Lucien was utterly opposed to the idea of visiting Jack and Edie for a dinner party, despite talking to Edie on the phone and thinking highly of her, once labeling her as a nice woman, though that may have been sarcastic, but even then, they experienced a few seconds of interaction before he hung up to avoid speaking longer, so he doesn't know the slightest detail about her, yet he's still whining like a child to remain at home, but I forced him to prepare himself for amending all that is amiss among the residents of this relationship cesspool, and he's still as frustrated as that aforementioned whining child, though I'm not backing down. I baked cookies for the first time since I was fourteen years old, and they were somewhat fruitful, so I'm here to present my rewards to a woman who deserves all of the rewards in the world.
I don't presume all has gone awry for this Lucien Carr character, as there's no doubt in saying that Lucien looks fucking amazing in the only suit he owns and barely ever wears, but there's also no doubt in saying that by seven o'clock he will have taken off his tie and his jacket and unbuttoned at least two of his buttons to flaunt a small part of his chest like a distraught artist sickened by the fading world as they lie on their velvet sofa being fed grapes by servants, and there's yet again no doubt that he'll never apologize for his intrusive actions to instead whine about how the suit is bothering him when I order him to clothe himself again, and from the doorstep to Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker's house, he's already adjusting his tie to loosen it slightly in the faith that I won't notice the genesis of his ordeal to strip off the thin garment completely. I'm not going to argue with him, however, because we've already argued enough over pointless things like a expanding my audience on my blog, and I'm not about to argue over a fucking necktie, in addition to the fact that this is right before a dinner party where arguing isn't so courteous to the fellow guests and especially the hosts, though this time we only have the hosts, and they'd probably ban us from ever conversing with them again, so I just ignore the fool of a man.
Ringing the doorbell and therefore neglecting Edie's hatred of it, I pray that she won't be upset with us for both bringing Lucien in his perpetually haggard state and for disobeying her only nitpicky rule of conduct, but when she swings the door open and halts the echoes of the shrillness from the bell, her face is anything but demeaning, rather kissed by a smile and bright red lipstick typical of a model, and she's equally as gorgeous, which I share with her so that I will no longer be on her bad side and in danger of being kicked out of the house before dinner has even begun, though that wouldn't disrupt anything, as Edie has most likely gushed about how much of an insolent child I am to Jack at her dinner that hasn't been so mandatory now that I've moved out of her house and landed myself in a position of ill repute, and my plan has succeeded, for Edie is now ushering us into her brightly decorated living room without besmirching us with her classic expressions bathing in silence to uphold her politeness in one terrain.
Jack is reading the daily newspaper to pass the time while he waits for us to enter the house, and now that we have, Edie clears her throat to signal our arrival, and he glances from the article on politics in the Middle East, surprised that we're here so soon, though we arrived a bit later than Edie would have liked us to arrive with her methodical planning skills, but I can attribute this surprise to his inability to know what the hell is going on at any point of his dreary banking career, so now that I've mentioned that, Jack wasn't the one who was astonished at my departure to live with Lucien, just Edie, because even though I wallow in my basement every day of the week, she somehow notices everything and keeps thorough tabs on the nonexistent.
"Jack, honey, are you ready for dinner?" Edie asks in the sweetest voice she can muster, but after living with her for almost a year, both Jack and I can detect that she's a bit annoyed by her husband's disorganized state, but Lucien is completely unaware of that; it just shows how familiarity can warp someone's perception, a neat little trick.
In fact, Jack and I have picked up on minor nuances in Edie's behavior based on her fluctuating emotions. When she's being passive aggressive, she'll speak to people like she just did with Jack. When she's full blown angry, she will explode over the tiniest thing as a means to release her acerbity that's been building up inside of her for a while, too long of a while for it to be healthy, so that's why it manifests as a corporeal reincarnation of the underworld. When she's gloomy, she rarely speaks to anyone, even those who make a grand effort to speak to her, and that's just how she prefers to be in order to cope with the depressions in her morale, and Jack understands this, seemingly the only thing that he understands, but that's okay in this situation, as it's what's required of him in Edie's current passive aggressive temperament, so Jack rises from the couch and from his intriguing read about things that don't affect him, following Edie to the dining table and accepting my tray of cookies with a thankful nod along the route.
"So, Lucien," Edie begins to engage in small talk with someone she doesn't know despises small talk, as that's just the kind of person that she is and has always been and will always be. "What do you do for a living?"
A sense of pride exfoliates Lucien's already beautiful skin, and with a boyish smile he states, "I'm a writer."
I locate a dash of disappointment upon Edie's visage as she tweaks the placement of a few of the forks and spoons so that they don't clash with the ceramic plate, and I suppose in all honesty that her disappointment is justified, because with most writers, they're a failure for their entire career, and even if they do become lucrative, they might squander it on the impulse from freedom gained after years of hell, but the abrupt sluggishness of the woman's movement implies that she's going to ask the winning question soon, and as I predicted, she does."Does that pay well?"
Through Lucien's impenetrable gaucherie, he is able to decrypt the subtle misconceptions about what he does to pass the time, naming a hobby rather than a job when Edie inquired, and he finds it in himself to clarify. "I work at the library for money, but my philosophy is that the purest sort of money is the knowledge imbibed by the soul."
