It was early afternoon and her sweater was the same color as her skin. I don’t remember what we talked about. I don’t remember most of her. Just flashes:
Rain on the windows of a parked car. Her eyes, her nose, her lips. Like powder. A Tibetan sand painting. Ephemeral.
A walk through dark constructions sites. I have a sketchbook. Why?
Bare walls of starter apartment. A futon on the floor. Languid breathing. God, had I tried to cook?
Bad revelations, but she’s understanding. Even sweet.
Rejected at Subway; a pithy shrug. “You’re just —“
Nighttime call in the dead of winter. I pretend not to remember her.
Another call, years later. I am lugging a bike up three flights of stairs and holding the phone to my ear with a shrugged shoulder.
We go for a walk. It’s about two miles, and she’s wearing new shoes. She finishes barefoot. She’s bleeding by the end of it.
Years later and a thousand miles away she reads a book on Caravaggio by the window looking out on Brooklyn. I sit in the corner, roiling in my anxiety, my ears pricking each time she turns a page.
More years. We prowl the museum, admiring the work of a Japanese printmaker who specialized in rendering monkeys. That was his whole life: learning the ins and outs, the subtleties of expression. Monkeys.
Life is sculpted. Time is clay and attention is a little garrote wire. I can look back now and say that the attention I gave her was simultaneously too much and not nearly enough.
When I left her in the lurch on that bleak St. Patrick’s day my mind was made up. I was letting it all go. I’d scrabble in the trash until the city killed me and it almost did. I gave up the apartment, the art, the records. All the junk. I went to ground. Slept in warehouses and flops. Walked the streets till dawn, living from rip-off to rip-off, high the whole time. By the time I got slashed with that box cutter I was already on the way back up. In the end, it was undramatic. I just got sick of it. I moved back home and reapplied for a driver’s license.
If I ever loved anyone I loved her. It’s horrible.
Now I’m middle-aged. People say I don’t look it. I think that’s because my life is a series of incomplete journeys. I always leave before the end. I never say goodbye.
Now I’m heavy. I’m chained. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to and I’m not even sure I want to. For better or worse, I am committed. I’m grooved to run on Ahab’s iron rails — at least until I’m thirty-nine.
The painter reads me a passage from the Bahgavad Gita. It recommends disciplined action without thought to outcome. Press forward, keep working. Especially in periods of ambiguity. It’s not just him. Everyone seems to boil things down to aphorisms these days; self-help platitudes.
Was Neil Postman right? Are we losing our facility for complex thought? Am I just an idiot? Why has my social life turned into a full-cast revival of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life? Has anyone even checked with the Hofstadter estate? Are we, all of us, in violation of the law of copyright?
One night, years ago, I was sharing a cab with two women from the fashion industry (I was, briefly, a model). Fitness was the rage at the time and they talked about starting a gym routine while we passed between the dark warehouses of Bushwick, empty aside from the minor infestations assembled for the usual rituals: DJs and art shows, film screenings, bands. The bit of the moment was “gains,” making them, tracking them, posting them. “Forget the gains,” I said. “I’m out here to make some losses.”
And so I am.