When Life Gives You Lemons

Issue 14

​Coming home to an empty apartment
slick with the sweat of other men’s affairs,
he sinks into his old leather sofa;
sighs as he pulls a tube of lipstick from
the crease between the cushions; wearily
surveys the kingdom of his desolation,
no longer even monarch of his home.
The man and the apartment seem to have grown
into each other in a symbiosis
of mutual decay. Until, at last,
brain reeling with exhaustion, images
of everything he’s seen that day, like in
the movies, he nods his head and goes to sleep.
Waking up in an empty apartment,
littered with the paraphernalia
of conquests not his own, he groggily
peels himself off the sofa, rubs his face,
and looks around him with a doleful air.
He sleepwalks to the bathroom, shaves, cuts
himself in various places and applies
shreds of tissue, stuck on with spots of blood.
Then for a while he gazes at his face:
a constellation of red dots upon
the faded map of an undistinguished life,
drawn on by dime-store dreams. And on and on
he goes about the business of preparing
himself to face another same-old day.
You might think he’d resent this halfway life,
a kind of hotel steward of his home,
only inhabiting the spaces left
by other men who use him to their ends.
But Mr. Lemon doesn’t have sour grapes.
He’s an eternal optimist, poor soul.
He goes to work in the metropolis.
He’s kind of a professional third wheel.
He flicks his fingers through the paper wheel
of names and numbers standing on his desk,
and makes arrangements for his clientele:
the men above him in the corporate ladder.
One of these days they’ll throw a dog a bone. 
Or at least they keep saying that they will.
And that’s enough for Mr. Lemon. See,
Mr. Lemon’s the kind of guy who lives
in constant hope of something wonderful
descending on him from the universe.
He sits there in his cramped cubicle;
chatters like a monkey on the phone;
presses a desultory finger on 
the typewriter every now and again.
The guy he works for is a total heel,
a thrusting businessman, an alpha male.
And back in the apartment, after hours,
he’s one of Mr. Lemon’s regulars.
There’s this girl he’s been seeing for a while,
keeps telling her he’s gonna leave his wife
but somehow never does. You know the deal.
Now Mr. Lemon wouldn’t treat a girl
like that, you know? ‘Cos he’s the real deal.
‘Cos Mr. Lemon, he’s a real nice guy,
the kind you might take home to show your folks.
The kind who likes his eggs sunny side up,
and only eats the yolks. An optimist!
And in the mornings and the evenings, when
he rides the rigging of the ship of steel
that crests the wave of cold modernity
(the building where he goes to work each day),
he tries to chat up the elevator girl.
And she’s a real peach, ya’ know? But she
is real hung up on Mr. Lemon’s boss.
That’s right. The very same. But he, poor soul,
hasn’t made the connection yet. But hell.
We’ll let him carry on in ignorance
a little while. Let a dog have his day.
She seems to kinda like his goofy jokes,
puppy-dog eagerness and innocence.
She isn’t even creeped out by the fact
he used his private detective skills to track
down her name and address. (Well, I guess
people are a lot less paranoid
during this period of history.)
Of course, she probably sees him more as friend
material, but he can work with that.
She tells him she’s about to finish things
with an old fling, an on-and-off affair,
an older man, the kind young women fall for.
It’s been going on for months. But now
she knows all this time he’s been stringing her
along. Keeps saying he’s gonna leave his wife
and run away with her, but somehow, it’s
never the right time. You know the way.
And Mr. Lemon nods in sympathy.
Oh yeah. Sure. It’s time to cut all ties.
Long overdue. Move on to greener prospects.
Hey, by the way, would you like to see a movie
with me tomorrow night? It’s no big deal.
I happened to be going anyway,
thought maybe you could use the company,
considering what you’re going through and all. 
She smiles: Why sure! I think that would be swell.
So later, when he’s riding in the subway,
surrounded by the other human ants,
indifferent businessmen and secretaries,
he starts to entertain a fantasy.
It’s pretty much your standard movie fare:
a sunny day, a picnic, him and her,
clinking glasses, leaning close together;
first kiss; wedding ring in a glass of fizz;
delighted squeal; the breathless ‘Yes, I will,’
and soon enough (the montage carries on)
a lot of little Lemons running around,
playing, fighting, growing; off to college,
first love, first heartbreak; home for holidays;
the pair of them (Mr. and Mrs Lemon)
growing old and love-worn; grandchildren;
wearing matching knitted hats and jumpers;
standing at a gate to watch the sunset.
You know the drill. The dreams of men are made
in celluloid. Like fragile flowers, at once      
authentic and derivative, sincere
and ersatz, they flourish in the cracks that fracture
the concrete pavements of modernity,
yet never threaten its integrity.
So, for a while he wanders around the city,
eats in a half-full diner, where the plates,
the knives and forks, the faded chrome tables
and worn-out faces of the other diners
all glow with a dusky film-projector light,
and seem complicit in his happiness.
And so, as the appointed time approaches,
he leaves and makes his way back through the streets,
through urban ravines, steep-sided, overshadowed
by the dark shapes of skyscrapers, through
the slums and run-down tenements, and under
the soft, unnatural gloaming of the streetlights.
At last, he reaches the apartment building.
He climbs the stairs and finds himself before
his door. He opens it and peers inside.
and in the apartment there’s this strange tableau:
a stage-set for an intimate scene, vacated,
