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I tricycle my way to the woman's house. It is a two-storey cookie-cutter suburban affair: vinyl siding in baby blue and beige, a meagre and unintrusive patio just above the sliding doors of the walk-out basement, opening onto the garden. Inside: muted decorations, seaside paintings in Georgia O'Keefe pastel, gunship gray carpeting that, straight out of a supermarket management course, begs the viewer not to consider anything outside the five-foot-and-change eye-level range.

I am visiting her along with her quondam lover; my relationship to either of these people, outside general amiability, is unclear. We chat over tea, we trade pleasantries, we tell jokes and steer far clear of anything even resembling a boundary, real or imagined.

Sometime during this conversation, the three of us are unexpectedly privy to a spontaneous visit by her new lover. Her "ex" and I cannot help but take an immediate distaste to him, for a number of superficial reasons: his mincing comportment, his textbook-nerdy appearance (overweight, bespectacled, goateed), his unauthoritative lisp - my friend likens him to Truman Capote and the woman, as though naive to how this was intended as a criticism, enthusiastically agrees. Her tone is plainly of the "isn't he dreamy..." school.

Indeed, the way Truman conducts himself is downright farcical, a minstrel show riffing on the most blatantly apparent quirks of the undesirable male. As we spend more time with him and realize that his topics and delivery in conversation are so unbelievably pretentious, we almost feel relieved that our disgust with this man has in some way been validated: this inkhorn ostentation goes beyond unfortunate genetic circumstances and lands squarely in the realm of the legit character flaw.

Tensions, predictably, begin to run high. Truman tells the woman that he will meet her outside in her garden, "away from these uncultured brutes" - she says that she will join him in a moment and turns to conclude her conversation with us, offering no apology for his remark.

My friend and I silently conspire to keep the woman inside; to have her choose Truman's company over ours represents some kind of defeat certain eyedropper-drips of testosterone in our egos refuse to allow us to comfortably accept. We lure her inside with the suggestion of a game so hypnotic that we all forget the immediate circumstances surrounding it and become engrossed; it involves cutting a picture (in this case, a portrait of Joni Mitchell) into indecipherably small pieces, shuffling and distributing them, redrawing them on a large and abstract scale and attempting to reassemble the original.

Thusly engaged, hours pass - when the process is nearing completion, Truman storms into the living room, features strained into a ludicrous expression of "anger" which would be at home in a depression-era cartoon: blubbering, snot-nosed, hints of steam tufts perhaps emerging from his ears. He demans an explanation and casts insult after pedantic insult our way - the woman, woe-stricken and apologetic, rushes to his comfort while casting the occasional angry glance our way - does she realize our diversion was deliberate? My friend ups the tension by delivering a groaner of a pun, riffing on an adjectival usage unheard since the mid-seventies: "I thought garlic was the only thing that grew fresh ni her garden".

It turns out this bon mot was the final straw - Truman storms off and we are angrily castigated. "Don't you know how kind he is to me?! Don't you know how he goes outof his way to do things for me?!" und so weiter.

With nothing left to do in the wake of the argument, we set about reassembling the puzzle we have created. Instead of Joni's face, we seem to have drawn an image of a pair of grossly overweight monks, bellies protruding beneath brown tunics, walking along a cliff face - above them, a female spirit floats capricious in the wind. One of the puzzle-piece faultlines lies directly across the monks' guts, separating them from their bodies; pretending naivete, the woman refuses to let us place this piece in its proper place, claiming we are a pair of ne'er-do-wells trying to slyly make light of Truman's weight through this puzzle configuration. Yet the picture is clearly completed with that square in that position, and any other alignment proves awkward and ungainly...

2006-12-16 - 11:32 a.m.

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