The Revisionist

 Originally Published by Class Collective Magazine, February 23 2022

 

 

The Revisionist  

By Keith Good 

 

You have to realize this started before everything went to shit. Before 3,000 sq.ft. screamed bourgeoisie gauche, before the Chihuahua shat in our collective Gucci bag. A ‘piece of the pie?’ Bitch, please. A ‘piece’ was George and Weezie and avocado shag carpet. Why just a piece when you can bake the whole damn thing? 

Kay resisted. “Hygge,” she said. 

We were wandering that dirt mall up the interstate, our fingers interstitched except when some forgotten gem demanded her affections. She sought baubles and bric-a-brac; I, first editions and Nintendo cartridges. Mostly, though, we drank the atmosphere as aperitif to Sunday brunch. 

“Hugh-gah?” 

“Hygge,” the word came from deep in her throat. “It’s like Danish feng shui. Finding contentment in simplicity, coziness.” 

“Says the poet.” (Did she tell you we met in a creative writing seminar? Again: cliché, I know. But she was the only other undergrad who subbed The Antioch Review. Mine may be history's first case of a literary journal getting someone laid.) 

“Exactly,” she said. “Our apartment is poetry. No word wasted.” Her fingers left mine to caress an earthenware bowl. Etched lines and circles raced its perimeter like ancient sheet music. Kay hefted the bowl, checked the sticker on its butt. “What do you think of this? My client wants a country-chic living room.” 

“You know,” I said, “female bowerbirds choose the mate who builds the biggest house.” 

She returned the bowl to its table and kissed my forehead. “Lucky for you I'm not a bowerbird.” 

She meant it as a compliment. But. Art needs outlet. Wandering the publication desert felt like a tumor gnawing my brain. The world grew fuzzy at the edges. Line editing and lady porn paid for groceries, but at what cost? Gig work cut channels inside, diverted water over the muddy places. I sat to write my own words, but the faucet ran thick and brown. “Cozy,” in any language, became prison. 

So I persisted. I convinced Kay to pour our lives into little more than hope and imagination. Credit and IRAs liquid, we bought a corner lot, all weeds and wildflowers. A brick-and-stucco Jacobethan estate dominated the hill behind. The land was our messy, enticing rescue mutt. Flour, butter, sugar, apples; just mix and apply heat. 

I visited lot D5549—my lot—the night we closed, unaware our signing would summon a monster. My Chucks damp with dew, the deed crisp between Bloom (Harold) and Bloom (Leopold) in my satchel, I saw my it: my greatest creative endeavor. The Great American House. Gatsby written in stone and steel. Frisson released the pressure behind my eyes. My knees buckled. Color returned. 

I did not hear the Historian approach. 

“So you’re the pup who’s bought my yard.” 

His snarl jolted 1-point-21 jiggawatts to my heart. Again eight, the neighborhood dog, vile arrow of a Doberman, snapped and growled at my thigh. A little nip, taste of blood, and retreat. The neighbor knocking on mom’s door, “Sorry sorry sorry. Won’t let ol’ Rommel off the leash again.” Like that was ever the truth. 

I gathered the warmth in my cardigan. “Public land.” I shivered. “...Should check the county auditor’s website.” 

But the monster was already gone, bootprints slithering to his Jacobethan’s maw.  

Young and idea-drunk, I built. I spelunked library basements, smudged my fingertips on blueprints flakier than momma’s crust (all butter, ice water). I hired a young architect of equal inebriation, his face scrubbed pink under a mop of red hair. He hrmed and huhed as I chirped a pidgin of his Shakespearean iambs. From my sandbox sketches he drafted a perfect hamlet. Future Victorian. The Virgin Queen on Tinder. Cross between a castle and a fucking spaceship. Brick and stucco, certainly, but also LEED Platinum, solar scales and wastewater neutral. Wind atop each of the eight peaks and hydro from aged copper downspouts. Most hours, he said, you’ll pump kilowatts back into the grid. 

I can only get so hard. 

Kay said she didn’t want children. She said our bank accounts wouldn't allow. I say all the better. To hell with the stay-at-home-dads and mommybloggers. Building a home trumps childbirth. Really, what do parents do? They drink one too many and forget the condom. Dad cuts the cord? Please. I cut door jambs. I held windows while carpenters framed them in. A dad gets over excited when his wife agrees to doggy and—oops!—hello, zygote. I, übervader, summoned life from force of will. 

Kay, naturally, designed the interior. She muttered beautiful, sparse poems in carpet and light. (Even scouring estate sales and swap meets, my office, we agreed, would remain Pemberley in winter until my novel sold.) Our Sunday constitutionals sped to racewalks. We passed piles of NES cartridges without time to check labels or examine circuit pins. Kay’s fingers pulled from mine, busy exploring each side table and secondhand lamp. She wiggled in the lap of every wing chair. 