like a discarded wrapper, the actors fled,
perhaps to greener pastures. Table set
for two; empty wine bottle, traces of
red liquid clinging to the insides of
two glasses; dregs like little pools of blood
cradled in the bottoms; and the smell
of something unborn murdered in the womb.
Oh, and one more detail: a little scrap
of paper on the table, blotted with blood-
red drops of wine, the masculine hand-writing:
I’ve done it. Left my wife. So what d’you say?
Beneath, the one line in a girlish hand,
a little shaky with emotion, Yes,
I will. And last of all, the final piece: 
he sees the imprint of the wedding ring,
limned faintly in a wash of half-dried wine.
He stands there a moment, dumbstruck, numb, a sleep-
walker slowly awaking from a dream.
He’s kind of like that cartoon coyote who
keeps on running in mid-air until
he looks down, realizes that the ground’s
vanished from under him, and even then
pauses to register his situation
before he finally begins to fall,
leaving nothing but a puff of smoke.
Just so the ground beneath him falls away:
from walking on air to freefall in a delayed
split second. This is the way reality
kicks in, the way he finally correlates
the contents of his mind. Maybe you think
this is a pretty big leap to make, that one
of such an optimistic cast of mind
as Mr. Lemon would most likely lack
the means to draw the invisible lines connecting
this constellation of dots, like blood-red stars
in a sky become suddenly baleful, alien.
And surely such an intuition for
disaster would much more befit a man
with the perceptive apparatus of
a pessimist. You’d probably be right.
Maybe you think this whole scene’s contrived,
and lacking the objective correlative
to justify this sudden revelation.
You’re probably right there too. The truth is, I’m
no Mr. Lemon, nor a Mr Wilder
for that matter. No, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool
pessimist, a glass-half-empty kind
of guy. You know the type. And, well, I just
can’t bring myself to give a character
a happy ending. It offends my sense
of truth. But still, I’d have you understand
that Mr. Lemon is my shadow and
perhaps I’m his; and that this gives us a
particular connection to each other;
that each, perhaps, in his intensest moments,
pierces the veil of his reality
and glimpses the other’s inverted world, and maybe
that world invades his own. For I believe
that opposites contain each other’s seeds: 
Carl Jung called this “enantiodromia.”
So now I’ve got that apologia
out of the way, back to Mr. Lemon.
He has his revelation (regardless of whether
you think it’s believable or not), 
and as the sense of gravity starts to sink
into his dazed brain, he begins to reel,
walks slowly to the cabinet, gets out
a bottle of whisky, half empty, downs it all
in one long draught, determined to drown the whole
world beneath a sea of alcohol.
This done, he staggers out the door and down
the stairs and into the nightmare of the night.
He finds his way into the city centre,
illumined store-fronts looming luridly
over him, and tower-blocks ascending
like impossible monoliths against
the starless half-light of the civic sky,
its opalescent light-polluted mist.
At last, he winds up in some seedy bar.
And on the stage, a seedy singer’s singing
maudlin melodies that linger on
his tongue with a horrible, cold irony,
a coppery aftertaste, a tang of rust.
Listening, he orders drink after drink,
blearily looks about him with a faint
light of accusation in his eyes,
as if the place’s patrons are all a part
of some conspiracy against him. Really,
nobody takes much notice of him. He
doesn’t look out of place in a place like this:
another hulk among the derelicts,
another piece of human set-dressing,
slowly sinking into the scenery,
a bit part in the movie of his life.
All his time he dreamed he was the hero,
and now he wakes to find himself alone,
the moonlight of his life-illusion waning,
another lonely no one in the crowd,
another life of quiet desperation.
He sits and drinks his bitterness to the dregs.
Then, mumbling to himself, he drags himself
back out into the street, and finds his feet
mechanically remembering the way,
and after a blurry, liquor-slurred passage of time
finds himself suddenly back in his apartment.
And in the apartment there’s that awful smell
of stale champagne and other men’s amours.
He stumbles about the apartment for a while,
then tumbles into bed and restless sleep. 
And Mr. Lemon dreams of a great wheel.
He’s in some TV game show. There’s the girl,
playing the beautiful assistant in
the game show of his dream. Our Lady Fortune.
And he, himself, spread-eagled on the wheel,
nails in his palms and feet, like Leonardo’s
Vitruvian man (but thinning on the top
and slightly stooped). And then the game-show host’s
stentorian voice is reading out his fate:
Ooh. Tough luck, Mr. Lemon. Looks like you’re
going home empty handed on this occasion.
And the invisible audience says Awww
as the dream spins out of focus, fades to black.
Waking up in an empty apartment,
surrounded by the wreckage of his life,
a pounding redness in his head, he drags
himself out of bed and into the bathroom,
looks at the razor on the washstand, and
looks at the razor on the washstand for
a dramatically long moment, and
picks up the tin of shaving cream beside it.
Maybe he’ll catch that movie after all.
 
* This poem is a reimagining of Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment.

---

Taliesin Gore lives in an annexe in his mother's garden and works night shifts as a care worker. His poetry has appeared in many publications, in print and online, including Littoral Magazine, Reach Poetry and Stimulus Respond. His fiction can be found at MetaStellar, East of the Web and elsewhere.

---