I picked up another card. It was most unfunny; cheesy and tacky. Then it occurred to me that a perfect valentine card would have a still of Carole Lombard in a silly pose and a pithy quote of hers from one of her movies. Of course, there wasn’t any such thing, not even of any glamorous starlet from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I was feeling at a loss when I happened to look up again.
The curly-haired stranger, standing by the door about to pull it open, gave me the queerest smile; as if he knew who I was, or had known a secret I didn’t know I had. He turned and left. Why did he smile like that?
I ended up not giving you a card or wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day. Yet, on that night you were quite randy. Almost too much: you kissed me very hard, fucked me very hard, sucked me very hard. I wanted to tell you that you didn’t have to try so hard, but I didn’t want to kill the mood. You were such a stud that you didn’t need to act like a porn star at all to get me going. Still, your passion was all the valentine I needed.
I try to remember the last time we had sex.
That Sunday morning we had just awakened, and you were horny. I knew exactly what you wanted. I lifted my legs, and you lubed up for entry.
Once inside, I’d never seen you sweat so much. You were thrusting so hard, it almost hurt. There was something different in your face; as if you had become possessed by a different persona, but it was still recognizably you.
You looked so relieved when it was over.
I was too, but I felt scared. I couldn’t figure out why, but the fear of losing you flashed through me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Just a lot of things on my mind.”
That surprised me. We had been together all that weekend, and this was the first time you’d mentioned a potential problem of any kind. “What things?”
“Oh, just . . .” You waved me away with your hand.
“You can tell me.”
“It’s not worth it.”
“Do you trust me?”
“It’s not that, dammit.” You pushed yourself off the bed and hopped to the bathroom door. “I should go shower now.”
While I lay between your flannel sheets and listened to the water hiss all over your body, I wanted to hold your hands and let you feel the love shimmering up my spine and down my arms and hands right into yours.
When you came out of the shower and pulled on your clothes, I smiled.
You gave me a tight smile, as if you weren’t sure whether you should be happy. Then it was back to the same old face of yours. Nothing happened, and yet everything did.
I have always liked winter. Always. The whiteness, the grayness, the blackness—the world turns monochromatic for a long moment. An assiduous chill burrows into my marrows, and I feel dead in the most alive way possible. I boil with the ache to stay warm, but all this will be temporary. The seasons will change again and again, and winter is just a season. I love winter the most because I’m the least loved in my family and it’s the least loved time of year. The days hurry by as if they couldn’t wait to get home, and in each long darkness I breathe entire books in the candlelight of my dreams. Here, I’m a writer learning to read, and a reader learning to write. The words I consume will kindle the fire deep in my bones, and soon I will be feverish with characters and stories I didn’t know existed. I don’t feel like an orphan anymore.
But no one warned me that if a man leaves you in the dead of winter, he puts you at risk of hypothermia. Naked, you will drown in a sea of snow and sorrow.
There were nights when I shivered incessantly in my flannel sheets. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. I wanted that annoying sound to stop. I wanted to take a leather belt and wrap it around my jaw and strap its buckle atop my head so I could sleep in peace. My teeth kept hitting, tapping out the Morse code of your name nonstop. I wanted to be warm enough so my tears wouldn’t freeze in midstream down my face.
The day you hung up on me was the first day of spring. My memories of those days that followed were gray with the full thrust of winter even when the winds turned balmy and the snow melted into the richest greens everywhere. It didn’t matter that I could walk outside with only a T-shirt and shorts; I still felt cold from the icy absence of you. I was feverish with dreams of you that didn’t make sense enough to create a narrative of any kind. I was a bad experimental film from the sixties. Everyone talked about the glorious weather, but my heart was still a hopeless rusty weather-vane that kept swinging back north to your house.
Then came the Pride Festival that June.
I thought of you all that weekend. I wondered if you’d come down to the festival and scan the sea of men for your next victim. You’d mastered the art of emotional unavailability to the point that everyone had thought you were indeed ready to date. Maybe I should be more like you, aiming for a permanent flint-like expression like Clint Eastwood’s, looking unavailable and therefore hotter. You’ve figured this out. I know you have. There’s something potent about a man of mystery, and he demands to be solved. He says he’s not ready for a relationship, but he doesn’t push away the sexual advances. He wants to cheat on Mr. Loneliness too, except that in his case, divorcing him would be emotionally expensive in court. He will forever doubt whether he’s made the right decision, and when he’s decided that he has, he may find that the other man has already moved on. The other man will rightly feel that he was never loved.
Like me.
Some nights, after we had sex, you turned on the TV in the bedroom. I watched you open the humidor. It was as if you were a rabbi opening up the Torah. You took a cigar out, and you held it up to the lamp after unwrapping its cellophane. You stroked it a bit and sniffed the promise of its aroma. You were meticulous about preparing a cigar; you had to snip the glued end just so. Then you struck a match and lit up your piece.
