These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.
—Evelyn Waugh
I don't think love should make you feel uneasy. When you feel sick, I don't think that's love—that's infatuation.
—Alexa Chung
I'm sitting in a dark, chilly room in Maine in early September.
But Tuesday it was hot when I went up to the attic with a box of cheap cards and two large rolls of Christmas wrapping paper.
I paused by the box of little red books, then decided to see if I could find 1983—the oldest one.
It was there, so I flipped the yellowed pages to August. I thought it might have been the 15th, but there's no mention of him on that date.
I pass the 20th, the 25th, then I'm at the end of the month.
And there the little boxed episode appears at the bottom of the page on August 31—which is today, 38 years ago.
The coincidence of looking at this entry on this particular day spooks me, reminds me that my attempts to decommission the memory, to cool it sufficiently so that it could be safely handled, are themselves an error of survival—of age: pardonable but nevertheless inaccurate.
I wore a boys size cardigan sweater umpire-striped in forest green and cream. I still have the jeans, faded sky-blue, that I wore that night.
The meeting after a long bar night was promising but not magical—that was yet to come, perhaps when I accepted his invitation to a housewarming party or, more likely, that first evening sitting on the futon in that room.
That room. 1719 Spruce Street, Philadelphia.
Third floor.
It was a brownstone flat of two large rooms separated by a bank of kitchen appliances and a small bathroom on the other side of the wall. He and Ruth kept the front room empty except for a small table with chairs in front of the sink, an antique sewing machine, and the futon, situated against one of the short walls—no frame, just a mattress on the floor.
The phone was kept under a small basket because it was (obviously) in its utilitarianism ugly.
Three tall windows glanced haughtily down on Spruce Street or across to the stately Victorian townhouses illuminated by the September sun coming from behind us in Rittenhouse Square, as we danced arm in arm to Chaka Kahn's "Ain't Nobody" on a Sunday afternoon.
Another dreamlike weekend was over, and I would soon walk miserably home.
Thinking about it now, that room was a stage. The futon was for guests—for lovemaking, adventure. Bob and Ruth were both seniors at the University of Pennsylvania with an impressive assortment of language and business studies behind them, and they were prepared to welcome qualified strangers into their lives that fall with the expectation of intensity and brevity. They were hunting for stories to tell each other in the easy and impenetrable friendship they shared—their comparatively placid weeknights of studying or shopping.
In that pre-computer era, I worked at what were called copy shops, which specialized in offering high-quality Xerox copies, offset printing, and stationery, patronized by students and job seekers perfecting their resumes.
Bob entered the store and asked me for two copies of a piece of paper on which had been typed, in the top left-hand corner, Are you busy tonight?
I was wearing a loose-fitting toffee-colored dress shirt and billowing black cotton slacks that came to a narrow closure at the ankle—designed for women—and I was softly yet sculpturally beautiful in my thrift store loafers.
Bob had found his adventure (after a summer on Fire Island) and I was introduced to his set with envious, unanimous approval.
Sitting on the futon that first time, the talk about Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound having at last collapsed, he grasped my hand. I honestly had no idea, even at that point—I felt in the presence of something like celebrity, the unique, whispered quality of his voice so seductive, his habit of drawing out the word Yesss suggestively, eyebrows raised, his impossibly broad shoulders but narrow, delineated body, sufficiently but modestly muscled—sinewy, made for tennis—so much taller than me.
But clearly not as cute, and I was cognizant of his focus on me. I began to appear in the little creative pieces he wrote. I was not invited to lunches on campus so that I could be the topic of conversation. I knew these things and cautiously enjoyed them.
And, later, with only the street lights coming into the room, he lay on top of me, smelling of fresh cotton and Remy Martin, entering a rhythmical trance in which my face and chest provided the predominant but not exclusive inspiration. I longed to share his physical release but was never able to attain it in our months together.
I was dry. Too awed by him. Uncomfortable with my good fortune—nervous.
He said Smoke, if it makes you more confident. I had adopted the practice of halting my two-pack-a-day habit from Friday night until Sunday. I barely breathed—always having my breath taken away by a shirt he wore untucked or the sun glinting off an ear cuff or even his "ugly" moments, when he held his head a bit too far back on his neck, lost in thought.
As my novelty wore off, what Bob saw as my lack of ambition and an infatuated, subservient quality when I was with him failed to be vanquished by lust. Every action he took—even those aimed at creating a more casual and relaxed atmosphere between us—only made him sexier and more unpredictable to me: a smug riddle with spiked hair. I could not be awakened from a dream that was, as November ended, self-mutilating and deeply painful. It was if the ending of our affair was present within my imagination from the first kiss—a wolf always at the door. I saved my moments with him like rare coins.
It is that September and October I remember most vividly.
Picnicking at Fairmount Park with a bottle of Lillet (I wore a checked blue flannel shirt and fringed leather moccasins), record shopping (I bought a double LP that we played that night—Ella Fitzgerald singing "I'm Glad There Is You"), going to the French pastry on 15th Street for brioche on Sunday morning, attending the Henry David Halloween Ball at the Warwick Hotel, running off Monday morning for the first day of a new job with a bag of apples he gave me for lunch—I had no money—and a sweater he loaned me so that I would look more businesslike (he became angry because I gave him a blow job before I left and got his cum on it).
All of this with the September sun always warm on our shoulders but aged and recessive in the manner that makes the season of fall so familiar and so melancholy.
Over the years, living in Washington DC and even here in Maine, I have returned to that door, frozen in the changeless antiquity of Old Philadelphia streets, where we sat on the stone steps one night discussing whether to keep seeing one another—then went silently upstairs together, to the futon on the floor.
The same door I would pass by in January, beneath the lights and music of a party they were giving, coming home alone from the bars. He had invited me—There'll be lots of cute guys there—but I couldn't be where he was, just some friend or, worse still, an ex-boyfriend, like Michael Downs or that punk rock guy just before me who styled his hair with his own semen. I was the improvement, the right one, the future, in all my artsy complexity and attention-grabbing facial beauty. I stood my ground.
We were in touch for a short time when he went to Mexico in the early 1990s. He wrote something—once again, in between the contrived attempts at literary conversation—about regretting. I have the letter somewhere. But he was quick to add Not that we would have stayed together.
By my calculations there were two major boyfriends after me, then the younger man he finally settled down with. For a while, I kept friending Bob on Facebook when I was drunk, then canceling it the next day, without our ever having communicated. He looks older than his years in photos—but truly happy.
I often wonder if his partner is familiar with that whispering voice, his raised eyebrows, his unique Yesss. I also wonder if he knows the finality of Bob's intellectual disapproval, his sudden coldness.
All endemic to his charm.
This September, I am playing Philip Glass' chamber opera "The Photographer" just as Bob did on those Spruce Street afternoons, conjuring the bliss—and the insecurity.
Along with their music and thrift store fashions, both of those boys are gone.
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