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Real Property Severance
A Short Story
Fiction by Victor Wolzek
...and the man in the monitor said something like this:
A joint tenancy may be severed, converting it into a
tenancy in common. Severance occurs when one of the joint tenants
conveys his or her interest to a third party, thereby eliminating unity
of time and title which previously existed.
What the hell does that mean?
If your memory serves
you correctly -- which is exactly what you cannot count on --
you've been this uneasy only twice before. When you first told her you
loved her, and when you told your parents you were abandoning the Ph.D.
and following her to start over with law school in California. (Of
blue-collar breed, they could never understand why you wanted the Ph.D. in
the first place, and law was certainly a more "practical" direction
career-wise, but you were quitting after two years and -- more
importantly, two Stafford loans -- into it.) Supposedly, you confused your
passionate enthusiasm for a new city, with all its secrets and mysteries
and possibilities, with authentic love for each other. Blind to the true
source of your rapture, you married. And all evidence would suggest it was
a disaster.
She said, "I do," but she didn't. Soon it seemed that
she couldn't, or perhaps -- (it can't be true) -- simply
wouldn't. In any case, she wasn't. Not even a little bit.
For all the pretense and self-inflated import, it was all just another
Jew-created drama. Vows, in hindsight, are the emotional equivalent of a
medieval catapult: bold in concept and artful in execution, they project a
future with such grandeur, such physical hyperbole that in the moment
everyone fails to acknowledge the inevitable fate of the future launched.
Vows: religiously inspired, state supported, personally edifying,
spiritually irrelevant romantic trajectories of failed optimism and
despair. They meant something when they were uttered in fear and trembling
by your parents in the '50s. Somehow, somewhere, between there and here,
something has faded. The palpable reality that once pumped the words with
blood and meaning is now...gone... A few months ago you were soaring,
together. Now, off in the distance, you're hobbling, alone,
brittle, trying to recoup from the fall. You still can't bring yourself to
utter, "It was good while it lasted."
Friday, the beginning of the
week's end, and you're stranded in the sterile silence of a cubicle
somewhere on the 26th floor of a skyscraping Market Street high rise
watching ABA-approved "First Year Law Review" videos. All year the
fluorescent fliers dangled from the auditorium railings and lobby pin-up
boards promising a semester's worth of key info in 6 short hours. Why
risk trusting your own notes, scrawled in your own untried hand, when in
just six short hours, the length of one traditional primary school day, a
proven master will walk you through all the material, providing thoughtful
analysis, a finely honed review outline, and a superficial but adequate
(thats all you really need!) understanding of the "black letter" law and
the case histories that support it. Have you come this far, spent this
much, just to blow it now? All first-year core classes are offered:
Criminal Law, Contracts, Civil Procedure, Torts, and, yes, sweet Jesus,
the bane of your existence, the cross for your haul, Real Property!
What you at first perceived to be the pathetic last refuge of
over-privileged daddy-sent numbskulls, mostly trust-fund Jews who couldn't
cut the Ivys, you ultimately embraced at last as glorious slacker
salvation! "Salvation." One among many. You should have known. The safety
net, you discover too late, after the leap, is poorly knotted and
may not hold. It's a ruse. It's comforting, but surely it will give way,
perhaps lessening the impact of the fall, perhaps sparing your life, but
not without injury. Not without damage. Where salvation is sought scars
are cover charge. It's worst case scenario: the tape you're watching
purports to be a re-view of class material, but you're not feeling
the slightest twinge of déjà vu.
The state of your case is
clear: the only relevant adjective for your individual courses and your
semester as a whole is -- unknown. It occurs to you that this seven
letter word, unknown, this dime-a-dozen descriptive,
unknown, this throw away utterance, this thoughtless scribbling,
unknown, this whore of language that gives it all, used by anyone
and everyone to describe anything and everything because it is just empty
enough and willing to say everything and nothing all at once,
unknown. Yes, this singular sign for hire is without question the
only word in the English language specially suited, tailor cut, indeed,
custom fit to the unwieldy contours of that dangerous question mark you
hazard to call a "self." "Karumpfff-ke-kuh!" A loud, sharp cough from
beyond the horizon of your beige cubicle walls disrupts your reflection.
