Exit Nothing Read online

Why did I give my nudity to you? You could see through my mirror though my head was reflective. I don’t know how to be naked anymore. The weight of your stare is too much. I can’t see myself getting older. Only more clothed.

  Kaye and I lived in a small one bedroom apartment in Montevallo, Alabama. The college town was about forty minutes or so from downtown Birmingham. It had one main road, one bar, a grocery store, a drug store, a used bookstore and a video store. We didn’t know anyone in the town but we knew the cockroaches. They lived in our apartment, outside in the parking lot, everywhere around us. They crawled over our faces and onto our naked bodies as we slept. They crawled over our food, our couch, made a home in our sink. They were a constant reminder to Kaye that we were not yet living the safe middle-class life that she so desperately wanted. For her, poverty was a means to an end. It was a nuisance at best. I feared leaving our poverty. For me, middle-class life meant leaving all of my dreams and fantasies and madness behind. But security! Almighty security! She believed in security much more than she believed in art. She was an inspired photographer, one of the best I had ever seen. But she was studying business at the University of Montevallo. She wanted her photography to be a hobby. A hobby. I never understood what that word meant except consciously deciding to be a mediocrity. And why? For what? A couple pieces of silver and a warm bedroom to sleep in I suppose. It all seemed so trivial to me.

  But we both slept naked and that was a start. Kaye started to sleep naked because I slept naked. It was exciting at first but then it became routine. We started very early on sleeping on opposite sides of our bed, our backs to each other. I slept nude because my dreams were always more intense that way. And so Kaye, in an effort to make me happy or perhaps to understand me a bit more, slept naked too.

  It wasn’t about sex. Good lord, I wish it was. We weren’t home at the same time very often. Different work and school schedules. She was a night sleeper and I generally preferred to sleep during the day. Besides, my cock didn’t work right back then. Kaye and I weren’t sexually compatible. It was always awkward and I eventually started to dread the thought of trying to make love to my wife. No, our nudity, together, lying next to each other during the few hours when our sleep schedules overlapped, mundane. But I still had my intense dreams, which I treasured, even when I twitched and sweated during my nightmares.

  But bed nudity was as far as Kaye would go. Anything else verged on madness. There were rules to be observed. Let not the idea of liberation cross your pretty mind. Don’t be troubled by it.

  Kaye would never have understood the idea of Mad Love. Too much, just too much. Too intense. Too violent.

  I liked to get up in the morning, scratch myself and let out a hearty fart. Then, I would eat breakfast naked. Once I was sitting naked at the table, cross-legged, eating a bowl of instant oatmeal. The morning sun shone through the half-open blinds. Kaye was in the kitchen getting a bowl of cereal together for herself. She was in scrubs and a t-shirt.

  “Goddamn it,” she said. “You’re going to get your butt-smear all over the chair.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She was only being half-serious, right? I just laughed a little and continued to eat.

  Kaye, I just wanted to feel beautiful around you.

  At the time, Kaye was working part time at a bakery. She brought home muffins and cakes and various other treats. It was often the only food in our apartment. I was getting fat. Expanding at an incredible rate. A lot of my old shirts didn’t fit anymore and the ones that did showed my distinctly pregnant-looking belly protruding through, as if it were trying to escape. I hated my body. I was disgusted with myself.

  So was it any real surprise that I wanted a little sanctuary within the confines of our apartment? I used to leave the blinds open and walk freely about the place, unconcerned with the possibility of a passerby seeing me. But Kaye would shut the blinds and admonish me, as a mother does a child.

  “At least put some pants on,” she said.

  To Kaye, my nudity was only acceptable within narrow limits. When we were having sex or taking a shower together or sleeping. My nakedness was an abomination. I was a lunatic.

  Kaye was chubby. She was thick and beautiful. I told her that her body was exactly the type that Renaissance painters would look for in a model. The way she looked used to be considered the perfect ideal of beauty.

  Kaye always laughed when I told her this. She thought I was making fun of her.

  Once, we were in the bathroom. We had just taken a shower together and we were still naked. I stood behind her, my arms around her stomach and my head on her shoulder. I reached up and cupped her breasts in my hands. I looked at the reflection of the two of us in the medicine cabinet mirror. She smiled shyly. I imagined in these slow, intensely moving moments that we might actually be all right. That the two of us might stay together. That we might find our Mad Love.

  But it never came. Instead, the cockroaches scurried around in the bathtub, waiting for us to leave, so that they might have the apartment to themselves.

  Artist/Muse