his fingers were altered only by the thin edges of the cards and cut-glass tumblers. She did not dance the distance the way another woman might -- a woman interested in the lines the light might pick out or a woman interested in how his hands might feel instead of how they shaped things, touched things. She was neither of these things and had no need to be so she stood with bare feet on varnished floorboards and looked at him as candidly as if he had given permission. Or in fact, as if she needed no permission at all, which was likely truer. “Adventures don’t need to be pleasant,” and Chessie was scornful, the kind of reasoning and emotion poured into that reason that was the intensity an adult forgets in the step between childhood and its magic and adulthood, weighted down by adult things. “If they were pleasant, there would be no danger to them.” He had blue eyes, this was noticed, noted. The way of things that might be recorded in a notebook as fact, or handled with the infinite care of one who might need to make repairs later. Eyes, blue. “Do you like it?” She’d followed the line of that reddened gaze. She knelt, unfolded the paper with soft fingers, the delicacy of a touch suited to old things, to care. The buddha sat amidst its newspaper petals, like a pearl at the center of an oyster. She looked at it with scrutiny. He was honestly surprised at her answer. Everyone preferred pleasant adventures to unpleasant ones, in his experience, and the manner in which she had accepted his bare-footed presence into her home suggested that she hadn’t had many of the most truly unpleasant experiences. He liked that about her, that easy assumption that nothing really terrible had happened to her, and he liked to think that nothing terrible really would. It was Vegas, though, and you never knew with these things. He always forgot not to get too attached. “I wouldn’t be too fond of danger. You like it until you’re dead.” A split-second pause. “So I hear.” His voice had warmed a little, not quite so distant as before, and he did not repeat his retreat pattern when she bent down into the box in acknowledgment of his interest. He didn’t pretend indifference, either. He let the warmth leftover from the whiskey settle in the pit of his stomach, comfortable, and then he shifted forward onto the flat of his feet. Reluctantly he said of the Buddha, “He looks happy.” Danger had never been a truly present part of any of her adventures, not the real and rough danger that swam across the senses and choked you with itself. Unpleasantness, yes. Enough to draw in a short, sharp breath and wonder what came next, but sunshine before too long. Chessie said nothing of adventure, dangerous or otherwise, all fingers sliding over the cool stone of the Buddha, prying him free from paper. Adventure could be anything at all, from the nights roaming Alexandria by herself with nothing but the dark for company, or a plane ticket with no return destination listed at all. He did not look as though he were overly concerned with adventure, or at least, not the kinds that interested her. The sharp tang of alcohol drifted across the narrower distance, but she said nothing of that either. She laughed instead and it was a strong, bold sound. She had a low voice, but her laugh was not, it was generous and it was inviting and it was the sound of someone who did not mind being looked at for it. "Do many people come back to explain how they've given up their fondness?" She was gentle with the jade figurine, as though it were old and precious (which it was) but also the gentleness borne of fondness. It was something in the way she looked at it, the way it was cradled within her hands as she drew it from its coverings. "He is. It represents contentment, happiness. In India, their Buddha is prayer, serenity. The artist is supposed to pray, to be able to picture the perfect Buddha as he makes it. But this, he is a Budai, poor but content. Happy." It was a lot of talking, when neither of them had spoken much at all. Chessie said softly, "I think I prefer happy to serene." She looked at him, quite directly, and she held it out as though the statue were nothing more than a tin of coffee. He liked her laughter, as it spoke to him of easier times, but he could not join it. He waited until it passed, and then he said, “No, that’s what the people still living say once you’re dead. No one looks forward to being dead.” The last sentence had a certain bleak certainty to it, an unspoken irony that was as gray as fog on a dark evening. He smiled for the first time, and unpleasant curve of his mouth that used no humor nor revealed the soft pink of his lips. This time when something was offered, he did not step forward. On the contrary, he did just the opposite, rocking backward on his dust-stained bare heels and hastily moving out of range. He didn’t spook like an animal, as it was a deliberate motion even as it was without grace, but he made it quite clear he didn’t want to touch the jade. “I don’t need anything like that,” he said, with more aggression than necessary, the volume of his voice unused to extended personal conversation. As if to cut off any further attempts at connection, Daniel gave himself a shake, thin form and soft skin under weak cotton, and turned away. He waved the coffee tin gently back and forth so it glowed silver in the light from the hallway, the back of his neck and thick curls all there was to see as he shuffled the way he had come. “Thanks for the drink.” He did not smile as others did but as though he could think of nothing worse. It was not a pallid, limp and forced kind of thing and for that, Chessie liked it but it was sharp and it was cold and she looked at him as though she might make a study out of the smile. But instead, there was the jarring movement, the voice that raised itself above the nothing that sank, soft and dark around the apartment. “All right,” Chessie was about to say, amenably -- there was no need to give it, no need to keep it, it was just a statue, but the man moved toward the door, the half light painting his outlines the way it had before. She did not move toward him, she said nothing at all as others might. She smiled - silver-bright in the dark - and she bent beside the boxes, her interest shifting like sand from one thing to the next, and the visitor apparently dismissed. |