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Yet the real damage was not in the cutting words she wished she hadn’t spoken and that I would never forget. The damage was to our love: it had lost its warmth, its spontaneity, and become a willed, conscious, rueful love. She was pleased to see I still loved her; I was pleased to see how readily both she and I were fooled. The two of us were aware of being pleased, which intensified our truce. But we must have sensed that being so easily reassured was nothing more than a dilution of our love.
Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, which he’d just discovered that spring and shared with no one but me. My father played Schnabel’s recording every evening, so that Schnabel’s piano resonated throughout the house and became the sound track of that year. I liked the sixth variation, he the nineteenth, but the twentieth was all about mind, and the twenty-third, well, the twenty-third was probably the liveliest, funniest thing Beethoven ever composed, he said.
You could keep doing this as his forefathers had done, day in and day out, hour after hour, year after year. We make assumptions about how our lives are being charted without knowing that we’re even making these assumptions—which is the beauty of assumptions: they anchor us without the slightest clue that what we’re doing is trusting that nothing changes. We believe that the street we live on will remain the same and bear its name forever. We believe that our friends will stay our friends, and that those we love we’ll love forever. We trust and, by dint of trusting, forget we trusted.
didn’t understand what devi meant that day. But thinking back now to that one word and to the way he’d spoken it, I must have sensed somewhere that this was the first time in my life that someone had treated me not as the child I still was or as a child who’d stayed out playing with friends one evening without letting his parents know he’d be late for supper, but as someone who on that very hour had strayed from being just a boy to becoming a desirable young man, who had tempted, maybe even threatened, someone quite older. On that day, without knowing the first thing, I’d been let into
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Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I’ve lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times
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Sometimes work gets in the way. Work keeps me busy. Work is my screen. My whole life is a screen. I am a screen. The real me has no face, no voice, isn’t always with me. Like thunder after lightning, the real me could be many, many miles away. Sometimes, there is no thunder. Just lightning and then silence. When I see you, there’s lightning and then silence.
He’s the one person who’d understand the inflections of what I felt, the sting and the salve braided together like twin serpents going at each other. This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.
Partner. With that one word you not only tore down my flimsiest and untold fantasies; you also shattered the romance I’d been coddling for two years. All I could do now was hold fast to the wreckage of what were mere illusions.
struggled to remember the raw fantasies, but their stirring sound track had gone dumb. All I was left with after hearing the p word was a collapsed house of cards, which it had taken me forever to build. What was inside that house, or why I had built it, or what storms it was meant to withstand, or which pleasures it hoped to billet—all gone. A mere nothing, and it was finished. And here our story ends.
“I know what clothes you wear, I know the color of every single tie you own, I know that you put on your socks after, not before, putting on your trousers, I even know that you occasionally use collar stays, that you button your shirt from the bottom up, and I know that I want to know you for the rest of my life. I want to see you naked every night. I want to watch you brush your teeth, watch you shave, I want to be the one to shave you when you don’t want to shave, I want to be in the shower with you, I want to rub lotion on your knees, your arms, your inner thighs, your feet, your dainty
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Once home, I go online to look for your picture again. I stare at your face. You are smiling, faintly, possibly at me. I want to close the page but I can’t stop staring. All I want is to look at you, touch your face, I want this face to be in my house, my office, my life. I want it so much that I am suddenly gripped by the worst fear: tomorrow morning you won’t show up. I’ll be there, waiting, and you won’t come. I’ll wait for you, and keep waiting, even if you’re two, three, four hours late, I’ll wait in the afternoon and by evening still say I shouldn’t stop waiting. I don’t know why I’ll
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‘Learn to see what’s not always there to be seen and maybe then you’ll become someone.’
He lived in a future that wouldn’t be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn’t been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward. I felt for him.
“If you die, there’ll be nothing left, nothing at all. But you know this.” She was silent. “If you’re not there, it would be as if a huge zero suddenly fell on top of me.” “But we’re never even there for each other.”
But that reasoning perhaps was as much a mask as the others. In the end, and without ever admitting it to myself, I’d grown to love serving two masters—perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.
