Rock & Roll Suicide

The dishes were drowning in the sink, surrounded by water Robert could easily describe as fetid. He’d never before found a reason to use fetid in his own day-to-day life, and the discovery pleased him despite the situation. It was probably the green beans in one of the sunken bowls. Rice developed that hot, sour smell of decay, and chicken had a musty quality to it. Vegetable matter, on the other hand, could really rot.

He gagged more than once as he attempted to wash them. Angelica would tell him he did them wrong later, but he’d win that argument. She was the one who was supposed to do them. His girlfriend was out at the moment, trying to swindle rent money out of their neighbors. They were always short come the first, because all of the money they earned went to buying studio time and paintings. She was always telling him the names of the painters.

They too had a certain fetid quality.

He had practice later on in the evening, too, and still hadn’t gotten that one chord progression right. Jake would kill him for sure, he’d promised to have it done. Humming it didn’t work, he needed a seat under his ass and some keys under his fingers—his knee shoved hard up under the piano in a stolen moment. He could really make it wail.

Angelica would sit in the other room like she didn’t know what was going on. It was when he did the dishes—her dishes—that her eyes accused him from the cute little teddy-bear soap dispenser she’d bought. Accused him, called him on his afternoons of making sweet music. Of writing love-songs. She knew of course. All women did. She tolerated it because what he was doing was in the pursuit of something better, for both of them.

Angelica Buckley, that was her name. She wanted glitz. She wanted to wear slinky white satin dresses, bodices made of sequins that flashed like diamonds. Her shock of white, curly hair teased into a halo around her head—the roots a custard yellow, showing just barely. Her name in lights, and in magazines. Robert Williams could get that for her, they both knew. Even if Jake ever really killed him—which he would never do, Robert wrote the goddamn music—she’d get what she wanted.

Robert’s hands stilled, and he stared as he forgot what he was doing. His eyes were green and hers were that weird American gray. He liked to think that his eyes were the windows to his soul. Remembering himself, he glanced down at the water—really, if Angelica had let these go one more day they’d be demanding voting rights—he couldn’t see their color. Maybe it was because their kitchen was green, an old, old green only found in the pre-’78 places. Maybe it was because of the damn beans.

The door slammed behind him, but he didn’t turn. Instead he picked up a plate from where he’d let it slither back to the bottom of the sentient sink. Her keys chimed against one another as she wobbled on one foot, tugging a clinging heel off while she balanced on the soft, dingy carpet. The keys went silent for a split second while she cursed, and before she had time to put the hard kuh to her word they landed on the carpet in a mutinous bouncing jingle.

Her footsteps padded across the living room to the kitchen, soft and barely audible. Her bare feet sounded sticky on the linoleum behind him, his only warning before her arms wrapped around his middle and her head sank between his shoulder blades. The scent washed over him a second later. Angelica smelled the way she always smelled the last week of the month. Her hair had that freshly-hair-sprayed quality to it. Her lipstick was recently applied, a waxy odor washing over him as she breathed. Her clothes hung on her shoulders, confused—Robert knew they’d been crumpled, ignored on someone else’s floor twenty minutes ago.

He understood the feeling.

The chord progression he was supposed to write, the one Jake wanted, came to him right then. He knew it’d make them famous even as he dreaded putting it to paper. He dreaded having Angelica hear it.

And she would hear it—on the radio, on TV, people humming in line at the grocery store. But Robert had to. It was what would give her everything she wanted. The lights, the sparkle, the cameras going off in their faces. Even if it meant she’d come home more and more often with confused clothes and fresh lipstick.

Robert’s hands, wet and covered in that eerily aware water, covered her forearms where she’d anchored them around his waist. He held them there for a long moment, savoring the sliding and twitching of the muscles under her skin, before freeing himself and turning around. He kissed away that freshly applied lipstick, trying to make Angelica into the woman she had been two hours ago. He put the waterlogged, worn, and grubby Scotch-Brite Pad into one of her hands, turning and slowly walking to the living room. She didn’t follow him, standing still in the kitchen in her sticky bare feet while he slid papers off their piano and sat heavily on the stool. His fingers slid a little on the keys, still wet.

This was what his fetid girlfriend wanted. Just not him. Not anymore.