PLAYING HOUSE

His house, I think, bears the landmarks of a man living alone, and liking it that way. There is simply no space left for somebody else. Not even a cat. And most definitely, not even me.
Let me tell you what his house looks like. It looks like him. Quiet and seemingly empty, but full of unspoken ideas. The living room is barren except for a single-seated sofa, but lying on the floor are his knick-knacks: an old Pentium II laptop, his desktop computer hovering over a keyboard which is its lifelong partner, the remains of a PDA we took apart one night because I wanted to see what it looked like inside out. I know what is inside his computers too, and that is why I know the seemingly empty room was full of unspoken ideas.

Like the owner who possesses very fair, porcelain skin, the house boasts immaculate white walls.

Like the owner who is quiet, distant and unreachable, the house is cold and private. I know not many people will be allowed here. And I know he’ll scrub off any signs of anybody ever entering his door, because he is a private man and he doesn’t like his territory crossed. Not even by a shadow of someone he loves.

“Did you pee all over the place?” I asked, observing that the house screamed the owner’s name wherever I looked. He laughed, and said he almost did, for the sake of marking his one and only private territory in the whole wide world.

Other landmarks of a man living alone and forever wanting to be left unbothered include the minimum number of towels available, no cups, only 2 glasses (“One to be used when I am too lazy to wash the other”), no high-carbohydrate food in sight, and no coffee. Because he doesn’t drink coffee. And he has forgotten that I do.

His bedroom is nice: this is where he reads, and sleeps, and watches movies. I looked through his books when he was not looking. He owns many computer books I never touched in a lifetime, because I am an electrical engineer who knows nada about digital signal processing and a civil engineer might know more about it than me, and he is an accountant who knows the details of taxation and auditing and Berkeley API and WinSock and Java programming and reads MIT OpenCourseware site to amuse himself during his spare time. So his computer books didn’t surprise me. The ones that put a big lump in my throat was his new collection of books on a certain religion, the name of which is written somewhere across my ID card.

When I went there for the second time, he already bought a cup, with the word LEO and a picture of a lion imprinted on it. “For you,” he said, “for a person who is a lion by western horoscope, and a tiger by chinese horoscope, but always looks like a virgo to me.” And he already bought a tiny container of instant coffee. Because I think he doesn’t expect me to stay around long enough to finish a bigger bottle of instant coffee. Because I could finish his supply of coffee in five or six visits, and he doesn’t want me to visit him anymore after five or six occasions.

Then I told him not all virgos are virgins and not all virgins are virgos and not all virgos look like virgins and not all virgins look like virgos. Then he told me to hush up and lie closer to him and don’t say things which are confusing, or better yet, don’t say anything. Then he told me he would throw away the cup if I were no longer around because he wouldn’t allow anything belonging to me to be lying anywhere in his house.

The night was spent reading for a while then I could no longer read and I kept looking at him, figuring why things went wrong. Then I know everything had been wrong since day one, since the day I admitted that I didn’t understand why one plus one didn’t equal two.

Some of the night was spent in his arms talking for a while about how IBM took PwC shares some time ago and all business life and believe-you-me, he could really make corporate dispute stories really interesting even in bed in a quiet night in his arms.

Then the rest of the night was spent in deep kisses, asking each other why exactly things went wrong and why nothing could be done about it and why one plus one equalled four, most probably even more. And how he would really like one plus one to equal two and how much I too believed one plus one must equal two but in our case it just didn’t. Then we consoled each other and said it was okay, I am okay, are you okay?

I promised him I would leave without a trace, I would disappear from his life like a dream and he nodded and hugged me and kissed me and said I should take the damn cup with me. He promised not to make things difficult for me.

But I broke my promise. Because when he was fast asleep, I used my green-inked pen to write down my initials on the inside part of the door of his wardrobe. Tiny initials in the corner of the wooden panel. Hah. Leaving without a trace is so not me. I want him to remember me, with pain, or with joy, whichever he chooses. I’ll leave my trace allright. So I am childish, so what, sue me.

And he broke his promise too. Because he texted me this morning, only hours after he made the promise, saying “I have bought a bigger bottle of instant coffee I miss you please come around we can take the laptop apart this time.”

So maybe I’ll visit him again. In that house which bears the landmarks of a man living alone, and liking it that way. Where there is no space left for anybody else, not for a cat, not for a LEO cup. And most definitely, not even for a lion who is also a tiger but looks like a virgo.