(no subject)

[moonshxne]

Happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. What a crock of bullshit. He didn't think happiness would befall their odd half-family at some point in the future but each passing day ushered in a new sense of defeat and the half-hope that there would be at least contentment to look forward to dimmed even more. Unhappiness is universal. Not that he was unhappy. Again, just...dimmed. The way he tried to rationalize it was that Temple might as well have been a kid. And sometimes he still saw her as the girl he first met by the university. Maybe it was her unhappiness that was universal.

With the concept of marriage came the ideal of home came the starting of a new family and thus a new branch of that universal unhappiness. Temple's unhappiness, he tried to tell himself, at least.

"You don't have much to say."

Surprisingly, it came out much more brusque than he intended, and in order to make this clear, Gowan released a slow sigh.

"The facade of domesticity goes a long way."

Comments

[clotting]

Temple's unhappiness does have a way of pervading a room, like some kind of noxious perfume, heady, unmistakable, and given a few moments as easily forgotten as the drones of birds outside or the humidity clinging to skin. You could drown in it and not realize it's what you were choking on, this gloomy stink of malcontent that clings to her like a shroud and permeates the air around her.

"It doesn't really do if you call it a facade from the outset," she mutters. They both know it is, though. No amount of beautiful words, no sacred vows, no pantomimes of love could save it from being fraudulent, a Virginia schoolboy's desperate attempt to salvage a Jackson girl's honor and maybe patch his own together a bit too while he's at it.

"What do you want me to say, Gowan?" She pours herself a glass of whiskey. She always pours one for him, to, to taunt him. Maybe it's so she can be impressed when he turns it down. Maybe it's so she can remind him (over and over and over) of how he brought the first shackle to chain them together when he abandoned her out at the Old Frenchman's place. She doesn't hold it out to him as she takes a sip of hers, but she does leave it within his reach.

[moonshxne]

"I didn't ask for you to say anything."
He speaks levelly, in such a way that it seems he trained himself to do so. He speaks to sound like the better man, somehow above her, somehow righteous enough that he married her out of something beyond saving his reputation. Saving his reputation disguised as saving her reputation.

He stared at the glass, fingers twitching just a bit, a motion that only increased when he watched her take a drink from hers.

"I want us to give it a shot. Go one step further than brushes of skin in public. Fake it, Temple."
He prevented himself from snapping 'it's what you do best, anyway.' Again, he had to be the better man.
In place of biting his tongue, he gripped the glass. He didn't ask for fake happiness but, instead, a half-hope that they could try out the real thing. But, like unhappiness, happiness was universal enough that even the butchered quote about families he overused when thinking about his marriage lost all meaning. This, perhaps, was the point, Gowan thought.

"What makes a family happy anyway?"
Certainly not facades.

[clotting]

"Do you want to put me to bed?" She asks this as if she were asking a simple question, but she knows it's barbed. Their marriage isn't consummated, and in a way she's daring him to force it. Daring him to be as depraved and brutal as every other man she's known for the sheer sake of proving her base assumptions correct.

She doesn't know what makes a family happy. She doesn't know what makes anyone happy. That knowledge was obliterated from her when she was hidden in a Memphis whorehouse and used as a slave and then as collateral. She can't answer that for him.

"Are you going to have a drink?" She looks at his bourbon, sipping her own.

[moonshxne]

"Temple--" He started. There were times he said her name but nothing followed, the final syllable hanging in the air. Sometimes he forgot what he was going to say and others he decided that whatever he was planning to say would not benefit them both. "--that's hardly an appropriate question."

A part of him felt like he was treating her like a child, handling her with gloves and delicate gestures. The part of him that respected her knew that she was perfectly capable. But the part of him that wanted to uphold some standard, some duty, demanded otherwise.

He did wonder about the state of their union, many nights in a row at times, as he lay beside her in the still, dark night, not even bothering to dare to inhale her scent. A touch of the arm might have even been too much.

He was about to continue about their unconsummated marriage, but, instead, he was asked about the drink. The ice was already melting in the glass.

"Temple." He said again, as if even just uttering her name would remind them both why the liquid did not get any lower, even as he gripped the glass.
And then, with an immediate swiftness, he shoved the glass to the side and looked at her.

"Is this some sort of test of yours? Your way of determining what sort of man I am?"

[clotting]

It's true, it's not an appropriate question. It's one that hangs over them, one that their code of ethics won't let them say out loud. Gentility rules supreme in the hot belly of the South.

Which is why Temple's brand of passive-aggression flourishes in the fetid, humid air. It sucks the moisture from the air and blooms untamed.

"Fine."

She blinks slowly, more for the gesture of her lashes as if they're closing a door. She watches his hand grip the glass, as if to let go of it were to let it overpower him. Like the damn thing's going to throw itself into his mouth.

"I married you. Don't you think I know what sort of man you are?"

[moonshxne]

"What in the Hell is that supposed to mean, Temple? Goddami--"
His exclamation is cut off as he slams the drink against the table. The glass shatters and the whiskey both spills on the table and seeps into the newly forming cuts.

"Goddamit." He says in full, more quietly this time, standing up and restraining an angry stride. This attempt is futile and the angry spark continues to ignite his step. "Don't tell me we don't have any gauze lying around this pit."

His words, sharp, and ultimately self serving, are not meant to swipe at her, because, in a strange way, Gowan always found that even looking Temple in the eye dimmed that irate passion into a mere simmer, if existent at all.
"I don't want to ruin the rug."
He spoke levelly, perhaps even grateful the elephant in the room was no longer being addressed.