We again passed the earthenware bowl. Still unsold a year on, I took it, surprised by its gravity. I presented it to Kay. 

“My lady,” I bowed with the offering. “Hygge.” The word swelled my tongue. 

“Oh my bowerbird.” She didn’t take it, only sped ahead. “You’ve already won the hen.” 

But creation breeds critics. And progress, pragmatics. You were probably at the open house (despite its gaseous density, a multitude cycled through). My New Yorker tête-à-tête held rapt audience under the pergola, its web of LEDs twinkling to rival star rise. We sipped in spring’s first exhale, the earth still spongy, bacteria yawning sweetness after their winter nap. Disregarding his own, “Keep off Grass” sign (the humorous non-article saving either fescue or potheads) our backyard neighbor, our toothless Doberman, stomped a beeline across his lawn. A rolled-up blueprint his riding crop, he shouted to snap steps from a lagging horse. 

“It’s bad enough you’re blocking my yard,” he said, “but this… This house is a got-danged monstrosity! This is an historic neighborhood, we have rules.” 

His stomping grounded the static holding my audience. Electrons fizzled from our nucleus, announcing empty cups, full bladders, leaving an unstable isotope of two. 

“Oh, hey,” I said. “Let’s not start any Sharks and Jets stuff.” 

I laughed. He didn’t. Who’s the real asshole? 

“Kay and me—” 

“And I.” 

“We captured the spirit of the thing pretty well.” 

“There isn’t a ‘spirit of the thing.’” He unfurled his blueprint like colors from a bloody pike. “Solar panels? Composite materials? A pergola? Our homes date to the American Revolution. Yours is a slap in history’s face.” 

The fucking bully. In front of everyone like that. I could only rub Kay’s back later, reciting empty promises like state capitals: “Here, here.” “It will be okay.” “We’ll make him see.” 

Except it isn’t for a lack of effort the blind don't see. And maybe this is where I start to get myself in trouble. But we’re talking maybe trespassing. Vandalism, max. He’d gathered a ring on the schoolyard, pulled me to its center. When a bully punches, you punch back. 

Wine empties bleeding down the sink, mini-quiches binned, every surface disinfected and disinfected again, and—finally—Kay snoring in the glow of late-night talk, I took arms. Twenty-four organic brown grenades filled my satchel. I crept through night to his boorish walls, the dewfall’s breath all perfume, my heart going like mad and yes; yes! The first egg exploded a satisfying yellow scunch! against his front door. Adrenaline and forty bucks’ worth of Cab Sauv, I’m sad to say, blurred the rest of my offensive into night’s darkness. 

I’d planned olive branches at dawn, bilateral de-egg-ification. When the sun finally dissolved the thickness in my head, though, his house shone. Not a single shell or yolk remained. Still foggy, I padded to the kitchen, wondering if I hadn’t dreamed the affair. 

“Kay, did our Historian…?” 

But she wasn’t there. A post-it haiku curled from atop the empty egg cartons: “gone to the strip mall / (we still need furniture, hun) / then the store for eggs.” I’d scripted a domestic Desert Storm—strike, counterstrike, accord—but sparked Viet-ghanistan. 

The op-ed in that week’s paper wasn't published under his name—bless the old-school anonymity of print—but, believe me, he fired the Scud: 

“Revisions of history bastardize our soul.”  

I wish I was embellishing. He wrote fetish slash fiction to an imagined picture of the founding fathers, gooey in its nostalgia, full of crumbling flourish, style crashing over form. He breathed cliché: “A thing either is or it is not,” “diminishing our past robs our future,” et cetera, et cetera. I only scanned the Corinthian column twice before interring it with the compost. 

Why revise history, why paint over the grit with bright Pollyanna strokes, except to prop unstable arguments? 

The reprehensible signs appeared shortly after. Red serifed letters shouted, “Protect our History!” over a blue-gabled home. The first sprouted two pixels inside his property line, big enough for the SUV soccer moms and urban tank pilots to see. Our putty-brained peers guzzled the jingoism like lite beer. Agreeable and vague, the signs propagated to make rhinoviruses jealous. I wanted to stop at every sign-shaded curb and demand a measure—just a single synapse—of logic. 

Whose “history” needs saving? The sepia cleft of Clark Gable’s chin? Mt. Vernon’s whistling “employees?” Isn't history, by its very nature, immutable? 

He jabbed at every opening. When consecutive “100-year” rainstorms swamped our gutters, he appeared, waiting until I wobbled on the top rung of a 32-foot ladder to belt out his basso profundo. 

“Gutters fail?” he sang. “Don’t build them like they used to, eh?” 