We've been at Jack and Edie's house for less than three minutes, and Lucien has already whipped out a process of his philosophical gears. Why can't he wait for a meal over candlelight to impress the hosts, because at least then it has the proper mood? If he barges into the cognition of my friends so brashly, then they'll surely think, but will they be supportive of his ideas, and will they receive the wrong impression of him? Mostly I'm just tired of him placing these rants in every conversation, but I'll admit that they are quite ingenuitive, and I'd actually detest if he stopped spewing them out of his cherry lips, so for now, all I can do is roll my eyes and pretend like I'm not totally in love with my best friend.
"You're a pretentious asshole, but you're my pretentious asshole," I mutter to him, upholding a shaky facade of one part scorning him and the other part nestled into his side to indicate that I still adore him.
He winks, the damn seductress. "Just how I like it."
And despite my claims distorted by the pique towards Lucien's obnoxiousness, Jack and Edie have followed the route that I had predicted that they would follow, one of confusion and a faulty first impression of my companion. There's always time to clear this up, of course, but I don't suppose Lucien will make it any better on his own, so I'll task myself with sweeping up the fragments of glass he shatters simply by existing in the den of diplomacy. I've become like the mother figure to him as Edie was to me before I moved into his dingy apartment and organized his clutter a bit like a mother would, and this is just one of my duties, whether I like it or not, because I sure as hell don't want Edie cornering me with a request to help her serve the dessert of my store bought cookie dough transcending to splendor, just to have her spit in my face about how I should return to the basement and how Lucien is a bad influence on me and how this relationship is unhealthy, and maybe she's right, but I've spent so long trapped inside of arbitrary confines, and I'm not about to greet them again.
We lower into our chairs to enjoy a meal, but it seems that the only people set on nothing but enjoying their meal are people who aren't me. I'm worried about Lucien, as I have been the entire night, but after he made that unnecessarily philosophical comment, my brain is on high alert about what he's going to perform next and how Edie and Jack will reform their opinions of him from it.
"So, Jack," Lucien starts, and I feel my soul depart my body from fear of what he's about to say. "I saw you reading an article about the state of the Middle East. Are you interested in those affairs?"
Maybe Lucien recognizes that he fucked up in Jack and Edie's eyes when he uttered something so stupidly pretentious, so now he's switching gears to appear formally educated with the kind of knowledge that is expected conventionally, despite never having gone to college. It's quite shocking that he's beginning a conversation like this, actually. I've remarked before that Lucien isn't much of a politics guy, rather sticking to freeform art and philosophy, so it's confusing to me why he would abandon his stubborn position in art, and choose politics instead, when there are millions of other topics that people discuss at dinner parties.
"I was mostly looking for something to pass the time with, but yeah, I suppose I am interested in 'those affairs'," Jack responds, still eyeing Lucien subtly, having noticed the sudden shift in his intrigue.
"What's your opinion on Russia's position in the Middle East, then?"
I have no idea what Lucien is pushing at, or if he's even pushing at anything at all. He may just be trying to spark some dinner table discourse, but it seems kind of risky. I don't know much about Jack's political views, if he thinks Russia's actions are justified or if they're atrocious, but it's nonetheless not the time to discuss this, especially because I'm unsure on where Jack falls.
"Frankly, I'm not sure."
I want to tell him that one cannot simply look at the mass amount of destruction blowing through what used to be beautiful Syrian cities, and then say that the lives of the thousands of people murdered do not make Russia responsible for their actions that caused this, but that's a Lucien move, and I'm trying not to get involved and ruin my relationship with Edie and Jack. However, not even Lucien makes that move, surprisingly, and just moves on to the other half of the couple.
"And you, Mrs. Parker?"
Edie smiles that thin, closed-lipped, red smile of hers, and fixes a napkin by the side of her plate. "I prefer to stay out of politics, thank you."
"No citizen can survive without knowing what's going on in the world and the effects it might have or already has on their country."
"Lucien," I snap, kicking his feet under the table, but he only shifts his legs away from me, to the point where he is immune from any future attacks.
"Do you even vote?" Lucien continues, disbelieving and offended by shit that doesn't concern him and never will.
One can clearly see that Edie is distressed, so I look at her sympathetically and pleadingly, asking to remove Lucien and me for a moment so that she can calm down and so that we can have a chat about why Lucien needs to shut the fuck up for a night. "Excuse me, Edie, but I need to have a little word with Lucien here."
As I drag Lucien from the table and into another room"Allen, you know I'm right."
"That doesn't mean shit, Lucien, because Edie and Jack invited us here for a meal so that we can reconcile with each other and catch up on what's been happening, not so that you can slander them for their level of engrossment in politics. Just because Edie doesn't track politics -- which I didn't even think you did until this conversation -- doesn't mean that she's the reason America is failing. It's not your damn job to argue with everyone."
Lucien slots his hand in between strands of my hair, trailing down to my neck and back up, anything he can do to occupy his hands. "I know, Allen. I'm sorry."
I clasp the hand that he was using to weave through my hair, and curl my own hand into it. "Now can you say sorry to Jack and Edie?"
"Of course." We stand in our places for a few seconds, before Lucien welcomes a devious smile to his face and adheres my lips to his. "I hate when we fight," he whispers in a low step on the staircase of his voice.
I walk, flushed, back to the table. Maybe it's I who needs an apology.
~~~~~
A/N: must lucien be so pretentious
scientism: science is superior to other sources of knowledge
~Dakotaffy