The Other Two Days I’m in Purgatory

At the beginning of this month, this year, I began to think of Julie as a sad thing of the past, an embarassment of my immaturity.  After all, there was Sandra now, and Jackie–possibilities, ways out of this now lustreless hell.  But there is no Sandra, and how seriously am I really considering Jackie when going to see her I’d hoped to see Julie?  Holidays, comp days, illness, and family emergencies conspired as well in the delusion:  Julie’s physical distance is my emotional distance.  She’s back, and I can’t be sure of anything, except that I still want her and will never have her, and that moving on emotionally and psychologically means moving on physically.  But I’m not going anywhere but to hell and back five times a week.

When Julie was not around this month, or I not around Julie, I had fictional May with whom I could sympathize and allow myself to try to understand.  I could listen to the band James and hear intelligent sensitivity.  With Julie at work again, James is preciously pretentious, overproduced and hopelessly stuck in the eighties.  Last month, before May came along, I gave up on Julie’s favorite band, Trashcan Sinatras, to the extent of taking the CD’s of them I owned to work and throwing them on the donations heap in the workroom, where they languished conspicuously for a couple weeks before I decided to take them back for “May” to listen to.  They weren’t there.  I suspect Julie of having taken them, finally, after initially vowing not to, herself suspecting correctly who put them there and fearing the notes that surely lurked inside them.  (This speculation is not as far-fetched as it appears.  My first conversation with Julie featured Trashcan Sinatras, and shortly trhereafter she lent me two CD’s.)  I left no notes.

May languishes now, but I hope the present long weekend affords me the distance from Julie that brings me closer to May.  I try to consider Julie as no more than a specimen, a model for May.  It is, of course, ironic that it is the only way I can empathize with either.  When I thought I was over Julie I thought I would also lose my motivation to tell the story, much as I thought when I began the story that I would lose motivation to continue Satellite Dance.  I fight both ideas.  May cannot be real without Julie, but cannot be real enough without a full transference of emotional attachment, and that would seem to entail a detachment from my hopes of Julie loving me, the true “sad thing of the past” I had thought was Julie just a month ago.  If I can’t have Julie, I can have May, but what new girl wants the old girl hanging around? especially when the only thing keeping her around is the boy?

What Is This Position Called? and Can I Ever Hope to Get Out of It Again?

After all, maybe there’s Jackie.

The weekend after Christmas, Matt invited me over for dinner.  He also invited Chris, who I hadn’t seen since his party Memorial Day, when I’d hoped to see Jackie.  In the second grade, when I was still an outgoing kid, Jackie was my “girlfriend.”  On the side of my house one day after school, Jackie asked, “May I hold your hand?”  “Okay,” no big deal.  I didn’t see her over the summer.  When the school posted the new rolls on the classroom windows in August, I couldn’t find her name.  Until I moved into the city five years later, I didn’t know where she’d gone.  Once again, we shared a neighborhood, but in the ten years I lived there, I never saw her, never went to the same school.

Chris had a Super Bowl part in 2006 (2007?–the last year Jerome Bettis was with them).  When Jackie walked in we were introduced.  She said, “Didn’t you used to be Kevyn’s brother?”  “I still am,” I answered, not a little peeved at the second-hand recognition, but amused by its wording.

At dinner, Chris said to me, “Jackie was asking about you.  She was real sorry to miss my party, because she’d hoped to see you.”  “I had hoped to see her, too,” I said.  Wow.  Interest.  Mutual interest!

Chris dropped me off home that evening.  I told him as I left the car, “Would you tell Jackie I asked after her.”  “Sure.  I’ll see her Saturday.”  So it’s been how long?  Four weeks?

Back in the summer, I overheard Julie tell Tammy she’d brought her a brochure from a yoga studio.  “Yeah,” she said.  “I sometimes ride my bike in Bryan Park, and then I go to this coffee shop I like on MacArthur….”  Stir Crazy.  She was talking about Stir Crazy, the scene of that humiliating non-date of ours.  How could she go back there, much less claim it as a favorite of her own?

