michael loyd gray

Fait Accompli

It’s hard to explain.

I’m not sure I can make sense of it myself.

I didn’t see it coming.

But after just a few Fridays of cleaning my house, Cameron Albright, who I met just a few weeks ago at a laundromat, has decided to stay. As in, move in. Permanently.

She has moved her clothes and cleaning supplies in, a favorite easy chair, and an orange cat named Ralphie.

“You just had one chair?”

“The rest of the furniture belongs to my ex. He can keep it.”

“Fair enough.”

I glance at my favorite sofa: Ralphie has already curled up for a nap at my favorite end. It looks non-negotiable. What’s the old saying? Fait accompli. Maybe Ralphie’s French. He yawns.

But not in French.

Cam marches into the living room.

“Now I’m here, you’ll always have a clean house, Mr. Marlowe,” she says, throwing her arms in the air like a runner crossing the finish line first. The excited look on her face suggests agreeing with her is inevitable.

Another fait accompli.

I smile bravely and nod, thinking, When exactly did this all come together, and why do I feel sort of…uninformed?

“Maybe you ought to just call me Marlowe now,” I say. “That mister stuff is best left for somebody’s daddy.”

“Oh, is it?” she says, making a face. “I called you daddy in the bedroom and you didn’t seem to mind that, as I recall…Marlowe.”

“That’s different.”

“Oh, it’s different, is it?”

She wraps her arms around my neck and blows softly in my ear, a bit of a high school girl maneuver, but it still feels good and then there’s her boilerplate Audrey Hepburn smile, capable of excising many sins.

“We keep the daddy stuff in the bedroom,” I say, but grinning.

“Anything you say, daddy,” she says seductively and making a fake look of shock while drawing a leg up like she’s hiking her skirt, even though she’s wearing jeans. She makes me think of Marilyn Monroe when her skirt famously blew up in a publicity photo while she filmed The Seven-Year Itch.

I wonder if Cam has seen the movie.

And then I wonder if our new relationship has even seven months coming to it, let alone seven years. I do the quick math—it hasn’t even been seven days yet.

But you never know, even though love is a gamble at best. Not that this is somehow love. I don’t know what we have, but it’s not love. I briefly remind myself of my college girlfriend Brie Tompkins ditching me and late-night Jimi Hendrix albums for the Republican Party.

There isn’t any sense in love and yet here we are.

I wonder if I can be what a woman wants.

But what does a woman want? What does Cameron want?

What can I stand?

These are all serious questions.

I will get to the bottom of them.

But I sense there is no rush where Cam is concerned. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it sure took her less time to move in.

A little overwhelmed, I need to exit her hectic flow about the house for a while. Some personal space time. A reprieve. I plop down at one end of a sofa, the opposite end from Ralphie, who opens his eyes narrowly and regards me suspiciously for a moment and then sighs and eases back into his nap as if he has occupied that space for years.

Cam goes back and forth, settling in. But twittering—flitting—about. She’s a bird scratching away at this and that. I hear her opening and closing the fridge door, running water in the kitchen, the sound of plates and glasses moving around inside cabinets.

The sudden and unpleasant hum of the stove vent hood is suddenly switched on, a sound I have rarely heard. It startles me for a few seconds. It gets switched off, then on again a few seconds later and I wonder why.

I am dismayed but silent.

On one of her odysseys throughout the house, she passes me on the sofa and thinks better of it and backs up to lean over and plant a sloppy, wet kiss on my cheek as I clutch at her elbow, an awkward embrace for a few seconds, a show of intimacy, then I hear her opening closet doors.

Yet again, the stove vent hood is switched on and off in quick succession, and I am astounded. It’s like a sound welling up from the depths of hell. Even Ralphie raises his head to look around.

I wonder if somewhere in my house Cam has planted a flag with a large C on it.

A C for Cam.

A C for Conquered Territory.

Apparently, I am now a conquered people.

She goes on like that a while, a bird loose in a house. Soon, she announces that her specialty is Hungarian goulash, but not just any old boring goulash because of the secret ingredients she uses and the influence of her Austrian grandparents, who apparently had their own Austrian version of goulash. Something to do with pine nuts and saffron. I nod, simply grateful not to hear the stove vent hood switched on and off again.

It gives me the willies.

I absently consider if pine nuts are anything I might be allergic to. But I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve ever had pine nuts and I didn’t know people cooked with them. I expect to learn much living with Cam.

But I might have to somehow disable that stove vent hood switch.

She brings me a cold beer that I didn’t ask for, but it’s good instinct, I note, and I smile at her. It’s now pleasant in my living room, the sounds of kitchen activity not so foreign after all. Smells begin to waft out from the kitchen and they are surprisingly good smells, the smells of goulash and pine nuts, I suppose, and whatever saffron is and whatever it does.

I make a note to Google it.

For some odd reason, odd because it’s not exactly like in the movie at all, I think of Robert Redford and Jane Fonda attempting dinner their first night in their new apartment in Barefoot in the Park.

There is a similar feeling of uncertainty now pervading my house. Muted dread? Maybe. I don’t know.

Abruptly, Ralphie raises himself up again and stares at me a moment. It’s his moment between wide awake and coming out of sleep, a moment when we all wonder where the hell we are and how we got there. Then he cautiously moseys over to me, staying just out of reach for a few seconds, mulling it, perhaps debating the wisdom of cottoning up to another human. He licks a paw, taking his time, glancing at me, judging my fitness to share his space. Then finally, enough subtle protest issued, he plops down against my thigh and I rub his head between his ears. I can hear him purr.

And the goulash was quite good.

But I disabled the stove vent hood switch anyway.