Brock’s Obsessions: A Men’s Health Column
By Brock Belvedere, Jr.
Senior Staff Writer
File photo
I have loved only one woman. But she has left me.
Yet, she still dwells in the same cold, darkened house. In the very next room, in fact. Upon occasion, I awake, my eyelids wet with tears from some unremembered dream, and I believe her to be there. There is a sound and then the creak of a door and she is gone.
I lay awake for hours, tormented by hostile thoughts. I scan photographs of her past lovers. A foreign artist, a sort of filmmaker, another artist– all of them more beautiful than I. And I imagine her nights then, in the mysterious woods and the endless, harvested fields. I was not there with her and I am not there now.
I sit in a chair in a little room filled with old books and look out at the falling leaves of autumn. The giant beans from a cigar tree litter the overhang; a siren can be heard far off in the distance. What does the siren indicate? My interpretation may be obscure to some but I have come to believe it.
I wake again, long before dawn. Another lonely, fitful night. She is not there.
I go to the mirror. There is a cream purchased secretly, manufactured in Lankville by the Buntz Mallows company, a concoction made of shea butter, Vitamin E and mallows. It is meant to reinvigorate the skin. I slather it liberally across my face– it fails to transform me. “You are still ugly Brock,” I say, into the mirror. “You can not compare to the past lovers. That is why she does not want you.” I think of more– a tall blonde dancer, a little archivist with a Christ-like body, a tiny boy of the East.
I repair to the pitch-black attic with a flashlight and a sobbing towel. There is a box there– formerly housing a Vitiello Decorative Ham, now filled with old photographs. There are a series of my lover and I, taken very early, when her desire was perhaps extant– our expressions are serious but satisfied as we pose for a long-forgotten shutterbug. I look over these longingly.
Then, I come to a smaller album, decorated in lace, perhaps hand-made. And inside, a straight-on shot taken at a dance perhaps, or some sort of party– the sort of affair to which I would have never been invited. And my lover is engaged in a deep, soulful kiss with the artist. I pass the already moist sobbing towel across my eyes. I feel myself sinking.
I go to the office before dawn– no one is there. I am assigned an article on Lingus Nets matches. I have no interest in it and place it aside. And I scan the photographs again.
I imagine the warmth of her body. It has grown cold, autumn is arriving. But I do not have it.
Where is she?
I don’t know.
Further depressing men’s health articles by Brock Belvedere will appear in future issues.
LETTER SACK