Monday was a holiday, for Martin Luther King.  Though Stir Crazy is nine miles away, I was determined to get there, despite Caffespresso being within walking distance.  I’d already had my coffee and it was already three when I was ready to go, but I’d finished my errands–dishes, clothes, groceries–and had the rest of the day free and clear.  This yoga studio is at the opposite end of the short retail strip from Stir Crazy.  Jackie, a massage therapist, works there.  I hadn’t really come for the coffee.

I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Jackie–I couldn’t form her face from memory–but I knew who I was looking at when two women stopped in front of the coffee shop between my bike and me inside:  The long chestnut hair curling lazily at the ends, the sharp nose, the spark shooting from the eyes nearly buried in the wrinkles of an open-mouthed smile.  They didn’t come in but continued on.  I leisurely finished the americano I hadn’t needed and followed.

The two women were at the counter.  I acknowledged the one I didn’t know, bashful at the possibility of recognition.  (Much as I wanted it, I was afraid of giving away the game.)  I asked for information, and Jackie moved away, down the hall.  Helen gave me a brochure and explained the various classes.  The only one that fit my schedule was Jackie’s.  Helen asked me what brought me in, and, stumbling in my mind over the urge to confide my pretense, I finally mumbled, “I can’t say.”  Whether Helen sensed an ulterior motive or just chalked up my havering to a muddy mind, she did not press me but immediately offered me a tour.  In each room of the converted post office I looked first for Jackie.  When we found her and were introduced, Jackie’s eyes flashed.  “Burns?”  I didn’t correct her.  “Um-hmm.”  I made no pretense at the “surprise” of finding her here.  We hugged.  Helen left the rest of the tour to Jackie.  I reminded Jackie of the Super Bowl remark and she laughed at herself.  She gave me her card and we hugged at parting.

I know this sounds dangerously like pursuit, and I won’t deny that it is, but I actually have been seeking yoga instruction for quite awhile.  Of course, I might still be seeking if I hadn’t found Jackie at it, but she’s as good a reason as any to end that particular pursuit.  Don’t think that I’m going to push the love agenda, either.  I’m not in love with Jackie and will not pretend to be so.  I don’t know Jackie yet.  Maybe I can’t fall in love with her, but maybe I can enjoy a friendship.  The hope is there, of course, but I’ll give awareness precedence over expectation and appreciate what’s given me.  Maybe.  I hedge my bets on the future against the lessons of the past and the realities of the immediate.

I Didn’t Land on Razor Blades, But the Fall Was Farther Than Expected

Melissa wrote me back.  No, no exclamation point, either of despair or elation.  “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I know for sure that Sandra is only interested in friendship right now.”  I wrote back, “That’s not such bad news.  Thanks for getting back to me.”  That was the best I could do–mask my disappointment with blandness.  Melissa went on to suggest that I “friend” Sandra on Facebook.  I doubt I’ll do that.  I may not have gotten my hopes up high enough to make the news a crushing blow, , but to readjust my hope is tantamount to accepting the second choice, and I just don’t do second choices.

James, upon finding that Kristen, the most recent woman he’s fallen in love with, is gay, has seemed to have accepted both the impossibility of a romance with her and the possibility of a friendship with her, and has struck a rapport with her.  Whatever it takes to be able to do that I don’t have.  The best I can do is know that and not inflict it upon anyone else.  Perhaps in time I can grow that special ability of James’, but in the meantime I can at least hope to find someone whose flaws are complementary to my own, mutually neutralizing and sympathetic.  I s that really what this about? a balance of flaws?  A balance of flaws must also be a balance of strengths, and that is a completeness.  Haven’t I always known that?  I know a lot of things.  I have accepted very few of them, stubbonly clutching contrived principles to my chest as if I could press them into my heart.  The heart knows, but I don’t know my heart.

Maybe it’s backwards; maybe it’s about what will work for me; but I want to find friendship with a woman through love.  Is that the first acceptance I have to make?  The first principle to let go of, then, would be the one that states it works the other way round.  I don’t know how my heart feels about this, but I can’t let my head simply invert the principle.  I’m already thinking too much about it. 

I have not fallen in love with Sandra, and I may never attempt to make her my friend, but it is not a connection I’ll sever.  It wasn’t such bad news, after all.

Risking Life In Limbo

I followed through on my two vows.