[clotting]

She startles at the breaking glass, not consciously, not intellectually but in an animal way, like her body is cringing dependently of the way her brain and her eyes saw that coming.

"Of course we have gauze," she says, purposefully dull and dim, a caricature of the good wife that she knows she could never be, that she was damned away from before they even got the marriage license. He knew when he married her that her dutifulness would be a sham, but he married her anyway. He had to. She goes to the cabinet to start looking for the gauze, feeling the bourbon slosh in her stomach.

"I just meant I wouldn't marry a stranger, is all."

[moonshxne]

He looks in another cabinet, back to her, trying not to let the cut on his hand drip on the kitchen floor. Gowan snorts a response to Temple's comment.

"No. You would just--" He is cut off by his discovery of the gauze. He has grown irritated enough with the evening that self-control would not have prevented any particularly scathing comments.

He leans against the counter while wrapping his hand, the gauze soaking up both blood and excess alcohol. Teeth clenched, he sharply inhales from the pain of the wound, the creation of which was no fault but his own.

"I wouldn't marry a stranger either," comes the trained, perfectly crafted response. The cadence of his accent is smooth, as if resorting back to the airs and mannerisms he adopted while attending the cotillions he was all but groomed for in his youth. Gowan, in that moment, tries to be a gentleman, an all-encompassing desire to look the part of a good man.

"I don't expect much in the way of married life, Temple. I ain't some idiot." He paused and looked at her, studying her face, her features. He found comfort in them, yes, but not necessarily love or desire. Normalcy emerged as the dominant emotion. "Who are you anyway? Big picture wise."

[clotting]

"Just what? You can say it, you know." She doesn't come to play the concerned wife, the merciful nursing angel to soothe his wounds. She watches him bleed through the white gauze, lip lifting over her teeth just slightly.

He won't say it. They've both already retreated into their gentility. He won't tell her what she already knows.

So she slinks back to get another drink.

"I'm the wife of a man who went to university. It doesn't really matter who I am outside of that, does it."

[moonshxne]

"I was just going to say that you look dislpleased."

A quick, cheap excuse. Gowan felt like a scared boy in that minute. He was a boy dressed as a man, pretending to take on the man's role of husband. He was indeed scarcely 20 years of age.

"Temple," he spoke her name quietly. "Boots. Let me make it up to you."

It was an earlier time, a time when he was almost willing to change.

[clotting]

She uses taking a long drink as a way to buy herself a moment before she says anything. She swallows. It burns all the way down her throat and sits, uneasy and warm, in her stomach, that mouthful of bourbon feeling less liquid than worm-like.

"What are you going to do to make it up to me? Buy me something? I could get my father to do that too." She shrugs, not demanding he rise to any occasion because she can't even think of one.

[moonshxne]

"Of course, your father the judge. Your brothers too, I imagine?" He almost, just almost sneered. He quickly changed expressions just as one eye squinted in distaste.

He stepped closer to her so he was mere inches from her face, sensing in his gut that this was a wrong move. The Gowan Stevenses, young, popular among other young, trendy couples. He had the mannerisms memorized. The right spot of her back to press his hand to when they opened the door, the right amount of time to kiss her when his uncle was visiting. But right now, it was just the two of them.

"I don't know, Temple." He threw his arms up and lowered them again, not stepping back but rubbing his temples. "What do you want me to do? What do you want me to say? How do I make it right for us?"

He knew, within, this was a barely hidden 'let me look like I'm doing the right thing.' Such a sentiment, after all, slumbered at the core of their marriage, a beast just one misstep away from emerging from hibernation.

[clotting]

She cringes back. She can't help it. There's a palimpsest that follows Gowan, the memory of the violence or apathy of every man that came before him, the crime of manhood for which he can never be man enough to apologize on behalf of.

He can never make it right, never rectify that he left her there to the claws of men.

"I want you to pretend we're happy, and I want that to be all that we are. Happy." She takes a step back, playing with her hair out of nerves.

"If we can't be happy, that's not my fault anymore. I'm doing what I can."

[moonshxne]

"And I am too, Boots."

He slumped down on the floor of their kitchen, a decidedly not gentlemanly gesture and he looked up at her. That guilt festered away, corroding his insides. He knew what he had done. And as desperately as he wanted to put some ounce of the blame on Temple, he found that he could not.

"Answer me honestly. Could you ever be happy? In this apartment, in this marriage?"

He desperately wanted a drink.

[clotting]

The true question is whether Temple is capable of happiness at all, if she has not been so damaged as to forget salvation and joy. These are questions separate from her marriage or the home she makes. Questions clutching like limpets to her heart, internal, pointed, traveling with her like a bad cough.

"Of course I could," she says, because how could she commit to the opposite? How could she vow herself to unhappiness?

She heads over to the bourbon again, not unaware of but apathetic to his own desires for intoxication.

[moonshxne]

"Can you put the damned bourbon down? Do cut it with this game of yours. I know what you're doing Temple."

As his words progressed they slipped from sharp vitriol to a tired disillusionment, a strained weariness, almost seamlessly.

"I'm doing what I can, Boots. Can you not do the same?"

He looked up at her again, slowly releasing a sigh.

[clotting]

She pours herself the alcohol, muttering angrily over her shoulder, like a child does when they're being sent to their room. And then she kicks back a mouthful.

"Can't I have a drink in our own home? Or is that yours alone too? It all has to be about you and your needs and you on the deed to this property, is that right?"

She turns and glares at him, eyes betraying the distraction of feeling the alcohol burn down her throat, and then they clear up and measure him like a cat deciding whether or not it'll allow itself to be touched.

"I married you. I'm not publicly embarrassing either of us. I'm doing all I can do too."