!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
“I remember…some smells of you, of us.”
We were lying on my bed, side-by-side, playing a new game we’d just invented: “What do I remember?” It didn’t matter who’d started it, the idea was to come up with something we’d done, somewhere we’d been, the other did not remember. We’d been miserable failures up to this point, as everything I said, he nodded vigorously with, and added to. He couldn’t find any gaps in my recollections either.
“Events, words, they’re easy to share. Sounds and sights, even. But what about aromas? I bet they’re more private, personal. What about these?” He turned on his poet’s [?speech/eyes/]. “Your hair in a graveyard,. an un-washed tent, Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine – and love.”
“What am I supposed to do with those?”
“For starters, you could say when I sniffed them. The hard part, of course, would be to prove that you and I each got the same sensation from them.”
“The first one’s easy – that day you came up in October, Columbus Day weekend, we went to the graveyards downtown. You kept putting your nose in my hair, telling me how much you’d missed the smell. Un-washed tent? I guess that’s the time last year, when we went camping with P&J, Lizzie ands Leon and everybody, up by the lake in Hueston Woods. I thought we were so adult, going off on our own, some of us celebrating the graduation, the boys wondering what they could get away with.” I repeated, “Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine…and love.” I was pretty sure I knew what he meant. That first time, after I’d gotten the pills, I had worn some Roman perfume. I decided to show him, not tell him. I felt a softly pealing rhapsody start inside me, a symphony we could play together – the harmony of love.
Soft caresses, not quite gestures began between us, falling, streaming, cascading upward and around. We enclosed each other, trembling, then shattering and finally stopping, with nothing coming of it but the pleasure of itself, appealing, soft forever. We seemed outside of time, beyond our lives, above our minds, a soft refrain we sang together with all our movements. It was a fairy structure, only a dream-wrought castle, more fragile than a turreted masterpiece built from sand.
But it was ours, our wishes for ourselves, come to full fruition apart from the world outside. Our presence, our presents, our present eternal presence in and out of the rapture of our life together. I thought, at last, this once, I place my trust outside of me. I was slightly sleepy, vaguely gliding towards his warm translucent flesh that pulled me over, met with mine, is mine.
Mike was first to speak. “OK, I think you win.”
“No, we both won, buddy.”
Next morning, Mike got up first. He padded over to the window, raised the shade, and said, “I just love this time of day, this time of year. It’s still early spring, the sun’s trying to wake up. The night’s melting, there’s a dull blue glow in the sky, not too bright, just enough to light the lawn down there. Everything’s still so new, that light green everywhere in the grass, the trees, the buds.” He paused, moving his hands as if conducting, painting, or maybe writing on a blackboard. “Wow, there’s something there. He recited, “All I see is green and blue and all that’s new and you, my love and you.” He turned and smiled
“I think I hear a poem in that,” I offered.
Rushing to my desk, he grabbed some paper and started scribbling. Soon, he read out loud, “You speak so clearly, gently wave the words across my ears, calm my fears…” Smiling again, he announced, “It’s pretty good, I think. But I like living life with you better than writing about it.”
That afternoon, I sat with Jeanne, Leslie, and Marcia on Cabot’s second floor balcony, facing the sun. With the bricks to our back blocking the wind and reflecting the radiance towards us, I almost felt comfortable in the cool April air. Below us, a red-haired girl sitting on the steps practiced with her guitar, singing folk songs. Stopping, she fiddled with the tuning pegs, put a green glass cylinder over her left middle finger, and shifted into a driving blues riff.
Jeanne leaned over, then turned back towards us. “Who’s that? What’s she doing with that glass on her finger? Is that some giant ring?”
Marcia looked down. “Oh, I know her. That’s Bonnie. She lives down in Bertram, I think. From California, LA.”
Leslie added, “She’s doing bottleneck blues. You guys know what that is?” Seeing our blank stares, she went on. “Back before the depression, down in Mississippi, they started cutting the tops off beer bottles, using them with a guitar that had been tuned so all the strings played one chord. You slide it up and down, it sounds really cool. Like someone moaning. Lots of people are doing it now, kind of mixing up country music with rock ’n roll. She’s really good, she knows what she’s doing.”
She turned to me. “Jane, where’d you go yesterday, after we went to the square. That boy you were with, he’s gone now?” She tilted her head, furrowing her eyes almost accusatorially.
Flustered, I said, “What have you got against him? You hardly know him.”
“I don’t need to know him. He’s a guy, all of them are the same. If they’re not trying to get into our pants, they’re busy ignoring us or putting us down. You don’t need him.”
Anger rose in me. “First of all, he’s not like that…”
Jeanne chimed in, “Yeah, it took them, what Janie, 18 months to go all the way?”
Leslie sneered back at me. “Was it worth it? Where do you think this is going, anyway?”
I looked to Marcia for help. She was leaning over the balcony, nodding her head with Bonnie’s syncopating blues. Jeanne carefully studied her fingernails.
I thought carefully, then said, “You know, I think it’s true, I’m using him, he’s using me. But neither of us cares” – here I hesitated, afraid of being seen as innocent, naive – “it doesn’t matter, because…we love each other.”
Leslie snorted. “Aww, that’s sweet. ‘You love each other.’ What’s that mean, anyway? Girls say that because they want to be wanted, and boys say that so they can get what they want. Then they ignore you, or worse.”
“He says I complete him, I make him a better person. And he sees a part of me no one else knows is there.” My analytic head sidled up next to the emotional tugs inside my heart, trying for an understanding, a merger. “OK, here’s what I think. Love is not a simple, isolated thing to me. It may have started with feelings, desires to have someone to fawn over. But that’s not enough, at least not for me. I can share what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing, where I want to go, in a way that’s deeper, fuller, different than I get with anyone else.” I glanced at Marcia and Jeanne. “Not my best friends. Not my family. Not anybody. With Michael, he’s all those things, and more.”
Leslie looked about to explode, then sighed, “You’re a lost cause, a hopeless romantic. That stuff’s not real. You’re better off just getting what you can from someone like him, and moving on to the next one. Or maybe keep him around in reserve, while you find out what the world is really like.”
I wondered if Leslie had ever felt love they way I had, if she’d only been hurt, or used or abandoned. I wondered if I were simply lucky, to have stumbled onto Michael Harrison. I wanted to say, “I know what it’s like to be loved, and that’s a feeling I don’t ever want to lose.”