Suddenly your eyes focus and recapture the monitor on the desk in front of
you, a dead umbilicus of coiled brown rubber between it and your
headphones. On screen a gray bearded bald man in blue shirt and yellow tie
rambles on and on from behind a clout-conferring podium about landlords
and tenants, easements and fee simples, remainders and reversions, and
severances. And maybe you've had too much caffeine, but you'd swear he
just said something or other was "running with the land." You're
perplexed. Yet he assures -- someone, you? -- that these rules are not
state-specific idiosyncrasies but are in fact "common law" (which you deem
then and there the greatest misnomer in the history of western
civilization).
"Jesus!" you think. "Something's gotta be wrong
here. You check the video box. Shake it to make sure. Empty (it's in the
VCR). You read the label -- "Real Property" -- confirming the fact that
you are in deep, deep shit.
Panning the room, the rest of them seem
irritatingly at home with their tapes. Under-achieving Hook-nosed Heebs.
Diligent note-takers, the whole pompous herd of them. Focused, attentive,
pausing only to lap at their coffees, yawn, stretch, blow their noses, or
enjoy some variant of the few basic pleasures afforded them in this
high-rent step-brother trailer park addendum to higher education (the
means mean nothing to these people; the end justifies any
means).
But you? You're too drained to romanticize your emptiness.
If this morning you were able to imagine yourself a kind of 20th century,
post-war (post-post-war) existential anti-hero, three coffees later you're
unable to rouse the slightest sense of metaphysical "absurdity" or
"nausea" -- 'cuz you just don't give a shit.
Surrounded by
strangers, hook-nosed over-privileged strangers, whose mere presence is,
in some almost indiscernible way, threatening, you find solace in
knowing that you know who they are; you used to be them. You find comfort
in knowing that you know what they are doing; you used to do it. You have
been that well-oiled liberal-loaded memorization machine, that
stream-lined, fact-fueled, I-dotting, T-crossing paradigm of academic
precision who, in the course of a two hour essay exam, could regurgitate
every essential point the professor made in lecture and expected to see
handed back to him in print.
Yeah, you have been there. You have
been them. Not like now, when the meat of your existence is marbled with
reflection. You have really been there, before the wedge was
driven, before the divide seemed so goddamned insurmountable. Yes, back
then. Then you were there. Then you lived it, were
it, with 100% of that blissful somnambulism definitive of the
first-person point of view. You have listened through the headphones.
You've heard the lecturer's voice unfold concepts so clearly and
distinctly it was like hearing yourself think. You've heard the voice of
instruction without sensing the slightest fissure between you and it,
indubitable truth, a closed circle of hermetically sealed clarity. But
today, like a ménage à trois in a Protestant wet dream, there is a
woman wedged between you and your work.
"Fuck this," you say under
your breath, stopping the video and removing the headset. "Fuck me." You
suddenly feel small, pathetic, ridiculous. Here you are, a bright, young ,
white man, doing all he can to create a place for himself in an inherently
hostile world, all in hopes of capturing the love of a woman.
You
shake the cup and drip the last of the cold, sweet coffee onto your
outstretched tongue. Your mouth is pasty, your cup dry. Café is in the
lobby. Starbucks, of course. You want to go but know you shouldn't. Lobby
is too close to sidewalk, sidewalk too close to street, street too close
to anywhere else, and that is exactly where you want to be, though
it is still too close to her.
You go anyway, the anguish of
impending failure eased by the thought of flaunting your newly acquired
ability to order an "iced café Americano Venti" in a single breath without
looking at the board.
You pack up your things and descend in the
quiet solitude of the empty elevator. You gaze at yourself in the mirrored
back of the elevator door through smudges and fingerprints caught in the
light, your image split by the door's vertical divide. You know exactly
what you need.
Paper cup.
Plastic lid.
Hot
water.
Grounds.
VICTOR
WOLZEK
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