Carle Vernet: Hussard Walking in Front of his Horse,
Smoking a Pipe (February 8, 1817)

" … one impossible plan."

It might be true that every Exile serves their time alone. Certainly, The Muse's Exile seemed very different than mine. She would disappear into the Takoma Park Metro Station every morning and return every evening, off to engage in meaningful work and petty politics. She was an increasingly significant presence in her workplace, expanding her role from its initially forgettable status into something with genuine if informal, influence. She was becoming something. I was the one who ensured she got up on time and would often give her a ride to the station. In the six years we lived in Takoma Park, she drove the car to work three times. I regulated her departures and arrivals. Having supper ready when she returned became my primary occupation.

I had rarely had so much alone time. I suppose I coped poorly, reading voluminously and running relatively mindless errands. I did the laundry and cleaned the house after my fashion, though never entirely to The Muse's satisfaction, for she had been tutored in those chores by her midwestern mother, while I, being one of the boys at home, had been almost exclusively taught how to accomplish outside chores. She and I had always employed different laundry sorting algorithms; for instance, mine, a simple lights and darks, and hers, different every time she attempted to explain it to me. I could not successfully satisfy her expectations for the life of me, so I sought to wash, dry, fold, and put away before she could focus her hyper-critical scrutiny upon me. My cleaning likewise failed to satisfy her mysterious standards, for she considered dust dirty. I honestly couldn't see the stuff without my glasses, so I took to cleaning without my glasses on. She'd often trail behind in one of those odd hours when she wasn't gone and find dust on every horizontal surface. I'd insist that dust qualified as a feature, but she wouldn't buy my defense. I was never quite good enough as a laundress or a house cleaner.

I could iron anything, though, and on mornings, while she rushed around trying to recover the fifteen minutes she'd lost in over-sleeping, I'd often be ironing her blouse and/or pants she'd chosen to wear that morning. I'd have the car warmed up by the time she'd caught up to her breakfast, and we'd zoom off into another morning. Once she left, the car became supremely quiet, a riot of emptiness. I'd think about driving somewhere to buy myself breakfast, but I'd quickly lose interest and return to an equally riotously quiet house. I'd soon dispatch the breakfast dishes before confronting my daily existential crisis. On what might I meaningfully focus my excess attention? I felt every inch TheInvisibleHusband then! During those weeks when The Muse would fly back to her home office in Colorado, I'd have three or four days of riotous silence to manage without anyone else complicating my existence. I couldn't secretly violate anyone's laundry sorting algorithm in her absences. I'd feel heartsick.

"It's late, I'm going to sleep.

You're still awake in an airplane seat.

I'm here, holding fort,

the cats are tended and the house is dark.

I’ll see you late Friday night,

too late for supper, I’ll keep the bed warm,

let yourself in if I couldn’t keep my eyes open."

I became a songwriter again. The conditions were hollow enough to awaken a talent I might have lost over the years. My first profession after high school was that of a songwriter and performer. My agents referred to me as a Single Acoustical Artist. I labeled myself David. I'd written most of my obligatory hundred truly terrible original songs by the time I turned twenty and then went on to write a few I considered worthy of me. Throughout my two subsequent careers, I composed infrequently. I'd become that old troubadour again during transitions, but I mostly kept the guitar in its case, fully separating that church from its replacement state. I referred to my work through those those later years as "playing a different-shaped guitar."

My office in the Sherman Street house was a perfect songwriting burrow with two glass walls. I could sit at my digital piano and sing into a window, creating the ideal bathroom-quality echo. I could hear myself singing in there. Further, as I mentioned earlier, the living room there had been engineered to acoustical perfection without an ounce of echo or distortion, a perfect room within which to perform and record. With my newly found friend Franklin stopping in every Thursday morning, we'd trade songs, and I'd even sometimes have a shred of something new to share. He encouraged my dalliance, and under his generous tutelage, I began to create music again.

I was never very much of a musician. I don't read music and focus most of my attention on creating the lyrics. I might characterize my final products as rather poor but honest. I wrote about TheInvisibleHusband.

"It’s early, you’re still asleep,

I killed the alarm clock so you could keep dreaming.

Paper’s in, your coffee’s on,

I'm thinkin' 'bout writin' you another new song.

This one describes you and me,

I’ll be invisible, you’ll be on the Metro,

and we’ll be bound together by some texting in between.

"Some dreamers pass in the night,

Others keep on scheming, regardless of the daylight,"

Those first few years of Exile often felt like The Muse and I were passing in the night, though we mostly accomplished our most convincing passing during the days. Our lives had been as both business and life partners for more than the prior decade. Exile split apart that arrangement, with her seemingly getting the more active assignment. Whatever it might have been that I did through those solitary mornings didn't produce much tangible evidence that I'd even existed. She at least submitted monthly reports to a home office. My songs remain as clear evidence that we were both Exiled there, with her inhabiting the far more visible role.

"Like an Invisible Husband, like an impossible plan,

some day we’ll settle into a garden

and never see this city again.

If someone can get there, well, we’re the ones who can:

An invisible husband, his immutable dreamer,

and one impossible plan."

I spent much of my Exile dreaming of being back in my garden again. The Sherman Street house had no lawn, so my accustomed routines had no outlet there. I could successfully putter around tending to that patch of woodland. I once ordered a bunch of bark dust and relined the paths with it, but that garden felt too wild to fully satisfy my native sensibilities. Even outside, my husbandry inevitably grew less visible there, sparking a continuing identity crisis, however much I might have otherwise enjoyed that place.

"Weekend, you’re sleeping in

I’m up writing as the day begins.

Cats fed, I finally read

the rest of that story you’d recommended;

It got me thinking again,

of all the good we did back when we were working,

when changing the world was our daily routine."

I would write more songs than The Invisible Husband, but that one survives as the most evocative. It expresses the experience and conjures those hollow feelings whenever I play it. Exiles are genuine out-of-body experiences. Whomever we become there is never instantly recognizable. Whatever we became there might only come into focus when peering backward into what once was, after it never could be anything again. In times like those, when falling in or out of love or losing my identity in some transition, I once again become the musician I once was. I never knew where any of the songs I penned came from. Each was beyond my skill, ability, and experience when I started but eventually integrated into whatever I've become. I was once TheInvisibleHusband, and because I truly once was him, I'll never be able to shake him.

"Some dreamers pass in the night,

Others keep on scheming, regardless of the daylight,

Like an Invisible Husband, like an impossible plan,

some day we’ll settle into a garden

and never see this city again.

If someone can get there, well we’re the ones who can:

An invisible husband, his immutable dreamer,

and one impossible plan."

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz