To Whom I Could Have Been: A True Love Story

“If it had been me ~~ and sometimes I am so drenched with images that I think it was ~~ but if it had been, I would have had no confidence, none at all. I would have been exhausted, wrung by disbelief, going ahead only out of a sort of curiosity, to discover exactly where it would all vanish.”

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

Moment One: The Ballet

To Whom I Could Have Been:

A decade before time wrote this story, you will go to the video store around the corner from your apartment on East 5th Street, the last space you rented in New York before you bought the little place where so much of what you are about to read happened, or at least where you lived, mostly, while it did, and you will rent a Japanese movie called After Life, which is set in a waystation between earth and heaven. In the film, heaven comprises a single memory that each character chooses to live forever. You will spend the next ten years considering your own life, and, being unable to decide which moment you yourself might select because there are just so many of them, you will want me to write what follows.

The first memory you can recall with clarity is seeing The Nutcracker ballet when you were four years old. The one part of that day that you don’t remember, the link that your father fills in whenever you ask, is how you slept in the car all the way to San Francisco due to a slight fever, which had almost kept him from taking you, but he decided to nonetheless.

You can see yourself sitting on the edge of your seat at the theater ~~ “Your eyes were just peeled as wide open as they could get,” your father reminisces ~~ during both acts. And, most of all, you remember eating a meal at McDonald’s afterwards, when all of a sudden a group of ballerinas appeared in full costume, almost dancing into line to order, and the exquisiteness of them twinkling captured you and you could not look away.

It was then, among the hollowness of that franchise, rounded out by the oranges and browns branding it, that you began to long for beauty, and thus embarked on a search for the heights that the soul might reach, in a process of creation and destruction and re-creation that will outlive you.

Years later, when you have reached young adulthood, your father will give you a book called Philosophies of Art and Beauty, which you will lap up as each wave of majesty flows toward you just as the previous one ebbs, and from which passages about your soul in the following pages have been drawn.

The conception of that spirit, of course, stretches back in time ~~ along with everyone else’s ~~ to the genesis of humanity, and before then the world, and before then the universe, and before then the potentiality of existence without beginning or end. Any attempt to choose a starting point for your story, or any story for that matter, will always leave out close to everything that its telling would take for completion. Yet choose a starting point we must; otherwise, neither you nor your soul, nor I, would exist.

And exist we do, I’d venture, for this story is true.

Which moment would you choose?

Let me share the ones where you and I were closest, if not in unison, over four decades, and see if you can pick from there.

Until we meet again, I am and will remain, with love, as always ~~

Your Life

Moment Two: A Feeling That Tempts

A few weeks before they met in person, she had posted two ads on Craigslist ~~ that is, back when Craigslist was still used for these types of things ~~ each seeking a different guy. The first ad was for a male cycling partner, someone to keep her company on the way up north along the Hudson River, over the rolls of River Road heading toward Nyack, and beyond (all of which they talked about the first time they spoke, since the colors of fall were coming and she wanted to show him).

She had been riding on her own for over a year by this point, and she desired the pulse of masculinity to sharpen the luster that shone from everywhere, especially on days with perfect weather, beginning where the George Washington Bridge meets the Palisades across from the City. She wanted someone to share the air with.

The second ad was for a fuck buddy, more or less. She’d given up on finding a boyfriend, but she did want to have sex every so often, after all, she’d waited a long time until she finally could.

Ideally fate would have combined the cycling partner and fuck buddy into one person. Ever since she had toppled into the heap over 30, however, the part of her where convictions formed knew that New York had won for good, and that the time had come to let go of hopes that had buoyed her until now. The sex ratio had tipped, and the imbalance would only worsen.

Resignation might have seemed incompatible with her personality, which had thrived on fantasy ever since she was young. All those afternoons spent daydreaming and wandering the worlds of imagination as a child had molded her into an adult whose utility tethered itself to ambition.

But, in the course of accepting her lot in life, she now resorted to sadness, extracting solace from the death of a part of her that she denied acknowledging altogether: life was over before it began, and, goddammit, right when she was getting started. The dejection lay in having lost the very passion that she may have learned to curb, yet had never stopped craving.

It turned out that the sex partner she found was also a cyclist and wanted to spend time riding with her, while the cycling partner wanted to bring her toes to a curl and fall in love.

The sex-partner-turned-cyclist was a Latin guy whose name is forgotten because he nuzzled against her a few times but the feeling of him was sort of like a squid; he couldn’t keep up on the bike ride he insisted they take together; and she wasn’t crazy about the polenta he raved over and introduced her to before he slipped away and she stopped hearing from him, except for the random text here and there, when he found himself wanting to cuddle.

The cyclist-turned-love-affair was another Latin guy, let’s call him Aureliano, and she had a feeling something might happen as soon as she opened his picture from that first e-mail. His features were dark, just like her last boyfriend’s (Yigal the Persian Jew), and all the more so his eyebrows, the bushiness of which pronounced certainty from behind the edges of his Ray-Bans (the same pair that he’d give her to see the world with down in Mexico, upon which she’d exclaim that she totally needed polarized lenses, too). The photo showed his bicycle on the rack atop his old tan Volvo station wagon, with the Rocky Mountains in the background.

Oh no, she sighed, as her eyelids drooped for no one to notice in the solitude of her hobbit-like apartment in the East Village, which she’d bought the year before. He’s attractive.

There abides the commencement of attraction in the essence of essences, assuming a quality that is without color or form, yet remains visible to the mind. The intelligence of Divinity, nurtured on the knowledge of our spirits combined together, will rejoice at beholding reality, replenished once more through a revolution of the universe, as we yearn, we desire, we extrapolate the intricacies we wish to perceive, in a cycle that we hope to repeat, until enough time has passed and we find ourselves again in the same spot where we began and again are begun.

Any single moment holds eternity like two mirrors facing each other and reflecting justice and temperance and other such absolutes ~~ if not in their manifestation or relation to anything else, then in perfect knowledge of existence itself, the very assumption from which this particular love affair arises in the first place.

Meeting these truths, and feasting on them just as the heavens partake of their own grandeur in revolution, she will, in the end, pass down into their interior and return home to the body here on earth that she left so long ago.

But that homecoming must wait until her soul is birthed, just like yours and mine, except only that hers will, with the manner of the ever-aspiring, be forever frozen in time. She is destined to be, in contrast to you and me, a figment of our imagination.

Yet, at the same time, that very interplay between fantasy and vitality ~~ the consortium of feelings that come into being for no reason other than to be shared, a purpose on which they depend ~~ is precisely what renders her real.

She is desire itself, quelled with thirsting.

By the time she and Aureliano, the prospective cycling partner with bushy eyebrows, finally met in person, she had all but written him off as yet another apparition that would flicker short of materialization. What saved their connection from the graveyard of her interactions with men was the degree to which so many others calloused her against caring. Had she still fostered even a modicum of hope, she might not have tolerated the couple of cancellations he started out with ~~ initially because he fell sick, next because he had to travel to Austin to inspect a factory or whatever (or maybe it was the other way around… the Austin trip first and then the illness), or maybe he’d even cancelled three times already, she couldn’t remember.

It was a Sunday afternoon verging on dusk.

Her plan all weekend had been to check out the Russian & Turkish Baths on East 10th Street. (She would have been surprised to learn, if you went back and told her, that so much of her life to follow for the next five years would revolve around the Baths: their dingy, throbbing steam rooms and saunas that, even at street level, felt like forgotten caves underground ~~ but surprised only because, even if dreams of romance and chance had relinquished their hold, serendipity stayed dormant inside her.)

She was dressed to head out the door when her phone rang.

Did she recognize his number? It doesn’t matter.

“I was literally on my way there for the first time ever,” she told him when he said that he was standing on the stoop of the Baths, yes, the same ones she was going to visit after having walked by almost daily in college, when she’d head home to her little apartment on 11th Street between Avenues B and C, taking 10th Street eastward because there was a bodega on 10th and B (across from Life Café), where she’d get a blondie every night, oh, my, in those days she really ate a bunch of crap, no wonder she was always so depressed and up and down.

Night had just fallen, but it was October, so she was not cold.

She strolled down 7th Street to 2nd Avenue, where they were going to meet at Atlas, a vegan and non-vegan hole-in-the-wall that smelled entirely of cake. The café was so small and non-descript that she could never remember the cross-street, 5th or 4th or maybe even 3rd, whatever she’d said on the phone just moments ago, half hoping that he wouldn’t be able to find it, or that she’d manage to drive him away by being so nonchalant, if he even intended to show up at all.

Of course he intended to show up. He’d called her, hadn’t he?

He wanted to meet her, sure he did.

Plus, he was really cute.

Those eyebrows.

She picked up the pace with a bounce in her step. No longer was she trudging toward misery and the certainty of an emotional abyss ~~ she was going to meet a man.

A man!!

She felt very lucky, happy even.

Maybe this one would be different. Maybe he’d turn out to be real and someone she could ride bikes with.

Or maybe she’d just have a nice time this evening, eyeliner and all.

And so her heart dipped and she felt a touch of disappointment ~~ or was it anger? ~~ when she arrived and he wasn’t there.

Of course he wasn’t. He was like all the others, waiting to hurt her.

Whatever, she’d brought a swimsuit (the trusty fluorescent orange bikini) in her bag just in case, so she could cut her losses and head to the Baths, as she’d originally planned.

Which is why she was startled, really and truly almost shocked, when she spun around, her hair following through the air onto her shoulder, and he was right there in front of the phone booth she’d passed a second ago.

That feeling of dread catalyzing in the backseat of her heart ~~ the one that she knew could rear up and cause her to crash at any time ~~ was very much what attracted her to him in that moment: the first one from this story that might tempt you.

Moment Three: The Space Before a Kiss

Their second date happened not too long after the first. She lost track of how long, though, and, years later, neither her phone nor the dating e-mail account that she used to correspond with him could yield the answer. The phone had cycled through deletions of him as a contact as the arguments and breakups rolled on, of course. And, meanwhile, the e-mail account lapsed into the ether of disuse, thus erasing, along with the exactitude she sought for reconstructing her mistakes, the initial strings that wove their entwinement into peril.

She could not rely on him for clarification, either. In truth it was always so, though she did not notice for quite some time ~~ at first because she was not paying attention, as I am about to explain, and then later, a year or so into things, once she learned how the other side of intrigue that arose the instant she saw him had been correct: he could not be trusted, at least not with the abandon she longed to experience, except to wound.

It was not the lies that jaded her after a certain point. It was being left, each time, just short.

Probably she busied herself and did not think of him after they met at Atlas. It might’ve happened that way because things had evened themselves out in her law practice, ever since she’d passed the first-year mark as a solo the spring before. She still lived a heartbeat away from anxiety that everything would come apart, that her caseload would dry up and she’d be left scrambling for work, that life itself would fall down along with the implosion of everything, basically ~~ but at least now she’d internalized the proposition that she would survive, and so she had better things to do than wait for another guy to call.

Or maybe the proclivity to distance herself from any daydreams of him at the start was attributable to her self-fulfilling prophecies, which had dulled the edges around dating better than any drug. (You see, I know, how the disappointment undulated ever since she had used Hawk-nosed Greg to betray her own soul, back when she was 16, and everything changed forever in that last night the two of them spent together ~~ or, at least, so you thought for many years.)

Whatever the reason, or combination of many, not paying attention was easier, and more readily available as a palliative, than giving two shits.

Plus, then she could enjoy what happened without worrying too much ~~ she’d e-mailed back and forth with a cute guy (who was just two inches too short, that’s all), he’d invited her out to meet, and they’d shared vegan cake at a little hole-in-the-wall café ~~ without pausing to consider that, if he’d called 15 minutes later, she already would have made it to the Russian & Turkish Baths and started sweating in the steam room that smelled like wet socks, thereby missing their encounter at Atlas, and, who knows, maybe the next seven years that became her life.

Yes, that first evening together could be enough in every way: as with the cake they ordered, which she merely nibbled at to preserve her figure, she’d trained herself to feast on crumbs ~~ yet another reason she gave no thought to hearing from him again.

In all likelihood, she delved into work as though the experience had never happened even though she felt happy that it did, took a bike ride or two up to Nyack, and sooner or later hit the Baths on her own. There is a similar probability that she texted back and forth with the sex-partner-turning-cycling-buddy, who remained in the picture for another minute or two. And, most surely, there were e-mails, and texts and phone calls, with other men ~~ whoever was supposed to supplant whomever she was currently interacting-with-not-paying-attention-to.

All of which is why he probably surprised her yet again, with another call, or an e-mail or a text, asking her to dinner.

A couple years later, she had a realization at the Baths, which by then had become a nightly occurrence unless she had something else ~~ and it’d have to be pretty good ~~ to do. The insight revolved around rejuvenation and the nature of existence, as expressed by the scale at the top of the stairs to the grungy saunas and steam rooms down below, a contraption so old that it was made of brass.

Clad in her fluorescent orange bikini, she weighed herself before she headed down to the heat, and, three hours later, she weighed herself again. She compared the result against the weight of the water she had consumed in the interim, only to discover that she’d gained one pound of body while having consumed seven pounds’ worth of liquid, which meant that she’d sweated six pounds in one visit. Her calculations brought home the point, for some reason, that she was a different amalgam of protoplasm going out than she had been going in ~~ the same person, perhaps, but not the same physical being.

Even in the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a human is called the same, yet in the interval between youth and age, in the lapse of time in which that person may be said to assume life and identity, the qualities that comprise existence undergo a perpetual process of loss and reparation ~~ hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing.

The same holds true not only for corporeality, but also for the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, and fears continue in flux, coming and going.

So it also is for knowledge, she believed: even what she knew from one minute to the next would, presently or later, spring up and decay, such that no part of her would ever be quite the same, and each particle that combined to make her would undergo change until she was dead.

The second date being another round in the pre-sex match, she wanted to keep playing on her turf. So, she suggested Mitali East on 6th Street between First and Second, the place where she’d met up with any number of other men, most notably the ex-boyfriend Robert, a skinny golden-eyed Guyanese who had finally managed to get in touch with her for the first time in a decade ~~ you remember ~~ and who then ended up back at her apartment nearby after dinner, only to become the first man she had sex with after her body was fixed.

She maneuvered early dates to Mitali East not just because it was close, but more so because the proximity and low-lit atmosphere enabled her to slide in and out as if the night had not happened (if things went badly), or seamlessly (if things went well). Not to mention she already knew what she wanted to order, and it wouldn’t make her fat.

But the real reason, though she would not have articulated it back then, was that the entrees remained at the lowest price you could pay for a sit-down meal in Manhattan ~~ and she just didn’t believe, even having been raised with trips to Europe, staying in luxurious hotels and eating whatever she wanted regardless of cost, that she deserved any better.

Nor did not she want her dates to feel pressured to splurge beyond their capacity, either.

She wanted to be someone they wanted to see again. She wanted it more than anything, even if she pretended the opposite past the point of believing so herself.

The plan was to be applying eyeliner at the same time they had scheduled to meet, and then to amble over at her leisure, so that he’d have a chance to anticipate her arrival and get that tingly feeling in the pit of him when she walked in, smiling as the scent of the after-meal fennel seeds and candy wafted up from the table next to the door.

A text notification beeped after she had already been sitting for several moments in the back corner, near the stairs down to the cramped bathrooms in the basement.

Ten minutes later he made an apology as he slid into place across their little table. She hoped her eyes sparkled.

A mustard blazer with intricate plaid sat on his shoulders, maximizing the breadth of his torso despite his otherwise small frame. She was wearing a low-cut top, and a multi-layered chain necklace that rolled over her breasts, likewise small but maximized, rising like flower buds from a push-up ~~ since we are still back in the phase of life when she troubled with a bra.

He held eye contact, but she could tell that he saw (and she liked it), the whole time.

The moment that tickles you came afterward, as they stood on the sidewalk in front of her apartment, saying Goodnight, and she wondered whether he would kiss her. She wanted him to, yet also she didn’t. She’d chewed on a handful of those fennel seeds, just in case. But she kept her body just a few inches away from where he could have reached her without moving, and the same feeling she’d had the instant they encountered each other in front of Atlas held her right here now, suspended in between the earth and the rustling of leaves in the trees, and our atmosphere bounded by space, overhead.

Moment Four: In Between Breaths

She had reached a point in calcification where it was easier to extract pleasure from squelching romance before it began, than to sustain disaster. Either she had learned to expect disappointment to the point where she produced the conditions that all but ensured a letdown, or so much disappointment over the years had inured her beyond the capacity to even entertain yearning for anything else ~~ in either case, the effect was the same: her dreams had become like birds that never grew feathers. Faith had turned on her, gashed a wound to the quick, and bled her into surrender.

As a young person, she was a free spirit, a dreamer. Her teenage years had unfolded with striving to touch the heavens of art, philosophy, literature, and music, and to see the world everywhere in all its splendor.

Now, as if all the years happened yesterday, she remembers moments of beauty that sprang from places otherwise barren of life or purpose. She remembers oases in the desert that restored her soul as it traveled. She remembers how the feebleness of her dreams gave her something to work for because those weaknesses promised something more, and better. And she remembers the extent to which she could never remember, being only one person and having experienced so much alone that she was conscripted to wonder, ever more with every passing minute, whether any of it had transpired.

But she also knew that, even if it had not, it was all still real, as real as it could, and would, be, forever.

She imagined that this emptiness matched how the same space will feel once full.

You see, no matter how much she always tried to kill hope entirely, to strangle her longing of its own immensity, hope refused to die. The lifeblood that suffocated her was also what kept her alive.

And so she found herself on her way to meet Aureliano for a third time, at Good Stuff Diner.

This spot ~~ a bustling and colorful tunnel into the center of a building over on 14th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, where she’d been devouring the veggie-burger-made-from-scratch, served up on seven-grain toast with a sliced avocado on the side, for months on end ~~ was so much brighter than Mitali East.

She had selected Good Stuff because the starkness of the contrast with Mitali East disrupted the vibe that Aureliano had coaxed into being, at her instigation. Surely forcing their nascent interplay from the low-lit warmth of a spot in Little India to the surgical table of a diner on the border of Chelsea would kill the romance festering without further ado.

As they sat at the counter, she hedged her bets and tried to push him away by broadcasting a disclosure from her past way too early. Let me save the details for later, though, because going into it now would ruin everything, and, even if that result is what she wanted back then, I am not afraid of waiting until further on in the process of getting to know each other.

For her part, in contrast, fear was the impetus, since she had yet to learn that others may feel just as much apprehension as she did, and that their doubts might be driving them, too. In her mind, men were perfect creatures who knew everything and saw life before it happened ~~ they had either some sort of omniscience or foreknowledge of what would occur, and, in accordance with this superpower, they had the capacity to protect or demolish her.

She would never have suspected, not then, that any of those men felt insecurity to the extent that she did.

Nor would it have occurred to her that they felt the same apprehension, nor that the power to do something to her scared them just as much as it scared her ~~ if for no other reason than the immediacy of their own readiness to do it.

They were all frightened of each other. Of themselves.

And since most men tend to be bad ~~ slaves to the greed of their emotions, even if cowards in danger ~~ it was, she knew, such a terrible thing to be at their mercy, even though being there is what excited her so much.

Having done horrible things herself, she knew that human beings were not only capable of, but also dispensed toward, evil ~~ like children whose love and affection for a new pet could smother it if left unchecked by a reminder to be gentle. She was bad, a fundamentally wicked being. And so she was terrified that others would do to her precisely what she did to them, or didn’t do (since she was a non-entity), and that the only true secret was everyone’s destiny: deceit and desertion.

The disclosure ploy failed because he either ignored it or enjoyed the hunt of pursuing someone who was trying to push him away.

He walked her home again, and, this time, they kissed.

Or did it happen another way?

Did he in fact give her a ride in his old tan Volvo station wagon ~~ the vehicle that would become the vessel for so many of their day trips over the coming months?

Or did they say Goodbye to one another in front of Good Stuff, right there on 14th Street, amidst other people?

Her memory falters once the love part of their affair had begun absorbing her.

It was not until later on that evening, right before she was going to bed, that her experience of what was happening would kick into gear.

The sequence of events that led up to this shift may be lost to the past for good ~~ but her memory can conjure life even more convincingly than her own eyes.

She believes they kissed in front of her apartment, at least it stands to reason that they would have, for she remembers wishing that she could, with him, do what she did with other men: stand on a step of the stoop, and still have room to raise her heels, so their lips would reach hers without them having to bend down. She always loved the feeling of being lifted into those kisses.

But, as you know, Aureliano was closer to her height, actually even less than a couple inches taller, and so with him she stayed on the ground, even when she felt herself flutter.

It must have happened that way, for sure: he must have either walked with her or driven her home, because repetition has now convinced her that their very first kiss happened in precisely that manner. She has molded a moment that you might choose from dreams, for dreams were what would matter when everything else betrayed her.

Yet the moment I suspect you want from this night is not the kiss, however it may have happened. Nor is it the feeling that the kiss left her, nor the joy that she tasted over and over afterward, as she showered and got ready for bed.

Nor the feeling that she went to sleep with that night drifting on so much everything.

Rather, it is the moment right after she heard his voicemail, which she retrieved with her bath towel wrapped around her head in a turban. The message was long, perhaps one of the longest, if not the longest, she’s ever received.

He told her how much he’d enjoyed the evening and the whole process of getting to know her so far, and how he could tell, already, that she was what he had been looking for. His voice kept turning into words that condensed the space separating the two of them, one sentence after another, her eyes widening as he admitted that, at such an early stage of their acquaintance, the length of this voicemail, not to mention the content, could very well intimidate her with its intensity and certainty and all those other things that she loved about him already ~~ but he had a feeling she understood, and maybe she even felt the same?

Yes, this very moment, the breath of time in between saving that message and returning his call.

Moment Five: When She Knew

Sometimes she would wonder how things might have turned out if she had let him lead from that point onward. But rather than succumbing to trust and oblivion, she sought to exercise control over the unfolding of events and chain their relationship to the routines she knew.

Even so, refusal to acknowledge the fear underlying her impulse to assert control, in order to allow herself to drift toward him, was prerequisite to everything to come. For without a certain recklessness, there could be no love.

The e-mail, and her reaction to it, sticks with her even now, all these years later. She wishes she had simply accepted the invitation, rather than respond with manipulation.

“I was looking to attend a concert at Bard College,” he wrote. “Would you like to join?”

He suggested that they cycle early in the morning and then drive to the concert and have a good time.

Have a good time.

Did she know how to have a good time anymore? Had she ever?

The reason she held back was, especially in retrospect, such a stupid one. She wanted to go for a longer ride, get a real workout, show him a route in New Jersey that she took often. Making the concert would only leave time for a 15- to 20-mile ride, at most, which by this point had become a warm-up for her. Moreover, if she didn’t push herself on her rides to the max each time, she might fall short of her potential, and get fat.

In reality, of course, she would not have gained a single ounce by going to the concert, and she would have experienced a memory that he wanted to give her.

The program included Mozart, Schubert, and Previn. Mozart was overplayed, she thought, even if wonderful. She liked Schubert, usually, though she didn’t really know Previn too well. In the end, she wrote them all off by reminding herself that she wasn’t nuts about chamber music and wished he’d invited her to the symphony instead.

Nevertheless, the e-mail glistened with its sincerity, and still does. A man had invited her on a bike ride and to a concert!!

And she was going to destroy it.

“Well,” she said, “if the concert starts at 3:00 and we’re going to ride in the morning, won’t it be a little tight?”

He fell quiet.

“I mean, we’ll have to shower and stuff before we head up there,” she added.

Eventually he said that she had a point.

“The ride I was thinking of is quite a bit longer, it’s the one I was telling you about the first time we talked. I want to show you because it’s so beautiful when all the leaves are yellow.”

Oh, River Road, you served her so well for so long. You had been her springboard away from torpor and isolation for a year already, just as you would be for several years to come.

But you were not the only ride they could have taken. He wanted to introduce her to the quiet little roads on the other side of the Hudson, around Bedford, Salem and Pound Ridge, where he took a series of photos of the changing leaves that he would send her less than a week later.

You got in the way.

More than her apprehension over losing control, the fear of stepping into something grander, something unwieldy and incomprehensible, the enormity of the unknown ~~ the portal of which swirled into a vortex ~~ festered beneath the surface of composure.

Ever since puberty she had associated physical attraction with annihilation. She had come of age sexually during the late 1980s into the early 1990s, when the free expression of love intertwined with illness. She had been taught that sex meant HIV followed by AIDS, and AIDS meant death. The petite mort of orgasm was, for her, a metaphor turned real.

If fear is correlated with the expectation that something destructive will occur, still no one will be afraid who believes that inevitability can be subverted, or that escape from fate is possible. The magnitude of the cosmos within these polarities dizzied her.

Yet she likewise knew that we shall not fear things we believe impossible, and so she chose to believe that she could stop herself from tripping in a dance with the universe by making her own rules for the music of the spheres. She even went so far as to believe that exerting power would keep her safe.

The extent of her egotism stood opposite to the conviction that she was useless and a piece of shit. She needed to be more than limitations dogging love…

How exhausting this stream of thoughts, and the ongoing process of erecting and defending this construct, every hour!!

Oh, River Road, you shone in your glory that day, a window of time in between the oranges and reds and when the trees went bare.

Yellow leaves were indeed magic.

Once, during her second year of college, she was walking from her apartment across the East Village to class at NYU. It was late in fall already, and the colors had changed. She was on 10th Street, just east of Second Avenue, when all of a sudden the air struck up in a blast of wind. Blinking the dust out of her eyes, she ducked into a doorway for refuge.

