“You look so pretty in this moonlight, Love,” you say.
“Yes, and if we were kids I would try to kiss you.”
You kiss her a little. She looks at you grinning, blinking this way then that way, droplets of water jeweled about her eyelashes.
“Now go away. My breath is bad,” she says.
“And here I was worried about mine,” you say, returning your hands to the chalky banister in the lamp-lit apartment pool that is always desolate by evening.
“If we were kids, I would have actually played with you,” you say. “I wouldn’t have ever tried to pull down your bathing suit or anything.”
“I know. I would’ve played with you, too.”
You look up at the holey baby-blanket clouds, through this the nearly full moon. In Los Angeles the stars seem not only afar and unearthly, but mostly they hide. It’s different with the moon. The moon is an old friend, and it’s all you get at night besides street lights and fog.
“Would you have played mermaid with me?” she says, testing your limitations, divining whether childhoods are attuned—if you can handle mermaid.
Since nearly six years with her and you know the sound of her questions—you love the sound of them. You do not know mermaid, but you know her and you know it will be good.
“Are you kidding? I would have loved to play mermaid.” You don’t betray that you have never heard of mermaid, of course, or that your game is Aquaman.
Suddenly you realize a sensual magic behind your sternum—surprising how it resonates in you like a singing bowl—and all at once, as though knowing all along.
But of course, dunderhead! Mermaid—it’s all so clear now!
A majority of boys in swimming pools are roughhousers and loud, some squeal, some croak things like: “I’m open! Derrek! I’m open!”—some SuperSquirt pool water at your eyeball and make fart sounds with their armpits. They pee freely.
No girl has knowingly told any of those boys about mermaid.
The girl who tells you about mermaid loves you and trusts you—or is about to see right through you, so do not bring up mermaid, do not ask about it, savor the fact that it might never be whispered in your ear—strive to be worthy of an unveiling.
It is no light thing to know the name of the game, so how much more wondrous is the invitation to play?
You are another kind of boy. You know some girl-games without knowing the exact rules. You prefer this company, in fact, and other boys misunderstand it in you.
“How do you play?” you say, just to make sure.
But you already see the ocean expanding out from you all around—and waves crashing and then bubbles, bright coral and black lava beneath you. Starfish. And you think of kelp and schools of whatever those orange ones are, and electric eels.
“Kelp—seaweed,” you say as it brushes underfoot—undertail.
You are surprised by the vision and the feeling, something familiar years ago, something you forgot. You expect this part of your imagination to be like a sticky rubber band at the back of a dusty drawer, smelling like gun oil and shoe polish. The band may stretch, but only in a manner of speaking. You are surprised at just how far it stretches.
“I would be a merman, and we—wait, do I need to be a mermaid?”
“No. You would be a merman and protect me,” she says, smiling.
“Yes, you would be my wife, okay?”
“Yes. Do you know how mermaids swim?”
“Do mermen swim the same way?”
“Well, I think I can, but let me see you do it first.”
She is alight and feeling you. The tension in her shoulders is covered over with shimmering scales, and lazy kelp overgrows the family scrapes and the impending move up north.
She glides away from the edge of the shallow end, clasps her ankles together swoops her tail-fin and sinks underwater clumsily, popping up wide-eyed and smiling, blowing water out her mouth, wiping the hair out of her eyes.
But you see the little girl, the same now as then. You love her in a new way, a longer hall with more pictures way. She looks at you, and you remember when first you saw her, in early school green-blue eyes blur—eyelids seven-eighths open—the dark and depth that waited for someone. How she’d got everyone’s number so quickly. How she was an intimidating twelve, an angry sixteen—but still hoping all things, believing all things. Waiting.
Now that you know her real story, the reality, the front put up to face facts. Well, some people are so afraid what other people think no matter what (even their own kids) they would rather you suffer, too. They’ll punch you in the tummy then call you a fag—and they rarely change later on.
As those school days progressed into longer tests and more complications, the furtive looks diminished—as sometimes she left to her mom’s for an entire school year. And other times she just had a different homeroom and pathways around campus, but the same curious flutters escaped fleeting, and like breath just to think of her.
It was so fragile and gentle and aching just to try to find her around.
Will she be near the hill? by the library at her locker? behind this corner if you turn it? And you’ll turn it.
You’d spend whole days looking to fill the hollow up with a long gaze (cut short if she caught it) so you’d act cool and it started all over—like playing your song on repeat.
It’s just that you don’t realize her friend has a car, and they don’t stick around at lunchtime.
Somehow time, science, maybe just understanding stood in the way of the greatness of your way together. You figured maybe your parents would never approve. And now you can only live it by guessing.
Besides, the gaps seemed so treacherously wide back then, too wide for your youth to bridge. And, of a truth, before you’ve been really hurt—and I really mean really—there is nothing to reveal that dimension in you, and you don’t see it in expression with anyone else, so it’s lost until it’s discovered.
You may feel it brush against you from time to time, and make more out of movies or books than is there. You may even write a poem or two about it, but you can never speak very clearly on the subject. You just haven’t earned it yet, baby.
“Well, I can’t do it right now,” she says, self-conscious.
“Are you supposed to move your body like this? Like a seal?” your hand and arm do a break-dance move.
“Yes, but I just haven’t done it in a while.”
“It’s easier with a real tail fin, or flippers or something, probably. So I guess I can go out and hunt for dinner with my trident and then bring it back to you?”
“Yes, and I’d thrash around in the water wrestling the great-white or a killer orca whale, and defeat it with the Sword of Narwhal.” You brandish the weapon briefly, she notes. “I wouldn’t always win, you know? I would get injured in some battles and then you could nurse me back to health, okay?”
She nods and smiles and a familiar excitement rushes around in your forearms and elbows and just above the elastic of your trunks. You imagine the nursemaid cradle the beaten bloody merman, floating near to death along the edges of chipped coping.
Poor dear, drink this, it will make you better—there there, my poor baby.
Parents grow shift-ish in uncomfy lounge chairs with nothing to talk about already, listening hard for any peep of pre-sex safety valves blowing off steam. Oh, the weird kids are just pretending to be fish or something.
Parents miss all the good parts because they forget—and besides, that’s not how merfolk have babies—merbabies just show up in the story, more lovely than scientific.
The problem with science being its impatience with spirituality and emotional life. Not the all, but the risk of all, and you have to figure residual because it gets on you, then in you, then rolls around on your feeling-buttons pushing on them so they beep, uncomfortable, irrational, a little confused.
And it leaves something behind you can only attempt to forget, but never succeed to forget. It changes you a lot—and a lot are afraid of change.
What chilled soul could refuse that merbaby grip on the end of his pinkie? Who would forgo that catch of breath, no matter how short or shallow, seeing her eyebrows raise loving when you cradle the finned infant?
But what of tears? that’s where it’s refused more often—those tears of recognition when finally seeing you look back at you in a mirror, not your father or your mother or brother or a concept of God—appreciating the success of a good struggle—apprehending the sex of a good love.
When at last you see how wrong you’ve been—or the interminable length and implications of your errors—or you realize for the first time your friends only just tolerated you—or when Simon Peter’s trade exposed all his doubts.
But you still see the little girl, the same now as then.
And it makes you say love-things like: I wish I would have known you better. I would have asked you to marry me in secret. I would have written love letters to you in Sunnyvale.
You love her childhood photos as deeply as the one standing forty-three before thee, while you—forty-two—see an underwater castle in the stairs of a swimming pool.
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