Dear Mr. You (6 page)

You took off your glasses and put them back on to get a better picture. Were those army shoes? With diaper pins? And there was some kind of graffiti on the back of the leather jacket. “Panther Elixer,” it said, with symbols in orange. The dark red tights over black tights, with holes in them; were they on purpose? Were they purchased like that or were they normal and ripped later by hand? You tried to imagine buying a suit at Bloomingdale’s and then taking it home and ripping it. Shredding it on purpose. You wondered: Do you laugh when you do it, the ripping? Was it a fun thing, done in groups? Or do you do it from anxiety, like a fetish? You have always wondered these things when you saw kids on the subway, looking like they’d gone at their clothing with a lawn mower.

“What, wait, is she sleeping?” asked Sandra as she entered with your soup. “That’s the girl who came just now? You put her to sleep that fast?”

“Get out, already, how do I know? She says she’s tired, what am I supposed to say?” You opened your Orangina. “You didn’t get a straw.”

“It’s in the thing.” Sandra fished it out and handed it to you. “She seemed nice, right?”

“How do I know? She’s asleep. I’ll ask her when she wakes up. If she is nice. All I know is she’s broke.” You inhaled the steam from the matzo ball and it had a calming effect. Sandra left, shaking her head.

Just then my hand flopped out and with a soft click a piece of bubble gum fell to the ground.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” You asked this of no one and I did not stir. You considered calling the rabbi for counsel.

In ten years you will consider walking to synagogue to ask the rabbi for counsel when you hear that I am at an ATM with a nonfunctioning debit card, since it is Shabbat and you cannot call me and you will wait until one minute past Shabbat to call me to help fix it. In twenty years, you’ll go to your office on your day off to look for a copy of my son’s passport because they do not allow him to board the plane since it has expired, and two days later after getting my son’s passport replaced you’ll wait in line with me while I am sobbing at Passport Express when I lose my own passport, only to take me the following day, again sobbing, to a passport expeditor when my new replacement passport goes missing two hours after I receive it. You will stand in line with me to wait to take my passport picture and you will hit me on the head with your hat when I ask you if my hair looks stupid.

In twenty-five years I will meet you near the synagogue to give a speech in your honor, and I will cry in front of the rabbi and all the people eating their kosher chicken when I say that you’ve treated me like a daughter and taken me from someone who couldn’t afford a taxi to being someone who has her own driver. I will tell the story of how I fell asleep on your couch the day I met you and everyone will laugh.

For now you get on with it. So what there is a girl asleep on the couch over there. So what.

You go back to work and pause for a saltine. There is a little triumph in pulling one completely intact from its package. Uncracked. Why someone would defile a perfect saltine with soup,
with wet, making it soggy and flaccid, is beyond you. You reach for another, which emerges also perfectly.

You buzz Sandra on the intercom.

“Is she still asleep?” Sandra asks.

“Mind your beeswax,” you say, brushing the saltine dust on the floor. “Get me a Dustbuster. And an ashtray.”

You stare at the crumbs so you won’t lose them. You will know where they are when she arrives with the Dustbuster. You wait there like that.

You said you would love me until you were ashes.

