Smoking in the Bathroom and Other Revelations 3/1/08

Caleb does not like it when she smokes in the bathroom. It doesn’t matter now. This is not his bathroom. She is in Mike’s bathroom and if he dislikes her smoking he has not mentioned it yet. She is always resting cigarettes on the edge of the sink, leaving them there as she fixes her hair or touches up her make-up. The ashes grow long and eventually fall off. She never bothers to clean them up, preferring instead to leave them for the next person who comes along and has some desire to wash their hands. Right now, her hands are on top of her head rearranging her hair and a length of ash has just fallen off of her cigarette and into the sink. The movement of the ash falling into the ivory abyss beneath her causes her to look down. As if seeing her cigarette for the first time she reaches down to it with her right hand as the left one remains on top of her head, holding her hair in place. She takes a quick drag from the cigarette and sets it down again. Both of her hands return to the top of her head and continue their work on her hair.

“What’re you doing?” Mike asks from the bedroom. She turns and looks at him. He is still sitting in the bed, propped up with pillows. She closes the door.

“I’m fixing my hair,” she shouts through the door.

This story came out of a first line that I really love. “Caleb does not like it when she smokes in the bathroom.” I love that first line. I love it so much that I haven’t given up on it yet and the truth is that nothing is coming out of it. I try and I try to write this story about how much Caleb dislikes it when his girlfriend is smoking in the bathroom but it never turns into anything that I like.

In nearly every version of the story that follows this first line she is not in Caleb’s bathroom and therefore doesn’t have to worry about him as much as she would have if she were. In this particular version she is in her lover’s bathroom. He lets her smoke in the bathroom. The smoking in the bathroom doesn’t even seem to be something that this particular character enjoys. She is always smoking in bathrooms but she does it more to get away from people than she does because she really wants a cigarette.

My favorite part of this excerpt from the story is the end, when she closes the bathroom door so that she doesn’t have to see Mike but continues the conversation with him through it. Closing a door on someone so that you can shout through it seems like something a person would do in a relationship that they aren’t exactly comfortable with. Maybe they don’t actually want to see the person so that they can imagine being with someone else or talking to someone else. I don’t think that my main character in this story really likes Mike. I think that she is just cheating on Caleb with him so that she doesn’t have to confront the commitment that he represents.

The truth is that people do things like this all the time. They become scared of the relationship that they are in and instead of confronting the issue head on by talking it over with their significant other, they decide to cheat or find some other way to sabotage the relationship, that way it will fall apart. It’s easier to destroy a relationship for an obvious reason (infidelity) than it is to worry over someone maybe leaving you for a reason that may not be so obvious (some kind of inherent character flaw that you never knew about but which is so obvious to everyone you attempt to enter into a long term relationship with). The main character in this story doesn’t like herself very much and does everything that she can to push the people that she cares about further and further away so that she doesn’t have to worry about them not liking her because she is simply who she is.

I understand her completely. Maybe that's why I'm so scared to write a final version of this story.