The wind snapped in one direction, and then another, tearing a spate of yellow leaves from the nearby trees into a swirl.

Yellow filled the air, yellow everywhere.

Years later, when she was reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, a book so powerful ~~ as I will explain later ~~ that it made her sob and scream out loud as she careened through the pages on her phone, she came across a passage that reminded her of that moment on 10th Street.

One of the main characters in the novel had just arrived home to his third-floor apartment in the West Village, on the corner of Perry and West 4th (not far from the studio-turned-two-bedroom apartment where she used to visit blond-haired and blue-eyed Alexander, her first real boyfriend in New York, and within walking distance from where they sat on a bench and he communed with the nape of her neck). Deep within the words on her screen, there it was: “…before he’d moved in, he’d had a vision that he would lie in bed late on the weekends and watch the tornado the yellow leaves made as they were shaken loose from their branches by the wind. But he never had.”

So, here she is, in between those two moments in time ~~ one real but past, the other just as real but eternal in fiction ~~ and, there she was, on River Road, cycling alongside Aureliano up and down the rolling hills next to the Hudson, on their fourth date.

She’d felt ever so trepidatious about riding with him because he’d told her, when she’d asked in that initial conversation weeks ago, that his average speed was 30 miles per hour. That pace was pretty fast; 25 to 27 was full-throttle for her on flat ground.

As it turned out, his average speed, after accounting for hills, was closer to 11 or 12. (She didn’t ride circles around him, however, until their next ride together, which was the last one they will probably ever take.)

They stopped for a picture or two here and there, and I bet they kissed.

You might select from among those moments, when at last she experienced the companionship she had sought on every solo ride, and for all of her life, so far. Or you might choose any other moment on the ride at all, for, though she did not stop to think so, that afternoon she was fully present, anchored to her body in the world, for the first instant ever since she could have remembered.

(Six years would pass before she came that close again, and went all the way.)

You see, it was the first time she had made it to a fourth date with a man who had learned about her past after they’d already met and gotten to know each other. All the other times, she’d either known them before, which was different, or they found out and left.

The abandon of being somewhere and perceiving it so completely carried her away like one of the leaves. She was, before she knew it, sitting in the passenger seat of his old tan Volvo station wagon as he nestled her bike into place in the back.

There was just something about the way he popped into the driver’s seat, the energy of him and the rustle of his after-cycling sports clothes and the newness of his sneakers ~~ she knew right then: the moment you might choose was there on the West Side Highway, immediately south of the George Washington Bridge, when, after a silence they’d enjoyed for several minutes, he said, “I guess I should install the other bike rack on top of the car.”

Moment Six: Tumbling into Love

The pictures of that first trip she took to Mexico to visit him ~~ their fifth date, a weekend getaway, how extraordinary ~~ congealed into the Crazy Glue that held them together.

There was the picture he took of her in the hotel room in Mexico City, moments after they had arrived, wearing a sports bra and running shorts, tying her shoes. She still had on the mascara she’d applied in New York that morning and freshened up in the little bathroom with the concrete sink just before the baggage claim area outside passport control. Her eyelids are cast down, and she is smiling in the middle of a word or something. Her skin glistens.

She was getting ready to head up to the gym on the roof, to use the running machine and then take a dip in the pool. It was such a luxury for her to be in an environment like this one, at the invitation of a man on top of everything. She had not stayed at a hotel with a pool in a long time. Anyway, she wanted to exercise and swim not just to rinse off the flight from JFK, but also, of course, because she wanted to avoid gaining any weight.

She looks so young in that one, and all the others from the Mexico City hotel suite, where they would later make love reflected in a wall-sized mirror that took up one bedroom wall.

There were pictures from Patzcuaro, the little pueblo in Michoacan where they stopped for tortilla soup at a restaurant where they were the only diners, and someone took a photo of them at the table together. Aureliano snapped more of her outside, under the stone colonnade on the way to ice cream ~~ back when she still ate ice cream, which she could do because she’d snuck in a workout that morning before they checked out ~~ and of her in the middle of a cobblestone street, and also in front of a big arched wooden door, squinting from the sun. He took a lot of pictures of her back then.

Before they left Patzcuaro, she picked up a little Calavera Caterina statue that she keeps out on display as part of her shrine to Aureliano in her New York apartment ~~ at least for now ~~ even though the bubble-wrap failed to protect the figure’s delicate extremities, those flourishes of intricacy that so drew her to this Caterina in particular, and the poor thing’s head and arms got knocked off during the flight home.

And also there were pictures in Ixtapa, a resort town around the cove from Zihuatanejo, the little seaside pueblo where The Shawshank Redemption ends and their love affair begins.

The lobby of Las Brisas hotel was open-air, as if the weather were always perfect, and their room had a balcony overlooking the ocean. She had gotten out of the custom of staying in places as nice as this one; but she fought to remember how to carry herself and take it all in, and she pretended.

Most of the Ixtapa pictures were taken that first evening they arrived, when she wore a red dress that she had picked up for $10 at someone’s apartment sale on 7th Street and Avenue B. That thin, shoulderless, backless dress was enough that night; she stayed warm with her hair down; lush curls had formed from the ocean air.

Her red patent leather purse was from a second hand shop over on Avenue A north of Tompkins Square Park, before the store moved and a 7-Eleven appeared across the street. If she looked a little shabby, maybe the taste of her very red Chanel lipstick would help him forget.

She was trying her best.

At the heart of her intellect lay the good of simplicity, untouched, from which all her thought and experience were generated by a process of emanation: from the Oneness of Unity comes the Mind, from the Mind comes the Soul, and the Soul forms into the body that contains it and sets it free through life.

The reciprocation among all these essences was the version of beauty that she offered him, in an attempt to illuminate the order and harmony which together comprise the One. For when the Soul encounters sensible beauty, that is, the world-mirror that reflects it, pleasure springs forth into a momentary paradise of nature.

There, in the energy from the tension between beingness and nothingness, a promise of movement and apprehension of rest, inheres the ultimate harmony of the Oneness she wanted with him.

Yet such beauty ~~ of things, and bodies, and the spheres of reality that make up vision and give it purpose ~~ simultaneously combines into a pouring over of love. And this overabundance, in turn, emanates from the Good of the intellect, from the process that never ends commencing.

Everything that separated them was falling away while culminating in a symbol of harmony: the reality to which all beautiful things are related and upon which their individual experience of beauty depends: the sinking, falling and fitting into place in the nesting area at the seat of desire and fear, a place where sensations reign over one another with such intensity that each cancels the other out, overturning itself into multitudes: their entities pulsed with awe.

They did not know they were falling in love until later, after they got home and went through all the pictures.

In the meantime, there were more photos from the following day. First they took some of each other on the balcony overlooking the Pacific through a frame of leaves. (The concierge had apologized because tree branches obstructed the view, but she could not tell. To her the horizon of water across the world as they consumed each other ~~ a vista that said, This man likes you and is giving you a weekend of which you have only dreamed ~~ was among the most extraordinary visions she had ever seen.)

Then there was the cascade of pictures of her in the fluorescent orange bikini, walking down the hallway, and even more as they awaited the elevator on a patio overlooking the alcove where the hotel was ensconced. She did not think to suck in her stomach, perhaps because she was so overcome by the sense that, no matter what ran through her mind, all he saw was a woman with whom he wanted to make love.

Also there were the pictures of her on the beach, which he snapped when she was aware and sometimes when she was not. He always said his favorite was the one where she’s skipping toward the water, with her arms outstretched behind her, a ponytail of ocean-washed hair aloft and suspended in sun. “You look so carefree,” he would say again and again, and maybe, for him, that moment was when it began. If she could just be that person always, he would insist, she would be the woman he fell in love with and they wouldn’t have any problems.

Lest I forget, there were the pictures of her on a footbridge amongst a sort of mini-jungle almost, as they made their way back from the swimming pool, which was a few staircases removed from the beach and hidden by trees. She’d swum up and down and around him, their skin touching as she brushed past, so lightly and perfectly that he’d had to stay in the water an extra 15 minutes until his erection went down.

There were the pictures in Zihuatanejo just over the hill, before they left back to Mexico City. By this point anyone could tell. A warmth soothed her face, and likewise his, in these instants of defenselessness during their walk through a little park along the ocean’s edge, punctuated in her memory with the sounds of seagulls and children dashing in and out of frame. There was a picture of them together there, somewhat backlit but still discernible due to the light that shone from them ~~ and one of her, moments later, choosing from among purple and magenta painted and glazed cardboard apples, inside one the shops overflowing with rainbows of these “alebrijes.”

That afternoon and the next morning there were pictures of them back in Mexico City, where they dipped into coffee shops and bakeries. You can just see how she was so happy in every single one.

The only part where they forgot to take pictures was after Aeromexico accommodated them and found two seats next to one another, in their own private exit row, and they did stuff like peek into each other’s pants all the way home.

But really it is the accidental picture, the one he took as if by reflex while they were awaiting the car from valet at the hotel in Ixtapa, that encapsulates the weekend, and everything they had been creating together up until then, and ever would. In this image, his right eyelid is drooping ever so much, his skin is gleaming with sweat in the humidity, as is hers, and his irises radiate a clear lively brown the glint of which parallels her smile. She is leaning into him, her forehead against the side of his skull.

It was the instant of tumbling into love.

Moment Seven: “Mom, We All Really Like Him”

He was to commence meeting her family at Thanksgiving. Although the import escaped her at the time, she had not introduced a man she was seeing to either of her parents since blond-haired and blue-eyed Alexander rode across the country in a series of buses to visit her in California before she left to Guatemala for the summer, when she was 18 years old.

Her brother Edward had met her most recent boyfriend, Yigal the Persian-Jew, who, as you know, physically resembled what Aureliano might have looked like a decade-and-a-half before ~~ only Yigal was bigger and taller.

She had felt proud but also somewhat embarrassed when Yigal had appeared as planned for dinner with Edward and her future sister-in-law at Mitali East. They sat within spitting distance of the table where she would sit with Aureliano on their second date two years later, and where she had sat the year before for her reunion with Robert the golden-eyed Guyanese.

Introducing Yigal made her self-conscious because at last she had met a man, a tall, good-looking and well put-together man, who was nice to her and could carry on a conversation. Even if she might have fancied more ~~ for instance, someone closer to where she found herself at that point in her life, someone ever so further along on the spectrum of independence ~~ still, he was more than she deserved.

The shame kept her on edge for every sentence of the conversation, as she sat there worrying that this man with whom she had by then exchanged I Love Yous would say or do something unexpected, reveal a weakness of hers or of his, offend someone at the table or engage in an impropriety, somehow dispel the illusion that this dinner, and everything that preceded it, were. And so she was surprised, and relieved, as each moment, one by one, and eventually the whole dinner, went off without a hitch.

At heart, it was the notion, deep down where it ate away at the bedrock of her subconscious, that normalcy lay beyond her reach.

For the past several years prior to meeting Yigal, she had trained herself to accept that, even if she merited someone special simply by being human, no one would want her once they found out more about her past and who she was.

Alone, she stared into the mirror over and over again until all she saw was someone wrong.

Out in the world, as she passed couples kissing or holding hands on the street, she made herself retch, or she dug her fingernails into her palms until they almost bled, so that she might associate love with pain and discomfort, instead of possibility ~~ a Pavlovian exercise designed to cut off dreams and stop her from even imagining they could happen.

Yigal appeared after she had tightened this tourniquet around her heart. And when they became one of those couples she loathed and envied, her vision of the world turned so inside out that she did not know what to do.

She boxed him into commitments, and nitpicked, and ultimately took solace in being rendered to a pulp after the relationship ended.

Beneath these layers of defensiveness lies the Ideal-Form of Beauty to which her intellect forever strives, grouped and coordinated from a diversity of parts into what will inevitably unify. The process rallies confusion into cooperation: from the sum of individualities derives one coherence, and there, where imagination combines with reality, arise all Ideas from the variegation of experience into one.

On what has thus been compressed to form harmony, Beauty enthrones itself, turning its components over to feeling and sensation as a totality: when Beauty alights in unison, then the elements give themselves over to the whole.

She is overcome by the simplicity of this grandeur. The process of unification whenever she falls in love resembles the wonder that overcomes her when she sees pictures of stars. In one image inheres the multiplicity of the universe, a complex singularity that represents more than it could ever seek to contain, even in the form of Ideas, or Ideals, and even when those potentialities distill the Ideal Form of Beauty from which her aspiration to appreciate such vastness comes.

Does material experience become beauty through communication? The act of coupling forms the vein that carries the life-blood of love, flooding that over-busy intellect where the desire to pair began.

Memories she shared with Yigal the Persian-Jew were now receding into the past as waves of passion for Aureliano continued to overtake her. By this point in their love affair, there had already been another bike ride ~~ the last one they will probably take together, as you recollect I mentioned, though he had by now installed the second bike rack on the old tan Volvo station wagon, where it would stay unused for the next six years ~~ and a couple dinners, including one where he suffered through her vegetarian lasagna with home-made sauce and smoked mozzarella ~~ and, most notably, several evenings and mornings of sex that exceeded her fantasies.

Speaking of which, he could last a long time ~~ long enough for her to work through a sufficient measure of her hang-ups and reservations and fears and self-loathing and distrust to reach orgasm. He did not seem to care that she broke into a sweat from the effort, especially up in her loft bed where the radiator pipe next to them rumbled. He even seemed to enjoy the beads of perspiration on her body, which he rubbed around with his fingers. And he did this thing where he kissed the back of her knees and sent shudders all over.

She took nothing for granted and was just as surprised when he showed up at her apartment every weekend. Each time was, for her, the first time, at least over the next three months, until everything changed and went to hell.

Afterward, on Sunday night or maybe Monday morning if he stayed a little longer, she would sit on the futon couch, the left arm of which her pit bull had gnawed around the edges, and look out the window, the only real window in her apartment ~~ sure, there were four others, and they were big, but they faced out into the air shaft and she was on the ground floor ~~ and, whenever he had scored a parking spot across the street from her building, she would watch him warm up the old tan Volvo station wagon and then drive off, leaving her to long for next time.

And to think: all those weekends were just beginning.

Thanksgiving.

She would never have acknowledged that her patterns and routines ensnarled the prospect of introducing Aureliano to Edward and his now-wife and their daughter Isabel, and also her father who happened to be in town for his annual trip back East. She was too preoccupied with the concern that Aureliano would cancel at the last minute, or he simply wouldn’t show ~~ that he was, in essence, imaginary.

He picked her up to head out to Queens wearing the intricately plaid jacket he’d worn on their second date. A little bubble of pride warmed her stomach: he had dressed up to meet her family!! She was in the type of real, adult relationship that, until now, she had not even dreamt about. She felt very happy to have reached the threshold of being like other people; she’d never wanted to be normal before, not explicitly, and today she wanted to do everything she could to help the feeling last long enough to remember.

It was not the afternoon itself that you probably want, that is, any particular moment in her brother Edward’s apartment in Long Island City on the 17th floor overlooking the East River, with the window wide open too late in the year, giving the place a stark airiness that recalled, for her, the feel of Cairo in winter. It was not the interval when Aureliano sat in the desk chair talking to her father who reclined on the couch, asking questions about the public works and other projects that Aureliano had recently managed or was currently working on building. It was not the several moments she watched this boyfriend of hers hold Isabel ~~ then a six-month old baby and, six years later, the person with whom this book will end ~~ patting her back like such an expert that a part of her, which she immediately beat back, wondered whether he had, somewhere in secret, a wife and family of his own. Nor was it the cloud on which they floated back home to her apartment where they made love.

Rather, it is the moment over the phone a couple days later, during a conversation about that Thanksgiving in Queens, when her mom related how Edward had said, “Oh, Mom, Audrey has finally met a nice guy and we all really like him.”

Moment Eight: An Embrace So Close to Far

If memory serves her, she took the train up from Manhattan on this particular afternoon. Train rides soothed her, and, although she resisted the Metro-North because it ran on a schedule and schedules alienated her, once she finally managed to get herself into place in a car, she always wished the ride lasted longer.

After departing Grand Central, where she and Aureliano would meet a couple years later for a fated afternoon, the train sucked in a few more passengers above East Harlem, and then sped through the Bronx and further onward into Westchester County and money. It was still early enough in their relationship that she wanted to please him and thought this little excursion might make a difference: she had a question that had been rattling around in her mind for a while now.

There were no fences enclosing the properties on the block with the big old house where he was living in Katonah, which he had chosen to escape the Marriott in White Plains near the project he had come east to manage. The hamlet was home to less than two thousand people (including Martha Stewart, whose nearby estate he pointed out on a drive one afternoon), and the center of town, if a town it could be so called, comprised a collection of shops clustering around the train station. It was the type of place where you might stroll into the hardware store after taking a shortcut over your back lawn.

The first time she had been there, probably two or three weeks before, they had entered through the side door to the kitchen. The décor leapt at her from an episode of Mad Men in the initial season.

She must have knocked on the kitchen door this time, for she remembers wondering whether she had previously noted the extent of the liquor collection near the pantry, from which he selected a bottle and poured himself a drink. She thinks that he then led her into the living room, where they likely disappeared into the cushions of the plush couch facing a giant TV screen, encircled by powerful speakers. He probably turned some music on. He usually did.

Assuming it all happened this way, they started right there. He got her down to her underwear, which she’d chosen especially for the moment when he drew her jeans open. He already had an erection. She made a mental note to figure out today for sure whether he was circumcised.

How was it that she still did not know? Why did he literally always have an erection whenever she remembered to wonder? It sounded crazy and every part of her knew it. She felt embarrassed and ashamed.

But also very excited. His roommate Sergio, the owner of the house, could conceivably walk in at any time. Supposedly, Sergio was away on business, but still. Her skin flamed.

They made their way upstairs, maybe in underwear, maybe naked, and probably fumbling all over each other. There was a cross over his bed, which she took note of ~~ although they wouldn’t have a conversation about religion until near the end, one of the most recent ends I mean, and even then he would suffocate the discussion at infancy.

He slipped her in between the sheets, which were very clean and smelled the way he did after a shower.

And everything sank away.

She feared it was not for her to speak, ever, of the forms of grace from the world that she appreciated, and to which she endeavored, for she had never in fact seen them or known their elegance firsthand ~~ they were, to her, like imaginings of vision from behind the blindness that her spiritual condition imposed. She kept herself silent on the beauty of nobility and order as though she had never cared for such things, although in truth she cared deeply, and, in the end, cared for little else.

Nor did she dare imagine the splendor of virtue to the extent she wished, for she had not known virtuousness herself, just as she had not known the selflessness and devotion that she so much admired in others. She recognized that she might never achieve that humanity, and would instead always be reaching for, but never touching, the Moral-Wisdom made beautiful beyond the beauty of the power behind evening and dawn.

Visions of this sort were reserved for others who saw with the Soul’s sight, not her ~~ those for whom the unfolding spectacle itself would rejoice. A stupor fell before the trouble that hampered her stirred, and she moved, as if apart from herself, outside the realm of Truth.

This effervescence of spirit was the form of life that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and trouble made delicious, a longing and a love and a trembling that was all delight. Being human, but less than fully so, she felt alone ~~ even with him in his bed ~~ for they were together in that great big empty house teeming with the ghosts of a past that was not hers and a future where she would be, always, by herself.

She probably came that time. She is certain that he did.

Or, rather, her certainty is relative. She feels almost positive that that particular late-afternoon of lovemaking ~~ in which his baby blue bedroom started out faintly lit by the remnants of dusk and settled further into darkness with every caress ~~ was the same one that preceded the conversation they were about to have. And, if not, so what?

On her way down the hall to the bathroom, the floorboards creaked under her footsteps. She could never have lived in a house like this one herself ~~ not ever since the assault just shy of five years ago, you remember, and probably not even if that event had never happened. She was used to her little apartment, stacked among her neighbors and protected by window bars that kept out danger while she slept.

That vulnerability overcame her now, as she made her way back down the hallway, naked in the space enclosed by the walls of this house, so trembling with expectancy on the wings of pleasure that she may even have failed to catch a drop or urine, or even two, on the tips of her pubic hair.

Was it really this afternoon when they found themselves in that 1950s dining room ~~ she seated at the table and he standing over her, his eyes alive with desire?

Now, really, she doesn’t remember.

Really, it doesn’t matter.

She had been holding back for quite some time, an interval that had stretched into eons, for her, due to the gravity of what she was about to say, but which was, in fact, probably no more than several days.

It’s just that time had come to mean something different ever since she had quivered into happiness and allowed him inside the bubble where she felt things.

The air buzzed between them as he looked down at her, waiting for her to speak, and she looked back up at him.

It was then, among the phantoms of that great big house, that she thought of the passage from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, of which I have written somewhere else, where a female character takes the reigns and pops the question to the male whom the book is about. Audrey wants to think those characters were, at that phase in their tale, seated in a horse-drawn carriage, on a special date out on the streets of New York. But probably it was something more mundane, like in a cab on the way home to cook dinner, and, in any case, the proposal in the book happened out of the blue ~~ unlike now, an interaction conceived to await expression, having incubated anxiety within her and been birthed from the only pregnancy of which she was capable.

The non-traditionality of the girl asking the guy ~~ punctuated in this instance by his Mexican heritage of machismo, the rugged tension that attracted her, along with danger ~~ lay before them in contrast to that 1950s dining room, feigning life with a few lace doilies on the table and china and pewter in the glass-doored cabinet along the wall.

Her hands were shaking.

He took her chin in his palm.

“Will you marry me?” she sputtered.

The moment I gather you will want to choose was right then, when he held her so tightly, and she knew that the embrace was as close as she would ever get.

Moment Nine: On Her Knees

The sensation of floating together on a cloud lasted through the New Year. Even during this handful of weeks she knew ~~ albeit without acknowledging her knowledge ~~ that she would be granted only a finite period of time in which to be happy, which she must cherish, before the edges, eroding from the very start, and further the more she ignored them, swallowed the middle.

The first part of falling in love was always her favorite. Because she detested herself so, losing her individuality into the vacuum of affection yielded forgetting. Also there was something about saying I Love You in winter. It had happened with Yigal the Persian-Jew, and with Secret Crush Amanda back when she was 16, just months prior to that fateful night with Hawk-nosed Greg in his father’s café ~~ and now with Aureliano who was, dare she say it… her fiancé… at least, for another few months, before the fairy tale shattered.

She had first gotten to know SoHo during her freshman year at NYU, when the city was a world to explore, rather than just get through on the way from one cell in the air to another. She would go swimming at Coles Sports Center on Mercer just north of Houston, and then maybe pick up a bagel at the café across the street, or wander through the over-stacked aisles of arcane hardbacks in the bookstore next door.

Perhaps she would head south a block or two and wonder how much longer the cobblestone streets would persist. Being in SoHo always conjured up Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, one of her very favorite movies back then ~~ in particular the scene where Michael Caine’s character spies on Barbara Herschey’s, waiting for her on the street until she exits the loft where she lives with her boyfriend, an artist played by Max von Sydow. Michael Caine dashes around a series of street corners as Barbara Hershey walks toward wherever she is going, until all of a sudden she looks up and sees him checking his watch and acting all surprised, and they duck into a bookstore and browse, and he buys her an e. e. cummings book, and then, as she steps into a cab and he says Goodbye, he reminds her to read the poem on page 112.

It was a different New York, a graffitied and gritty city that still had bookstores with overflowing shelves to get lost in and emerge from bearing a volume of poetry. That place in time was different and yet not so, since the New York she had come to know was perpetually changing back into itself.

The poem on page 112 has always been one of Audrey’s favorites, ever since that movie, and especially the stanza Barbara Hershey’s character reads later that evening in bed: (i do not know what it is about you that closes / and opens;only something in me understands / the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) / nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

Somewhere further on in the film ~~ at first, she thought it was at the end of that scene, but she Googles it and discovers that it must be later, at least by a couple scenes ~~ Michael Caine’s character either runs into Barbara Hershey’s on the street again, or somehow manages to see her once more, or maybe it’s after they start their affair, or way before ~~ she doesn’t know, she’s a little confused now ~~ still, there is a memory she has from the movie, and in her mind’s eye this memory, whether real or imagined, is very clear: she sees Michael Caine’s character standing there on the street, with one of those Woody Allen monologues going on that she used to so adore, and he says, in her recollection, “I’m walking on air.”

She repeats those words to herself now, as she and Aureliano stroll down Mercer Street, holding hands. They see a lingerie store called Agent Provocateur ~~ she has never gone lingerie shopping with a man before ~~ and her heartbeat intensifies.

The flush is like the one that overcame her in the big old house in Katonah, with its dark hallways where she might not have felt so brave without him in the bedroom nearby.

Courage, for her, derived from fearlessness of the death which amounted to but a parting of the Soul and the body, an event that she dreaded as a prospect but lost fear of as she imagined delighting in being her unmingled self, at long last. Life asked for a Magnanimity that disregarded the lure of desires tethering her to the earth. Wisdom was no more, and no less, than the Act of the Intellectual-Principle that defined her place among society, withdrawn from the lower places so it might lead the Soul to Above, notwithstanding the weight of prejudice and hatred that encumbered the longing for normalcy that she had found.

There, in the clouds beyond the storm of humanity, the Soul grows cleansed until it is all Idea and Reason, free of the body still ambling below, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises ~~ the same process that created the desire welling up for him now, inside Agent Provocateur, as he drew aside the curtain to the changing room ever so much, and watched her trying on the black lace minidress he’d picked out.

“What are you doing in here?” she remembers asking.

It was the feeling of the feeling of him. The skin all over her whole body still flushed.

She smiled, and touched him back.

And with that touch her Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle that glistened with beautifulness in all its power, an amalgam of intellection and all that proceeded therefrom.

The Soul may become a good and beautiful thing ~~ as it did when he paid for her new sexy minidress without thinking, an instant at the cash register in which her heart skipped a beat because she could hardly believe she was worth the same amount that a man would spend on any other woman: here he was paying a few hundred dollars for this piece of lace that only he would see, something special for her and her alone, a material item which, though she would have shuddered to know it then ~~ although, deep down, maybe she did ~~ she would only wear for him once.

Years later, well after he moved back to California, he would keep that lace minidress in the nightstand next to his bed, maybe as a memento of what could have been. In the meantime, this process of the Soul’s becoming was the transformation of its likeness to what God must have wanted, a resplendence untouched in purity, for from the Divine derives all the Beauty and Good in Beings.

The Good was both the closest thing and the furthest thing from her thoughts as they walked back down Houston Street on the way home to her apartment. It must have been cold, not the cold that freezes the bones with the dead of winter, but likely that onset-of-winter temperature, a zone in which the prospect of the coming months somehow renders the cold even colder, unlike the cold of spring, which is, of course, a cold that, while seeming colder than it should be because it has gone on so long, nevertheless twinges with warmth from the knowledge that winter will soon end.

He had an erection the entire walk. It tented his jeans and she could totally see it. She reached out at a couple points, right there on Houston west of the Bowery, in front of the sliver of block where that semi-outdoors semi-antique place used to be, and it was okay because they were in love and no one saw, or maybe someone did. She laughed, and he did too, unembarrassed, because the world around them had tumbled away.

You might choose any moment on that walk home, or maybe just the whole walk itself, as their desire to have sex just built and built, arching into kisses they shared on an afternoon as perfect as one in December ever comes. Or, you might choose their lovemaking afterward, in her loft up close to the ceiling next to the clanking radiator pipe, when she looked down at him and felt so much love that she burst and so did he and they came at the same time.

But then there is that moment before, in the bathroom once she’s tinkled and put on the lace minidress and fluffed her hair, and there he is, having slipped in like he slipped into the dressing room at Agent Provocateur ~~ and she descends to her knees promising herself that this time she will remember to figure out whether he is circumcised, unzipping his jeans which remain tented from a half-hour ago, and looking up at him with a mixture of lust and terror sparkling in her eyes.

Those green eyes that, years later, when he said he missed her during one of their black holes of a conversation on the phone, he remembered as blue.

Moment Ten: The Precipice of Yes

As much as she wanted to let go during sex when Aureliano asked her to, she could never relinquish something she no longer had: the innocence taken in second grade.

She lived two blocks away from school and had started walking on her own the year before. Back then she was in a mixed first and second grade class, which is how she developed her crushes on Sexy-lipped Joshua and Unibrow Kurt, who were both one year older. When she was supposed to be working on printing with the other first graders, she would instead sneak glances up at the wall above the blackboard and try to memorize the alphabet in cursive, which she longed to learn because it was so pretty, and also because it was how adults wrote, and she wanted to be an adult so she could be free. (Incidentally, she recognized that adulthood also meant obligations, and so she yearned for responsibility, as well.)

Every morning she would race the Ellison sisters ~~ they lived one block closer to school and came out to walk the rest of the way with her ~~ to see who could do the most sprinklers. The object was to step on the heads that had come up to water the lawns overnight, but had gotten stuck after the water cycle, and didn’t go down.

She was tested, and she qualified for gifted and talented education at the school across town. If only she’d gone as soon as she could have, rather than the following year, as a third grader.

Then it never would have happened, and she might have turned out to be someone else.

Mr. Bagsby was new the year that she started second grade. No one knew anything about him except that he had just shown up in those tan corduroy slacks he always wore, one size too short, and those light tan suede shoes tied tight. He covered the classroom walls with posters of Corvettes and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he said things like, “Up your nose with a rubber hose.”

At first she sat in the back of the classroom close to Candi, whom Audrey now realizes was probably getting it, too.

Candi was a sickly child with pale skin and bony limbs. Her light brown hair clung to her forehead in oily strips, and, depending on how prominent her overbite seemed on any particular day, her face could at times be mostly teeth. Candi threw up a lot, often in the middle of class ~~ barfing out a sort of oatmeal-colored fluid. Sometimes she would make it to the sink at the counter behind them; other times, not.

Soon Mr. Bagsby was told about Audrey’s test scores, or he discovered her capacities on his own, and he entrusted her with the adult chores she so longed for: she was appointed classroom monitor and fly monitor at the same time.

Being classroom monitor entailed telling on anyone who broke the rules when Mr. Bagsby wasn’t looking. Audrey loathed tattling, though, and so she rarely did, instead utilizing her position to manipulate enemies into assets.

Eventually Mr. Bagsby moved her to the first row, right up there in front of him, with their desks almost touching. And there it was that she lay in wait for weeks until the opportunity came… and she slammed the fly swatter down on a big one right in the center of his gradebook.

His pale face, behind the strawberry beard he kept trimmed to perfection, turned red, and the purple veins in his temples pulsed.

After enough time had passed, she would be able to look back on her childhood with fondness, particularly in light of how the seeds she unwittingly sowed ~~ with Joshua and Kurt, for example ~~ sprouted into moments that fluoresced years later, and enabled her to glimpse the durability of her spirit, stuffed down and battered into submission for the moment, but not broken, and certainly still alive despite everything that was being done to it, and what she would do, herself.

How else was she to see into the virtuousness of a Soul so hidden, and to know its loveliness? If anything, the force pulling her to act out was a voice that entreated her to look inward. Should she fail to find herself beautiful yet, it counseled her, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothens there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has emerged.

She wanted to be beautiful. And the life inside of her knew it.

So do you also, it instructed: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling the statue of you, until there shall shine on your Soul the splendor of virtue, until you shall see the goodness without obstruction.

She always tried her best.

The classroom and fly monitor positions yielded in time to curtain duty.

She had to drag those heavy, light-blocking plastic tarps across the entire side wall of windows, facing out on the back playground, the one she didn’t want to go to unless she was headed all the way to the edge of the soccer field, where she could hide under the bushes at the fence near the alley.

And after curtain duty it was the duties she attended to at his desk, sitting on his lap, his knees knocking against the metal drawers as he swiveled around in his chair.

And after desk duties it was the duties that she remembers only in flickers, like frames from a silent film for which most of the spools have been lost.

Flickers and flashes.

The frame where she is perched on his thigh and his pants are unzipped.

The one where she is on her knees in front of him.

The strangely upside down ones of his chair and the desk legs, and the walls with the Corvettes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The close-ups of his hands, sprinkled with pinkish wisps of hair ~~ and his dry freckled skin and impeccable fingernails.

And always, over and over again, those curtains, those heavy plastic curtains that were the same color as Mr. Bagsby’s light tan slacks, mixed with Candi’s vomit.

The memories swirl around the globe of her consciousness, often going years and years before they end up directly overhead again. In those vortexes of time and place, she must stop, cry the tears that she hopes will wash away the scum of the past so she can see it clearly again ~~ and sometimes, when the clouds start to disperse, she does begin to see a little more ~~ but eventually the present wave slips back into the next one, which crashes into her.

It is at one of those point breaks that she rushes home from her morning run in Los Angeles years later, on a day very near the end of this story, and picks up her phone the instant she walks in.

“Mom,” she says, and immediately she asks about the navy blue Speedo, a boy’s swimsuit that she used to wear to school. “Did I start doing that in second grade?”

“Yes.”

“Mom, I think I wore that Speedo because I thought if I tied it tight enough that Mr. Bagsby couldn’t get to me.”

“Yes, I know,” her mom says. “You’ve told me that before.”

But there is something else, another detail that she has clawed back.

“Mom, I remember tying it in a double knot.”

The memory is, for now, as clear as it will get. She must accept how, for the time being at least, and possibly forever, the past will remain underwater.

A broken part of you may want to choose the moment she is pretty sure it all began ~~ in his red Corvette on the busy street parallel to the one with the sprinklers, the same street where, in a few years, after she transferred to the school across town, she would go for piano lessons from Mrs. Stack, and also where she’d ride in the car on the way home with her fifth grade best friend’s mother, who once said, “I just love when the trees cover the whole street, like angels protecting us.”

It was on that busy street with all those angel trees where, with your mind’s eye, you can see, in the light dappling in through the Afghan quilt of leaves overhead, Mr. Bagsby’s pale, lightly haired hand: it reaches over from the gearshift, through the air, and comes to rest on her little thigh.

She feels so important in that moment ~~ fly monitor, classroom monitor ~~ and now someone so special as to get a ride in the red Corvette.

But just as she feels his palm alight on her skin, the memory shrinks toward a tide pool of black, like one of those fades in a silent film that is the past. The screen swallows itself up into a circle at the center, and then everything vanishes.

The moment you may rather choose happened prior to that ride, as she stood on the sidewalk in front of school, right after Mr. Bagsby asked her if she wanted a lift home and right before she said, “Yes.”

Moment Eleven: Before We Fuck It Up

There was just something about being in a car together that they both loved. Years later, during a phone conversation when they were on again, or at least one of the periods in which they were talking, he would mention to her, almost offhandedly, that he liked to drive because it calmed him down.

“It’s my therapy,” he said.

He was making fun of her, kind of, about seeing the same therapist and getting nowhere for so long, but she let it go and imagined him in the old tan Volvo station wagon, which now had over 300,000 miles and still ran like clockwork, speeding across some highway out in the West, through the desert, with no one else around, or toward the mountains, like the peaks of the Rockies in the background of that very first picture he had e-mailed to her.

For her part, driving soothed her less because it was a metaphor, even amounting to a veritable form, of escape, than because ~~ no matter where she was or where she was going ~~ being propelled forward took her back in space and time, all the way to the very first DMV appointment on the morning of her birthday, when she was turning 16 to the minute, literally right as she was taking her driving test.

Over the course of that virgin driving year, a half-dozen or so places in her hometown solidified into a routine of spots that she would drive among almost every night, sprinting around in the grey Volvo sedan that she had inherited from her grandfather, and then, after she wrecked that relic in an accident with a pregnant woman, a baby blue Camry that she infused with smoke from one cheap pack of cigarettes after another, having picked up the habit from her first love.

Amanda, whom I alluded to before, was a chain-smoker who had been in and out of rehab three times before they got together. She wore her almost-white blond hair in a short bob, was flat-chested, and had muscular calves.

She was a dream.

The way it happened was this: Amanda called up Audrey one night while Audrey was working on the face of a singing woman, inspired by Billie Holiday, about a third of the way through the 18-foot mural of oils on canvas that she painted in her final semester of high school.

“I have a secret crush on you,” Amanda had said, to which Audrey had replied, “I have a secret crush on you, too.” Then they’d hung up, and, in the coming weeks, fallen in love.

Audrey and Amanda found a couple places they loved more than anything to drive together, like the African coffee plantation, as they called it, a farm way beyond the outskirts of town, almost near the foothills, or the old big white mansion where they’d sit parked across the street and wonder what happened inside, listening to “Voices Carry” by ’Til Tuesday ~~ a song that Audrey always thought said, “Oh Charles, keep it down now, this is Carrie,” until the Internet arrived and she found out the lyrics were, “Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry…” Duh.

Secret Crush Amanda had been in the car for the accident with the pregnant woman. She was smoking, of course, and she held her cigarette as the car spun in circles across the busiest street in town. Afterward the police officer had said, “It’s a good thing you were wearing your seatbelts, see how they can save lives?” Neither of them had been wearing one, though, because they were rebels.

They were so in love during those first several weeks that they didn’t want to sleep because it meant being apart. One morning in particular, at Roosevelt Park across the street from where Audrey had gone to jr. high (in the halls of which she had experienced her first kiss with Jessica, who exuded Exclamation! perfume, and also had pre-liked sweet, Non-gangbanger Gerardo), they sat there in the car, smelling of stale smoke and teenager, aching from part delirium and part urge beyond quench to just make the fuck out.

Audrey and Amanda stayed together for three months.

After they broke up, in the last half-year that Audrey spent in her hometown, she mostly drove alone, first in one direction out to the house where a dusty-blond swimmer I’ll call Sean lived (Scandinavian Sean, as you remember, was a friend of Amanda’s whom Audrey developed a very severe crush on but who did not reciprocate). And then it was over to Adam’s house (Broad-shouldered Adam, as you’ll also recall, was a football player from history class who was the very first person Audrey revealed her secret to).

Finally, after Adam’s, it was over to the park in the sketchy park of town, down by the river, where she left pieces of her soul that might never grow back.

She liked the movement above all else; it made her feel she was going somewhere and could be someone, like the lyrics from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” that she sang over and over again as she smoked, and drove, and drove.

All those nights she still believed that her Soul had beauty, no matter the depths to which she had just sunk in acting out at the park, and, even if that beauty was less beautiful than the Intellect she utilized to contort reality, the image bent so that her nature could manifest. If her Soul had been so lovely in its own right, she would have wondered what quality its preceding state would have to have been.

The only remaining question was what the power from which the Soul takes beauty would be ~~ borrowed, as it were, from the inherent in her. She possessed beauty, she believed, only because she held true to the basest parts of herself; such that her self-knowledge, insofar as she could claim it, beautified her, while leftovers of self-ignorance rendered her uglier than she felt.

Could this acceptance of the Intellectual Sphere get her away from herself, and the base and ugly behavior that rendered her so, or would she have to make yet another attempt by another road?

Yes.

Sure enough, the roads that she and Aureliano found as they explored the tri-state area in his old tan Volvo station wagon made her so, so wistful.

One winter day, strangely warm right after it had snowed, they were driving through the side roads around Katonah, and all around unfolded into a wonderland of melting white. He looked over at her from time to time, but she didn’t notice mostly, for she was staring out the window with her mouth agape. The beauty!! It was as though she could hear, right through the windows, the entire world dripping from the trees through the air and onto the banks of untouched snow-cone-like powder rolled out in a carpet of silence crackling over the ground.

Another time, a much colder day, they drove and drove and drove and ended up in Mystic, Connecticut, which was supposed to be a place to go in the summer, but they didn’t care, they ate at Mystic Pizza anyway. The walls swelled with pictures of the movie with Julia Roberts that had been shot there.

Afterward she convinced him to drive out to the ocean, which she wanted to see because she always missed it during winter, when the weather coffined her in Manhattan and it was way too freezing to ride out on her bike. They snapped a picture as the sun set over a frigid Atlantic, and you can see the tears in her eyes from the wind and cold.

On the drive home she asked him why relationships between men and women always get fucked up. Her asked her, in response, whether she really wanted to know.

They were laughing because it was so funny, for some reason, although they both knew that it wasn’t.

She wanted to remember his explanation, and she knew she would forget (just like he had already noticed that she so frequently did, even if he pulled back from commenting, or yelling, that she never listened, until much later), if she didn’t memorialize what he said on her phone:

Reasons females fuck up relationships:

1. Remember commitments and honor them.

2. Never assume. If you have something to say, or feel or sense something, then bring it up.

3. Do not use disclosures made in confidence against each other.

4. If all else fails, just ask.

5. Ditch the hang-ups and be intimate.

6. Her personal characteristics.

Reasons males fuck up relationships:

A. Intolerance.

B. Unintentional “criticism” re hang-ups.

C. Emotional distancing re hang-ups and disclosures.

D. A male would prefer to resolve A — C with a female and is not concerned with who’s at fault; a failure will result in self-destructive behavior.

E. His personal characteristics ~~ jealousy?

You might choose that moment particularly, in the passenger seat of the old tan Volvo station wagon that she’d grown to adore (with its aging leather cracked at the edges and the rest of it), overwarm from the heater, laughing so hard now that her stomach pulsed with ache, prior to when their personal characteristics fucked everything up.

Moment Twelve: Love Among the (Soiled) Sheets

She was so excited to see his friends Juan Carlos and Bruno again. She ended up rushing to the bar on Houston and First where they were supposed to meet, because, as usual, she had waited up until the last minute, and then some, to leave her apartment, and she was already late.

Aureliano had once remarked that he liked how New York women wore short skirts and boots. And so she slipped on her jean miniskirt and tights, even though the January night outside threatened to freeze her to the marrow.

When was the last time a guy introduced her to his friends? Had it ever happened, except maybe in Egypt, where people were friendly and moved in the flow of things, with less of a divide between personal and shared space, in general? It occurred once in Israel, and in Guatemala, for the same reason, or maybe more by happenstance than anything else. Other than those instances, the only other time she recalled was her first boyfriend in college, though she’s pretty sure that she met his best friend that one late night / early morning at the Waverly Restaurant on Sixth Avenue over a plate of spinach (the friend was battling a cold and thought spinach would help), well before they finally got together.

The first time she had met Juan Carlos and Bruno was at Good Stuff, where she intended to introduce them to American diner food. Of course she should have known better ~~ Aureliano was cosmopolitan, as were his buddies.

When Juan Carlos’s order arrived, he leaned over the pile of food on his plate and said that he was going to “dominate” it. She missed the turn of phrase in Spanish and Aureliano translated too late for her to giggle.

Bruno once said that working with Juan Carlos at the Mexican industrial equipment supply company where they were both employed was like collaborating with Walt Disney. Juan Carlos saw the world in a different way, you could just tell.

Sure enough, when Aureliano showed Juan Carlos the painting that Audrey had made of the two of them together awaiting the car in Ixtapa, he had apparently talked about it for 15 or 20 minutes. Years later, Audrey asked Aureliano what Juan Carlos had said, but Aureliano just brushed her off as usual, saying he didn’t remember. She never knew when he was going to be mean; she just knew that it would happen at some point, and, no matter how prepared she thought she was, no matter how thick her skin had become and how hardened her heart had grown, despite how she had come not only to expect the daggers of speech but to await them as inevitable, something she deserved ~~ no matter, the blows knocked a breath out of her.

Back at Good Stuff, though, she was still so in love that she couldn’t see it coming. She was just proud to sit next to a man, trying to be friendly and please his amigos.

They kicked back a few cocktails over dinner.

She had stopped drinking a while ago because, when she kept getting tired and depressed after a glass of wine with dinner, she had realized that alcohol made her tired and depressed, and, now that her first year of law school was distant in the past and she no longer had to drink herself through it ~~ to the point where she consumed Vodka nightly just to bang herself down into a fitful sleep, what a horrible period ~~ she didn’t really like to be around drinking at all.

And so she smiled, and cast her eyelashes down every once in a while, and laughed whenever she could. She hoped that Aureliano would come over that night and make love to her, but she knew that maybe he’d go back home to Katonah.

She was right. He told her the next day that, as he was driving them home ~~ and of course all three were drunk by then, having gone out until late to some club in the Meatpacking District she’d never heard of before and didn’t care about ~~ that Bruno wondered out loud what on earth Audrey saw in Aureliano, and Juan Carlos, who they thought was sleeping as he lay across the back seat in the old tan Volvo station wagon, volunteered, “He must be hung like a horse.”

As he recounted that story over the phone, she promised herself that she’d figure out next time whether he was circumcised. It was getting ridiculous.

After they hung up, she sat on the futon couch with the gnawed arm and gazed up at the painting of them awaiting the car in Ixtapa, meant to be his Christmas present, which still hung on her wall (and still does).

There is an immediacy to that painting, a touchability of feeling right on the surface of it. Up to that point in her artwork, it was probably the most expressive portraiture she’d ever produced, capturing that moment in their history like a butterfly in midair. It was the first painting she’d done in a couple of years, since the last one of her and Yigal the Persian-Jew, and she was so pleased with how this one turned out that she wondered how she could ever make art again, nothing she did would ever be that good ~~ though now when she looks at it, the image seems dated, and almost two-dimensional.

The gratification she sought to supply through that painting gave rise to an unresolvable conflict between order and harmony ~~ a sort of rupture in the Divine insofar as it exists in nature, and, by extension, art. The perpetuality that she struggled to portray prevented her from contemplating the eternal and unchanging nature of the glory she wanted. Artwork built a staircase to God, but its banister guided her Soul’s return back down to earth, where their reunion blinded her because the beauty of being pushed away and pulled in at the same time was too much.

The guys were not at the bar on Houston Street and First when she arrived, even though they were all supposed to meet there like 45 minutes ago. She should have known then, for sure. She really should have known back when he showed up late to their second date at Mitali. She really should have known, as she probably did, the very first time she saw him outside Atlas, and the drop in her stomach turned her on, and she knew it was the wrong feeling to be turned on by.

But they were still relatively early on, and plus she believed that he was going to put a ring on her finger, a nice ring from Taxco (he kept saying), which is famous for its silver.

A ring would make her like other women.

Someone worth marrying.

Someone who would not want to die.

Aureliano stumbled through the door in between Bruno and Juan Carlos and immediately she did not recognize the expression on his face. He was not usually looking around vacantly and smiling; in fact, he rarely smiled unless he was making a joke or teasing her from the driver’s seat of the old tan Volvo station wagon, like on the way to Mystic when, in a precursor to the discussion about relationships getting fucked up, she’d asked him why men put up with women if they drove each other so crazy, and he’d formed his fingers into an upside down triangle to signify a vagina, while sort of steering with his elbow, and stuck out his tongue a little in between his teeth.

The four of them stood together crushed in by the crowd at the bar. She wished that Aureliano would say something about her jean miniskirt and tights and boots, but still he had that empty look, and his eyes remained glassy.

For the entire 15 minutes he stayed in the bathroom, she made excuse after excuse to Bruno and Juan Carlos. Aureliano had been working a lot recently. He was tired. She’d been sick a couple weeks ago and he’d been so kind to come over late and cook shrimp soup and hold her in bed and dab her body all over with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol ~~ which was apparently something people did in Mexico? ~~ and he really was a wonderful guy.

At last he wobbled out, and she said she was going to take him home. Juan Carlos complimented her for being very nice and taking care of Aureliano.

He kept the cab window down even though the wind was absolutely freezing and she begged him to roll it up.

She took pictures of him so she would remember and because she was evil.

Back home, he went straight for the bathroom again. She went in to check on him after a few minutes and there he was, slumped against the wall, right where he had stood as she descended to her knees after their trip to Agent Provocateur ~~ except now it was he going down, kneeling at the toilet to throw up. And through it all she took some more pictures.

She doesn’t remember leaving the apartment to the laundry downstairs just yet ~~ wasn’t that trip later, when she was washing the sheets? ~~ but she must have, because she remembers returning and seeing his clothes strewn about on the bathroom floor and near the ladder to the sleeping loft.

So up she went and now there he was in bed, and she held him, right where he’d held her and dabbed the cotton ball when she was sick.

She zeroes in: that moment is the one you might choose, yeah, okay, not when he threw up a little into her hand, but right afterward, when he murmured, “I’m sorry, Audrey, I’m so sorry,” and she chose to believe him.

Moment Thirteen: How He Loved Her Smell

“I don’t want to be in a long-distance relationship,” she said.

He told her that she was going to be okay, they were going to be okay, everything was going to be okay. He promised her.

She longed so much to believe him, and, because believing him meant annihilating her expectations and oblivion comforted her, she did.

The last night they spent together while he was still living in New York, she bundled up in the dark brown fleece that she had bought at Campmor in Paramus, New Jersey, which some guy Aureliano worked with up on the project up near Katonah had told him about. She cannot remember whether they went there specifically, or if they were coming back to the city from one of their drives and just happened to be near.

She knows it was December, though, because she remembers trying on a windbreaker and saying, “Oh my God, I could wear this all winter,” whereas, if it had been January, she would have known that the fabric would not have been enough, even adding the fleece underneath.

She hated shopping and almost never went. Mostly her clothes were accidents that she had happened upon on the street (like the red dress she’d worn in Ixtapa or the brown leather jacket that she’d picked up from the same sale), or hanging on some rack of reduced samples outside one of the boutiques on East 9th Street, a top for $10 or $15 or whatever, a really good deal that was meant to lure customers inside and which she snapped up as if competing for the item.

She had so conditioned herself to scavenge that she couldn’t recall the last time she went to a real store and bought something new ~~ maybe the job interview suit she’d bought at Macy’s in San Francisco during law school, a vestige of the sadness and fear that overwhelmed her when she thought she was going to flunk out, or the patchwork of shirts and blazers and skirts that she unearthed in Filene’s Basement the following year for her internship with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, the same office where she went six months after she finished interning to report the assault, in which, you remember, her assailant cut off her breath with a headlock and said that she knew what he wanted and he would kill her if she didn’t give it to him ~~ or the stuff she bought when she went back to stock up for her first associate position at the law firm where she worked before she went solo, a three-man shop at which her annual salary was about equal to the size of a large law firm associate’s year-end bonus.

But, here at Campmor, she was just thrilled because she’d finally be able to buy a winter wardrobe for herself and stay warm in different colors until May: she could fit into a large in the juniors’ section, and, at those prices, she could live in less mature shades.

She heaped one article of clothing after another, including the brown fleece, onto Aureliano’s arms, as he trod after her through the aisles, each one of which yielded treasure.

“His job is to carry everything,” she said to a woman who had looked up from browsing a rack in the back corner of the store.

“Oh my,” the woman smiled, “he’s a keeper.”

A wish to be transported to the almost blessed contemplation of things divine connected her to the time that was slipping away. Terrified that feelings would topple her from the precipice upon which she stood, enveloped in the warmth of him and the hot air streaming from the old tan Volvo station wagon’s heater on the way back to New York, she sought to devise an orderly path down the slopes she had climbed to escape from the winter of solitude that threatened her outside, on her own, without him.

To beauty, love would draw the intellect, and lead a mind formerly un-beautiful to the same mind made beautiful.

Love would make her better.

Wouldn’t it?