You bolted from work that morning and took a cab sixty blocks for a fuck-our-lights-out festival, you busted in and took me from dreams by throwing your backpack on my floor and then throwing down the pussy gauntlet; I roused and rallied and smiled and you tossed me across the bed—you could have had me fine in the direction I was facing, but it was a morning that needed a body happily pitched across a duvet with a guttural mm hmm, a morning that begged for bodice ripping and hair-pulling and whispering and taking off and taking me away, and just then—when I was waking the homeless on the streets with my OH GODS, you slammed into neutral at the end of the
in
part of the next
in
and
out
, you pulled fully out of me and backed off the bed like I was a parking space you were deciding against after several attempts to nail; you stood up so obscenely perfectly stiff and lumbering slightly, no false grace or attempt to indicate to me
that: Hey! Woman with your legs as open as the E-ZPass track, I am coming back! No, “hang on one second,” no halftime announcements, nothing, and so I was not sure if I should applaud, feel indignant, or just say screw that and start scrapbooking or what; so I stayed splayed and thrown and eventually started to think about maybe going to the gym, or the bodega, maybe today was the day I would learn how to use a Waterpik; at which point I heard, what, you opening my fridge? Looking for something in a drawer? Imodium?
Brian’s Song
? On VHS? But then I heard a pop and a fizz and you appeared again, Renaissance Fair stud, with your cock in one hand, not because it needed reminders but because you wanted it in that hand while the other hand gripped a bottle of Coke Classic, the old-school kind, which—doesn’t it? Taste so much better like that? Held in glass so you can see it as clearly as yesterday; you were singing “Harmony,” I think, by Elton John, or no, “Melissa” by the Allman Brothers, and as you approached the bed you smiled and waved at me like I was across the street and you knew me from church or something, but I was right there and you were right there too and then even more there, inside me, and you had a grip on the headboard pulling yourself in, another hand holding your Coke so it wouldn’t spill because you hadn’t taken a sip yet, but you did, then, you stopped mid
in
or
out
or who remembers, took a long pull on the bottle while your free fingers started at my hair and moved down my front to my softest, where you were held so completely and you came at me both hard and soft and just when that stopped being strange, your having a bottle at your mouth, you pulled it away from your mouth, my eyes opening then as your hand found my cheek, not
gently but not rough, either, and your mouth it was still full but you didn’t swallow, you leaned in with lips near to spilling over and I parted my lips because I knew to and I like to obey when I can decode the command and you put your two lips on my two and opened your mouth, the Coke still cold and pepper sweet as you so slowly, like a faucet just left on by accident, you on purpose let it in my mouth and said

I thought you might be thirsty, baby

and I said ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh, oh yeah.

and it was loud, the next part, very loud, and we took it very seriously, and then it was quiet and there was some near-sleep and when I curled into the great wall of you, which was still not ordinary, still fragrant with your new exotic familiarity, I said a bold thing, which a girl who doesn’t speak much can sometimes pull off, but I wasn’t pulling this time, I wanted to say it, I said, “I feel full. I feel, if we were forever poor, and had to live with so little, you know, really poor, and this was the best thing we got, I would be all right with that,” and you said

but we’re all poor people. this is the best we get

•  •  •

Today I heard your voice. Years after losing each other, you’ve managed to hold to loving me still, in the way you can when you know you both tried.

I remember when you went off to trek the Pyrenees, you brought me flowers you picked from the top of a mountain there,
carried them back in a tiny woven basket that I saved to this day, even though the flowers are dust. I wrote about us while you were away in a notebook that eventually saw the end of us, but the last I wrote about that time was in ink; it was a hurried, angry scrawl reading: Time, that cold bastard, with its nearlys and untils. I think, what a shame. Time should weep for having spent me without you.

That was quick, what we had.

I saw you on the couch at the party I didn’t want to attend. Your legs were crossed in elegant trousers that exposed a length of what had to be a cashmere sock. “That’s a gentleman,” I thought, and I watched the way you held a glass and a conversation until I realized I wasn’t looking at anything or anyone else.

I came out of the corner to sit beside you. Fairly quickly something sparked that was past flirting; and the scent of you was enough to keep me there. It was a mix of rituals from a perfectly groomed man who had one foot in another era: pressed shirts, oiled loafers and aftershave, but an old-fashioned, distinctly masculine smell. I wondered if you went to the races and wore suspenders on Sunday. I wanted to put my head on your shoulder and make a wrinkle there.

“Don’t stop talking to me, ever,” I thought. “You are the most interesting man on Earth.” I kept asking you more and more
questions and you turned your whole body to face me. We were both animated and nearly ignoring everyone else, but someone walked by smoking, you clearly knew him and pointed accusingly, laughed and said

When are you going to put those out?

I said something flip. I can’t remember what. It was some reference to vices being our true comrades. The people sitting on either side of you were quiet. One smiled uncomfortably. You pointed to your head, which was bald, and I realized then, my mouth dissolving into a silent “Oh,” that you hadn’t shaved your head as a style choice for a dapper man losing his hair.