I talked to Julie.  It was nearly as difficult as the time I asked her out, but I finally spit out, “Julie, how is your mom doing?”  “Not very well,” she answered, turning to me.  “She’s in hospice care.  All we can do is keep her comfortable.”  “How are you holding up?”  A patron interrupted before she answered.  I let it go, but when the patron left, Julie said, “I’m hanging in there.”  No more was said by either of us to the other while we were out on the desk.

I was right about how I would feel–relieved, a bit righteous, humble, hopeful.  I wanted this to be the end of things, the beginning of better things.  I had put the ball at her feet and wanted her to play.  Four days later, I still don’t know if anything has changed.  Until yesterday she still wouldn’t meet my gaze and when she finally did today it was with that defiant glare I’ve come to know all too well–chin tipped upward, jaw clenched square.  Yet yesterday she had opened and held a door for me and my cart of juvenile non-fiction.  I looked at her, thanked her.  She smile and replied, and I stared at her.  Still she smiled.  I’d missed that smile more than I realized.  I devoured it.  I missed the doorway and banged the frame.  But now?…

I wrote Melissa on Facebook two nights ago.  I have not heard back, and the worst assumptions grow in my mind:  My message didn’t go through; or she knows that Sandra doesn’t care for me and doesn’t know how to tell me.   I can’t imagine a best-case scenario, and it’s difficult to even consider the realistic, neutral possibilities.  The longer it takes to hear back from Melissa the less worthy I feel to be in a relationship.  I’m steeling myself for bad news.  But as I imagine, with apprehension, waking up with morning breath beside someone, I also think of those things I said I want–someone to talk to and be and do things with–and there’s that hope that the positives, if they become real, will melt the negatives.

I hope they would also melt my feelings for Julie.  Listening to Belle and Sebastian last week, I nearly convinced myself I was still in love with her.  I can’t quite trace the mental path that brought me so close to that conviction, but I think it began with the character May of my novel, who is modelled after Julie.  I’ve begun to feel very close to the character empathetically, and I think I began to wonder if I could feel that way without being in love with Julie.  Then came that defiant glare of hers yesterday, and I just became angry.  Whatever my feelings for Julie, I would expect a meaningful relationship with another woman to extinguish the most passionate of them and leave me with, at least, indifference.

I am out of vows for now; until these two are reacted upon I don’t know what to do.  There are no contingencies.  I hope my life means more than waiting for women to talk to me.

Unless Maybe a Bed of Razor Blades Cushions My Fall

Matt and Hinckley both have exhorted me to not let my attraction to Sandra lapse in inaction.  Coming from two men with no more romantic experience than myself, the advice was surprising–until I thought about it.  Matt and Hinckley (James from now on) were speaking from experience, but from an experience of regret of having n0t done what they now urge me to do.  As I have been reticent to attach importance to my attraction to Sandra, so was I reserved in telling my friends about my New Year’s Eve encounter.  But I told them, so my coolness did not fool them, because they know I don’t speak to fill a silence or hear my own voice (or to read my own words, in James’ case).  Matt and James support me as friends do–with the greatest, most honest empathy.  Their hopes for me are my own.  Matt has been married more than twenty years.  James, twenty years our junior, has not been married, but has been passionately but unrequitedly in love twice in the nearly fours years I’ve known him.  Matt doesn’t want me to play it so cool that it grows cold.  “If she is attracted to you,” he said, “the longer you wait to try to find that out, the more she’ll believe you aren’t interested in her.”  James told me, “If this is to happen, you will have to take at least one other step in the direction of making it happen.”  Faith isn’t going to do it.  Zen isn’t going to bring Sandra into my orbit.  I found Sandra on Melissa’s Facebook page, and I looked at her photo self-portrait on her page.  I lingered on it.  It was all I could see; her page was private.  I didn’t solicit her online “friendship.”  This was before my friends’ double-barrelled exhortation to action.  I’m still not prepared to contact Sandra.  What I am prepared to do is contact Melissa and ask her if Sandra has expressed any interest in me.  Not daring, but  a step forward and no chance of rejection–for the fear of rejection has been at the heart of my reticence:  I wasn’t sure I could handle it.  I’m not sure still, but the longer I wait to do anything, the higher hopes climb and the greater the difficulty in reaching them.  If I jump now, the fall can’t hurt me.