On their final night together in New York, they went to Life Café, on Avenue B and 10th Street, across the intersection from the bodega with the blondies. The restaurant was, you remember, the first place she’d gone after being released from the hospital following her almost accidental suicide attempt, back around this time of winter 13 years before.

Tears hovered on the lower ridges of her eyes the entire time, as she thought of all the plates of nachos she’d devoured over at the bar here on Saturday or Sunday nights, after riding up to Nyack and home.

(Years later, as I’ll remind you of shortly, she would assume her perch at the bar behind their booth where she was sitting across from Aureliano, and order a plate of nachos with Bernard, a Haitian thug who, in a coincidence that no longer surprised her because life was made up of them, had gone to high school in Nyack. Bernard would dismount his stool in order to stand inches away as she balanced on hers, look at her, shake his head in earnestness, and proclaim, “It doesn’t matter to me how you were born.”)

Aureliano ordered a few drinks with dinner; she winced with the second hoping that there wouldn’t be a third. (Hey, Bernard would have a few drinks, too.)

She gave up trying to smile.

They’d already been through how he turned down a great job offer in New York to return to Pasadena without her. He’d invited her to come live with him, but she wasn’t admitted to practice in California yet, and, besides, she was only in the first year of her own five-year plan to relocate to Los Angeles, a subject she’d skirted because she was clinging to the possibility of a miracle…

Maybe he’d accept that job here and they could move into an apartment together on the Upper West Side, at least for the next few years while she worked on migrating her law practice across the country.

Maybe he would understand that the process was going to take time, she was in business for herself, she couldn’t simply up and transfer to another project like he always did.

Maybe he really would come and visit twice a month like he promised.

She kept hoping, even now.

He told her, again, that everything was going to be okay, and he repeated himself all through dinner, which she had no appetite for.

“I don’t want this,” she said, in disbelief that her one real shot to achieve a relationship was going to plummet, after she had launched and soared through the air, falling just short of outer space where she’d be safe from the gravitational forces that were yanking her back down to fate.

The cold air hit their faces outside, and she thinks she may even have stepped into a pool of icy black slush in the gutter on the corner.

As they walked across Avenue B, somewhere near 9th Street, he pressed his forehead upon her collarbone and inhaled.

She was wearing the brown fleece from Campmor, which must have had her smell by now, whatever her smell was.

What was that piece she read somewhere ~~ a blog or a newspaper feature or something ~~ with a quote from some girl who had told her boyfriend that she only stayed with him because of his natural aroma?

I suspect that’s a moment you want, right there, in the middle of Avenue B, as she saw that, even though he was leaving her behind, he loved the way she smelled.

Moment Fourteen: Her Scream for Him Across the World

She had not wept with such sincerity ~~ at least not up to that point, though of course, later, in Manzanillo with Aureliano, she would ~~ since the last night they spent together, sitting on the pillows strewn about the balcony of her houseboat on the Nile, amidst one of those warm summer evenings in Cairo that she had come to love but would now associate with a downpour of sadness, the loss of a dream she had harbored and tended to and transformed into a garden in her heart.

They first saw each other, you will recall, at Horriya, a bar in downtown Cairo near the American University, back when the campus huddled in a complex of buildings in a corner of Tahrir Square, the site of the revolutions, you remember, against President Hosni Mubarak, and, two years later, President Mohammed Morsi. She didn’t want to be alone at night anymore, and so she hopped in a taxi to Horriya, shuffled through the sawdust on the floor, and munched on chickpeas and fava beans while sipping a Stella, the Egyptian beer, working on her Arabic.

She noticed him right away, of course, and she caught him staring back at her, just as he wanted her to. It was a good year for him, before the heroin took his beauty away; he looked like he had stepped out of her fantasies, only to invite her right back into them.

In between glances he talked to his friend, or whomever it was that he had come with. She probably checked them both out, she was like that back then.

Mohammed’s forehead sloped down into definite but soft eyebrows atop a pair of black-rimmed glasses that perched across his quietly majestic nose. The cheekbones and jawline throning his eye sockets sculpted the air down into a pair of lips that gleamed plush with a touch of moisture at the center, and their mauve corners curved upward into the ever slightest of smiles. His black hair was recently cut, probably on a weekly basis she imagined, tapering from the back of his skull in a curve to his neck. The skin of his face shone a golden olive, and, since he was several years beyond her ripe age of 23, but still less than the older-looking man that the drugs would turn him into the following year, he was luminescent, even in the cheap florescent lighting overhead.

He was there the following night.

She does not remember whether he was already sitting inside when she got there, or if he came in after; she believes it was the latter; it would have made more sense for him to sit down next to her, as he must have, and start talking.

He went home with her that second night to the nondescript flat in a posh part of town where she lived before the houseboat. The next morning, he wrote his phone number for her in old-style Arabic numerals ~~ which she asked him to use rather than Western versions (a special request on behalf of the memory she was making) ~~ and she kept that scrap of paper in her wallet for years, although she never needed to, because she remembered what he wrote as soon as she saw it and remembers it still.

“I pushed to know you,” he would explain later, in English, which she would remember because “push,” even if a curious word choice, was exactly what he did.

Over the next four months, they communicated in a mixture of Arabic and English, depending on how drunk or stoned either one of them was and which language suited the purpose. English was for communication, Arabic for nonsense and sweet everythings.

One time he threw the pot down under a floorboard of the houseboat balcony, and he showed it to her the next day, sitting there at the bottom of a buoy.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, gazing down into the shadows.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

It’s probably there now, all these years later.

If love for a man is the desire for beauty itself, and the beauty of the human body ~~ especially one that tasted of odorless sweat, as his did ~~ consists in a certain harmony; and if that harmony is a temperance of conflicting emotions, it follows that love seeks only what is moderate, and decorous ~~ and, if all that fluff is so, it was not love she felt for Mohammed, but the force of love that makes love love.

Amongst all the pleasures and sensations that overflowed from them, night after night, each one filling with an impetuosity and irrationality that jarred her mind and unbalanced her, and him too, and as the electricity welling up tipped further toward a craving to be submerged together in their desires ~~ for her it was to touch his face and for him it was to lick her feet ~~ their love grew to hate any moderation, electing instead to find beauty in its opposite.

The mad lasciviousness that dragged them down into such intemperance and disharmony, attracting them to each other’s underbellies, devolved into a harbinger of the depths to which she would sink into sex addiction a few months later, and he into drugs. In the meantime, though, they pulled each other toward ugliness like gravity, and the brightness of the fire there singed them down to the core, which made everything seem all the more beautiful in savagery.

After she returned to the States, she called him periodically, leaving perhaps four or five weeks in between conversations. Usually his mother picked up, never seeming even remotely flummoxed to be answering the phone at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, the only time of day or night that he would likely be home and awake.

She went back the following summer, and, for a second there, life was heaven. I want to confess: she believed more than anything that she had stumbled upon the rest of her life ~~ until a week later when he said that he needed to tell her something and showed her some bullshit identification card with another name and said all this stuff that didn’t make sense. She knew not to believe any of it anymore, and, besides, he’d always be Mohammed to her, no matter how he thrashed against the memories they shared.

A few days later came that night-long Goodbye on the houseboat balcony, you remember the one, as she sobbed and sobbed, tears leaping from her eyes. And he cried too, for he knew that he had mangled it all.

He was probably high.

Fucking heroin.

He had been the love of her life.

The years passed and she got in touch with him every six months or so. She wanted to hear his voice, and for him to hear hers.

Once she even called from a hotel in Zamalek, the posh foreign embassy district, across the river from the houseboat, at the conclusion of a fellowship after law school.

“You were in Cairo for five months and you didn’t phone me until now?”

“I’m sorry.”

She should regret refusing to see him that night because of what happened five years later…

…where we are in the story of Audrey and Aureliano.

It’s May now, three months after he has left New York, and, even though he’d promised to visit her twice a month to ease the long distance thing, he hasn’t come once yet.

She is alone in her apartment, convulsing with sobs on the futon couch with the gnawed arm.

Because now, for the first time since she and Mohammed met, she cannot get ahold of him.

That phone number she committed to memory from the first instant so many years ago doesn’t work anymore. The line is dead.

She sobs and sobs, screaming for him all the way across the world ~~ she screams so loudly and for so long that her upstairs neighbor from two floors above knocks on the door to make sure she’s okay, and she bleats, “Yes,” but she isn’t, the neighbor knows she isn’t and so does she, nor will she be okay, not ever again, something will always be missing now, stuck down at the bottom of a buoy in the shadows, where it will stay, untouched and beyond reach, forever.

You might choose that moment because it was then that she first understood that she could love truly, and, in her mind, a life with Aureliano remained possible.

Moment Fifteen: “It’s Not That Bad”

“Tomorrow’s the big day, baby,” he said, a couple weeks later, and she tingled on the other end of the phone connection.

Over the next few revolutions of the earth around the sun, whenever they were on again, she would wish that she had just fucking accepted the invitation to stay at his house in Pasadena rather than try to puppeteer the evening with a hotel downtown. Spending the night at his place had been the original plan, when she first scheduled the interview a month before. But then his mom had fallen ill and moved from her second-floor bedroom over in Hancock Park to his living room, which was on the ground floor.

“Why doesn’t she just stay in the living room of her own house?”

Audrey crumpled inside as the words left her mouth, and she pasted over her shame by admitting she was nervous that meeting his mother would disrupt her concentration for the interview.

How much she wanted that job amounted to little in comparison to how much she wanted to be wanted for it.

She tried on a couple outfits the morning of the interview, and, when she showed him the black suit she’d gotten in law school, fitted over her favorite bright pink shirt punctuated with a white collar and white cuffs, he looked at her from his recline on the bed, and said, “That’s it.”

Not half an hour later, one of the interviewers asked about the partner in Pasadena she’d mentioned in her cover letter. She painted a smile and a nod over the last three weeks prior to submitting her application, in which she had alternated between removing that sentence each time they “broke up” because he wasn’t coming to New York to visit ever, and putting it back when they spoke again and he placated her.

She still believed that one day they would go to Taxco together. One day he would formalize their engagement with a silver ring and turn her into someone special.

Maybe she shouldn’t have been so bratty with him, always demanding and rigid. Maybe she should have let him love her in his own way, not subject him to amorphous, capricious standards that he could never satisfy!!

The old tan Volvo station wagon pulled out of the hotel garage after she had completed her interview around the corner, and they turned onto a series of streets that she drives daily now that she has moved to LA. Back then these long blocks still seemed new, so full of possibility and uncertainty, welcoming and open, yet somehow better than she was, more than she deserved.

They headed over toward the 5 ~~ she isn’t sure which route they took, but probably Hill Street over to the 110, since that’s the route he directed her to years later when she happened to be in Chinatown during a phone conversation and asked, and she was nasty to him and lamented it later because he was right, it was the quickest route ~~ and then likely through the tunnels near Dodger Stadium that he once told her had been used for a scene in Rebel Without a Cause, which she never bothered to verify.

Soon enough they were heading north, down the grapevine to Bakersfield and further, all the way to her hometown in the Central Valley.

It had been a big day: she’d flown to Los Angeles and he’d actually picked her up as promised, he’d chosen a hotel that was a three-minute walk from her job interview, and he’d helped her pick out what to wear and all that. Meanwhile they’d made love and slept together and held each other and not fought and everything seemed like before.

And now they were together in the car again, propelling time over the wrinkles between them, polishing away the layers of discontent and revealing the hope they shared that things would get better.

You see the beauty of the Body, she told herself, thinking of how sex with him in Los Angeles before a job interview had tenderized her into the person she might become.

Do you wish to see also the beauty of the Soul? Then subtract the weight of the matter itself from the bodily form, the one that tethers you to him ~~ it was her body, he’d later tell her, that keeps him coming back for her ~~ and leave the rest, and soar.

Do you wish also to see the beauty of the Angelic Mind? Then take away now, please, not only the limits of place, but also the sequence of time, while keeping the composition of physicality in your relation to each other.

Do you wish finally to see the beauty of God? Then take away, in addition to everything that came before, that composite of forms in which you delight and squirm, the interplay of the two of you together, ensnared in all your dreams and interpretations that do not exist.

And what will I have left after subtracting all these qualities?

Do you think that beauty is anything else but light?

The sun in California, even through the bad air of the Central Valley, shone so bright. For the whole drive, she wore the pair of sunglasses with polarized lenses that she’d found in a Japanese second-hand designer clothing store in the East Village ~~ and he wore those same ones she’d tried on in Ixtapa three years prior.

The night he’d thrown up in her bed, she’d called her mom and cried a little into the phone, speaking quietly from the bathroom, where she crouched on the ground, in the same spot where he’d slumped against the wall an hour earlier, and where she’d knelt before him and undone his pants a couple months before.

“Audrey, do not stay with him,” her mom warned. “When he wakes up, just let him go, and don’t ever talk to him again.”

“But I’ll be alone.”

She followed her mom’s instructions for a few days. Then he texted her from a German beer hall in the neighborhood, minutes away from where she lived.

I miss you, said his text, and those three words crumbled her.

Now, a year-and-a-half later, here they were in her mom’s living room, with its high ceilings and walls of creamy white. Her mom sat on the edge of the couch for the entire conversation, except when Aureliano left to go to the bathroom, at which point she leapt into the air and pointed in the direction he’d gone and mouthed: “YES YES YES.”

Audrey would bring up those YESes for the next several years, whenever her mom said to just stay away from him.

“That was before I knew,” her mom would say.

“Oh bullshit,” she’d respond. “You knew about the night he threw up in my bed when I called you three months prior.”

Later that evening, at her father’s, she got choked up.

The ridiculously enormous house he’d moved into with his new wife was right behind where Lindsay Carpenter used to live. (Lindsay is a girl Audrey had had a crush on and walked the school halls looking for her entire sophomore year. At their 20th high school reunion, Lindsay would remind Audrey that Audrey had kissed her ~~ “I kissed you?” “Three times!!” “Really?” “Oh my God.”)

Most of it was the irony of how much she would have wanted to live behind Lindsay during high school and now she did, all this river of time later, when there was no Lindsay anymore, and look what her father had come to. The new wife had walked out on him ~~ literally just walked out of the house ~~ as he was recuperating from a neck operation and his corrupt partners had fired him for ~~ they even said so ~~ being disabled.

Some of the backyard furniture was overturned, there were spider webs in the guest room, and a layer of dust lay over the dining room table and every piece of furniture in the living room, which felt unused.

“It doesn’t seem that bad,” Aureliano said to her, as she cried a little in the car on the way to their hotel. “I don’t see why you’re so upset.”

“Then why don’t you want to stay there?”

On the way back to LA, they drove over to the ocean to take Highway 1 all the way down. They took a picture outside a restaurant made of windows in Big Sur. She was wearing one of the zip-up fleeces she’d gotten from Campmor in the junior’s section, and she tried to smile and look happy. The picture, however, captured the strain in between them.

“It’s not that bad,” he said, glancing at her phone as he steered. “I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

It was then that you may wish to choose, the moment when she wanted to let her premonitions slide, as they continued on, trapped in the fog of the coast that, with just one gust of wind, could have cleared.

Moment Sixteen: Just for a Second, She Thought

She’d asked Half-bald Drew to marry her, too ~~ well, not so much asked as suggested, really ~~ and not just once but whenever she had the chance. And then, at a certain point, there was the letter.

They met on the first group bike ride she ever took, to City Island, with a bunch of people she never saw again except for him. He noticed that his back wheel had flatted after they got there and the group were milling around in front of some order-at-the-window lobster joint or other. He wore a headband that day, so she’d just figured he was gay. But then he frowned at the wheel, unscrewed it from the frame, sat down on the curb and ripped the tire off to inspect the tube ~~ all in one gesture ~~ and she perceived that he was not only straight, but single.

He sat with his feet in the gutter, his hands and thighs streaked with grease from the chain, kneading the tire back onto the wheel with all ten grubby, nail-chewed fingers. He was sweaty, and also speckled with the dirt of the city, plus some from the freeway, which they’d somehow ended up on for a New York minute ~~ and she wanted to kiss and lick his body all over.

The second time she saw him was out at his parents’ house in Montauk. By then she had purchased a bona fide road bike, not the piece of shit from K-Mart that she’d been riding around because it was the cheapest set of new wheels she could find. And also she’d been up to Nyack and back once or twice now already, so the 40-mile jaunt they went on that afternoon along the Atlantic Ocean was nothing. The energy she had on that ride ~~ she sang along to her iPod and felt like she could spread her arms and lift up off the world!!

There were two other people there that day, including a girl who was competing for Drew, but Audrey was okay with the inevitability of losing because he’d invited her out to participate in this get-together, and he was a man ~~ and that development, whatever else happened, was incredible.

The fourth person, a guy she never saw again, was so unprepared for the length of ride they’d done that, when he emerged from the bathroom back at the parents’ house, Drew said, “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

She remembers because, as Drew spoke, she was standing nearby at the kitchen counter, and he was so big and tall next to her that she closed her eyes for a second, just to feel the sensation of being next to him that she knew she could survive from for months.

At first she offered to take the train back to Manhattan, and she totally would have, especially since it seemed like the other girl had sunk her claws into him.

But she let him insist, and then he managed to get all three of their bikes into his Subaru. (A headband and a Subaru, what was up with this guy?)

Audrey did climb into the back, though, so the other girl could have the front.

Before the drive home, they parked out at that famous lighthouse on the edge of the world for a few minutes, to get a final few breaths of ocean air. “The Story” by Brandi Carlile came on the radio and became, for Audrey, their song.

The other girl wanted to be dropped off near her own parents’ house deep in Long Island, forlorn in some random parking lot that could have been any other.

And so the next thing Audrey knew, she and Drew were driving toward Manhattan, just the two of them, as the sun was setting behind the cityscape and lighting up the sky with orange and violet. She wished the ride would last forever, and, in her heart ~~ where she could imagine what might have happened if he liked her back ~~ it would.

The beauty of their bodies, at the heart of their prime, was a visible light, whereas the beauty of their souls, having yet to emerge, was an invisible one; and the light they formed together, having encountered each other on this earth Platonically, was truth.

Grant, O God, she wished, that my soul may be beautiful to him and that those things which pertain to my body may not impair the beauty of my spirit.

Her moral virtues, evident in her restraint, were apparent, whereas her intellectual virtues, the world inside that she endeavored to show in slivers so as not to overwhelm, were more esoteric.

She longed for him to consider these characteristics as her first beauty, followed by the nobility she was capable of achieving, if only she were loved.

Embedded in their interactions was the perfection to which they might attain only in unison with another. The universe charged them with loving the shared characteristic of their souls, knowing that whatever lay in each was, during that car ride back to the City, enveloped in the orange and violet majesty of the sunset, a multitude they brought to fruition in togetherness.

She knew it was wrong to invest such qualities in him, and that she should better discern what rose from her alone ~~ yet there was something about the feeling she had that made her want to hold on.

Being with him signified the Wisdom from whose truth all truths sprang ~~ at least, for the next few minutes they were in that Subaru.

She lost count of how many bike rides they took together over the years. They became friends, and he always remained very tolerant of her, even when she professed her affection for him and tried to ruin the friendship.

Around the same time they met, you see, he had started dating yet another girl and was already falling for her. Audrey grew disappointed, however, since Drew made time for her even though he was seeing someone else, she didn’t mind. She contented herself with their rides to Nyack and an occasional dinner. Still, whenever they hugged after seeing each other, she closed her eyes like in Montauk and imagined what it would be like if she didn’t have to let go.

She met Aureliano not too long afterward, which meant that her love affair with him, and Drew’s with his girlfriend’s, paralleled one another in time, and also kinda in space, a continuum in which each couple was tumbling into love on different blocks of the same city ~~ she and Aureliano in the East Village, and Drew and his girlfriend across the East River over in Williamsburg. Each morning on her daily jog, she saw the big glass apartment building where Drew’s condo was ~~ she’d somehow managed to stop by and say Hi the very day he moved in, and ended up shaving the sides and back of his head for him ~~ and each time she promised herself to respond with a smile.

Drew’s girlfriend left New York around the same time Aureliano departed.

The two of them responded to their respective long-distance relationships with ever more bike rides and dinners. She felt so lucky to know him.

One Saturday night he took her to Spa Castle out in Queens, and there, in a sauna room with no one else around, he reached out and massaged her feet. It was as if he couldn’t help himself, and she dared not imagine what the gesture could mean.

Because she got lazy this way, her destructiveness crept in and got the better of her. She started dreaming that maybe their respective significant others had left so that they could be together.

And then, succumbing to fate on a plane ride back from a trip to Tampa for work, she finally wrote him the letter that poured out every drop of her heart.

The disclosure precipitated a several-months hiatus in their friendship, which she imposed of her own volition ~~ until one day she was riding home from Nyack and saw him coming in the other direction, and she realized that their bond was strong enough to withstand her emotional spasms, if only she did a better job hiding them.

Eventually they met at the Russian & Turkish Baths, and, one day, shortly thereafter, they had dinner.

The months rolled into years, dovetailing their compassion for one another ever closer.

But the moment you are thinking of happened much earlier, during the summer that we have reached in the story of Aureliano, when Audrey and Half-bald Drew have just taken an evening ride in the middle of the week, and now they find themselves at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. Drew bends down to hug her Goodbye and then just sort of stands there, and the sky is orange and violet like on that first car ride back from Montauk, and she thinks, just for a second, that their lips are going to meet.

Moment Seventeen: He Could Still Turn Around

Her second trip to visit him in Mexico started off with a familiarity that lulled her into complacency despite herself. There, just before the baggage claim area, was the bathroom with the concrete sink where she had freshened up last time, and where she did so now, too, changing into the jean miniskirt that she had worn that frigid night the previous January when he had thrown up in her bed.

He kissed her in the car ~~ he’d driven his black Mercedes sedan down from Pasadena ~~ and she felt herself withdraw from his hunger, ever so slightly, in fear. She held back from voicing her mind, which clanged with all the times he was supposed to come visit her in New York over the last few months; this trip was supposed to erase all that noise, and make the relationship better.

Besides, she was being picked up at the airport in Mexico City by a man who had said he loved her. When would she ever be satisfied with enough?

The bed in his apartment was too small. They squished in and she didn’t sleep well.

The next morning, after freshly squeezed juice from a shop around the corner, they went to the local baths that he had been coming to since he was a teenager, and then they set off for a park he wanted to take her to, outside the city. She had yet to learn that they had about 24 hours before she came apart and everything imploded along with her, and she was so happy to be with him, making up for all the time they had lost apart.

(She wants to call him now, all these years later, and ask him the name of the park so she can look it up and read about it. But, as with the painting/Juan Carlos thing, she knows that, if she does, he might yell at her and insult her for not remembering ~~ she doesn’t pay attention, ever, she never has, he has shared all these special places in his home country with her, all of his life, and she is useless, she doesn’t remember anything.

It’s not that she doesn’t remember, she might try to say, she has a very clear memory of many things they’ve done together, she just can’t remember the name of each individual place, she can see them in her mind, she took pictures and she wrote a lot of their memories down in her journal ~~ she just didn’t always note all the names.

At which point he would unleash a stream of vitriol, and for many years she would push back, but then, after she reaches the point where she can predict the unpredictability of these episodes, she simply listens and shakes her head, as she hardens against the world ever further.)

With the entire park almost to themselves, they took a paddle boat out into the center of the light blue lake there, and then shot across zip lines over the water ~~ he was so nervous that he trembled, strapped in, she has pictures ~~ and on the way back to the car they paused to gaze out over a valley of rolling lands and fincas and horses, shimmering.

That afternoon he took her to a pueblo where she bought a silver ring with three blue stone gems ~~ which she wears virtually every day, thinking of him whenever she puts it on ~~ and then they ate at a restaurant on top of a hill.

It started before dinner with a shot of tequila, followed by a couple beers with their food, followed by a shot of tequila afterward.

“Why don’t we walk around a bit before getting in the car?”

He complied for a minute, but then he got mad because he saw what she was doing, trying to buy a few more minutes in between the drinks he’d consumed and their drive to Mexico City. So he threatened to leave her there, in that pueblo on the hill, to find her way back on her own.

She gritted her teeth and buckled herself in. As he sped down the mountain roads way over the speed limit, she screamed out in fright, wishing inside that they would crash and she would die.

There is but one truth of the pure life that she so wanted to live, a course which, through the exercise of Justice, Courage and Temperance ~~ the lofty ideals that she kept her eyes on ~~ she hoped might lead to happiness. Esteem these qualities, she wanted to urge him, and you will not only understand me, you will also appreciate the beautiful light of the soul that I so desperately want to show you.

Know also, she longed to explain to him, that we can rise above these strictures to the clarity of wisdom, knowledge and prudence, which I want you to understand are the virtues I hold in the highest regard, a moral life ~~ that’s all I wish to live.

Still, however varied these doctrines may be, remember that there is but one single light of truth that guides me, through which the world I see is beautiful.

Can you not love the beauty of the soul as I do, or at least appreciate how I appreciate it, even if we are different?

Can we not agree that the one truth to which we both aspire, even if we disagree on its origins, is one and ought to rise from one, the union of our love? And can we not also agree that there must be one wisdom above our souls, however high they dance, which remains undivided, the one Wisdom from whose single truth the multiform truths of our separate perceptions spring?

She ended up in the street with her suitcase in the middle of the night on the second trip.

Months of barrenness passed, and, now, it is her third.

And, for the third time, she stops in the little restroom with the concrete sink just before the baggage claim to make herself pretty again. This time she dabs on some kohl ~~ a new discovery of hers ~~ to darken her eyes in a way that she believes is sexy.

Outside she tries to smile, maybe a little seductively, and he tells her that she looks tired…

His new apartment had wood floors. Their hollowness made everything seem bigger, more resounding, hard.