Well, it’s . . . I have cancer, you see. It’s unfortunate.

You tossed it off. A gracious dance move by a partner who didn’t want anyone to see that their partner had tripped. You went back to talking about your girlfriend who I’d been asking about, as you had my boyfriend. We were both articulating, by extolling the virtues of our partners, that we were committed to our mates. Once that was laid out we were free to keep talking without worrying the other was receiving any incorrect signals. We were both so amped up by our interaction that it had to be established so we could get on with it. There was such freedom talking to you and no obligatory small talk. Your smile felt so alive with affection but there was a fixed quality to your face, as though you were memorizing me. You seemed poised to catch my phrases and pocket them with their accompanying silences. I felt like I was the Super
Bowl, you were that engaged, but with the permission to say, “Wait, what did you mean?” when I didn’t get something. There was no squirming when the quiet went on too long.

Scientists can’t agree where speech evolved from so no one can arrive at what makes a particular communication successful. This is something I would never ever want to know the secret to any more than I would want to know on which day I will die; but it’s a subject I could pull apart for hours without getting bored. I love attempting to describe a thing, but I might love even better the fact that the more words you have available to encode with when you attempt denotation, the farther away you can sail into ambiguity. I could go on about you forever and that might only make you less clear to someone discovering you through my words. We might have had another twenty years to reveal ourselves to each other and not come away as sure of each other as we did.

Part of why we can’t explain the origin of language is our reaction to perceived truth. If words were entirely reliable they would have evolved as the most efficient means of communication, but they haven’t, because humans lie. An ape makes a sound or gesture to another ape signaling that it wants a banana. It gets the banana or not, but the communication is clear. An ape would never say, in ape-speak, “Your socks say a lot about you and I am intrigued. Would you mind handing me that banana?” Despite the fact that animals do “deceive” one another, they are resistant to deceit when they sense it. An ape would simply ignore a communication that was too convoluted, which I think would be a big fat relief. Humans are saddled with so many terrific ways of overcomplicating what we want. “I will give you five dollars for
that banana,” or “How come Jolene gets a banana and I don’t?” Or even “I think we can both agree that after what happened last night, you owe me a fucking banana.” All of this takes us further away from what is ultimately: Banana. Give it. We have all these fancy ways to say things, so why do we end up walking away from a simple interaction wondering, “What did they mean by that?” I don’t know what made me want to sit there next to you or why talking to you felt so energizing. Is it how you were stringing words together or what was behind those words or both? I didn’t need to interpret you, I wanted to take your hand and kept touching your arm. I nearly grasped it at one point, but the way you would with a brother or long-lost friend. It was everything minus the one thing that usually ruins it all in the end. I don’t know what you call the sum total of that.

I left that night with your number and an appreciable craving to see you again. Weeks went by before we could make a date that we could both finally keep and I headed uptown that afternoon to see you for our unique nondate, fantasizing about what it would be like to see you once a week.

Your girlfriend answered the door, lovely and welcoming. She said you were in the bedroom not feeling well and I tried to convey that I was sorry. I wasn’t expecting you to be unwell and worried that I should just slip away, but then you came out to greet me. You looked pale and a bit thinner but still dashing. I suggested that I should go and let you rest, directing my question to your girlfriend out of respect, but you wanted to have lunch. “I’ve been looking so forward to this. I’m not missing it,” you said, and your girlfriend nodded her agreement and patted me on the shoulder as we left.

We walked to a place very near you and picked a table outside. I saw that you were moving much more slowly than you had a couple of weeks before. We ordered sparkling water and Italian food and it didn’t take much time to connect. Our conversation was slower but the comfort was still there and your indescribable smile that made me have to restrain my impulse to take your face in my hands and kiss you, but without tongues and apologies and pulses flaring. I wanted to curl up next to you but not end up on top of you. It was clear and it came with boundaries that I would never have to draw. I just liked you so much.