Excerpt: A Haphazard Arrangement

The artists had been on strike for almost a month now and no one had noticed. The leader, Yeong Park, issued a statement to the university officials stating that their strike was a symbolic move to bring attention back to what he called the “creative sciences,” a coin termed by notable Art History professor Dirk Wheaton in his essay “The Arts Aren’t for Sale.” Yeong and a coalition of fifteen students carried signs (acrylic on canvas) and marched around the center of campus for two hours each day from noon until 2 PM, shouting that the recent funding cuts in the art departments were a restriction of freedom of speech, a violation of the Equal Education Act, and a harbinger of more cuts to humanities departments across campus. Most humanities students knew this to be true but in the interest of staying on the good side of the university funding officials, slyly side-stepped their picketing brethren on the way to class.

Garcia was bored and had no idea what was going on. He had studied German in school, not Italian, and he thought that even if he had he would probably still have little idea about what was going on. His wife spoke Spanish (the irony of the situation, that Thomas Garcia did not speak Spanish but his wife, Laurine Geller, could, was not lost on him, nor was he allowed to forget it) and could figure out most of the words, when they were articulated clearly enough. Honestly, he didn’t care. There was a woman complaining about some man and a man complaining about some other man. It was either a love triangle or a story of unrequited love or something to do with love and people not being happy about it, like all operas.

The opera was coming to a crescendo and Laurine was crying, the tears streaming lightly compared to the snot running down her nose and into her (his) handkerchief. He put his arm around her and she lay her head on his shoulder. He knew it wasn’t about the opera, it was about the catharsis of emotions she kept bottled up because he rarely asked her to share them. In fact, though she had never told him explicitly, Garcia knew that his one great weakness was his inability to be there for his sensitive and emotional wife emotionally. He often wondered how long she would allow him to get away with it, but the opera, it seemed, allowed for their relationship to thrive better than any talk the two of them could have had. Marriage counselors be damned, he thought to himself confidently; Art was so often the answer to life’s woes.