They had sex in another bed that was too small ~~ even though he’d promised her, when she’d asked, that he now had a bigger bed; it’s just that she wasn’t used to sleeping with another person and got no rest when crammed in, which meant agitation from lack of sleep, she didn’t do well on too little sleep ~~ and her heart fell when she saw it, and probably she said something.

He took her to another baths, closer to the city center. (She asked about the ones they went to before, but he said they had closed. She wasn’t surprised because they seemed from another era, so sparse, and no one was there.) They made love in a private room.

That night things were still off a little, and she could tell that the end of the 24 hours they were allotted was going to come soon.

He told her about a mountain nearby that he had walked up and she said she wanted to go. She did not tell him that the real reason was that she wanted exercise in order to maintain her weight, because they always did so much driving and eating down here in Mexico, and she was going to bottle up and explode.

She sped ahead on the climb, hoping to teach him some sort of lesson. The view from the top was breathtaking and transported her. But she felt so lonely and she wanted someone to appreciate the experience with. So she went down the path and back up again until she found him, and tried to hold his hand.

It was too late.

At the bottom of the mountain an hour later, he slipped into a bar that she didn’t even realize was a bar, until she looked inside and saw a few sad figures wavering on their feet in the shadows.

She pretended like it hadn’t happened, and they made their way through the mishmash of booths in the town market on the way to the car. He purchased a bag of grasshoppers, which she tasted and said she liked, trying to smile.

They were high up in elevation and the proximity to the sun made everything brighter.

(She can’t remember the name of the mountain, and, once again, she can’t call or text him to ask for the reasons you already know, and he won’t tell her anyway ~~ unless it happens to be one of those times when he’ll remind her, touching the words with his teeth like a song, and they’ll reminisce.)

They walked into the apartment in Mexico City and he went straight to the liquor cabinet. She sat on the couch, trying again to smooth over her misbehavior with pleasantness.

He told her to sleep on the wood floor of the living room that night, and only let her into the little bed when she begged. But her sobs disturbed him and so he made her go back to the floor.

And then it was the liquor cabinet again, and once more she was out on the street with her suitcase, searching around for a hotel, just like before.

He e-mailed her the following morning, and they Skyped, and a quarter hour later he took her to the airport. And that’s the moment you could choose, on that short drive, when she thought: maybe, just maybe, he will say he’s sorry and turn around and we’ll go back and start all over again and I’ll be okay in the little bed and I won’t make any trouble, I promise, I’ll stay for two weeks like we planned, and I’ll fix myself and behave and we’ll enjoy Mexico together.

Moment Eighteen: Until the Day He Died

The tree climbing started after what happened with Mr. Bagsby.

On the first day of third grade, she wished that she had not transferred over from the old school, where the Corvettes and images from 2001: A Space Odyssey and flies were, to this new one for the “gifted and talented” kids ~~ though she would, in time, go on to wonder how she would have turned out if only she had transferred the year prior, along with her schoolmates who began attending as second graders.

She felt so uncomfortable that first day because there was a discussion ~~ teachers at this new school encouraged discussion, and, when the possibility of one arose, they would simply scrap their lesson plans, stand up, maybe lean back half-sitting on their desks, and engage everyone.

During this particular conversation on this particular day, so many of the other kids kept using the phrase “vice versa.” Audrey longed to participate and promised herself that she would learn all the words she needed to.

It was then that she began in earnest. First there was The Wizard of Oz series, beginning with the initial 14 books by L. Frank Baum and then more by Ruth Plumy Thomson (in which she was Dorothy being whisked off to a faraway land), and then it was Anne of Green Gables (where she was feisty red-headed Anne out on a farm in the countryside and in love with handsome young Gilbert), and then she was Meg Murry in Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quintet series (“tesseracting” from earth to other parts of the universe by wrinkling time). Anything, anything to get away.

The first “treehouse” was in the plum tree in the front yard. It consisted of a chair that she’d managed to drag up to a triple fork in the branches, spread out like the palm of a hand holding her in a magic throne that carried her away as she sat and read, and read.

Eventually she laid a bed of foam over the chair arms, so that she could recline. She added an umbrella to shield away the sun, and she covered the whole construction with a blanket tucked in at the corners.

It was very hot in summer, but she would still stay cocooned up there in the air among the deep purple leaves all day, ensconced in the journeys she took on the pages in front of her, until time for gymnastics practice came at 4:00 in the afternoon.

Over the next few years, additional “rooms” would be added, in one tree following the other. After another few levels appeared in the plum tree, where she placed pillows and an additional small chair in various spots, it was certain trees in the backyard, like the apricot tree in the corner near the alley, and the mulberry tree in the middle of the back lawn, next to the stone path from the patio to the rear gate.

She preferred the front because it was up above the earth, but closer to people, somehow; it was exposed yet hidden in the open, exactly as she wanted to be.

The mulberry tree in the back, on the other hand, was reserved mostly for games with her younger brother and Colin, who was closer to her age but played with her brother because they both liked boy things. And there she sat cross-legged ~~ as they hunted a series of bison and antelope and other animals she imagined for them to find ~~ braiding thin yarn bracelets to contribute to the stockpile that she and Dinah would sell.

In order to distinguish among the beauty of her experiences, she juxtaposed their representations, not by understanding them as objects for cognition, but instead by imagination, in relation to herself and her feeling of pleasure or pain. (Selfish though her approach may be, it is the only one she has ever known, and the only way she knows she can know anything.)

Each juxtaposition might have been objective, through its reference to sensation, yet nothing in her amounted to such a signification, other than feelings affected by the representations.

In order to apprehend a regular, purposeful force to her cognition, she needed to engage in intellectualism. She wanted so much to understand her emotions and their origins.

Her understanding of life fell under this rubric, as did her corresponding impressions. The universe of imaginings that sprouted up gave rise to a faculty of judgment, but only insofar as she could discern a comparison between representations of what lay within.

There were her feelings, and there were her imitations of them.

The former were real, empirical, almost tangible, and the latter formed the basis of judgment, by which she exercised choice. With this frame of reference, each decision comprised a birth from the interplay among the human desire to learn about aesthetical perfection in the books she read, the bracelets she braided and the reason why (to get closer to Dinah), and the gymnastics routines she practiced over and over and over, after taping up her bloody hands.

She had developed a crush on Dinah, an angular girl with a crooked nose and feet and hands one size too big, in the fourth grade, when they sat in the same table group at the back of the room. Dinah had been on the girls’ team for two or three years already, and, now that a boys’ team was organized, they were at gymnastics together at least three evenings per week.

Audrey learned the word “transsexual” that year, out on the playground with a group that included her deaf sign language practice buddy Brendan and some other kids. No wonder she so longed to cycle in with the girls’ team for uneven parallel bars and beam, rather than muddle through routines on rings and pommel horse.

Unfortunately, things were different back then, and so she contented herself ~~ for the time being, and up through jr. high when it became clear that she could no longer compete with the boys by compensating for her lack of strength with momentum ~~ with high bar dismounts and floor tumbling passes into the “pit,” where she could fling herself into double backs and layouts with double or even triple full twists, flying through the air and into the sea of foam scraps.

Meanwhile, she asked Dinah to “go with” her pretty much daily, and Dinah always said No. They still passed dozens of notes back and forth to each other every hour, however, just as they continued to collaborate on the thin yarn braided bracelets that they sold for between 25 cents and a dollar, depending on the number of threads and the complexity of the diagonal or diamond designs.

Out of all the days and months in elementary school, she might have chosen the moment in the fifth grade when Dinah finally said Yes, they could go together, albeit with certain conditions, for example that they tell no one. Or she might have chosen that final dance they did.

It happened this way. For the last half-dozen years, Mrs. Starr’s class had gotten to go to Yosemite for a class trip ~~ it wasn’t fair, there was supposed to be a lottery and classes from all over the state were eligible, but the reality is that Mrs. Starr prepared her class for Yosemite like no one else did, and so her kids kept getting invited.

Everyone spent several months studying the characters from history that they were assigned to play the role of once they got to the Park, and of course assembling costumes, and learning how to square dance.

Audrey reminded Mrs. Starr that she and Dinah should be dance partners because they were both gymnasts, and reminded her again, until finally she prevailed.

You might pick that night in the barn up in Yosemite, where, at long last, they had a real fiddler making music, and she and Dinah got to hold hands and do a heel-and-a-toe and a heel-and-a-toe and a slide-slide-slide all around the floorboards.

Or you might pick the ride home the next day, as they communicated in sign language out the car windows, whenever the train of vehicles heading down the mountains slowed on the hairpin turns.

But instead I think you might end up focusing in on another moment, one afternoon a year or two later, perhaps over the summer in between elementary school and jr. high (when she met Exclamation! Jessica and Future Best Friend Jordan and Non-gangbanger Gerardo and all of those experiences happened), as she was showing her grandfather the model Rolls Royces that she collected, which sat on the desk in her bedroom among the Oz and Green Gables and Wrinkle in Time series books, along with The Lord of the Rings, which would keep her up all night on a family trip to Switzerland.

She began mowing his lawn after her grandmother died. He picked her up Sunday afternoons in the old grey Volvo sedan that would one day be hers, and she appreciated the five dollars she made each time, and not just because she could save it to buy more books and oil paints ~~ “Can’t you practice with regular paints?” her father had asked. “It’s not the same,” she would say, “and I need real canvases, too.” ~~ but, rather, because she knew how much it meant for him to be able to pay her.

This afternoon he stood there reading the thoughts and notes for stories that she wrote in cursive and pinned to the wall above the desk. But what she did not know until later, after her father had gone through her grandfather’s effects, is that he copied one of them down ~~ “Something is not appreciated until it ceases to be.” ~~ and carried it in his wallet until he died.

Now, if only she had appreciated what she shared with Aureliano before what happened with Bernard the Haitian thug from the Baths…

Moment Nineteen: An Instant She Was So Alive

“I’m not high-maintenance,” she said, which, as you know, was really not true.

She had noticed him, of course ~~ how could she not? He had an extraordinary body, lean and of perhaps among the most chiseled musculatures she’d ever seen, certainly one that distinguished itself here at the Baths, which overflowed with office-bound slaves to money and ambition, and unathletic Hasidim or aging Russian men whose bellies preceded their physical presence as if making way for them in space.

Bernard the Haitian thug worked in construction along with another regular, Marcus, a tall and tattooed faux jerk whose gait said he was slightly above it all, even if he always pretended (and turned out) to be very nice. The undertones of this association, which Audrey had managed to extract in bits and pieces from Marcus over the course of several weeks, kept her from angling for Bernard.

Nevertheless, they contrived to look at each other often. And then one time he inadvertently knocked over her water bottle as she was stretching on a plank of rotted wood on the floor in the Russian Room, a low-lit dungeon with the built-in furnace that she imagined never would have passed city inspections if it had not been grandfathered in from a century ago.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, which is when she made the comment about not being high-maintenance.

Her response was not completely untrue, either. She was high-maintenance overall, for sure, but not about little things like this incident ~~ and especially not when someone so attractive was to blame, or not really blame, even, since it was an accident. Other guys had knocked over her water bottle over the years, and it always agitated her to have to pick it up, along with the hand towel that she folded on top to keep it dry. She was almost grateful when Bernard did it; he was so fucking hot.

They spoke for the first time ~~ we’re not counting that initial brief exchange ~~ one or two visits later. He was heading out of the showers, and she, emerging from the murky cold plunge pool toward the Russian Room, nearly bumped into him.

“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” he blurted out, hedging, either before or after the invitation, that she probably already had a boyfriend.

Several months had elapsed since the most recent debacle in Mexico with Aureliano; and he had yet to show up in New York.

“I’d love to,” she said, gleaming.

Bernard chose an Italian place on First Avenue between 1st and 2nd, but he neglected to make a reservation, and the bar teemed with hordes of 20-somethings one-upping each other at the top of their lungs. Glossing over the blunder, she proposed an Indian restaurant a few blocks north, around the corner from Mitali East.

He ordered a cocktail, and then another. At one point he spoke to the couple at the adjacent table and kept the conversation going several sentences too long.

She is not sure when he told her that he was an ex-felon ~~ it may have been that first date, or later on ~~ but, whenever it was, she thought she would be a hypocrite if she didn’t accept him for who he was trying and working so hard to be ~~ she represented people with pasts like his, after all, and more so she had a past herself, and asked others to imagine beyond it, too.

All of which is why, at Life Café a couple weeks later, just feet from the booth where she’d sat with Aureliano, when Bernard pushed aside his plate of fried chicken and stood up from his bar stool and said that how she was born didn’t matter, she softened up to him for good.

It is true that she judged him based on reasons that she could marshal against going to bed together. She was torn between, on the one hand, her physical desire for him coupled with the intellectual desire to move on from Aureliano, and, on the other hand, the sanctity of love.

Since her judgment of Bernard, which she would have described, if pressed, as pleasant, comprised an interest in what might happen between them, sensation excited a lust for more encounters, of the kind she had already had, skating on the surface, yet deeper.

Consequently, her satisfaction presupposed not only the mere judgment she was exercising, but also the relation of its existence to her state of being.

So he was not merely pleasant; his presence promised to gratify her.

She gave this flourish no assent, but still her inclinations were aroused, and, when it came to what was most exciting about him, she resorted to an absence of judgment upon anything other than his character ~~ for she had come to learn that enjoyment would fain dispense with judgment altogether.

He respected her desire to move slowly, and, over the next couple weeks, they got to know each other.

She ran into him at the Baths from time to time. One evening in particular her heart skipped when she saw him standing in the doorway beneath the rain: she walked up to him and stood very close, as if to kiss him, whereupon he extended his enormous veined hands which, cupped together, appeared to have been molded by genetics from a Rodin sculpture.

Those glorious hands unfolded, and there, in his palms, wrapped with a little cone of brown wax paper, and glistening in the water that fell in droplets from the sky, was a pink rosebud that had just begun to blossom.

Another time she encountered him a few buildings away, swaggering down the street in the masculine fashion he cobbled together, that ever-so-sinister but heartwarming glint sparkling in his eye. They met in space, and he withdrew an earbud from his ear and placed it in hers, as an aria from Puccini’s Madam Butterfly lit up her face.

He invited her to the restaurant he was working on renovating, and also the Pilates studio, and one night he took her to the apartment where he lived in East New York to show her his room. She wigged out at the last minute, saying she didn’t want to be cooped in somewhere he smoked, and now she wishes she had gotten over herself and gone up.

A few months later, over dinner at Mama’s, a now-gone home cookin’ joint where she took him for the fried chicken, which he indeed devoured, she explained that she liked him very, very much, only she couldn’t be around all the drinking ~~ he’d shown up at her apartment with a flask more than once by now ~~ because she’d had bad experiences with alcohol and men.

“Oh Bernard,” she said, caught mid-breath as he wiped away the tears streaming down his face with those enormous hands.

Making the decision to sleep with him agonized her for weeks.

She hesitated because she knew that setting herself free into sex with anyone else would change things between her and Aureliano forever, and she was vacillating. But then came that one Friday night a month ago, when she sat cross-legged on the futon couch with the gnawed arm awaiting his arrival, all dolled up and wearing the jean miniskirt he loved, and it turned out that he hadn’t gotten on the plane and even lied about getting tickets to begin with.

Of course, Aureliano’s antennae detected what was happening. He texted her within minutes after she had called Bernard and stowed a condom and lube within reach under the gnawed arm of the futon couch.

A half-hour later, from within the embrace of those dizzying arms, she asked if they could stay down here rather than climb up to her loft because she knew that he might sweat and she didn’t want nicotine and the smell of smoke to seep into the bed sheets. (She needed a few months yet before she’d let that neurosis go and ask him to sleep over, and he would ~~ just sleep and nothing more ~~ so that she could feel a man next to her, and he, a woman.)

She looked up at him as he propped himself over her, and marveled yet again at his shoulders and biceps, all covered in tattoos.

It was the first time she came with a guy on top. Usually she had to be in control, with her eyes closed, exercising illusions of dominion.

Afterward he lumbered back from the bathroom, touched her with one of those hands of his, and asked why she was crying.

She shook her head a little, smiling kind of, and looked out the window at the spot across the street where Aureliano used to park the old tan Volvo station wagon two winters ago.

And there is the moment: because in that instant, when her heart had broken open and she felt the swirl of agony and hope that arose from having gone where she had been so afraid to trespass, she knew, without question, that she was alive.

Moment Twenty: At the Center of the Universe

Even as she was on her way to Atlas, she remained unsure whether he would show.

From the evening she spent on the futon couch waiting for the plane that he had never boarded, to the carrot of a silver ring from Taxco he dangled in front of her, there had been so many broken promises and unmaterialized plans; she has lost count. She is not sure exactly when or how they got into contact again. Things have gotten muddled. At first she believes he suggested this re-creation of their very first encounter after that summer when she’d almost succeeded in maintaining 90 days of no contact ~~ but then she consults her diary and discovers she is wrong about the year.

When she told him that she had slept with someone else, he had expulsed “Oh Audrey!!” in disgust, and then hung up. She had sniffled and believed that, unlike the last time they’d ended it, and the time before, and all the others, now it really was over.

But eventually they were back at it ~~ one of them sent a text, or the other called, and the cycle recommenced.

As usual, their interactions remained mutually respectful and pleasant for a few days ~~ and then everything unraveled and went to shit. Another spring ruined, and buried.

Once summer heated up, she had reached the point where she could stand it no longer and committed to 90 days of no contact. This attempt wasn’t the one I just mentioned, but, rather, the first one, which lasted for about a month.

His response to the prospect of three months’ silence remains one of the nicest love letters she’s ever received, apologizing and naming all the memories with her that he was grateful for.

He continued to text her periodically, and each time she saw something about love, or moving forward, or Building a Life Together, another layer of ice melted, and it became harder and harder not to text back. She cheated here and there, telling herself that some of her communications were not actually communications because they didn’t say anything substantive ~~ or whatever other nonsense she fed her delusions.

In this manner she revised the 90 days to 30, and then decided 25 was close enough.

She still promised herself, though, that she would not see him in Pasadena until after she had finished the California bar exam ~~ and, mind you, not on the second day, which she was excused from because she was already licensed in New York, but the third, when everything really and truly was over. She couldn’t risk it.

But, of course, he told her she was being silly and should stop wasting time ~~ and she was, after all, staying in a hotel across the street from where he worked, and taking the bar exam in a building that he had helped renovate. And so she met him right after the first day of the exam, and they went to Griffith Park and lay together on a patch of grass where they could totally hear the 5, and then she spent the night at the apartment he was leasing in South Pasadena while he rented out his house.

Shockingly, their evening turned out to be very nice indeed, and she felt relaxed and refreshed for the final portion of the exam, and, wouldn’t you know it, the performance test memos she wrote that day were eventually chosen as model answers out of work from over 5,000 test takers.

She walked out of the exam room he had probably overseen the design for and drove straight to his place.

That night it started up again ~~ just as soon as they saw each other ~~ though it was not nearly as bad as it would be the next time they got together in Los Angeles, when he kicked her out again. This time she just felt grateful that he had waited to tell her all the things that were wrong with her, and their situation, and that she’d been able to get through the exam, before the onslaught.

After almost two years, she had learned that the way to get him to pay attention to her was to do the opposite of what her heart inclined. It was the same lesson her work had taught: to make it look effortless took every effort of which she was capable.

So too in art, and the beauty that she sought to bandage over reality.

The beautiful, for her, had always been that which, apart from concepts, found representation in the object of satisfaction. Such an extrapolation derived from an existence separate and apart from beauty itself.

That separateness seemed to imply a universality, but judgment proved too singular to sustain the divide. And since judgment distinguished her feelings from thoughts, she was unable to discern the basis for satisfaction in any conditions connected to her ~~ accordingly, she regarded her sensations as grounded on what she could presuppose.

She assumed that his experience of pleasure was equivalent.

And so when he had told her, again, beautiful things like I Love You, and repeated something about Building a Life Together, she thought that he had the same ideas in mind as she did, and she once again believed him.

On the walk to Atlas, humming the last two years of melodrama into whatever song played over her headphones, she thought of a story she read in The New York Times about the troubled modern history of the Plaza Hotel, which had appeared the month before Aureliano left New York. A co-owner of the Oak Room was struck by a 97-year-old man who showed up to have a drink at the Oak Bar ~~ his wife had passed away, and he had come to remember their first date.

Audrey’s ego interfered with appreciation of how Aureliano had, in fact, now done the same thing. Instead her mind poisoned enjoyment by telling her that she was not worth meeting at the Plaza, and the location of her first date with him ~~ which she had to own up to having suggested ~~ was a little hole-in-the-wall vegan and non-vegan desert spot destined to shutter.

She felt cheap. The red patent leather purse under her arm, picked up at a secondhand store, you remember, was the same one that she had carried that first night in Ixtapa.

He was there already.

She smiled as she took her seat, hanging her self-deprecation on the back of the chair with her purse: she was worth a trip across the country!!

First the song “Time to Pretend” by MGMT played from the speakers overhead, and she felt herself lift up, and then “Just Say Yes” by Snow Patrol came flowing out, and she wanted to do just that, just say Yes, that’s all she wanted to do.

Her enthusiasm sagged and fell out of the following day, when he declared that he would be staying at the big old house up in Katonah.

Years later, when she thought about why he might make the decision to sleep there and not with her, she would realize that their catastrophes affected him, too.

But in the moment, as what he was saying disappointed her, she thrust the words coming out of his mouth into the light of her indignation, and her selfishness twisted their sincerity into daggers, sharpened by the past year-and-a-half of waiting for him to somehow discern her needs and care for them even when she herself did not.

The volcano erupted that evening, when he broke off their engagement from behind a cocktail at the pizza place where they used to go when he was still living in New York ~~ and all she wanted to do was hurl memories of all the dinners she ate here once upon a time with Yigal the Persian-Jew.

She bounded up and stormed out of the restaurant, and did not stop until she was home.

He showed up and tried to explain ~~ she sees now how her immaturity must have upset him, how he had simply been trying to express his needs, as she always did, relentlessly, bulldozing over his with expectations and so on.

It ended with her sobbing, “You are my heart… You are my heart…”

As he left, she gave him the painting of them in Ixtapa, his present for two Christmases ago.

It was a moment the next day that I believe you are thinking of, when she was on her way to Grand Central to meet him, before he had a couple mid-day drinks at the hidden bar she always liked at the Marriott next door; before she reached the desperation of proposing that they just be lovers rather than partners ~~ anything to hold onto the thread between them; before (in an attempt to make him feel sorry for her) she told him that she was bipolar and had gotten on top of it recently in therapy (where the memories of Mr. Bagsby had bubbled up, even though she had originally gone to learn about disclosing her past to men and not anything any deeper); before he had returned the painting to her; before she watched him walk away to the train he was catching back to Katonah, wishing with all her might that he’d turn around and come back… before all that, as she was walking into this great big hall at the center of the universe, and was just excited that he had agreed to meet her before going home to Pasadena.

Moment Twenty-One: The World from a Bus Window

Her fourth trip down to Mexico to see him was the last one she would make before this story ends. He was going to take her to Manzanillo on the Pacific Ocean, and, this time, really this time, everything was going to be better, like in the beginning.

And so she found herself in the little bathroom with the concrete sink freshening up once again, only now she stared into the mirror and wondered, for a second, whether she would be able to take care of herself if something happened ~~ and then she strolled out just as she had gone in, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, and no make-up.

She did not complain about the size of the bed on this visit. She simply let herself go, stealing solace from the arms of a man, even if she feared he would lash out at her.

The next day they drove in the old tan Volvo station wagon through Michoacan, over into Jalisco, and then down into Colima toward Manzanillo. It must have been there, after they’d turned onto the 200, which runs along the coast, that he stopped at a local convenience store to pick up some refreshments.

As he was backing out of their parking space, he withdrew a banana from a little ice chest he’d brought ~~ and it just looked so good.

“May I have a banana?”

He gazed at her.

“Last one,” he said, biting away at it, slowly, with his foot on the break.

She shook her head and sat quietly.

Several minutes later he reached into the ice chest, withdrew another banana, and gave it to her.

She wondered why he enjoyed being so mean, but then delighted in the realization that he had thought of her and brought an extra.

When they reached Manzanillo, he pointed out a subdivision where he said some of his extended family lived.

“Do I get to meet them?”

“If you behave.”

She asked him to stop so she could take a picture of a nearby beach because, with the lounge chairs stacked and the umbrellas drawn closed, everything looked as lonely as she felt.

“It was really hot last week,” he offered, motioning his chin at the storm clouds overhead.

She smiled, happy to be enjoying the last few minutes that they would get along.

The expression of saddened joy stayed on her face as they walked into the quaint old lobby of Las Hadas, a cluster of white buildings that sat like cotton tufts on the hillside above a beach overlooking the harbor. Their room had a balcony facing the ocean ~~ just like in Ixtapa, except now they were supposed to remember what it was like to fall in love rather than forget themselves in doing so.

He always spoke of her beauty as if it were a characteristic of her, rather than a quality, and, after a certain point, his pronouncements twanged of judgment. Once, he had told her that she would look beautiful whatever she wore ~~ heels, tennis shoes, miniskirt, exercise shorts, evening dress, cargo pants. Now, he told her what he wanted her to put on.

The beauty that he saw in her was aesthetical, and involved little more than the representation he imposed in his own mind. She had, in his eyes, such a similarity to what he judged beautiful that he thought her beauty true for all men, and commented on them looking from time to time.

“You should wear a bra,” he would say, ever since she stopped.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like other men looking at your nipples.”

