Bound into Day

Gerhard Richter, Ella (2007)

This is a piece from a longer work in progress.

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I remember fog resting on the pine branches. We sat on the balcony and drank orange juice. She made me pasta, and we talked as if it would always be this way. We painted each other’s toenails. I thought it was all safe. She was. I wasn’t. It never occurred to me that this would be the last time I’d be with her.

I know where she lives. Often, I’ve fantasized about breaking into her home. I wouldn’t steal anything, or maybe I would, because I deserve to. But I don’t think I would. Really. Just to smell her perfume, Dune by Dior.

When I let the daydream run, I am in her bathroom, staring into the mirror at my younger self. A green velvet jewelry pouch sits on the sink, and inside it is the ring her parents gave her when she was a teenager. I take the ring, leaving the pouch open.

***

Last night in my dream, we met in a hotel lobby. At a small table in this grand Art Deco room, you finally admitted it! Chandeliers cast light across our faces as we laughed, incredulous that you had wasted all these years keeping it from me. Now you can wear my necklace, and I can wear yours, so when you’re back in the Fatherland, we’ll still have something of each other. (I want to reassure you that I am married and don’t want to be with you at this point in my life; however, I am overjoyed you relented and met me here.)

“It’s been years of feverish dreams, and they were a hellish kind of hangover,” I explained, squeezing your hand, anticipating your fresh empathy. “They held me bound into day and wrung me fucking empty… and it was so lonely, because who could I tell?”

I know now that you had no idea how hard it was to carry you with me. Could a day pass without my thinking about you? Not if I noticed I hadn’t. Those were the good days; on the others, you were a thick, rusty wrench in the gut. God, I ached… and believe me, I wanted it to go away. This was not some kind of masochism.

Too bad the WiFi in the lobby wouldn’t load my wife Olga’s email. I wanted to hand you my phone and watch your face when you read it. She studied your photos while I translated your letters into English for her, and she hoped she could internalize you well enough to write me the closure I needed. It was kind and touching, and it made me cry, but we both knew it had to come from you.

By the way, I truly am sorry that all these years, it was me calling your landline every few months and hanging up. I wanted to know you were still there on the frosty green couch in your living room, where I could picture you.

I’m also sorry, or rather ashamed, about how I found your Belgian friend on Facebook. When Anna posted pictures from the Italian language school in Verona, spotting you was thrilling, like discovering a diamond tennis bracelet left in the sand.

“How in the world did you find Anna?” My sleuthing bemused you, and color rose in your cheeks. This, too, was ridiculous and funny.

So was the yellow blouse in the photo. I knew it looked familiar and realized I had seen it at Ann Taylor Loft (you had been in the States). Crazy how I found the same one on Poshmark and bought it, as if it could somehow connect us.

But the best was our laughter when I explained the metaphorical “man in Iraq.” Two seconds into the story, you knew it was also Carlos.

“Olga’s aunt had a ‘man in Iraq,’ the one and only person she dated, because she was gay.” I could barely get the words out because it felt so hilarious: the ubiquity, the fact it’s really “a thing.”

You might remember the guy in my apartment building at Union Square, and how, with an inauthentic wistfulness, I turned up my palm and described him as “the first adult I ever dated,” a phrase I borrowed from a friend who talked about her ex-husband this way.

Everyone like us had covers: the man in Iraq, a Chilean Carlos, and the first adult she ever dated.

Remember how we took the subway to the Ostbahnhof but rode in separate cars, so nobody would see us together? (God forbid someone from the university.) On the night train to Kraków, you wore purple pajamas that looked like silk and weren’t. Like a puppy, I curled up next to you on that board of a bed hanging from the wall, jerking under the dark Polish sky.

I can’t believe you and I went this long without sharing the truth.

Last night, before meeting you in my dream, I did something.

(Keep in mind I was unaware you’d be there, and never would have imagined we’d laugh and remark on how hysterical it was that we were both gay all along!)

Right before I put my phone away, I googled “grooming and emotional abuse.” After all these years, I started to wonder if your being seventeen years my senior and my professor might have given you an advantage. Maybe that’s why the laughter came so easily to you last night?

For fourteen years, you shut me out — no matter where I was or what I was doing. When I called to tell you my dad died, you screamed at me from 4,337 miles away and hung up the phone.

And I cannot believe we are so old that it’s been twenty-eight years since it all started. The muggy September afternoon in Dahlem, when you strode across the lawn toward me.

I had just turned nineteen, and at thirty-six, your face was dewy and rounder than it is now, but you were never chubby. I don’t remember noticing how crooked your teeth were until you sat across from me at dinner that night (I didn’t realize crooked teeth could be pretty). When I twisted too much spaghetti around my fork, the marinara splattered onto your sleeve.

Right before I woke up, I found myself in a meadow that looked like a screensaver, leaping over minty fields like a giddy leprechaun. Back in the lobby, our fingertips had almost touched across the white marble tabletop. There was no time to share that one last thing, the words that finally came to mind, the ones I typed into Google. I think I wanted to say them, and was on the cusp of it.

But when I woke up, I was relieved I didn’t.

(Maybe it’s my turn now.)