rounds

Row, row, row your boat…

At the end of last summer, I had an affair. As the summer days took that barely perceptible slide into autumn, the light falling earlier and less lemony from the sky, the evenings tinged with the tang of decay, as we all in the Northeast, at least, began to wrap ourselves in the occasional sweater and saltysweet nostalgia of summer’s passing, I met, seduced and slept with another man, a man different from Donny.

It wasn’t as if I had been looking for him, this other man, but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been either. In the fade-to-grey area of my unconscious, I had been fantasizing about another, and in the Technicolor world of my reality, I found him.

He, conveniently, lived otherwhere. He was, not uncomfortably, married. We met once, we kissed, and I held that kiss in my mind, rolling its illicit and serendipitous pleasure around and around like a lemon drop. I replayed it, each delicious nanosecond of it, slow-mo-ed it in the remote of my memory: the expectation of a convivial hug, the surprise of close-pressed summer-sweat flesh on a crowded daylit street, the pliant wet of his open mouth, the marinade of hand-rolled cigarette and saliva, the shock of the new, the pleasureguilt of the not unforbidden.

He was married; I was dating Donny. It was a kiss this man planted on my mouth, and in my mind, it bloomed.

Gently down the stream….

This man and I wrote to each other. Long lust-laden electronic conversations, and they pushed the blooming kiss to become a burning bush. Finally, he would be in my city again. Finally, we would have the chance to make corporeal the fantasies we’d spun in ethered words. Finally, we met again.

But first I broke with Donny. I made the lingering wanderlust my excuse, but there was more. Donny was holding back, but so was I, and so I took this excuse and ran away with it. I can’t say I fucked up, exactly, though this breaking off did give Donny many bricks for his emotional walls, but I definitely fucked.

We fucked, this man and I, in an anonymous commercial room on an anonymous commercial block in this easily incognito and unapologetically mercenary city. It was as nervous and furtive as most illicit copulations, though it followed a script of our own making. And while the sexual antics fell short of our linguistic acts, they didn’t fall so short that we didn’t do it again and again and again.

And some of the fucking was good—very good—though to be explicit and honest, two things to which I strive here on my pretty dumb things, very little of what we did was actual fucking. There was a lot of sucking and touching, but we didn’t seem to copulate as much as fellate and manipulate. Nonetheless, it was often very, very pretty indeed, even for all its adolescent sheen.

We had long and pyrotechnic brilliant conversations, this man and I, in the flesh and outside of it. We seemed to legitimately enjoy one another’s company, which might seem a weird thing to say, except that so often people do not. Yet I found negotiating the whole rocky terrain of this married man landscape tiresome and anxiety-provoking. At the same time, Donny and I reconciled, grew closer, more open and honest and trusty.

Merrily, merrily, merrily…

I broke it off, this undefinable relationship, this relationship thid other man and I shared that was not an affair and not not an affair, this fade-away amour. And we became friends, as X-lovers do, which is in itself a tenuous and faintly itchy friendship, a friendship as skittish as cats, scented as it is with the faint tang of jealousy, of unrequited lusts, of unfinished business.

We met again and again, this man and I, as friends. We talked about our lives and our relationships, mine with Donny, his with his wife. We had lunch and I drank lemonade. He flirted, I resisted. The thrill, for me, wasn’t gone, but it was diminished, turned low as with the precision of the flame of a  chemist’s burner.

Gently down the stream…

Then the moment came when I realized that this man was having an affair with another. I could tell from a change of tone, a shift in his writing, a new subtext that his attentions were somewhere else, and I knew, knew with the unfathomable certainty of a physicist, that he had fallen in love.

Our conversations became fewer; our meetings, always infrequent, became tenuous—the time came when he was in my city and neither of us seemed able to pick up the phone and call one another to make plans to see one another.

We had become acquaintances well acquainted with one other.

When I took the time to take my internal temperature, I found I was ok about it. There was, if I checked, the brief low-heat quick flicker and flare of an insubstantial jealousy, and then it was gone. In its place was a gentle loss, a quiet, even unmurmuring, not quite longing.

Row, row, row your boat…

I had moved on, I found when I inspected the Byzantine walls of my interior self. And while I had been marked by this man, by the articulations of new desire, by the deftness of our cerebral touch and the awkwardness of our adolescent fumblings, by the experience as a whole, I found that I had but one man in my head and my heart and my loins, much as I’d tried to distract myself from his unilateral hold. That man, of course, is Donny, whose song I hear more clearly as this other, rounding and looping in and on itself slowly, inexorably has faded away to near silence.

Comments

[amer geisha]

This entry helped me so much. Thank you.

[bulls_bollocks]

I have a completely different take - I was getting my hopes up at first.

Donny is lucky.

[KtotheE]

My GOD you're a good writer, girl.

[Tea]

What a fucking great piece of writing! "...the Byzantine walls of my interior self..." Oh my god.
Thank you for this. I bow low in respect.

[chelsea girl]

A.G., I'm glad I could help, though I'm not sure how.

B.B., I'm sorry I didn't, though I'm not sure why.

KtotheE and Tea, get up off your knees, you silly noodles. Stand up straight. Shoulders back. Stop fidgeting.

And thanks so much.

kissykiss,
chelsea girl

[Septguy]

Nice piece...it reminded me of lovers of the past..mm..the rush of those moments.

[Doll]

I love how you wrote this piece. And the use of a children's song. So simple- yet it fits so well...

Nice to show how the journey grew and you did as well...

[Owen]

Damn, just damn. No one should be able to write like this, unless of course it was me. But artistry of this caliber is much more than the pleasing arrangement of words; any wit can accomplish that with some reading and a bit of effort. To write as you do requires more than facility, honesty, and the courage to be explicit: it requires a greatness of soul that can apprehend the fullness of each experience and a depth of mind to capture the smallest and most crucial details.

Such words as I can command cannot convey in any but the smallest measure my gratitude for the gifts you share with us. So perhaps I should put you my Will.