The universality he presupposed, however, arose from something other than his concept of her ~~ for concepts deliver no feeling of pleasure or pain, unless their purity overwhelms the senses. His taste accompanied a consciousness of separation from all interests, which was why he believed his view to be valid universally.

He might have agreed that reality, whether having arisen from Nature or the Mind, amounted to little in the face of apprehension by the intellect. After all, the mind games they played did turn him on ~~ especially the part where he claimed that he didn’t like games and wished that she would just be sweet.

Far from being brought closer to her by this mutuality, he seemed removed and apart from the very intimacy he said he wanted ~~ forever rendering his own aim a nullity.

This one started over lunch when he ordered some sort of seafood dish served in alcohol. And then there was another drink. And another. And then she stormed off to the bathroom, and came back, and tried to keep a lid on it, and failed.

He got angry at her for declining to ride back to Las Hadas in the car with him, and misbehaving as usual.

And soon enough they were yelling at each other out into the street.

That afternoon she lay on the bed and sobbed and sobbed. She sobbed as she had not sobbed since saying goodbye to Mohammed on the houseboat balcony a lifetime ago in Cairo, and the tears just kept spilling out of her eyes for over an hour.

At some point he could not help himself and reached out to comfort her. She tried to reject him, but she couldn’t, and they held each other. She kept crying a little, then stopped. They started kissing and making love, but he pushed away.

She ate dinner alone that night, walking through the mist to a restaurant on the water, where she was the only solo diner among the couples and dancing lights and quietude of night. She felt embarrassed and ashamed, trying to savor a meal that had no taste because she’d hoped to share it with him, and instead she was dining by herself, pitied by the waiters.

There was another argument that night, and she found herself embarrassed and ashamed once more, at this stage down in the lobby, requesting another room because she was afraid. They didn’t have any. And so she trudged back upstairs (skipping the elevator for the stairs to get extra exercise), knowing that she couldn’t afford to pay the nightly rate anyway ~~ and wondering what was going to happen.

The following morning, she did something she’d never done before. He’d left his phone in the bathroom, and she looked: after they’d argued last night, he called a whole bunch of female names. She quietly grabbed a pen and piece of paper and went back in saying it must have been something she ate. (She still has the list of names and numbers, in a drawer in her apartment in New York, tucked inside a notebook that she once used to communicate on a first date with a deaf guy all through brunch and a decent afternoon, until she told him about her gender transition, and he got up and left.)

“What are you doing in there?” Aureliano asked, knocking on the door.

Those antennae of his ~~ he just always knew.

A bit later he told her she would have to leave that day.

She tried to find a plane ticket out of Manzanillo but the prices were prohibitive.

“I can’t afford this,” she pleaded.

Her attempts at manipulation just made him angrier.

He ended up taking her to the bus station. It was a five-hour trip to Guadalajara, where she’d get a hotel and catch the next flight to the States or however it is that she’d manage to get home, believing that this time, for sure, it was over.

“Change, Audrey,” he said, putting a bus ticket in her hand and walking away. “Change.”

It is a moment on the bus ride, about an hour or two into the mountains, as she looked out the window at the beautiful countryside, that I think you want: the moment when she knew that, no matter what happened, she could indeed take care of herself, and, even when she made mistakes, the world was still so vast yet interconnected, and the cycle of life would catch her.

Moment Twenty-Two: An Embrace So Far from Close

Orlando would, through no fault of his own, help her around a turning point in her evolution as a human being.

I wrote about this piece of the story in my book There Is Room for You: Tales from a Transgender Defender’s Heart, though I left out a lot of the details. I related, of course, the buildup about how a friend of hers from the Russian & Turkish Baths ~~ Jim, whom she had gotten to know over the course of a year ~~ had, when she revealed that she was transgender, told her about a friend of his she really ought to meet because he, or she, was transgender, too. Jim kept messing up his friend’s pronouns, though, and Audrey just assumed the person was another woman.

Which is why she was so surprised a few months later when it happened. Jim was celebrating his birthday (at the Baths, of course), and a whole bunch of his friends ~~ both male and female, but mostly female, and mostly younger than he ~~ were running around. Among them was Orlando, and what drew Audrey to him was his striking youthful beauty, and the way he carried himself ~~ as though he had stepped from the Roman Senate into the present.

What bone structure. And what eyes.

He reminded her of Hawk-nosed Greg.

She had not, so far as she was aware, been attracted to another transgender person before. And since conversations with transgender people typically spiraled down into the rabbit hole of shared experiences in, or opposing views on, transition, she presumed that, inevitably, the trauma would outweigh anything that might have made the effort worth it.

But with Orlando, her first thought, which she shared with Jim, was that she could marry this guy tomorrow, or become friends with him, or sleep with him once or a thousand times, or never see him again ~~ and her feelings in any instance would remain the same: she was, like, totally in love. And when Jim explained that Orlando was the transgender friend he’d mentioned before, the revelation intrigued her all the more.

What I haven’t written, until now, is that she sensed where things would head right after she had followed the party to the roof, tapped Orlando on the arm and told him he was incredible, and he responded by saying he thought she was incredible, too.

Even in that moment, the orbiting mass of her relationship with Aureliano bore upon the tides of her sentiments ~~ in the same manner as its gravity had pulled her away from meeting other men and escaping into the oblivion of love with someone else ~~ thus subverting any effort she made to cauterize the loose ends that extended toward her like tentacles, growing back as soon as she cut them off, regenerating constantly, a hydra of affection. Interactions with possible boyfriends would deflate, or collapse, or go full circle and close themselves off into suffocation, snapping her back to memories of Aureliano and how he was, all things considered, sexier than anyone else ~~ because he was so smart and understood her, and whatever happened with other men would either not have happened with him, or would have happened better.

There on the rooftop, as Orlando encouraged her to eat some of the cake from Jim’s party, as he clasped her in response to her touch and was warm and affectionate and physical and just very there (he was Israeli, don’t get too hung up on the pseudonym), and as they exchanged phone numbers and she knew that he would call or text (as in fact he did), and that she was always going to be glad she had followed him up here and initiated a conversation ~~ even with the friendship that was about to unfold, still, she sensed, correctly, where it would all lead.

The sense of the sublime in this interplay arose, for her, in consciousness of how trivial the body became in the presence of a universality that existed only in her idea of it. In this state, her certainty generated itself from the contrast between her insignificance and the interdependence of humanity, each individual phenomenon bubbling up into a generation of will, from which process she became aware of herself as the subject of knowing.

Orlando saw her, on that rooftop, just as she saw him ~~ in a unique way. And the stars overhead ~~ those that survived through the glimmer of the city ~~ added to their vision a light that had burnt out long ago, like the meaning of a moment reaching us in a message from the past.

The dome of the starry heavens is perpetually producing this sensation for her ~~ provided, of course, that she contemplates its expansiveness with reflection rather than projection, the opposite of the underground cave where we search for our own shadows cast on the creviced walls by a fire whose smoke will, if the flames go on too long, kill us.

Orlando excited transcendence and reticence in equal measure through the vastness of experience that he promised. Reducing herself in contemplation of him emanated pleasure.

Now, the nature of a man consists in this conflict, she thought: his will ~~ or whatever it was that shone out from him so brightly ~~ was satisfied in striving, anew and always, so long as his heart beat with life, toward love. Yet his happiness and well-being consisted in the transition from wish to satisfaction, and, simultaneously, the creation, from that very satisfaction, of a new wish.

I sort of skipped to the end of their friendship when I wrote about them in the book, simply distilling the vignette into another, subsequent rooftop party on St. Mark’s Place, a year after they met, when she finally said Thank You to him for being so instrumental in her life. She had not known he was transgender, she explained, and, when she found out, she only became more intrigued to discover firsthand that attraction could surmount self-hatred.

He hugged her, in that closely far-away way of his, there on the rooftop on St. Mark’s, emblazoning physicality onto one of those experiences in a building that she’d spent years and years walking by, and every so often wondered about, and then all of a sudden had found herself inside, as though time set up the climax by intention.

You might choose that moment, just as you might select the last few seconds after the first movie they went to together, shortly after they’d met, you recall, when he walked her all the way home from that second-run theater on Second Avenue and 12th Street, where We Need to Talk About Kevin had peeled their defenses down to the bone, particularly that scene where the disturbed teenager played by Ezra Miller talks about how bad things have gotten, so bad that the people on TV are watching TV, a monologue that transfixes his frayed mother (Tilda Swinton) ~~ all of which I wrote about in the book, except not really, because I did not relate how, that night, she and Orlando stepped onto her block beneath the awning of tree branches that Hurricane Sandy would eventually bring down ~~ and they stood there on the sidewalk, in front of her apartment, right where she and Aureliano had stood when he walked her home from Mitali East on their second date ~~ and now, just like then, she thought the guy she was with might kiss her ~~ but he didn’t.

Or any of the lovely moments in between, like the other rooftop parties he invited her to ~~ in Chinatown, in Brooklyn… or the night they saw the Iranian film A Separation together at Film Forum… or the time at the Baths when she took off her top and got just shy of naked with him and they smeared Dead Sea mud all over each other, and Jim, who happened to be there that night, shook his head at the both of them while staring down at her little mud-covered breasts…

Instead, you might choose that moment on the hillside out in Prospect Park, the second or third or maybe fourth time they hung out (a few months after the misadventure with Aureliano in Manzanillo).

They rode their bikes over the Williamsburg Bridge and all the way up the Slope, and then they lay in the grass on the northern lawn, still sparse in early spring, and she cuddled up next to him and closed her eyes. He texted her the next day to clarify, saying he wasn’t interested in her romantically, but he wanted to be friends ~~ that part I wrote about in the book.

I sense that you might choose this moment for what I haven’t written yet, which is the very strange feeling she had, as she nestled into him and felt his chest move with the breaths and heartbeats that kept him on this planet, the very strange and extraordinary feeling that make-believe was enough.

Moment Twenty-Three: It Hurts Less Now

She received the text message while she was at a friend’s birthday party at some bar on First Avenue that she had passed by thousands of times but otherwise never would have entered. Although maybe she did go there, she now thinks, once, when she met up with another lawyer friend, a guy she probably would have dated if he’d expressed interest.

Televisions bellowed and flickered in the front bar area ~~ she imagined the patrons would have called each other “bro” ~~ though she arrived a bit early in the evening for the place to have filled up.

The group she was joining, a handful of women whose only commonality was their mutual friend, sat on the back patio, stretching to find anything to talk about.

Men. They could always talk about men.

For almost the entire summer, she had told herself that she would not talk to Aureliano, or even respond, unless he showed up in New York.

Less than a week after he’d kicked her out of the hotel in Manzanillo, he texted her how extremely painful it was loving her, needing her, wanting to do all kinds of things with her and yet everything was always becoming so difficult. He wrote that he was going to Spain, a trip he had indeed mentioned before, and he really wanted to take her. It was troubling, disappointing, he wrote, however, he did love her ~~ he just needed to share. And he closed his Pandora’s box of temptations with the key: an apology.

When she turned 35 a couple weeks later, she found herself wishing he would call.

He didn’t. But, a few days after that, she received another text from him, saying he was back in Mexico again and couldn’t stop thinking of her, how easy it would be to be together ~~ if only they valued each other more.

His merciless antennae ~~ he always sensed what to say.

She had a relatively high-profile case going on at the time and focused on staying busy.

He texted, again, unrelenting: he missed her and did not want to be without her.

She stood her ground.

But then she accidentally spoke to him because he called from an unidentifiable number in Saudi Arabia or wherever, and she picked up thinking it was work. Damnit.

In the meantime, she had met Orlando, and that whole thing had begun. He made it both easier and harder to drift away from Aureliano. On the one hand, Orlando distracted her because he was cute and fun and cultured and interesting, a sort of renegade who wore old dress shoes with holes in them and dripped with passion for life that flowed without direction. On the other, there was the space that would always remain between them, the chasm she’d sensed the instant he’d responded to her touch atop the roof at the Baths ~~ and besides, even if she had buried her feelings with hope, as he uncrumpled $1 bills to pay for the food they ate at a Moroccan restaurant after they lay close together so far apart on that hillside in Prospect Park, she knew that she still wanted Aureliano, who kept his life in one piece, notwithstanding how the seamlessness with which he sewed it together meant that she could never squeeze in.

Over the summer she had another job interview in Los Angeles, at the same place that rejected her last time, and she did not call or text or e-mail Aureliano the whole week she was there. And when she got back to New York, she messed around with a guy from the Egyptian national kickboxing team, or something, whom she’d met at the Baths.

By this point she was at day 87 of 90 days of no contact.

And so, now, as she griped with these strange women on the back patio of this bro bar, she believed she really would make it.

Looking back, she sees that she had gotten stronger in increments. Not responding to his texts had taken it out of her at first ~~ the second week, after the initial novelty of feeling better about herself had worn off ~~ was always the hardest, and, of course, with those antennae of his, he texted her on day 30, though she hadn’t told him this time that she was going for a full 90 ~~ it never worked to explain ~~ she simply decided, and began.

The muscles of self-defense that she’d had to rely on in her profession thus came into play in her personal life, wringing a healthy skepticism out of the belief that she was a second class human being.

She was becoming, at long last, the artist she had always longed to be ~~ only the canvas was her life.

Pleasure originated from the beauty she was creating with her own two hands: the life that she was trying to build, the consolation that the process afforded her, and the enthusiasm that enabled her to forget cares about the details ~~ a process that culminated in advantage over her own weaknesses, a thrill of repayment for the suffering that increased in proportion to the clarity of consciousness she gained.

Her being rested on the fact that the essence of life, the will, existence itself, all were a constant sorrow, partly miserable, partly terrible; while, on the contrary, as idea alone, contemplated in purity, or copied in the art of the life she sought to live, free from agony, the world presented to her a drama full of significance: one in which she could control, if not the outcome, then at least her reactions to however things turned out.

Those antennae of his perceived her progress, sure they did.

She no longer thinks how uncanny it was that he’d texted her just as she’d invited Bernard over to have sex, or right after the evening with the Egyptian kickboxer, and so on. By now those coincidences had migrated into the realm of cause and effect ~~ every time she met a new man, Aureliano texted or called or e-mailed whenever things were getting started, usually right as she was opening up, or as she wondered whether she was emotionally available yet and could go ahead.

And so she was not only unsurprised ~~ but also in a way relieved ~~ when, during the conversation with these strange women that probably included something about finally standing up to men, she looked down at her phone and saw the one text from him that could change things.

He had come to New York.

The first couple days were just lovely. She felt so happy that, at last, he had made the effort, taken a risk without having extracted a promise or a concession from her first ~~ he had simply organized a meeting of 25 colleagues here rather than elsewhere, just so he could see her.

Look what she was worth!! So much planning and energy ~~ all on hope and faith ~~ as though she really really mattered!!

She could hardly trust her ears when he apologized for dishonoring her and acknowledged that he could do better to respect her and her “spirituality.” It was he who used the word, not she, which of course shattered her because, even if all those other guys were cute and interesting and had nice bodies ~~ the Egyptian kickboxer, yes, and also the Lebanese U.N. worker who rollerbladed over to see her one magical summer afternoon, and of course Bernard, who still texted from time to time for another six months or so, and had by now slept over, just slept, once or twice ~~ even if those guys offered new experiences and other dimensions and ways of seeing the world and so much more ~~

They still would never love her as Aureliano did, never ever, not in the same way.

And now he was here.

And everything was finally better.

Until the cancelled lunch. And then the entire day he didn’t call. And then the times he wasn’t picking up the phone ~~ what was he doing, exactly? All as though he had not arranged for two dozen people from around the world to convene in New York, as though he was not really there.

They argued over dinner his last night about some miscommunication or other, and the next morning he left a hole the size of all the hopes and dreams he had awakened.

The moment I want to remind you of came three days later, when she woke up feeling better, stronger than before, energized, having found reassurance in the certainty that she had engaged with him and felt something, but that, whatever it was, it didn’t hurt her quite as much, for at this point she required almost no time at all to recover.

Moment Twenty-Four: The Night She Could Have Touched Him

She met Non-gangbanger Gerardo in eighth grade ~~ after she’d already had her first kiss. He might have been a perfect boy to start with, alas, she was born about a quarter century too early, and, as much as she wanted to, she would not be ready to appreciate kindness as a quality in a boyfriend for another two decades, anyway.

Her first kiss happened the year before, in the middle hallway at school, near the bathroom that she hated because it had no stall doors. (She didn’t want anyone to see her, even for a second, lest they stare at her, and laugh.)

She thought that she should have a first kiss because there were a lot of boys and girls who had already started making out, most visibly between class periods in that center hallway, where the whole school intersected ~~ and she wanted to be among them. And so she had lain around on the floor of the band room after class one day with Exclamation! Jessica, pursuing a scheme that she and their co-friend Ginnie had cooked up.

Now, Jessica had an older sister, which meant that she knew not only about Exclamation! perfume, but similarly how to wear makeup better than all of the other girls, and also that she was familiar with things like water polo (to which she would introduce Audrey later that year ~~ they’d practice in the same pool where she’d try to go skinny dipping with Hawk-nosed Greg a few years after that), and, on top of everything, her socks always matched her top. Jessica was a big deal, and Audrey’s crush had been months in the making.

Ginnie’s role this afternoon was to hypnotize Jessica into wanting to kiss Audrey upon hearing the phrase “The grass is green” ~~ and of course Jessica, pretending to be way deep under, emphatically agreed.

But then Audrey couldn’t spit out the words, neither in the band room nor over the next half-hour that they spent going in circles around and around through one empty hallway after another, until finally it really was time to go home, or else.

The moment had come. Not far from that horrible bathroom without stall doors, Audrey sputtered, “The grass is green,” and Jessica spun around on one heel and skipped through the air.

Jessica had a lot of braces going on, replete with a spacing contraption for her upper jaw, and her lips and tongue seemed very big. But Audrey liked it enough to want to do it some more, and so, over the coming weeks, they kissed to their hearts’ content in tucked-away corners around the school.

Sooner or later Jessica’s pal Jordan appeared on the scene, and installed himself as one of Audrey’s closest and most enduring friends for the coming decades, despite what happened next.

That summer, Audrey and Jordan made plans to sneak out at night and go to Jessica’s, basically just because, and so they concocted a meeting place (which happened to be around the corner from where Mr. Bagsby had put his hand on her thigh, and across the street from the house where, in a couple months, her new friend Annie would come and live), and somehow they both made it there at the same time, years before anyone had a cell phone.

They hugged in the middle of the street. They were both so scared to be out this late, past the citywide curfew for kids their age, plus, Jordan had just walked at least two miles alone.

On the way to Jessica’s, they hid in bushes and scrambled behind trees whenever they saw headlights, forming their arms into the shapes of branches, so as not to be seen and get caught.

They made it over to Jessica’s in time for David Letterman, whom Jessica knew about and watched nightly because of the older sister, etc., and the next thing Audrey knew, she was listening to Jessica and Jordan slurping each other’s saliva and the sound of Jordan fingering Jessica on the couch.

Eventually Conan O’Brien came on. Audrey wanted to go home.

She said several Byes which went unacknowledged, and left. By this point she had decided that darting around and hiding was dumb, and being scared of the nighttime was for babies, and so she strutted a few miles all the way to her house, slipped in the back door, and went to bed.

As a result of this expedition, once Gerardo came into her life the following school year, she knew something about the manifestations of sex, even if she didn’t really understand that two male-bodied people could actually do what she wanted to do together.

From the very beginning, rather than tinker with the constellation in her mind that sprang from the dreams she had of him, she chose to appreciate them from a distance.

Perhaps she could picture the process to herself as follows: out of the original firmament she had created the possibility of joy through impulses that evolved into beauty, just as roses bud from thorny bushes. How else could people like her, so sensitive, so vehement in their imagination, so singularly constituted to long for something more while suffering the limits of being human ~~ how else could anyone so created possibly have endured, if it had not been revealed, early in life, that there may be a higher glory for the spirit?

Can it be that the same impulse which calls desire into reality, as a complement and consummation of life itself, seducing each of us into continuing, is also the cause of art and the human will as a transfiguring mirror?

Art justifies life, in that we all inhabit the worlds we create, and existence under the sunshine of creativity and imagination is desirable in and of itself ~~ so grief lies in parting from such experiences, especially before they have shimmered into being through reminiscence.

She wanted her feelings for Gerardo to come to fruition, yet knew that they would become a memory before becoming real.

It started because of PE, the only class they had together.

Oh how Audrey loathed those locker rooms, even more than that fucking bathroom without the stall doors. Almost all of the other boys had already started going through puberty in some way, while her own despicable body had yet to show any changes. Years later, she would of course be grateful. But back then, she was self-conscious, and changing into PE clothes made her want to die.

Thank God they could stay in their underwear and just change into shorts and a white t-shirt, if they wanted to. At least that way she could keep the worst part of her body covered.

Some boys clad themselves in boxers. She stuck to briefs that reminded her, secretly, of the navy blue Speedo she wore to fend off Mr. Bagsby.

Gerardo was not, to her knowledge, a gangbanger. Like their older brothers who were off in high school, those guys (gangbangers in training, actually) wore long Dickies shorts, white tube socks, and sneakers ~~ while their girlfriends pasted on stonewashed jeans tapering into socks with imitation Birkenstocks ~~ at least for that year. Gerardo distinguished himself with fitted jeans and Air Jordans.

You could probably have guessed that Audrey and Gerardo had adjacent lockers. Audrey had learned early on that the best way to deal with the gangbanger situation in PE was to become friends with everyone in the vicinity, so that’s what she did.

Gerardo was really looking forward to watching The Simpsons ~~ there was a lot of hype around the first episode ever. So was she, totally.

And there was the extent of it. Just keep being friendly and you’ll make it to the promised land of high school next year.

Gerardo called a few weeks later. He’d gotten her number from Annie (who now lived down the street, remember, near where Audrey and Jordan hugged), and he wanted to know where she’d been today.

She said that she had the flu. He said he hoped she was okay.

“I’ve slept all day,” she said, “and now I’m never going to get to sleep tonight.”

He said he understood; his mom likewise tried to keep him up even when he was sick, so that he’d still be able to go to bed at night.

Audrey didn’t tell him that she’d had trouble sleeping ever since second grade (and, even if she had, she could never have explained why, since the memories of Mr. Bagsby had already gone away and would stay submerged for the next 17 years), back when she would try to drift off by writing stories in the air with the cursive that she had now learned, but still ended up awake. Instead she just listened, amazed how he went on and on.

Gerardo came over several times, and, once, she went over to his house for a few hours after school. All of these years later, she wishes she had just appreciated the friendship that he offered, with sincerity, rather than grow impatient with the pace of his intellect and wedging space between them until he drifted away.

After all, what difference would those concerns have made that one night he slept over, if she had only listened to the whispers of her heart?

He was so close to her then, only an arm’s length away, and, whenever she looked down from the bed to his spot on the floor, the moonlight twinkled in his deep brown eyes and the sound of his breathing electrified the darkness.

Do you remember being with me in that moment? Right when she could have slid out of bed and lain next to him, reached up through the distance now gone, and touched his face?

Moment Twenty-Five: A Hug 23 Years Ago

She was just so disappointed in herself for letting it happen again.

How many times was it going to take? How many fissures could crack across her heart before it broke for good?

She wished it would.

The first 24 hours were not bad, as usual, in fact they were among the best she could remember.

For dinner they had tortillas with grasshoppers, which she hadn’t eaten since the market at the base of the mountain that she doesn’t want to ask him the name of.

She thought the lingerie he had purchased for this evening ~~ a sort of white netted body-stocking ~~ was tacky, but she wore it anyway, and he just went nuts. They made love right there on the couch. He bent her over the cushions, which she thought were unnecessarily hard and designed for people with short legs anyway, and touched her ass and kissed the back of her knees, and she shuddered all over like she used to back in the very beginning, you remember, and it was all very wonderful, better than ever, really, for all the time and horror that had passed, instead of weighing everything down, made it all the more special and hotter.

She saw a cum stain on the front of the couch, a drip that had dried halfway down, the next morning, as she was sipping coffee cross-legged in the love seat across the room, luxuriating in the dawn even though she’d promised him she’d sleep in and enjoy things ~~ but that plan had fallen through as soon as she’d awoken with a smile from last night, and felt so eye-burstingly happy to be alive that she couldn’t stay in bed. She looked at the cum stain while she was practicing yoga, and again when she came back after her run, on which she had jogged past streets carpeted in purple leaves from the Jacaranda trees.

They ate breakfast ~~ she had made him stop at Trader Joe’s yesterday so that she could recreate her daily morning fare from New York right here in Pasadena ~~ and then he filled water bottles and packed lunches for them both.

In his new car, an SUV from his company apparently, they fired up the 5 to the 134 and then the 101. It was the first time she had ridden down through the mountains into the farmlands of Camarillo toward Oxnard, and then on into Santa Barbara, and then further north in the direction of Lompoc, where, one day, she would go to the United States Penitentiary for work.

La Purisima Concepcion left an imprint of frustration, though not because of the Mission itself. That afternoon, in this outpost of the past tucked inland among the hills and away from the highways, she walked through a series of rooms imagining the people who used to roam the grounds one or two hundred years ago, going about their business so far from Spain, and maybe paying lip service to whatever they were supposed to be doing and fudging over the details.

The library enamored her with dreams of how meaningful each book must have been here, removed from cities and towns with other people. But her heart sank 15 minutes later, as she imagined out loud how daily life might have been for the once-upon-a-time blacksmith in the little blacksmith’s shop over there, and Aureliano stayed silent ~~ and everything grew heavy once they reached the garden in another five minutes, and she tried to hold his hand and he withdrew.

