~~ 1st D R A F T . . . free write ~~
11/18/17
Can you hear that song? It’s Meaghan Smith singing “Here Comes Your Man”, a sweet, easy-going ramble down the street kind of song; pretty young woman peddling her bike, long hair, no rush, wearing — I swear! — the same navy blue dress with white polkadots that was my seventh-grade favorite, and a boyish man peering out from behind a tree with James’s Christmas-surprise eyes, that boy-joy smile. She peddles past, he runs fast. She lives in a song about that man to be and he, in a chase without words, he gives up. Why do boys always forget to use words?
I
He was 14 and I was 14 and it was just one class, but from 5th period on, I couldn’t see anyone in my view finder but him. That grin. The flip of his hair. His eyes always smiling. That way he had of talking to me - his words quick and clever - and his hands so close. If I hadn’t known how to flirt, if I didn’t already major in flirting - which was my cover, so very shy was I beneath it all - I would have learned just to spend more time with him. All I wanted was time.
But time intervenes. Time lets the door click closed behind you. Time asks for the hall pass you don’t have.
He was 17 and I was 17 and in the years that came between us I learned of his kisses and his touch, his gentle restless hands and his mouth - Oh God! what he could do with his mouth - this beautiful boy, this boyfriend of my best friend. All that time, he was hers. All that time I didn’t know he wished he could be mine. All that time, he didn’t know I went out with the boys who asked me — he never asked me — and neither of us could know that the boys who asked wouldn’t be nice boys. They weren’t cruel; they took what they wanted. No one had taught them better. No one had taught me.
High school years feel like forever in the classroom, but oh how quickly time throws you out on your ass. Time doesn’t wait till you’ve made up your mind. Time tells you: get a job, get a move on, get your fucking act together.
He’d been a stoner. I’d been a scholar. He went on to the Coast Guard and to addictions to bigger badder things. I went on to college and to a bigger badder depression than the one that nearly killed me at 17. He married, had a family, was happy till he wasn’t. I met a man, made a life, wanted to be happy, happier, happiest. I forgot the boy I adored, forgot high school, forgot most of the decade after grad school, too. But he never forgot me, not in all those years between. But of course I didn’t know that.
II
Enter the 21st Century and the new world order: virtual reality, cyber sociability, global connectivity where we’re all social media information addicts. Napster Friendster MySpace; FaceBook Twitter YouTube; Google googled googling. Time warps and woofs under the strain of it, twisting the Mobious strip time slip until all things past become present again.
I was halfway through life and he was halfway through life when we passed each other in the hall, names on a Face Book wall, the chalkboard whereupon is scrawled the graffiti of life’s passages. Death of a friendship, death of a marriage, death of a mother. And with death comes the past resurrected. Lessons learned the hard way. Roads not taken. All the time wasted in worry. We two confessed immediately: I had such a crush on you.
It was my birthday, that zero birthday that knocks everyone on their ass, and it was lunch. Just lunch. He sat across from me and shared the pain and the triumphs. I sat across from him and stared. That grin. The way his eyes crinkled each time they smiled at mine. The curl of his clean-cut salt and pepper hair. That way he had of talking, genuine, thoughtful, and his hands so close. I sat across from him and my heart sang, Why oh why are you married?
* * *
Well, it’s a start, not an essay, but a start.
Funny how you forget that you’ve done things. How I forget. I forgot I wrote that essay, or started it. It’s not really much of an essay, just a happy recollection. Joy on a Christmas morning. Joy until I get to the unwrapping part and I hear my Auntie, venom in her voice, “You’re just like your mother!”
We were sitting in a nice restaurant, our favorite, when she asked me, “When do I get to meet this new man of yours?” and I had answered, “You don’t.” I’d given it some serious forethought. The answer had to be no, definitely no. Though I wanted to tell her, the choice had to be not to. Too risky. You just never know who knows who, who is listening to who. Any hairdresser will tell you that.
“Why?” Now she looked mad. Sounds mad. Why mad and not concerned or confused?
“Because he’s married.” The bare fact. Another choice. I had assumed, wrongly, that if I laid it plain on the table, like a menu, the question would be about me: Why did you choose this? I had a reason. I wanted to share it, at least partially, and I trusted my aunt. She was the closest thing to a real mother I have ever known.
But she spat it out, that judgement, and I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d reached across the table and slapped me hard, a grown woman, married, divorced, educated, and fully capable of sound decisions, slapped me like a child into next week.
“You’re just like your mother! Totally fine sleeping with married men.”
