A Summer of Rain

          I.

          My coffee experiments have led me to the conclusion that the best-tasting coffee is the one you are used to. 

          All the fuss with the French press—warming the carafe, setting my timer for four minutes, depressing the plunger slowly—has suddenly made the K cup taste superficial, its brew a mere electrical function.

          Robot coffee.

          The best life is the one you are used to.

          The life I knew is suddenly gone. A fatality of those clipped living room conversations, brief games of checkers at five o'clock—all my round pieces stacked up beside Gary's lovely wrist. 

          His is narrower than mine, and he would always demonstrate this by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around it. Taller than me, smaller at the waist, he is a man of better proportions. Even after 31 years, his bracelets put me into an agony of desire.

          Christmas after Christmas, my lust was my only gift.

          Now my midnight emails and posts have created a rubble that—when the smoke of morning coffee clears—looks like those old aerial photographs of Main Street after the 1933 fire. I inhabit this devastation with a sort of plucky self-pity: being disliked is what I am used to.

          I recall my mother's battered face, sitting across the table in a diner somewhere on the way home from Delaware, the black and blue marks extending below the lenses of her sunglasses—her silence, dragging on her cigarette and sipping her coffee, determined not to let me see her cry. It was supposed to be a vacation, and Gordon beat her with a particular savagery that only long chaise lounge afternoons and restaurant gin and tonics could provoke. 

          Relegated to the sleeping porch, I was reading a paperback book by Billy Graham when their fight came through the length of the house from the bedroom like a malevolent locomotive, my mother already in her driving jacket, clutching her Samsonite overnight case. The porch door was one of those midcentury glass louvers operated by a metal crank, and when she opened it he must have pushed her. She fell head first down the steps with her legs and bottom still in the door frame. He pushed her with his foot then started closing the door on her body—now curled into fetal position, still clutching the luggage—repeatedly until the hinges nearly bent.

          When the awful dawn finally came, my mother had passed out in the front seat of her landau Chevelle, all her clothes in a pile next to her. 

          She married him anyway, locking in another year or two of private horror.

          No one knows this woman of whom I am the product—whose cavalier, wounded personality molded mine, whose voice lies just beneath my breath like the pedals of an organ, out of sight, operated by muscle memory, powerful and deep.

          I am the reupholstered, redacted, gentrified version of the life I survived.

          I have seen some bad nights, and terror and jealousy and a bad habit of seeing something for exactly what it is are a psychological inheritance I withhold from friends and lovers.

          The pantomime of alcohol is never truth as we expect it but rather the desire to be honest. The inevitability of a long night of drinking—its denouement—is a terrible craving simply to be heard. 

          Last Saturday night, by the time Marie called, I was beyond speech. Sitting in her living room at 2:00, there were no particular words to say, only an expression—formulated of arms and tender smiles—of tacit agreement, of solidarity for somebody who bottomed out too late in his life for it to be fashionable.

II.

          It was raining again the day Jose was in town. They made it down to the island in sunshine, but by the time they pulled into our driveway it was coming down cats and dogs.

          We would have lost touch for good but one night—quite drunk—I messaged Magali and she must have scolded him into writing. The craving to be heard.

         Here, in my driveway, was the boy who made single-serving meals for my grandmother when she was delirious from blood pressure medication and tranquilizers and froze them so she wouldn't have to cook. Moving into the back seat, now, was the boy who ran up to the gate in Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires and, throwing his arms around me, said You are my life.

          His nickname for me was "Chu-chi."

          We had lunch. After hearing about his new work and various properties, they were off to their motel room for phone calls and emails. It was still coming down in sheets when they dropped us off.

          Time itself seems to be the central character in all of this, making absolute liars of our youthful photos, toying with our posture, bringing things back around to some ironic coda with a black humor that seems calculated and cruel.

          I accept the consequences of my mistakes perhaps too obsequiously. Blaming myself is its own comfort, like an old baggy sweater, or—better still—like a good piece of Samsonite you hold on to when things get rough.