!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Mike showed up Friday afternoon, carrying Dylan’s new album, Nashville Skyline. On my little suitcase record player, the understated instruments and Dylan’s softened voice were right at home.
“This came out on my birthday. When you told me not to come up after all that stuff happened here, the strike, I decided this might have been the present you would have gotten me. Have you heard it yet?”
“Just snatches. I’ve been all worried – consumed – trying to catch up on the classes I missed. What’s with his voice, anyway? It’s not scratchy like before.”
“I read, after he had the bike accident, he had to stop smoking when he was in the hospital, the doctors wouldn’t let him, or something. This is what he sounds like without cigarettes, I guess.”
“It’s almost … sweet.” I offered.
We listened to it straight through together, both ostensibly reading, but, as it turned out, intensely focused on what, if anything, the songs could tell us about us. The album was filled with love songs which, oddly for Dylan, were unambiguous and straightforward. During those concentrated 26 minutes, we heard about new love, lost love, men wronged, women scorned, couples reunited. Not a minute into the album, Bob was joined by Johnny Cash in his warbling baritone drawl, “See for me that her hair’s hanging down, it curls and falls all down her breast…that’s the way I remember her best.” Mike walked up behind me, lifting my own tumbling black locks off my shoulders, sighing, “That is the way I remember you best.”
I held a book open on my desk, reading nothing, saying nothing. He returned to the edge of my bed. Five songs, including “I Threw It All Away”, quickly played on the tinny speaker. Mike flipped the record over, and on the other side we heard, “Lay, lady, lay; lay across my big brass bed.” He lay on his side, on my narrow dorm bed, also pretending to read. I couldn’t meet his eyes. By the time Dylan sang the final line, “Tonight I’ll be staying here with you” (after urging his love to “tell me that it isn’t true,”) neither of us spoke for a good five minutes.
Finally, I stood up and went to my closet. “No, that’s not the present I was going to give you. Actually, I didn’t have anything at all in mind, things were so crazy here.” He gave another sigh, sat up, and started to speak.
“But I did make this,” I quickly blurted out, reaching for my satchel on the closet shelf. I pulled out the sweater, still with a few strands of yarn hanging out, needing to be tied off and cut. “It’s way too big on me, so I think it should fit you.”
He didn’t smile, looking from the sweater to my face, and back again. I realised I was not smiling either. The air seemed leaden, stifling. Mike held the sweater out in front, then pulled the shoulders up to his. “I think it’s perfect. Just right. I don’t know what…I never had anybody do anything so good for me, so …loving. Thank you.” He sat back down on the bed. “You know that philosophy class I took this year? Phenomenology and Existentialism?”
“The one you thought would give you the answer to all life’s questions? Did you find the grail?”
He laughed drily. “No. It got pretty esoteric there towards the end. But they sneaked in this guy, Alain Badiou. It really got to me, this one thing he wrote, this past month since we’ve been…since we’ve not been…” He frowned, then went on, “Anyway, his point was, love is not all about the first encounter, that ecstatic initial bloom. He says, ‘Love is a tenacious adventure.’ Tenacious, because it doesn’t fully flower if you give up at the first sign of trouble. I really like his thought, that real love triumphs, often painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space, and the world.” He left that hanging in the air between us.
“I’ve been cooped up here, for weeks, it seems. I’ve got to get out, walk around, feel fresh air. Want to come with me, down to the Square or something?”
He looked thoughtful. “No, you go ahead. I’m tired from driving here. And I think I want to write something. Is that OK?”
I nodded, touching his cheek with my fingers, drawing them slowly away as I headed for the door. Out on Walker Street, a rhododendron bush flowered over a picket fence in front of a three-story white clapboard house. I’d watched the buds burst into pale pink splendor over the past two weeks. The slowest buds were now only beginning to open, while the earliest blooms spread majestically, bigger than my two hands cupped together. I cradled one, sniffed, and leaned back, looking up at some thin high clouds. Their feathery edges tinged with the setting sun’s fading light, as if reflecting the flower I still held. I drew my hands away, and as I did, first one, then a second petal broke off from the center, each softly, languidly falling, slowly arcing away from each other, towards the earth below. I thought how they’d start to melt, disintegrate, becoming part of the soil, fertilizing the plant, renewing its beauty for another season.
After nine, I returned, finding Mike asleep on his side, fully clothed, facing the wall. On the desk, he’d left his spiral notebook open to a poem, written in blue ball-point on the white, lined paper. Titled “To Janie, on Her Twentieth Birthday”
Twenty
seems so , seems a bit too much
For your newly slender cheeks to carry
without dropping.
As old you are, as old you get,
and yet,
To cap my slight remembrance and call back
a bright and sunny
Weekend,
so long ago,
when the only time we lost the sun
Was in our sleepy fog,
who whipped in and back
Across the beach, as if he were a wave.
And clinging to the island roads, cavorting through the
Forest,
was a machine
who felt our joy
And she was happy.
But I kept from you a little girl, whose spell
had warped my heart, and made me weep
when I should laugh.
And now you keep yourself from me,
and through my
anger and my joy at summer’s toys
I might hide me too.
But I don’t want to,
I can’t bear
to share another summer
far away
without our forest island fog
and crowded summer house or beach
beyond the lobster boats.
But I must wait, and when your full day comes,
When you must grow alone,
far from
any house or hope of home,
think of me
and what will be,
as our love becomes a separate being,
which, like a child
born too early, must be nurtured separate for a while.
I looked over at Mike, hands curled under his cheek resting on the pillow, shoulders rising and falling evenly with each breath. I marveled at how he got…everything I was feeling. The special times together on the Vineyard, riding around in that converted VW dune buggy. My unformed fear of who or what he was going back to in the summer. The fight between his hold on me, and my struggle to be free. Our love, like a premie in a nursery away from its parents, struggling to survive, every breath an adventure, a tenuous hold on life. Beyond tired, exhausted not only from studying, from the relentless strike, tired simply from life, from trying to understand how to live my life with love, or without it. I lay down on the bed next to Mike, back-to-back, each of us fully clothed, and tried to sleep. A dreamless sleep, I hoped.
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