I had never slept with a married man. Had it not been James, a man I had loved since we were just kids, just fourteen, I never would have slept with a married man. Alright, that’s not strictly true. I would never have had a serious relationship with a married man, the kind of relationship I spoke of to my auntie. Just sex is different. Just sex doesn’t count. I mean if it doesn’t count for him — he’s the married one — then why is it my job to worry about it?
I should have left right then and there. This is true of most of my intimate relationships but it is most true of my family relationships. How would things have been different if I had just gotten up and left the restaurant? I know my aunt, she would have had to apologize. She can’t stay mad forever in the face of relationship collapse. I’m not certain what would have happened after that, but I know she would not have sacrificed the relationship wholly. Then again, she was just fine sacrificing our auntie/niece turned mother/daughter relationship to her anger. She had always been catty, my aunt. She and my mother together were a couple of too-good-for-you peas in a pod, those two, and they were so funny with their arch commentary on the world, but as age bore down on them and the ravages of their choices broke them down to their constituent parts, my aunt grew angry and grew in her need of things to be angry about. And people. My mother’s drinking was a big target of my aunt’s anger, which worked for me; the effect of my mother’s drinking had ravaged me. I needed a haven in the hurricane and my aunt had provided it, but with my mother gone now, I have become the target. In retrospect, it took a long time before I could see, much less believe, that’s what had happened, that my loving, protective auntie had turned against me. So, I think I can be forgiven for not knowing what to do, but what if? What if I had gotten up and left the restaurant that day?
What happens if the target moves?
Years later the doctor would say to me, “Things might have been different if you had said no.” I didn’t know what he meant. I actually had to ask.
“If you had told James that you wouldn’t sleep with a married man, that if he wanted a a relationship with you he would have to get a divorce, things could have been different. If you had asked for what you wanted.”
Okay, first of all. First of all. First of . . . fuck it all. That never occurred to me. Point conceded. Maybe. I didn’t say it that way to the doctor, but I was flattened by that fact that it had never occurred to me that this had been a choice. How can you make a choice that you didn’t know you had?
Second of all, the first words out of James’s mouth, before he asked me if I wanted to go to Vegas with him, were, “I don’t want to get divorced.” I took him at his word.
Third, at that first lunch together, the way his eyes crinkled when they smiled into mine, the curl of his salt and pepper hair, that way he had of talking, his hands on the table, so close . . . At that first lunch I promised myself I would do whatever it took to spend whatever time it was that we got to have together in this life. I lost him once. Childhood makes losers of us all, but adults get to chose.
And fourth, fourteen, fortieth, four-hundreth, I could not get what I needed if James and I were free to pursue a real relationship. I needed us to be conscribed. Limited, hamstrung, netted . . . fraught. That last one is James’s word. “Our relationship is . . . fraught,” he would say, with that pause always built in. It was his way of referring to the fact of his marriage and, presumably, that he loved his wife; he certainly planned to stay married to his wife, and when we were still connected on Facebook and the logarithm kicked up shit it thought I should see (why, I ask you), he certainly looked happy in his marriage. I never asked. And as I told the couple of girlfriends who were thoughtless enough to go there, “James’s marriage is none of my business.” Did I tell this to the doctor? I don’t recall. Probably. I know I told him that I needed what only a relationship like the one James offered could provide. And I know that the doctor didn’t argue with me with I told him, didn’t tell me this was a bad idea. He knew what I was dealing with. After all, that’s the reason I was seeing the doctor in the first place, so how could he argue with my plan to get better? Unorthodox? Sure. But I don’t remember asking anyone’s permission for a Get-Well card that lists the approved ways of putting back together what someone else broke.
So let me lay it out for you.
Lots of people understand rules and morality, properness and property, rights and (self)righteousness. Not so many understand passion or compassion, or safety. I put all three of those last ones in the same sentence for a reason.
And pain? Everyone feels pain, but who understands it? Who willingly stares it in the face? Who steps into it? Who dances with it? Most people like pain escapes, pain numb-outs, and pain-away practices (church leaps to mind), and of course everyone loves an inspirational story to chase the pain away. I like all those things too, things that take away the pain, but — and this is important — pain is my posse. If it weren’t for pain, I’d be dead. Alive dead. The way most people are. The way those are who are doing pain escapes and pain numb-outs and pain-away practices are. This is because nothing zeroes out pain. We are human, therefore we feel pain.
So, let’s do this again.
Who stares into pain? Who steps toward pain? Dances with pain? Kisses pain hard on the mouth and says, “Make love to me”? Do we do this it for the passion of it? the knowledge? the release? Who laughs and jumps away from pain to dance with another, happier partner, one light on his feet before, dutifully, going home again with pain? All of us? Are you sure?
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