We spend
countless days on his floorborn mattress, days which turn into weeks. I am
shaken from the changes that were occurring in my existence, and had barely
begun to process it by the time Victor
came into my life.
came into my life.
When he
says, "I want you to be with me," I take it as my invitation to do
something I have never before done, to lie lazily under the covers with someone
while listening to the sporadic rumbling of outside trains, occasionally rising
to peer at the crisscrossing skyline of buildings and bridges through the cheap
burgundy curtains flanking the windows of his flat. Once in awhile my ringing
cellphone brings us out of our reverie. I work on my upcoming exhibition in
snatches, and write in my journal. But the pace slackens then dissipates, until
I can barely garner the desire to answer the phone unless I see it is one of my
children calling.
At these
times I slip away and speak to them privately, not yet willing to reveal to
them that I had joined with a relentlessly loving and impoverished artist in
his walk up apartment on the Lower East Side. It was not for fear of their
disapproval, I tell myself, but rather the brashness of it having come so close
on the heels of my break-up with their dad.
We make
love endlessly, as if there is no other reason to be in the world but to do
this.
The
reasons for my indulgence with Victor are not selfish: I simply find myself
loathe to do anything other than be with him.
Mar. 3, 2008
I am
getting use to the balm of his
arms and body, and to the feeling of desire which forces me to become entwined
with him, not just physically, but emotionally as well.
He is
exactly what I need, and I am happy to be all that he needs for him. Neither of
us is here by default.
"I
was ready to leave, Cherie," he said today.
What did
he mean by this? He pulls me
close, his eyes betraying his need to be understood but not judged.
"I
wanted to leave this place. I wanted to go."
"But
you're young," I bring up his relative youth naïvely. He is five years
younger than I am, and I can't understand this need to leave.
"But,"
he continues, "You saved me. I want to stay here with you, to be with you.
And because of you, I can finish what I have to do."
It is a
huge responsibility to be someone's earthly anchor, but one I accept. I never
wanted to leave my life like he did. Even in my darkest hours I was still
filled with hope. Hope is what gave my the strength to leave my marriage, hope
for something else, something more fulfilling, and more enthralling.
It is
enthralling being with Victor. I relish the physicality of him, of finding him
touching me when I least expect it. I'm not a Brad Pitt kind of girl, in fact
Victor made me give him the name of a movie star I find attractive today and I
was forced, by sheer virtue of not being able to come up with a single name, to
reply, "Daniel Day Lewis."
"He's
a pigmy," Victor chortled. "Just plug ugly." Then he laughs.
"Oh, I get it, 'Last of the Mohicans."
I bridled
with embarrassment as Victor adopted an Irishman's fake American Indian accent,
"Staiy aliyve! I will come back to yu. Staiy Aliyve!"
For his part, Victor's taste in movie
stars runs from Sophia Loren to other smoldering Italian wench-types from the
Golden Age. I have that type of body and sultriness, he says. No fake boobs and
facelifts for him; he finds these things unpleasant and artificial. It is a
refreshing sentiment.
He tells me I fulfilled his list of
requirements.
"What were they?" I demand.
"Breast size, D, height, 5'9", foot
size--" he checks off the things that he asked the universe for in
providing his true love.
"That means you were looking for the
physical," I retort, wondering if having a relationship based on raw
appeal was really that bad. In that I had only two relationships of any length
in my life, neither of which was lustful, I had nothing to go on.
"What we have is not lust," he
explained. "Lust is the byproduct. What I have been looking for is
'you."
But he
had forgotten to ask for one thing, and he shared that while we lazed under the
burgundy blanket he bought down the street to match the curtains.
I was old.
He had wanted
children with the love of his life, he explained later, and my age--well, I was old, he repeated. He hadn't reconciled
the age thing at all.
I think
again to myself, there are a mere five years separating us. "Maybe you're
too old for me," I retort.
No, he
repeated, I was old for him, and, since he was on the subject, I was lacking
any kind of edge, an edge which, if it had been there to begin with, was not
very much at all.
What kind
of edge could I have after being whittled down to normalcy by years of suburban
living with a neo-conservative golf-club wielding husband whose idea of looking
sharp was throwing on jeans from Sam's Club? These comments hurt me deeply
coming from Victor, and I reacted to them inwardly. I was obsessed with age,
and had worried about it before leaving my marriage, my encroaching years
spurring me to move quickly, to date and take chances on love before I became
decrepit. Like
a homing pigeon, Victor had lit onto the things I felt most distressing about
myself: fears I had pushed down
and tried to suppress.
Now here
I was, chugging steadily towards the "f" word--the unprintable one
that came after thirty-nine--as assuredly as the stream of trains that grumbled
by the window, and my lover was complaining about it. As for the edge comment,
it was a hard thing for me to accept, and I denied it for all I was worth. Now
my worry turned to fear that I pushed down lest it explode.
Despite
these things, he reveled in my body, as well as my mind and creative spirit. My
body held infinite attraction for him, and he told my that I in no way had a
thing to fear from other women of any age, though the number of those he had
been with before us meeting rattled my senses. But I didn't do any kind of
examining of this.
Instead
I suppressed any doubt inspired by his earlier comments, and chose to revel in
him and in the things he said about our future, like how we would conquer the
world on the strength of our love.
You're
my "Mary Poppins," I tell him. When Jane and Michael wrote down the
things they desired in their perfect nanny, their father tore up the list and
threw it into the fire. It rose into the ethers and attracted not the nanny
they desired--but the one they needed.
I explain
this to him as my way of broaching how I felt about him. How can you say anything more when
you've only known each other a few days? And yet, by our second meeting I had
to keep the "L" word from falling from my lips. For his part, he had brought it up
already, inquiring: "is this true love?"
I was
terrifically afraid of being hurt. But I would not risk acknowledging it, at
least in any normal manner.
Still,
as attracted as I was to him physically, it were his ideas that held me in
thrall. He was like no one else: he spoke of things outside the realm of normal
edification, displaying expanding knowledge on far-ranging topics unrelated to
normal earthly experience. I thought myself jaded until I met him: now, I
realized, I was an idealist who was disappointed in a world that was at most
relatively enlightened, and at
worst, selfish and indifferent.
With
Victor, I was pushed to the edge of my understanding, physically, mentally and
emotionally. As far as my doubts, I preferred not to think of them, leaving
them like salamanders under their rocks, until they were ready to be heard from
again.
Instead
of dealing with these uncertainties, , I pack up my rickety Benz, the former
banner of having emerged in middle life somewhat intact after carving out a
sort of career while rearing a child. In the backseat were tightly packed
plastic drawer units along with coats, dresses, toiletries books and a folding
table and computer. My entire life, or what was left of it, was packed in the
back seat of my creaky car.
As
I pull up to his apartment, he
looks at the back seat with a wry grin and asks, "Wow. Are you moving
in?"
Maybe
if I had faced the things that lay like slimy salamanders under the surface,
what happened afterwards might not have transpired.