Still, she found her buoyancy again once they were in the car on the way home, and the lightness of spirit made her talkative. She talked and talked as they inched back down the 101 through two hours of traffic, talked and talked, all the way to the 134, where, all of a sudden, he said, “I feel stuck in this relationship,” and the house of cards that was the nice day she’d fabricated came toppling down.

She must, at some point, apprehend the extent to which the ecstasy she derives from him, an annihilation of the bounds and limits of her existence, contains the element of lethargy, in which her past is submerged in its entirety.

This gulf of oblivion separates the world of everyday from the transcendental reality that sprouts from the communion of their minds, always at war.

Once she regains consciousness of the everyday beneath the surface, she will acknowledge the nausea it engenders, the fruit of that state which negates her will.

In this manner she will penetrate closer to the nature of things, irksome and unchanged, in a realm where the timeline connecting past and present is out of joint, and she will be overcome with shame and ridiculousness in the desire to set this disjointedness right.

Her knowledge, then, will stifle, if not kill, action, since acting would require the veil of illusion that experience has now lifted. The idleness she has spent in dreams will dissipate the surplus of possibilities that she has daydreamed, and spur her to act.

This transformation will, in turn, lead her beyond all comfort and awaken her longing for a world after death, past the glitters of existence in reflection and toward the face that reality presents of truth. There, conscious in perception, she will see everywhere the terror and absurdity that existence is, lapping over each another in waves that, one by one, will fill her with loathing.

At this juncture, where her will is imperiled, she’ll turn inward for redemption and healing, realizing at last that she, and she alone, can alter the monstrous reflections that have haunted her into representations with which she might live.

How it started up this particular time has been lost, the details pitched headfirst into the murk of the following hours, and the next day.

They must have arrived home to his apartment in South Pasadena because the argument climaxed at the dining table, a few feet away from the liquor cabinet. She must have noted the cum stains on the front of the couch, though she probably didn’t smile now, as their confrontation continued to mushroom up from the grenade that he had lobbed on the drive back.

At first she’d thought that he was kidding or perhaps needling her, and so she tried to ask him, exhibiting patience laced with interest, where, exactly, his dissatisfaction was coming from.

“I want to help you feel unstuck,” she ventured.

Her earnestness just fed him.

Indeed, by the time they exited from the 134 onto the 5, they had already worked the situation into a foment. They jousted along the edge of a cliff overlooking the spot where Ixtapa had once been, eroded away into the ocean by the acceleration of time that had spun the forces of nature beyond all reason.

She kept asking him what she could do, how she could be better ~~ a better listener, a better partner, a better person, and the rest of it ~~ trying to say everything she could think of to slow it all down, reset the visit, recalibrate what was happening back into a conversation… and then to dissuade him from pouring another drink, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another…

At which point she finally said she was going to go get some dinner, and she went outside and walked and walked until she found a grocery store, where she purchased ingredients for a salad, and then she walked and walked back.

Who knows what she hoped ~~ that he would be different when she returned, or perhaps that he would be gone, or asleep, or sober? But he was there, and he stood next to her in the kitchen, close, while her hands shook as she tried to separate the yellowed arugula from the fresh pieces (since she hadn’t been paying attention at the store and had bought a salad that was two days too old). He hovered over her, very near, until finally he jammed his hand into the leaves, flung a handful onto the plate she was working with, and said, “Oh Audrey, just eat it.”

She tried again to fix things the next morning, probably too soon right after he woke up, and she kept trying in the car on the way to the airport, careening down the 110 to the 10 to the 405 to the LAX exit, at which point she realized that nothing she could do would stop everything from stopping, and so she unleashed herself and told him what an asshole he was, and what a disappointment, and what a horrible, horrible human being!!

That approach didn’t work either, of course. And so there she stood on the curb, alone with her carry-on, hollowed out, scrolling through her phone for the nearest hotel that she could afford, wondering how much these incidents, had, in total, cost her.

And whether there was anything of her left to give anyone anymore.

From the DoubleTree, which cost more than she wanted to spend, but which was still cheaper than changing her flight, she walked over to Jordan’s apartment on the other side of the 405 to meet his children, who, in the rush of time compounded with the depths of whatever selfishness had given her excuses up to today, when she needed friendship, were already pushing teenagehood.

“Oh Jordan, they are just beautiful,” she said, as soon as the kids had gone to bed and she and Jordan were sitting alone at the kitchen table, among a wall of books and an apartment filled with life, all of which would vanish when the family moved to Japan the following year.

And it was the moment comprising the walk that they took together afterward, circling through a little park on a hillside nearby, that you might like especially ~~ when Jordan was listening to her, and helping her, and being her best friend, and their connection extended all the way back through time to that evening so many short revolutions around the sun before, about the same time of year and the same time of night, when they met and hugged in the middle of the street before venturing across town.

Moment Twenty-Six: “You Inspire Me”

She wonders whether she might have wanted, back then, to foresee how this particular obsession was going to unfold. Still, would the knowledge have lessened the burden she assumed all through that last semester of high school?

Her crush on Scandinavian Sean had already begun building up by the time she and Secret Crush Amanda fell for each other. The urges and whirlwinds and flashes of teenage passion he sparked in her simply went into hibernation, while Audrey dove into the young love affair with Amanda that she would aspire to for the rest of her life.

She became aware of him at least the year before, when, as a sophomore, she was still following down the path that Exclamation! Jessica had set her on with water polo, and swimming also ~~ perhaps she and Sean had competed against each other the previous spring?

With his blond hair and blue eyes, Sean was basically a male-bodied version of Amanda. He even had a button nose, which gave his face, in at least that way, perhaps a touch more femininity than Amanda’s alluring tomboy profile.

Although she had identified her feelings for him, she dared not name them until after what happened with Hawk-nosed Greg, well, I mean, after she had recovered from the part where she wanted to throw up, and, once she had moved forward from there, through the following weeks of twisting and flailing against her own fate, and she accepted, and had begun to enjoy, that she liked spending time in bed with boys, even if it did mean abandoning herself for 22 years, and more ~~ all of which I am coming to shortly.

In the meantime, it unfurled this way: within days after their breakup, Audrey told Amanda about liking guys and her attraction to Sean, and so Amanda had not only renewed her lapsed friendship with him ~~ she was forever falling in and out of alliances, as suited the whim of her romantic designs on a month-to-month basis ~~ but she had in fact strengthened their mini-cabal and managed to turn Sean against Audrey.

“I’m not gay,” Sean declared into the phone, with Amanda seated next to him. Audrey just knew they were in his bedroom, where she had sat only weeks before, on a night they had come so very, very close to making out.

Audrey listened, and smiled, continuing to work on the mural about 12 or 13 feet further down from where she had been when Amanda first called about the secret crush. Audrey found every reason to enjoy the revenge that Amanda was exacting for their break-up ~~ because she knew that Amanda would eventually tire of this game and come back to her, for, of all the acquaintances that Amanda germinated, theirs would endure.

As predicted, it was only a matter of time before Amanda was back in the baby blue Camry that had replaced the Volvo after it was totaled in the accident with the pregnant woman, and likewise Audrey assumed her position in the passenger seat of Amanda’s little white two-door Nissan Sentra. Feeding off one another’s obsessions, they drove in between Sean’s house and the house of whomever Amanda wanted to sleep with or torment next, and then, for old times’ sake, to the big white mansion, and the African coffee plantation, and all the other places they went in search of places to go.

It was on the nights that Amanda was not with her that Audrey fell into trouble.

She never meant to injure her soul. But the meaningless sex she had with strangers as she scoured the park down by the river until 11:00 p.m. or 12:00 a.m., or, if she hadn’t found anything by then, far later into the night (after, of course, first torturing herself with driving by Scandinavian Sean’s, and then by Broad-shouldered Adam’s), built a wall around her that rendered opaque and far away the beauty she wanted to merge her life with in making art.

The tasks that she set herself after the park ~~ working on the mural, reading books, cultivating her imagination, watching Woody Allen movies, trying to make herself a better person, going and going until she collapsed into sleep at hours of the night that, later on in life, she would consider morning ~~ altogether remitted her to a separate realm, one where she was cut off from the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, and, most tragically, the very preservation and refinement of her soul that she was trying to achieve.

She wished, if nothing else, to perceive a sense to it all, some sort of philosophy that would pull everything together and help her understand why things were happening, and how to improve them and fit in.

The undertaking at hand, therefore, was to restore continuity between the forms of experience that constituted artistic creation and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that crested in universal recognition as the components of experience. Neither did the peaks that she might reach in moments of ecstasy float in the air without support, nor could they simply rest upon the earth ~~ rather, they rose up out of the struggle to live a moral life while she compromised her ideals.

Sometimes she sat outside Sean’s house, maybe around the corner but inched just far enough forward to see his bedroom window if she leaned, writing scribblings that he would never read. She did not usually stop at Adam’s, for by that point in the routine she would be overtaken by the compulsion to get to the park and search for men who were, more often than not, as old as Mr. Bagsby would have been.

It did not occur to her to wonder where everyone else her age was. She assumed that what she was doing was normal, and that she deserved the disgust she felt afterward, if for no reason other than because the rush of pursuit obscured the self-loathing, and she felt natural after flagellating herself with unrequited affection.

She sees now, years later, that all those nights in the park having sex with strangers amounted to a chase after the moment she left herself with Hawk-nosed Greg ~~ please be patient, I’m getting there ~~ although back then she was occupied with training herself that she must be unlovable and was unworthy of dreams.

Prior to leaving for college, she went by Sean’s to say Goodbye. This time she stopped, and, now that the threat of anything happening had dissipated, they hugged.

Sure, she still drove past his house, and Adam’s too, from time to time on visits home ~~ over Christmas breaks and those first couple weeks of summer before she was off again on one or another of her adventures to Egypt, or wherever. But by then it was just to reminisce, before she headed to the park.

One night you might choose is the last time, so far, that she saw him in her hometown, a warm summer evening when she dropped by to catch up and he took her for a ride in his jeep with the top down. They drove downtown by the same road she took hundreds of nights after hunting for sex, and he changed the music and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” came on.

“One of my two favorite songs to drive to, ever,” she said.

“I’m going to guess ‘Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution’ is the other one?” he asked, referring to the song that precedes “Fast Car” on Chapman’s debut album.

She looked ahead and felt the wind on her and yet she didn’t, because the temperature was just so, such that she couldn’t really tell where she ended and the rest of the world began, and she thought that, a few years ago, she would have given anything for this moment, and now here she was, and nothing more needed to happen for it to be an instant that she would cherish forever.

Or you might choose their chance run-in at a lounge on Market Street in the Castro, where she met up with her sex addiction recovery sponsor to say Farewell before moving from San Francisco to New York, and Sean, who happened to be working the bar, did not even blink at her transition, but just smiled and said, “You look great.”

But think also of the moment a decade later, as I know you are, after she handled a case that had made international news, when all of a sudden she received a message on Facebook saying that she inspired him. That note came one year after Aureliano had left her on the curb outside an airport for the final time, and one year before she met Billy from Philly, who would change everything.

Moment Twenty-Seven: The Arms of So Many Friends

You might just as well choose the moment in his former teammate Brian’s kitchen, around midnight, when she placed her hand on his shoulder blade, and more than 22 years of time drew a smile from the well of what-had-been.

Broad-shouldered Adam was a reason that she purchased her ticket for the reunion at all, and he was among the handful of people she most wanted to see. The weekend started with arrival at the house out in the countryside that she and four other girlfriends were Airbnbing; then she found herself at a football game (which is where she learned that she had kissed Lindsay not once but three times); and then the crew were off to whatever new bar downtown where they were meeting the guys.

Adam and Brian showed up together. Brian recognized her without hesitation because he’d heard years ago. But after she managed to work through the crowd to speak to Adam several minutes later, it took a second for his eyes to widen in recognition after she asked, “Do you remember me?”

They saw each other at Brian’s house the following afternoon. The group now included Annie, whom Audrey had picked up from her parents’ house across the street from where she and Jordan had hugged. (Annie, in true form, brought pot, and Audrey had to say, “I have a national security clearance!! I can’t have that stuff in my car.”) And then everyone headed to the restaurant where the main event was hosted.

She wanted to speak privately with him the whole night, but she couldn’t manufacture a chance until midnight in the kitchen, when he had sort of cornered himself while making tacos. (Annie, still in true form, would spit out a mouthful when no one was looking because they tasted too sweet.)

He seemed thinner than she remembered him, and his shoulders not as broad, but maybe it was just that life had shrunk the whole world.

“Adam,” she said, “I don’t know if you remember a conversation we had one night when I showed up at your house, but you are the first person I ever told about being attracted to men, and I have always wanted to say thank you for responding so gracefully.”

(Those 22 years before, she had tapped on his bedroom window on one of the nights she was driving by ~~ before she touched the hairs on Hawk-nosed Greg’s leg and ended up in bed with him, and even before she had told Amanda about the guys thing and it being time to break up ~~ and she is pretty sure that she must have woken him because he was in his boxers when he opened the door and led her to his bedroom. They sat in the dark, talking, until she mangled the conversation into a pause where she sputtered out, “I like you,” and he responded, “I like you, too,” and she had to clarify what she meant. At which point he sat up in bed and said he couldn’t deal with this ~~ he wasn’t gay ~~ but the thing is that he said it gently, and with way more kindness and patience than you might expect from a football playing jock who looked the way he did. What is more, he still talked to her after that night, and he still accepted her invitation to ditch school one day and drive to Yosemite, though he slept in the car all the way up and all the way back.)

The lights in Brian’s kitchen were brighter than she might have wanted at this age, as she awaited his response. Adam remembered that conversation, he said, breaking her heart and putting it back together again in the same instant ~~ the moment I already wrote about in a piece called I Mean, You Have Tits Now.

If you’ve read that story, you know that the real kicker came on the car ride back out to the house in the country with the girls, when one of them asked why she was crying, and, after they exchanged a few sentences, Audrey came to understand that having been born in the wrong body was, instead of being what separated her from others, an experience of being human that anyone could understand, insofar as the phenomenon was no different, not really, from the invisibility that any teenager with a crush on someone who didn’t reciprocate might have felt.

The conversation in the car with the girls reminded her of the last time she had been in a car with high school friends, two-and-a-half-years before, only that time the friends were all men.

Mortality invested her with a consciousness that had fissured her living self from her past, and her future, as well. The weight of what had been hung upon her all these years, and would likely invade whichever present in which she found herself, as nostalgia morphed into a sense of regret, of opportunities not used, and of consequences she wished either undone or instated retroactively, in hopes of transmuting her life into the one that she had wished for.

Despite the universality that being different yielded, she still wanted to have arrived in the right body earlier, before high school, before jr. high, before elementary school, and indeed from the get-go. Then again, being female wouldn’t have guaranteed anything with Broad-shouldered Adam ~~ and, plus, then she would have missed out on falling in love with Secret Crush Amanda, and, who knows, Jordan might have been her first kiss instead of Exclamation! Jessica, a misalignment that would have hurtled the two of them asunder from a lifelong friendship, and, moreover, had she been a girl in second grade, who knows whether Mr. Bagsby would have satisfied himself with Candi and found, for a boy, someone else ~~ all of which would mean that her life, and her self as it existed, would never have been.

Were she to adopt the past without hesitation, and fully, she could hope to befriend all of her embarrassments and errors, the ones that once made her cringe, now transformed into warnings that increased her wariness of the present.

She owed everything to the hushed reverberations of the universe that whispered life into life… Like that last occasion she had been in a car full of high school friends, the time with the men, which was the first time one of those car rides happened since she had transitioned…

They had just been to Layla’s memorial service, and most of their group were there ~~ along with a couple thousand other human beings whose lives Layla had touched, spinning gold.

You know I’ve written before about how Unibrow Kurt drove the three of them to the airport for their flight back to Los Angeles. Jordan sat in the front seat, and Sexy-lipped Joshua had climbed in next to her in the back. After they ran out of tears, about midway across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland, one of them asked who everyone thought had changed the most. Her face lit up with certainty that she would win, until a second later when they all agreed that she was the same as she’d ever been.

But what I want to tell you now is that you could just as well choose any moment from the last 24 years with Jordan ~~ when he showed up in the East Village in a rented Suburban (“Where the fuck are you going to park it? How the hell did you even find something like this monstrosity in the first place, and why?”), and remarked, upon seeing her for the very first time since she became a girl, that she had achieved a “very desirable” feminine form, or when their friendship somehow bounced right back from stuff like what happened when Letterman was on at Jessica’s house or when Audrey walked in on him and his then girlfriend (when they were all tripping balls) and said some really stupid shit ~~ but I understand if you would stick with their talk in the park near his apartment on the other side of the 405, after Aureliano dumped her on the curb at LAX, because it was in that exchange that she realized how much Jordan loved her, and she him, and it was impossible for her to fathom anything that could make that love change.

With Kurt you might choose that one summer afternoon after their last year in high school, when they were all drinking in the park adjacent to the “temporary” classrooms, and she rose and demanded Jordan’s keys so that she could take his cruise ship of a decades-old white Pontiac for a spin ~~ and Kurt leapt up and said, “I’ll go with you.”

Her crush on Kurt from first grade lingered; he had only become cuter and cuter.

“What’s it like,” he asked, as they pulled out onto the street, “kissing another guy?”

And with Joshua you might select the moment they met at the airport for the flight up north for Layla’s service, and he commented on the clarity of her eyes. You remember: the instant Jordan stepped away for the bathroom, and Joshua said, “I had all these questions I thought I wanted to ask, but as soon as I saw you they all went away.”

Any of those moments would be just as wonderful. But the one I like most, and I hope you’ll agree, was in bed that night in the house out in the country, where she drifted to sleep held by the arms of so many, many friends.

Moment Twenty-Eight: She Left Herself There

And now the moment I have been coming to this entire time: one night in the winter of Audrey’s junior (and final) year in high school, when she arrived at the crossroads of breaking up with Amanda and the threshold of her future, and chose the wrong path.

Greg was a year older, and she is not sure how their acquaintance developed. She does know, for certain, that he materialized in art class periodically, delivering messages or whatever he was doing to keep busy before he graduated. She would watch his profile move across the room like the head of a coin floating through space ~~ his strong forehead and angular hawk nose, slightly uplifted, cut the air like an angel’s wing.

He had a white Camaro that roared.

She did not really know what her feelings were, but she knew that she wanted to kiss him.

Greg worked evenings and weekends in the café downtown that his father owned. She and Jordan would go there sometimes, and eventually she would display her art on the walls. Greg gave her free coffee, which made her feel special. She smoked one cigarette after another as she sat in the mezzanine above the kitchen, gazing down at him manning the register and coffee machines below.

He was 19 when their fates crossed, and she was still 16. He was old for his grade or something, and, in any event, already physically a man.

His extremities were extra large for his body, and he walked splaying one foot out in front of the other, kind of like Kevin Spacey, but with his spine erect and tall.

How is it that two human beings ever come into contact with one another? How does a crush form and come to fruition? What is the force that draws us together? Why do we obey, knowing full well, even at a young age, where those feelings will lead?

She was even more confused because she was still in a boy’s body back then, of course, and, even if it was cool and rebellious to come out as bisexual, boys were really not supposed to want to be with other boys. It was not ideal.

The buildup took forever. She does not remember how she ended up at the house where Greg was living, over by the railroad tracks, a few neighborhoods away from the one where she had been raised in the same house ever since she was born.

But end up there she did, and there they were in his bedroom, talking almost in whispers.

When she felt fully alive, like this instant as she was about to experience another boy for the first time and knew it, the future seemed less ominous, surrounding her imagination like a halo. And the past ~~ which still would have been black for her in many places ~~ consisted of possibilities that broke into shards on the floor of here and now.

Everything overlapped and merged ~~ yet still she tremored with curiosity about what even a second would bring, if, for example, he rejected her or pushed her away. Desire and apprehension, in this dance together, divided her.

Even had she not been overanxious, though, she could not have enjoyed the experience so much as she might have because she subordinated it to what was absent: everything that this first time could be but was not.

As life went on, the frequency with which she abandoned the present to the past and the future, and the space between happy periods, would leave her feeling incomplete ~~ but nevertheless she would continue the pattern, absorbing both memories and anticipation into her aesthetic ideal.

Her pursuit of beauty was destined to destroy her, tear her apart down past the bone, over and over again, before it could finally reconstitute her and enable her to transcend all that held her back.

Only when the past and anxiety over the future had stopped perturbing her ~~ as you will see momentarily ~~ could she be united with her environment and therefore fully alive. And only then would the peculiarity and intensity of beauty combine into a moment in which everything that had been would reinforce the present, and the future would comprise but a quickening of what is.

As she lay on Greg’s bed, she finally muttered that she liked the hair on his calves, and asked if she could touch it, and he said, “Yes,” and so she did.

Her heart nearly pounded out of her chest. It beat so hard that, after the light was out and Greg was lying next to her, his armpits and groin smelling faintly of hay, he commented on the thumps.

He was a much simpler person, in many respects. He would not go on to flee their hometown, or ferret the ends of the earth for adventure, or scale the ivory towers of federal court in New York and Los Angeles and the rest of it, as she would seek to do, and more. He would, instead, attend the jr. college in their hometown, continue working in his father’s café for another several years, and live a life of quiet dedication and responsibility, at least insofar as she knew until she no longer returned often enough to look him up, and they lost contact. He would represent the ballast that she would, throughout her life, wish that she had treasured and kept.

Afterward, she drove away from his house feeling sick, and retching out the window in between drags on the cigarettes that she chain-smoked on the way home, rushing to get into a hot shower and scrub away everything that had just happened. She wanted the hay smell of him off her.

She hated herself and what she had done.

But nature prevailed over society, and, within a few days, the scent that had turned her stomach eventually drew her back, and she was at the café suggesting to Greg that they sneak onto school grounds one night and go skinny dipping in the pool (where she used to go to swim practice and water polo, beginning in jr. high with Exclamation! Jessica, up until she quit both earlier this year).

They met in the side parking lot, near the “temporary” classrooms adjacent to the park (where Unibrow Kurt would, later the following summer, jump at the chance to talk to her on their ride in Jordan’s white Pontiac). He wore way too much cologne, but the masculinity of it excited her.

They ambled through the hallways and she could hardly stand how much she wanted to hold and kiss him.

His footsteps ~~ that way he walked ~~ echoed in the emptiness.

They got to the pool but there was no water. She is pretty sure they kissed.

He called a couple weeks later.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

And he was on his way to pick her up.

She got into his Camaro and away it roared.

They parked in the alley, which was empty, dark, and a little scary. She doesn’t think she had ever been behind those buildings before.

He turned the key to the back door of his father’s café and they walked inside, through the kitchen area that she knew because the little bathroom was packed in there. He might have asked her if she wanted something to drink, and they might have shared a coffee.

Or maybe they didn’t wait.

Upstairs, they lay on the floor of the mezzanine, a few feet from where she’d sat so many times and looked down at him, hoping he’d look up.

They were naked like experts now. Their skin was pale from winter, and their muscles quivered with adolescence, seeping the aromas she now recognized as exciting and delightful.

He had very nice nipples. They stood hardened in the air.

The stubble along his jawline scratched her cheeks and her lips.

She shed the cloak of embarrassment that her body was still almost prepubescent ~~ he understood, or didn’t mind, or liked it that way ~~ and their bodies swung around like clock hands in a Dali painting, and they went down on each other simultaneously.

It was in this moment, as she closed her eyes and inhaled that faint smell of hay, and right before she left her body for the next 22-and-a-half years, that you might have chosen a different life ~~ one of normalcy and love and affection, without the parks and the self-hatred and the doomed relationships and everything that followed.

What if I leave my body and float away to the ceiling where I can watch all this as though it’s someone else?

Because it’s not me in this body with this man, not my childhood that he’s taking, not my innocence, not my pride from being chosen as fly monitor and classroom monitor and having all these responsibilities and being special, none of this preciousness is being taken from me, it’s not happening, it’s not me, I’m not real.

I’m not here anymore, I’m gone.

And so, instead of sinking into the arms of an exquisite young man, she left herself there, soulless, and that was that.

Moment Twenty-Nine: Her Little Life Becomes Mine

Even with the thousands of books she read in the intervening years, she cannot remember another one keeping her up at night since she plowed through The Lord of the Rings (on the trip to Switzerland I’ve mentioned, over the summer following that moment at her desk with her grandfather before he ceased to be).

She has been in her house in the barrio for a year now, and in Los Angeles for two. She and Aureliano live about seven minutes away from each other, although she has reached the point where she just laughs when he professes his love, or tells her she needs to do this or that, or breaks another promise, cancels plans, or simply doesn’t show up or call when he says he’s going to.

She’s dated various men up to now, including Billy from Philly, with whom this story will near its close, but the problem is that, still, no one seems quite as smart and incisive as Aureliano ~~ or perhaps she’s just so used to their cycle that the idea of breaking it seems beyond her reach, and anyway she’s grown to feel a little turned on by the sado-masochism of it all.

The time they spend together every month or two seems to go best when she blames herself for everything that has gone wrong during the past six years. He doesn’t correct her, and maybe he even assents. He likes feeling power over her, and she likes letting him think that he has it, and he likes knowing that she’s only pretending to cede her ground, and she likes that he can see right through her. And so on.

She stopped keeping track of the letdowns months and months ago, perhaps even years at this point. What would really disappoint her, if she thought about it, would be how she has calloused herself to the point where she doesn’t even feel disappointment anymore; she doesn’t really feel anything except melancholy over not feeling.

If you had told her when she was starting out, or even just a few years ago, that she would become such a person, she would have done everything she could muster up, and more, to prove you wrong. Now she would just smile and say, “It’s not the life I wanted or hoped for, but it’s the life I have, and life is precious.”