You mean built by slaves? Full of lead and cancer? But of course I didn’t say that. “Not failure,” I said, “it’s science. The gutter grates just need a slight re-calibration.” 

“Well that’s the thing,” he shoved his hands deep in the pockets of pleat-front khakis. “We’ve amended the neighborhood charter. All ‘re-calibrations’ must be historically accurate.” 

His lack of imagination slid under my skin, the ragged end of a sliver beyond extraction. He prickled and itched my every move. I threw a handful of muck to the ground where he’d stood after he left. 

Kay, blessed voice of reason, urged I let it go. She sat at her drafting table, client requests and bills and loan documents spilling to the floor. By this time, the market wasn’t in free-fall so much as a continued, infinite death spiral. We hit bottom only to find another bottom below, and another still below that. Our mortgage joined the gutters underwater, the loan repackaged and sold to three firms in six months. “We’re house-poor,” she said. “Just fix whatever he wants and be done with it.” 

How could I make her see? Art is revision. It’s the torture of each word, strapped into the optometrist’s chair: one or two? one or two? True art is never finished, only severed by deadline. The draft of a whispering window or a weeping gutter, I tried to explain, open pathways to the ecstatic. Sanding drywall patches in the hall outside my office was Michelangelo revealing David by degrees. My poet only returned blank stares, the old words dead on her tongue.  

“Just fix the damn house.” 

If art aims toward truth, here’s the bullseye: I should have listened to Kay. Please tell her for me. You can make her understand. There isn't a single war in history if men put their dicks away and let the women drive. Instead, I sought revenge: a pound of flesh closest to the Historian’s heart. With Kay’s clients shouting inanity from our parlor (“Oh I must have textured wallpaper!”), I practically lived at the library. I devoured historical codes, drank each revision to the town charter. I hired Hessians (bless the new-school anonymity of Craigslist and crypto). If the Historian wanted Revolution, revolution he’d get. 

I stomped his damn grass. I pulled up the stakes on his stupid sign and pounded his door. 

“You’re a fucking hypocrite.” 

And oh! If you could have been there when he opened the door. His unsteady heartbeat. I lapped the confusion from his saucerwide eyes. 

“It's 10:30 at night.” 

“Your historical building code is a mess of contradictions. You’ve retroactively picked only the rules which suit you.” 

“And you haven’t? Where language is ambiguous, I honor the intent of the city fathers.” 

“You’re naming yourself ultimate arbiter then, preserving the errors of bigots and slavers.” 

You tell me: is that assault? Understand Judge Andersen is one of his country club klansmen. (How do you think he amended our neighborhood charter so quickly?) The only real crime here is that my Gatsby is being starved to Usheresque disrepair. Box gutters, wide as the rain-fat Potomac, have swallowed my hydro. The turbines atop each peak, deemed “above maximum allowable height,” have toppled like little dictators. One by one, my solar panels have morphed to slate, my roof the mismatched slave teeth filling George Washington’s mouth.  

Do you want me to admit it? Fine. I lied. I lied, I lied, I lied. It was Kay who consoled me after our open house. Her hand rubbed my sobbing back. She recited the state capital promises. Is that what you’re after? That I’m, what? Whatever you call it now? Poisoned by toxic masculinity? But if I was black, if I was gay, I’d be published ten times over and Kay would still be here. 

You know, for the longest time, I thought we were disparate points on a line. Perhaps, though, we’re adjacent dots on a circle, our gulf an illusion of turned backs. 

I walked over there, you know, before coming here. It’s why I’m late. Kay’s papers in my satchel, Chucks damp to my socks with morning dew, I tip-toed to the edge of my 500-foot radius as he troweled cement onto his foundation from an earthenware bowl. 

“I see you’ve had to patch all around your foundation,” I said. “Rough winter, huh? I heard mice can chew through field stone.”  

“Not perfect drill spirals, they don’t,” he growled. 

“I just hope that’s not Portland cement,” I could hardly get the words out, I was so excited. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” of course I wasn’t, “but your home predates Portland cement. I only mention it because the amended neighborhood charter bans non-period materials. If all those patches are Portland cement... Whew! You’d have to tear out almost the entire foundation, wouldn’t you?” 

He rose to his feet, jaw shaking, his pointed trowel a bayonet ready to slice. 

“You did this.” 

“No.” I took a breath and fired the final shot of our war: “you did.” 

So: victory. I’ll sign whatever you want. Just please tell Kay I was right. Tell her I flung open my office door to a rush of light. Toes tickled by ultraplush green carpet, I pressed my nose to the east window and watched the Historian literally tear at the foundations of his home. I was right! All his wasted money. Wasted time. Waste for the luxury of those who waste. I watched until the swell of satisfaction cooled. I watched until a single drip of dark water wobbled from the ceiling and splashed the nib of my nose and jolted me awake.