How it caught a gentle but fierce fire when you breathed in, and how I longed to be that cigar, to be the center of so much devotion. Draw my soul deep into the cavern of your mouth, and remember just how I taste. I’m the richest-flavored smoke you can ever hope to find.
Each time I inhaled the darkest crevices of your body, I thought of the potting soil I used for my plants. How deep and rich it was to smell the essence of root and mineral. How hungry it was for water and chlorophyll. How pungent it was to live. You planted seeds each time you burrowed deep into me. It was as if I grew another inch. I wasn’t a sapling anymore. I was a tree. You had turned me into something I never thought I was capable of being: a tree. The thin film of sweat was thick as soil under the grass blades of your fur. How I loved mowing your grassy fur clean. How much I’d learned to imprint the body of you onto the atlas of my tongue. How much I couldn’t get enough of you.
That I’ll never know how much I’d mattered to you is what’s killing me.
I am a tree eaten alive by the elm bark beetle.
I am hollow.
Not even the squirrels want to stash their acorns inside me. It’s a matter of time before I’m chopped down and carted away.
I’ll become a stump, and my sawn and splintered face will never reveal the number of years lived.
I branch outward every night in my dreams. When my roots are finally pulled out of the ground, my nails will still linger in the soil of you. It will scratch a bit longer for that smell of you filling that gasp of air inside my nails. My memories will turn into gray crescents of moon, and my roots will bristle white.
Have I been loved by something strange, and has it already forgotten me?
A SHADOW FLUTTERY AMONG THE BIRCHES
What kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hea
ring it, to assume it is mine to call.
—Jeanette Winterson
At dawn an unexpected fog had descended on the streets where I walked from my house to work. The city wasn’t near a major lake, which made the fog stupendous. The mist of gray muffled the sounds of people walking, cars inching with their headlights on. As I walked, I realized I should’ve brought along a flashlight. Everything, including the cracks of my sidewalk, didn’t feel familiar. I was lost in a foreign country right on my own street. The chill permeated my bones. I was a sleepwalker. As much as it felt like a dream, it wasn’t. I’d shaven my neck, showered, eaten a banana with a bit of yogurt, and put on fresh clothes.
As I headed closer to Broadway and Hancock, a figure in black strode toward me. The sound of its feet had a slow rhythm, but there was no hesitation, no off-beat from the way it moved. The figure approaching me turned out to be a woman wearing a tight-fitting hat, a black cape, and high-heeled black shoes. She caught sight of my face, and she smiled as if she knew me, as if we’d already met a long time ago. I almost expected her to say my name, but she stopped right in front of me. I was struck by how tall she was; she must have been six feet tall. She spoke sharply, her cadences ringing: “I’m not fluent in French, but I speak the language of night very well.”
It was then I knew who she was.
My housemates, Chloë and Veena, have been together for twenty-two years.
When I first met Chloë Nurnberg in our class, Women’s Literature from the Nineteenth Century, her skirts struck me. She did not like T-shirts or pants. She was quite schoolmarmish even back then, and her pearl earrings and black glasses were caricatured in chalk on the blackboard behind her desk when she stepped out for longer than a minute to talk with the principal. She was wide-hipped, the reason why she preferred skirts, and she, already an old lady in her mid-forties, wore knitted sweaters over her white blouses. She was the master of the cutting glance that silenced her students. She didn’t accept excuses easily; she was not popular. But those who really wanted to learn adored her. She spotted early on those who wanted to learn and gave them subtle nudges when no one was looking so they’d know they were not ignored when a student complained that it was too much work. Every year the new students stayed the same age, and she saw more and more the effects of the mobile technology on them. They were more interested in texting and emailing even during class. One morning she hit on a simple solution. She wrote their last names sideways along the bottom of her blackboard, drawing a line upward between each name, and told the students that if they wanted to graduate from middle school, they had to put their cell phones along the shelf. No one could miss their phones, and when a text message went off, Ms. Nurnberg went to the phone and turned it off. She became proficient in knowing how to shut off a wide variety of phones and insisting that the phones be faced against the wall. It was not long before other teachers adopted her solution. She had grown up with blue-collar parents in a small town in Nebraska, two states away, and they had insisted that she finish high school because they hadn’t; she had to go to college for their sake. She didn’t know what extraordinary parents they had been until they showed up for her graduation. They had driven all day, taking turns in their small rusted car, and even though they were still tired from sleeping in a strange bed in a cheap motel just out of town, they stood proudly in their Sunday best. Didn’t matter that their clothes were cheap-looking compared to what the other parents wore. She didn’t care about that because in that moment, after having apprenticed that spring semester and met parents of her students, she realized her own parents were indeed great. They never treated her badly; they expected her to do her chores. They knew the importance of education, and they had pushed her this far. It was because of them she went to graduate school for a master’s in teaching. When she told them she was a lesbian, they were disappointed, but not for long. They’d figured that she was a smart lady, and who were they to know what was best for her? She was exceedingly practical, compassionate, and bookish, all of which had endeared her wife, Veena Pelle, to her.