There are any number of dinner plans ~~ he’ll pick her up at seven, or at eight, or later. Whatever. She doesn’t care. She knows he won’t come and has already left the house to do something else when the appointed time arrives.

There are plans to enjoy the symphony, and outdoor concerts downtown, and movies at the cemetery. There are make-believe sojourns down to Tijuana and Baja. There is something about Telluride at some point. There is even talk of him visiting in New York on one of her trips for work.

“Sure, I’d love that!!” she exclaims, wondering what it might be like to meet a man she is attracted to, where attraction means something positive, and affirming, rather than another reenactment of what happened with Mr. Bagsby in second grade.

She is a cliché, and that realization is what stings. She has spent all this effort ~~ a whole lifetime of striving and striving, swimming upstream every stroke of the way, searching and yearning and longing and endeavoring ~~ all to learn that she has yet to become more than the sum of her past, nor might she ever.

That night on the mezzanine with Greg was not really when she left her body, and she knows it: she left her body on Mr. Bagsby’s lap, and there it still sits, tied neatly into the navy blue Speedo with a double knot, frozen by the horror of a touch.

In much of her past she has not been concerned with the connection between any given incident and what went before and after. This particular experience was an exception.

There is little interest that can control her attention or selection of reality into the developing experience of beauty in any given instance. Things happen, but they are neither included nor excluded for certain.

She is adrift. She has been detached from reality and truly caring what happens, from the very ecstasy and heights of emotion that she lives for, from the potential of love even, for all these decades of life that she must have lived, but which have assumed the qualities of a dream.

She has yielded to pressures from outside her; she has abandoned her ideals.

Her experiences amount to a series of beginnings and cessations, lacking an initiation or a conclusion in truth. One thing has replaced another, and another, and another ~~ but nothing has been absorbed, nothing carried on.

The demons that she has fought have been enemies of the aesthetic her spirit perceived ~~ fabrications of the mind. These foes are the Humdrum, the slackness of loose ends, that hydra of affection with its tentacles outstretched, as she submits to convention in practice and procedure when, instead, she might have innovated something true.

Her rigidity, which Aureliano continues to remark on, her coerced ~~ and feigned ~~ surrender to him, the tightness of her routines and patterns of thinking on the one side, and her incoherence and desultoriness and indulgence on the other ~~ all these tendencies draw her in the opposite direction from the unity of experience that is, in the end, all she has ever sought.

Probably she would not have braved Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life if a friend of hers from law school had not posted a photo of his hardback copy on Facebook, captioning it as the most moving work of fiction he’d read in his entire life. Probably she would have leafed through it at the airport when it appeared on the shelves a few months later, and decided it was too long, hackneyed and predictable in its subject matter and character choice.

Or maybe she would have given it a chance, especially being captivated by the face of a man in severe pain on the cover. (Later she would learn that he was having an orgasm, which only made her love it, and the book, all the more.)

She might have liked the first chunk, in which four men, one of them gay and another straight and two of them something else, converged on New York after college, and experienced a lot of the phenomena that she did back when she came to the City with its lights in her eyes.

Certainly she would have kept going as the story pulled her further in, closer and closer to the human experiences that the book engendered and incinerated at the same time. The violence, the brutality, the self-loathing, together intertwined with the beauty of art and the intellect ~~ it all unraveled before her into a vision of life that she could relate to in every way because she herself knew so deeply what it meant to believe that she was nothing, worth nothing, and capable of nothing, even while someone outside peering in, all her friends, for example, Unibrow Kurt and Sexy-lipped Joshua and Exclamation! Jessica and Best Friend Jordan and Non-gangbanger Gerardo and Secret Crush Amanda and Scandinavian Sean and Broad-shouldered Adam and Half-bald Drew and Yigal the Persian-Jew and Billy from Philly (he’s coming) and everyone else, not to mention all the men she’s encountered and maybe dated or kissed or flirted with, and all the women too, all around the world, our great big miniscule world, and I am talking about not just the people she’s gotten close to, but also human beings everywhere all through life with whom she’s exchanged kindness, interludes long swallowed back into time ~~ these waterfalls of moments and people have in fact been, and, what is more, are all real, for even now every moment remains embedded within her, in the form of synapses that have connected neurons in her brain, there are so many thousands of those moments, tens and hundreds of thousands, millions, and many many many millions more, indeed, after she was lucky enough to be alive for 31 years and 251 days, there were more than a billion seconds of her consciousness ~~ and counting ~~

And all of This comprises her and makes up her life, and the whole fucking thing is so goddamn beautiful, even including the terror that laces it all: the inevitability that, at some time certain, everything will cease to be… just like her memory of being in Mr. Bagsby’s Corvette when he reached over and put his hand on her thigh and everything goes black.

She barreled through A Little Life because she couldn’t stop inhaling it as the air she needed to breathe. She feared finishing, but raced through the pages with the inexorability of seconds on a clock.

About two-thirds of the way through, she ran into a sentence that erupted off the screen of her phone and into her: “This time, he keeps his eyes closed, imagining that soon, he too will be able to go wherever people go when they kiss, when they have sex: that land he has never visited, that place he wants to see, that world he hopes is not forbidden to him forever.”

That land, that place, that world where she had always dreamt of visiting, too.

Where all the beauty we feel is real.

Tears streamed down her face but on she went, relentless in lacerating herself with the misery and self-deprecation and anhedonia that she recognized from her own life ~~ there were moments, especially in that final hundred pages, where she could not breathe.

And when she neared the end and saw what was going to happen, she screamed out loud through the sobs that soaked her face, and she threw herself to the floor, and ~~ just as Amanda had kept holding her cigarette as the car had spun in circles across the street ~~ she held her phone in her hand, and read.

It was that moment that I would probably choose out of all the others, if I were you ~~ when reading proof that I was not alone in these feelings, or in the world, brought me back to inhabit my body for the first time since second grade ~~ that moment is the one I would probably choose from everything up to now, if not for what happened next, first on Valentine’s Day two months later, and then on my 39th birthday just shy of a month after that.

Moment Thirty: After a Goodbye Kiss

I apologize if the chronology has seemed jumbled anywhere. But by now you realize that the sequencing doesn’t necessarily matter all that much ~~ our relationship has spiraled for so long that any given moment is a question of tossing a dart blindfolded and relishing in whatever you hit ~~ a sort of drinking game with love and sex.

The theme of late has focused on Baja more than anything ~~ another trip to Mexico, where we will, once again, reawaken our passion for one another, become one, and “build” together.

“Come to Mexico tomorrow,” he will text me.

“I’d love to!!” I’ll reply.

And then nothing further.

Or perhaps he’ll ask when I’ll be arriving ~~ at which point I’ll do a quick search of flights and text back something like, “I can do [this one] or [that one]. Please just send me the ticket confirmation and I’ll be there. Can’t wait.”

To which he’ll respond that he’s not buying my ticket, I have no trust, I need to hold up my end of the bargain. You know.

I’ll reply that I don’t have the sort of money for these excursions, I wish I did, but I had a bad year last year. Or something.

He’ll use the exchange as an example of how I have no idea what commitment means, I am selfish, I am rigid ~~ you’ve already guessed.

Years ago my temper would have dashed in and tried, in desperation, to remind him that he had promised to pay for my last two flights to Mexico (in fact those promises were prerequisites for the trips), and that I spent a couple thousand dollars dealing with the fallouts and I just can’t sustain those financial hits anymore ~~ I would have tried and tried and tried to get him to admit that he understood, and say he was sorry, and manipulate him into assuming the risk.

But now just thinking about how that conversation goes will tire me out, and I don’t want to remember any of it anymore. I just wish that the whole motherfucking affair had never happened, that the armor I wore to Good Stuff on our third date, my Transsexuals Do It Better t-shirt (a remnant from a random t-shirt printing shop on an accidental afternoon in the Village with Yigal the Persian Jew), had succeeded in pushing him away before we kissed for the first time, that I had just adhered to one of those goddamn periods of no contact and never spoken to him again, and that he would just meet someone else already, or that I would, or that I would stop having feelings altogether, stop being human, stop dreaming and wishing hopes that keep birthing themselves out of me like deformed slugs destined to froth life for an instant, and then die.

“I’d love to!!” I’ll say when he texts an invitation to dinner tonight, or two days from now, or three, and then I won’t even notice when it doesn’t happen.

“I’d love to!!” I’ll exclaim when he suggests another movie I’d told him I wanted to see. Only then, astonishingly, he’ll be outside my house here in the barrio and I’ll walk out wearing the jean miniskirt he’s always liked, and we’ll be on the 101 driving to Hollywood.

Except that I’ll have misread the time for the film, and also the restaurant we’d planned on going to will be closed, and I’ll say it was all my fault, I fucked up, I am a fuck up ~~ and he will feign an objection, or maybe he won’t, and I will savor my meekness because it really does soothe things over and render our interactions almost pleasant.

The problem, as you can see, is that he doesn’t always fall through. And sometimes he tugs on my heartstrings by showing up in the old tan Volvo station wagon, which he still has even though he’s gotten a couple new cars since we first met.

And sometimes, every so often, we’ll have sex.

Imagination remained as the instrument that I relied on through it all to carve out the good. As much of a commonplace as it was for me to claim that my ideas and treatment of him depended on my powers to extrapolate how he must feel due to all my flailing and failings and melodrama over the years, so too the primacy of my mind’s eye always saw beyond our relationship to spite.

Even after all this time, my ideals creep into my consciousness, infecting our interactions with an inclination toward love and beauty, in deference to the reverie of sentiment destined to revitalize our moral outlook and loyalty into the imagination itself. I love him so much, I tell him, and he responds that he loves me, too. “We live just seven minutes away from each other,” I’ll say, remembering how he used to tell me stuff like, “I spent my whole life looking for you and we somehow found each other,” and doesn’t anymore.

Back then his words were poetry in verse, objects of art crafted specially for my ears, and I adored him so very, very much. I remember those moments with precision even if the present curdles into a scramble before it even exists, stunted by the stupor in which we interact like addicts so blunted by mundanity that our song of life has become a slur.

The vision of possibilities that once drove us has converted into a proclamation of facts, and hardened. Imagination verges on falling casualty alongside memory and love.

What we have left, where we had once been, in the space we had created together and where we could have been united forever, is the time suspended in that picture he happened to snap while we awaited the old tan Volvo station wagon from the valet in Ixtapa, the moment that both of us will retain until the universe has washed us away forever, the moment we had each lived our lives for, and always would.

Valentine’s Day.

At first I thought we must have gone out to dinner. But then I recall that we didn’t, since neither of us seemed to remember the holiday, nor would we have cared.

The last time we’d had sex was a disaster. It was some Sunday morning when he’d texted me that he was horny, and we’d spoken on the phone, and I’d said, “Why don’t you just come over,” and he must’ve had nothing (and no one) better to do.

I was reading when I caught his head in the window from the corner of my eye ~~ I hadn’t gotten ready or anything, for the last thing I’d expected him to do was actually show up, and I’d already pushed the possibility out of my mind in the ten minutes since we’d spoken.

It was a beautiful Los Angeles winter morning, 70 degrees and sunny, the hills glistening behind him as his outline shone in the doorway. He was wearing a nylon jump suit that turned me on because he already had an erection, and the track pants, tented up at the groin like on that walk back down Houston after Agent Provocateur, invited me.

He took me with a degree of roughness, and within a minute we were making out on the floor. He pulled off my shorts, and my shirt, and went down on me.

“Let’s 69,” he said, and, for a minute, we did.

He seemed into it; I was not. My mind was stuck in A Little Life still ~~ as much as I wanted to let go into the pleasure of adulthood, the thrill of being with a man I continued to love, however fitfully, over six years later, the sexiness of him reverberating from the collision of our worlds as the force of gravity brought us back together to fuck…

I couldn’t.

I just couldn’t.

We would stop for a minute and he’d be patient with me. I’d apologize for my “episode” ~~ the word, used throughout A Little Life for what the central character went through, sprang to my lips. And after it passed I’d try again, I’d even give him a blowjob to say sorry for retreating just now, right when things were heating up. But it wouldn’t work and he’d leave (though not before stroking my face).

As I was about to say, Valentine’s Day started in much the same way. I texted him, or maybe he texted me, and I tossed on an outfit that I thought he’d like, and headed over.

We sat on the couch for a while, not the one that got the cum stain on it years before, but the other one, the love seat, and we had the type of conversation we should have been having all these years…

I asked him how work was going, and he told me ~~ not in too much detail like he sometimes did when his mid-life crisis first hit and he was grappling with existential questions about what he wanted from here on out. And he asked what was going on with me and I told him, likewise sticking to the surface of things, where all was light.

We started kissing, and our lips were warm, and we hugged also, and eventually I took off the heels I’d worn for him, and the feminine flowy top, and the jean miniskirt of course, and he complimented me on my panties, the black satin ones with pink lace that tied with a ribbon zigzagging in an upside down triangle over my pussy.

In bed we 69’ed again, and now, for the first time in as long as I could remember, perhaps, in a way, for the first time in my whole life, I jettisoned all my hang-ups and just enjoyed the smells and the tastes and the feelings and the sensations and the whole experience of it, expecting nothing more than the pleasure I delivered and received in equal measure.

And I made sure, at long last, of what I kinda always knew: he’s uncircumcised.

It is not so much the moment afterward, as we lay in each other’s arms among his nice clean sheets, when I said, “You know, I still love you,” and he said, “I love you, too,” as beautiful as that conversation was.

Rather, it is the moment several increments later, after I had dressed and kissed him Goodbye, and after I had turned and smiled and waved my fingers from his bedroom doorway ~~ the moment when I let myself out the front door and slipped away into the rest of my life.

Moment Thirty-One: Of Course He Would Come

The last time I had seen Billy was the summer prior, when he had stopped by for his camera stand and the light fabric shirt that he’d left in my closet.

I have come to believe that there is an identifiable moment in each of my relationships where I fall in love. With Yigal the Persian-Jew, it was on the futon couch with the gnawed-away left arm ~~ the same futon couch where, as you know, I would later sit and watch out the window as Aureliano warmed up the old tan Volvo station wagon after spending the weekend, and where I had sex with Bernard for the first time, and also where I sobbed when I couldn’t reach Mohammed and knew that that whole part of life was gone.

With Billy, it was the first time our hands touched ~~ although we would not start up with each other until months later.

I had been driving over to the Westside for dance class on Sunday mornings since I had first moved to Los Angeles, even before I bought the house in the barrio seven minutes away from Aureliano.

It’s not that I hadn’t noticed Billy. Of course I had. I just assumed, as I always did by now, that he was either married or already in some form of a commitment, and that, even if he were available, he would not be interested, or, if by some disturbance in reality he found himself intrigued, that he would lose the attraction once he got to know me. The latter prediction turned out to be the case, but not before he became, for those several months that I am granted in the beginning, before everything comes apart, the nicest guy I have ever dated.

The first time we spoke was after dance class, when one of us had struck up a conversation. I tried to push him away by dropping hints that I was ruined for love at this point, but he just kept talking, leaning against the wall in the early afternoon sunlight that cascaded through the large windows above our heads.

I hazarded a guess that he was from Trinidad, and he responded that it was actually Philly. But we did have New York in common, as everyone I gravitated toward out here seemed to.

We danced two or three times over the next few months before the hands thing took place. Each time I would stay with him just long enough to feel something, for a second, before I was off again, dancing on my own.

And then one Sunday it happened.

Our bodies came together and we danced for a few minutes like usual. But then, right as I was about to twirl away, I decided to stay, or rather staying decided me, and all in an instant we were closer than we had ever been, our skulls leaning millimeter by millimeter forward until our foreheads kissed, and our hands met in the air.

His palms against mine made my whole body tingle from its beginning all the way up into the tips of my eyelashes.

Pasadena. Two months later.

I should have known that our first date was a date well before he had to tell me.

The backstory here is that we had been messaging back and forth on Facebook ever since the dance on New Year’s ~~ a special three-hour class that led right up to midnight, which he had DJ’ed, playing a number of sets from his past couple albums. He was wearing one of those light fabric shirts that I loved ~~ it hovered over his shoulders and rippled upon the torso that would later cause my mother to note that he was “quite a specimen” ~~ the same lonely garment that he’d come to pick up the following summer.

During a break in his performance, there was some sort of artsy interlude in which we were all encouraged to draw with crayons on the mural paper that had been rolled out and taped up around the performance hall walls.

We ended up fiddling with each other’s fingers and tracing our hands apart, and then overlapping, and, as we giggled, I thought of the last time our hands had touched, back whenever that one particular dance crescendoed and we inhaled one another.

I left early, before the New Year rang in, and he sent me a message about Cinderella and midnight, and I smiled to myself because I had used that metaphor to describe the whole sex change disclosure nightmare for years now ~~ and still, I didn’t realize.

I remained obtuse because, as you now know better than anyone: the world I inhabit is never an object that stands before me, anything that can be seen. Rather, it is the ever-nonobjective to which I am subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse, keep my heart transported into being.

I wasn’t even aware that it was a date when he showed up at my house in the barrio with flowers ~~ something he would do often over the coming months before I ruined it ~~ I just thought he was being a friend.

It was only over dinner ~~ Indian food that managed to be two shades too bland, probably because this place was in Pasadena, a city that is very pleasant but lacks flavor, I mean, they have the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory but the parking meters still take coins ~~ when he finally said, “I’ve been wanting to ask you out for a long time,” and it dawned on me that he liked me, and it was okay for me to go ahead and admit that I liked him back.

Most of my favorite moments from our relationship were the ones that materialized in the same manner he had appeared in my life: just like that.

When we were on our way up to Crystal Lake in the Angeles Forest in his clunker of a charming old RV named Tinkerbell, and I accidentally rested my foot on the floor too close to where the carpet had been singed away and the heat from the soon-to-malfunction carburetor scalded my foot. After Tinkerbell had inched up the winding road, I limped along the rocky trail to the so-called lake, which, following three years of historic draught, had dried up into a rancid puddle; later we ate dinner at sunset parked on the side of the road halfway back down the mountain because my morning routine had gone on too long, and, by the time we’d made it to the camping grounds, there wasn’t a single site left.

Or when we were working one of those weekends for a month-and-a-half straight on the guest quarters downstairs, humming to the music broadcast from my laptop through the actually very decent Bluetooth speaker, and he stuck his head out from the bathroom, his face splattered with white paint, and said, “Any girl who likes The Chemical Brothers has me wrapped around her little finger.”

Or any of our hikes in Placerita Canyon State Park, and Eaton Canyon and Escondido Canyon ~~ those endless hiking trails we were only beginning to explore before I imploded. Or all the episodes of Archer we watched from my living room floor drinking tea and eating figs. Or the times he showed up at the airport, waiting (one level below where Aureliano had left me), with more flowers.

I had been pushing him away from the very beginning ~~ it’s just that we both hoped, for as long as we could, that I’d finally get over Aureliano, and more so myself. Unfortunately the timing was off, albeit just barely, and near the end I found myself alternating phone calls between the both of them.

It was only a matter of time before Aureliano told me, “End it,” and I did.

Not explicitly, of course ~~ I knew that I wanted to be able to blame Billy, and finesse him into blaming himself, so that I might reinforce my feelings of less than, and revel in the demise that I believed was my destiny, if only because I was just short ~~ just barely ever so short ~~ of reaching the point in life where I could finally vanquish the proclivity to ensure my own solitude.

And not even in person!! On a visit to my mom, I was sitting at the same table where he had first met and eaten with the whole family only a couple months before ~~ except now I talked at him into the phone, coaxing and prodding, until finally he admitted that he did not know where our relationship was going. I begged off and called Aureliano to tell him I had done as he asked.

The months of phone calls and cancellations and sex that you already know about ensued, culminating in the Valentine’s Day when ~~ at long last, just weeks before turning 39 ~~ I settled into my own skin after A Little Life brought me home.

To celebrate my birthday the following month, I hosted a performance that I really wanted to give. After convincing myself that this event would surely suffer the same fate as the last debacle I threw (back in New York four years ago, when almost no one came), I was shocked that so many people showed up and filled almost every seat on the back patio of that little neighborhood bookstore in Echo Park, where I’d conceived of and worked on much of the material that I performed.

Traffic kept Billy from making it on time, and I figured that he might not show up at all ~~ that is, until, right as I was taking a breath before telling a story about a man, he walked through the doorway to the left behind me, and everyone looked over at him: he was carrying flowers.

The moment I remember most effervesced during my birthday dinner afterward at the restaurant next door. Billy sat next to me and we were both across from my parents, whose effort to drive into LA touched my heart. We talked and we laughed and it was like old times all over again, except only sadder, dipped in the poignancy of what-could-have-been. During a pause in the conversation, he slipped in that he liked my cream and gray snakeskin-design tights, which I had worn especially for him, along with the jean miniskirt he liked ~~ the one that I had put on for Aureliano on Valentine’s ~~ and I cast my eyelids down and said, “I chose them just in case you’d come.”

“Of course I would,” he whispered. Then he reached through the breath of space in between us and placed his hand on my thigh.

Upon which I looked up.

Moment Thirty-Two: The Ballet

To Whom I Could Have Been:

Thank you for allowing me to be in place of you. I am as far from perfect as I could possibly be, but I hope that I have nevertheless given you the chance you always wanted, which is no more, or less, than that: a chance.

I am so sorry I did not turn out the way you might have hoped. I have always striven to do you justice, and, if I have fucked up, it was only because I was trying too hard.

In all, I have indeed been happiest when you and I have been close ~~ at points where our paths veered toward each other, almost touching, or flickers of time in which they crossed.

You were with me during each moment of this little story, just as you were with me at the Met in New York, when Mom and Dad took Edward and his future wife and me (as adults) to The Nutcracker, and, up on the mezzanine, I saw a costume display with ballerina mannequins that made my eyes moisten. I thought, of course, of the ballerinas back in McDonald’s when I was four, and how much I wanted to be they. Now, gazing at the mannequin physiques, I realized that ballerinas oftentimes have thin hips and wide shoulders ~~ and in a flash I believed that my own body might be able to fit in one day.

We parted shortly thereafter, when Edward felt embarrassed because I was still early in my transition, and he noticed people staring.

But we were back together for an instant a dozen years later ~~ at The Nutcracker once again, this time down in Irvine, when Edward was visiting with his now-wife and their children Isabel and Imma.

I sped down the 5 as fast as I could, but I was still a quarter hour late and the ballet had already started.

Imma lit up when she saw me through the darkness of the auditorium, and she crawled over everyone’s lap to sit on mine. She was four, just as I had been the first time.

During intermission, Isabel and I dashed through the rain outside to grab the snack of peanuts and raisins that I had forgotten to bring in from my car. We made it back just in time.

For the first few dances of the second Act, Isabel sat on my lap where Imma had been, eating peanuts and raisins one by one, and how poignant it was because this year might be the last one she would be comfortable there, for she was turning seven in a matter of months ~~ a second grader, already!! ~~ which would make her too big. I whispered that the Sugar Plum Fairy, who had just come onstage, was my favorite.

As perfect as it all seemed, the moment I want to end with happened two Christmases before.

Mom, who was visiting New York, had said it was time to tell the girls, and so I gathered them up and said I wanted to share a story about how I was born and how things had changed.

An illustrated storybook version of The Nutcracker happened to be hanging over the edge of the coffee table nearby. I opened it and asked, “Do you know how the nutcracker was magically turned into a prince?”

Isabel nodded; by now Imma had already grown distracted.

“Well, that’s kind of what happened with me. I was born in a boy’s body, but it was a mistake and so I went to the doctor and he turned me into a girl.”

Silence.

Isabel wriggled her toes and squirmed on the couch at my side.

Then she looked up at me: “Why is the story so short?”

And with these words, made of the air we share here in life, crystalized into memory within your mind, a moment containing forever that will leave the earth with you when we can be together no more, I am and will remain, with love, the moment you ultimately choose ~~

Your Next Breath

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Appendix

Passages in this book are inspired by works collected in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns.

Moment Two: Plato, Phaedrus.

Moment Three: Plato, Symposium.

Moment Four: Aristotle, Fear (from Rhetoric).

Moment Five: Ibid.

Moment Six: Introduction to Plotinus.

Moment Seven: Plotinus, Ennead I, Sixth Tractate.

Moment Eight: Ibid.

Moment Nine: Ibid.

Moment Ten: Ibid.

Moment Eleven: Plotinus, Ennead V, Eighth Tractate.

Moment Twelve: Introduction to St. Augustine.

Moment Thirteen: St. Augustine, De Ordine, Chapter Fourteen, and Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, The Origin of Love Out of Chaos.

Moment Fourteen: Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, The Origin of Love Out of Chaos.

Moment Fifteen: Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, God Is Goodness, Beauty, and Justice, the Beginning, Middle, and End.

Moment Sixteen: Ibid.

Moment Seventeen: Ibid.

Moment Eighteen: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Analytic of the Beautiful, First Moment.

Moment Nineteen: Ibid.

Moment Twenty: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Analytic of the Beautiful, Second Moment.

Moment Twenty-One: Ibid.

Moment Twenty-Two: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Third Book, Second Aspect.

Moment Twenty-Three: Ibid.

Moment Twenty-Four: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.

Moment Twenty-Five: Ibid.

Moment Twenty-Six: John Dewey, Art as Experience, Chapter I.

Moment Twenty-Seven: Ibid.

Moment Twenty-Eight: Ibid.

Moment Twenty-Nine: Ibid., Chapter III.

Moment Thirty: Ibid., Chapter XIV.

Moment Thirty-One: Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, The Work and Truth.