!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
CHAPTER FOUR
I place my trust apart from me
Mike and I took another trip to New York to see a play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. After opening at the Alvin in October, word of mouth forced a move to the Eugene O’Neill on Broadway, selling out every show. Intrigued by the buzz and rave reviews, Mike ordered tickets for early March after his swimming season had ended.
The wordplay and mysterious comings-and-goings intrigued us from the start. Laughing throughout, I wondered why it had been billed as an absurdist existential tragicomedy.
“What did you think? Did you understand it?” I asked as we walked past Carnegie Hall towards the Park. Our plan was to ride the carousel before heading on back to Grand Central for the train to CT.
“At first I wasn’t sure, but once they started all that confusion about who they were, I felt right at home. I like it when you have to work to keep up with the conversation. It really seemed to make sense to me, nothing absurd about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what I feel like, going through life sometimes. Everybody else appears to know where they’re going, what it is they’re supposed to do. Then I drift into their space, try to figure out how they see the world, and I never really can.”
If Mike was confused about who he was, and where he was going, he sure hid it well. “No. I don’t believe you. Yeah, that’s how I am too, I think, but you, you decided about being a doctor when you were fifteen, about where you’d go to school early decision, about everything, so easily and you’ve kept with it. How can you say you’re insecure?”
Slowing his pace, he dropped his head in thought. Placing one arm around me, giving a little squeeze to my shoulder, he answered, “When I’m with you, I do know who I am. What’s that song by The Supremes? ‘My World Is Empty Without You’? Ever since we went on that long walk the night after the state debate tournament, I’ve known there was one place, one person, I could feel comfortable with, wouldn’t have to pretend who I am. Why do you think I keep coming back to you, every time I go away? When I’m with you I feel alive.” We’d crossed 59th, about to enter the Park. He stopped, turned to look at me, then at the skeletal trees, leaf buds barely sprouting, and recited, “Life is all around us, an eternity in every fragment.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a poem I’ve been working on. I don’t remember all of it, but, ‘For once, just once, I place my trust apart from me…I only want to live my heart, I merely want to be a part, of all that I can be.’ Something like that.”
“Sounds promising. I didn’t know you were still writing poems. You haven’t sent me any for a while now.”
“I spend so much time reading, writing papers, trying to memorize all those Organic Chem reactions. And I’m always either going to swim practice, to a meet,writing you a letter, visiting you. No time any more for investigating that inner world. I’ve only written a couple, three this year, and they seem pretty repetitive. All about the ocean sand and the beach, finding life in love, sappy stuff like that.”
That sappy stuff had first pulled me towards him. “Maybe we have a different way of telling each other what we feel now?”
We’d come to the carousel, calliope music clouding our words, enameled horses beckoning.
“I don’t feel any different…” he mused.
“I do. Everybody at school, they’re always talking about ‘finding’ themselves.” Mike helped me onto a coal black stallion, fiery eyes staring endlessly upward towards the brass ring. The ring I remembered Phoebe, in Catcher, kept trying to grab.
“Like when somebody says, “I’m going out to California, to find myself?”
“There are some people who do that, sure, but I’m thinking the conversations I’m having all the time, in the dorm, after class, at dinner.”
“Bull sessions?”
“That’s what boys call it, but with girls, I think there’s more sharing, more supporting, less seeing who can one up the other.”
“That’s like the play,” Mike offered. “Sometimes – a lot of the time – I feel like you have this whole other life I’m not a part of. I just get these little snatches of seeing that, when I come up to see you. That’s what I was saying, about feeling left out.”
“And you don’t think I feel that? When you tell me you’re writing a poem, how excited you are to go skiing? All these things you’re doing when I’m not around, I wish I could feel what you’re feeling them when you do them. I think we have to be apart, to be together, you know.”
He said mostly to himself, “How can we be together, apart? And how can we be apart, together?”
The music ended. I climbed down from the horse by myself, then stepped off the slowly moving platform.
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