Veena, when she met Chloë at the university, was an unfocused art history student. She tried to do studio art, but she didn’t master techniques well enough to bolster her crashing GPA. She had long frizzy hair, a peppering of freckles on her high cheekbones, and white teeth that seemed to light up when she smiled. She had tiny breasts, and she hated her chest flatness so she walked around in sweatshirts, sweatpants, and flip-flops when it was warm out. She didn’t care about looking pretty for anyone. She had spent long days alone poring through one book of art reproductions after another at her grandma’s house when her parents traveled all over Europe. She tried to draw, she took individual tutoring classes; she knew she wasn’t very good, but what else could she do? She loved art, that was all she knew, so she tried again in high school to draw, made collages out of expensive Artforum magazines, that sorta thing, but nothing; she knew she wasn’t good at anything related to art. She liked walking idly among one painting after another in the museum downtown, and absorbed gorgeously composed black-and-white photographs that seemed to shimmer in the pools of light focused on them. She brought along her sketchbook and tried to copy a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, but she got the charcoaled shading wrong. She wanted art, but she was not an artist, and not into research, but maybe she could teach art history even though those jobs were impossible to find. Her parents told her that it didn’t matter, she should just learn what she wanted to learn, and life itself would take care of her. She hated feeling like a failure, so she never told anyone how wealthy her parents were. She didn’t want to be seen as a trust fund baby, a dilettante rather than someone seriously committed to something. She was always vague about which neighborhood she grew up in, and she was relieved that none of her friends from the boarding school she attended had come to her university. They were all into the Ivy League thing, but unlike her parents, she didn’t like to travel all that much. She thought of dropping out of college, but on that first day of class in the Classics of Modernist Literature, she took the first available seat. Chloë happened to be sitting next to her.
They didn’t pay much attention to each other for the first fifteen minutes until Professor Jane Sharer, after explaining how she’d tabulate their grades, said that they were going to plunge right in. She held up a copy of Nightwood, a novel by Djuna Barnes that had been published in 1936 with no less than T. S. Eliot’s help, and said, “I’m going to paraphrase something from this book: I have come to tell you of the night.” She had been a trained actress before becoming a teacher, so she chose her texts on the basis of whether they had an ear for language; not just their historical importance. She enthralled her students with her renditions, sharpening their ears for the nuances of language.
Twenty-two years later, Chloë and Veena still talk about Professor Sharer, the woman who brought them together. It was Chloë’s idea that Veena look into graphic design. Bingo. She has been working at the headquarters of Brewe Sisters Corporation downtown ever since. She’s really good at what she does. She often designs amazing posters for her favorite local bands in exchange for their autographed CDs.
In their living room is a much-thumbed copy of Nightwood. Most people have never heard of it. It’s a slightly trippy novel, a roman à clef, actually, in which two women connect in Paris, only to have one of them stolen away by a socialite woman for America. There is a man who has delusions of being of royal blood, and there is a doctor of questionable background. Between them, Paris in the 1920s breathes out what night can only do, seducing everyone in ways most unexpected. The plot may not sound all that significant, but its style of writing is. The dialogue is unrealistic yet compelling; it is a voice utterly like any other. You read it, and you listen. You just do.
Chloë and Veena liked to read random passages from the book out loud when they got bored with whatever was on TV. It is still startling to hear a familiar voice speak differently in a voice from the past: “. . . put those thousand eyes i
nto one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.” Whoa. Really stops you, doesn’t it? What does it mean? A bit of shadow is all you need to get something lodged permanently in your brain, and no amount of sunlight can get it out. We were conceived in shadow, and therefore hunger for shadow we do even though we know better to look for sunlight. Such are thoughts that trickle into my brain long after I’ve heard passages from Nightwood read out loud.
Of course, they never mention her last name in conversation. Just Djuna. She was the dream love child of every literate lesbian, and she was quite a black cat with a seductive and witty tongue. They read everything of hers, but Nightwood was the bible they returned to over and over again. You should’ve seen their faces when I’d scoured online for a battered copy of the first British edition of Nightwood, with its tattered purple and gray cover one Christmas. They squealed with delight. They couldn’t stop hugging me all day long. Sometimes they call me Felix when I come home from a lousy date. Or Guido when I’m being too childish. Or Dr. O’Connor when I’m too show-offy with my book smarts. Fans of the novel would know whom I mean.
When they got married twelve years ago, they flew to New York City so they could visit Djuna’s last residence on Patchin Place and pay their respects in front of her house by reading out loud their favorite parts of the dialogue between Nora and the doctor from Nightwood: “. . . I have come to ask you to tell me everything you know about the night . . .” That was their first Djuna pilgrimage. For the next twelve years, they had been planning their first week in Paris to haunt where she used to live and eat. They left the day after you hung up, and I didn’t have the heart to spoil their jubilant anticipation. Being left alone in their house was perfect timing.
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