Julie-Bitten, Twice Shy

I’m trying not to think of Sandra.

Big sister Kevyn took me to a party New Year’s Eve.  Eight people, she said.  I wouldn’t be able to hide (I said). She reeled off the names–nobody I knew.  On the way there I began to dread the event.  I felt out of place for awhile, but everyone was genuinely friendly, and I relaxed without having to tell myself to.  Everyone had known each other for some time, so points of reference in conversation were often implied and I found little footing.  Before I was drawn into talk I noticed there were only seven of us.  When Sandra showed up it was a while before she joined the group, possibly talking to Melissa in the kitchen.  She had not hailed greetings when she came in, so I assumed she was not the eighth but maybe Nadal and Melissa’s daughter, because at the first, brief, glimpse she appeared much younger than anyone else there, and I was the youngest.  When someone plunked down beside me on the narrow wicker loveseat, I did not expect to see a new face when I turned my head that way.

I really don’t (I think) want to think of Sandra.  We had a first-date kind of conversation–kids, jobs, etc.–and I felt a creeping suspicion that this was some kind of set-up.  I didn’t let that suspicion creep too deep.  I knew I couldn’t continue to have this conversation if I blew up the whole scene into a conspiracy.  It was tempting to jokingly bring attention to the suspicion, but I didn’t see a win in that effort.  But by the end of the evening it was too late.  Kevyn and I were the first to leave, and by then I felt as if I’d been adopted by a new family–hugs all around, until Sandra and I were face-to-face, and then it was muttered, polite farewells as we dug our toes into the schoolyard dirt and avoided eye contact.  On the way home I said to Kevyn, “Sandra’s a very attractive woman.”  Kevyn only said, “Yes, she is a beautiful woman.”  I ventured no further, either that night or the next day before Kevyn left for Staunton.

Melissa, our hostess, friended me on Facebook, and I thanked her, in turn, for the hospitality. I struggled to find a way to mention or ask about Sandra without seeming obvious, but I knew there was no way and so left off altogether.  It occurs to me now that if Sandra is on Facebook she’s on Melissa’s friends list, and I wish I’d remained clueless on that count.

I’m afraid of a lot of things right now.  They may all be one thing, but I can’t trace it to its roots, or even chase the branches to the trunk.  I don’t want to commit to what isn’t a sure thing.  I don’t want my desires whitewashing the realities, sending hope soaring without wings over a beautiful precipice and falling into love.  I’ve not quite fallen back behind rational ramparts–I know my emotions must be served–but I can’t help being cautious after Julie.  Though Sandra and I enjoyed a rapport that Julie and I never had, it was, still, just a conversation.  Perhaps that’s where love starts, but I’ll not presume that this is such a case.

I’m afraid of losing Julie, too, though in what way that I haven’t already, I’m not sure.  Dammit, she still fascinates me, but that might come down simply to the impossibility of ever satisfying my curiosity about her.  In Sandra’s light, Julie seems almost a child to me now, missing a certain maturity or wisdom that would prevent her from ever connecting with me beyond mutual points of interest.  That saddens me immensely.  I’ve tried many times to make eye contact with Julie this week, but she refuses.  I’ve already vowed to not let our next desk hour together be silent, regardless of the hopes of my heart.  I’m not eager to talk to her–there’s almost nothing to say–but this is a horrible way for two people to treat one another.  If she can’t rise above it, I have to.

Maybe I really would rather be thinking of Sandra regardless of where it takes me.  It can only be a better place.  What’s wrong with hope?  There’s always a better world ahead than behind, real or not.  And what does it hurt? except maybe my next encounter with Sandra, when I might not be able to get my teeth out of the way of my tongue.  So what–a chance I’ll take.  I’ll think of Sandra if my mind wanders there (and I will let it); I just won’t tell anyone about it.  That has not been hard to do with Stacey’s example before me.  No cry-wolf humiliation for me.  Thinking about Sandra won’t make me fall in love with her.  Knowing her might, but right now that’s a galaxy far, far away.