Summer Hiatus

At one point, he went outside the restaurant to have a smoke. I watched him, smoking, from my seat at the window table. It was chilly outside. Not frigid, probably somewhere close to freezing, but it was early November and there was no wind. He stood outside, I remember, one hand in the pocket of his jeans, the other holding his cigarette. He was watching the people going by him, and every now and then, he would turn and look at me watching him. We would both smile.

Anyway. Sex after Yves has not been the same for me. How could it be? It's funny that the black humour started up almost immediately. Within a day, my friends and I were making jokes about my ability to kill men by going out with them, how I'd have to warn all future dates about my abilities. And, one friend made the inevitable, obvious remark that had actually been so obvious I hadn't thought of it myself. "Wow," she said. "You really fucked his brains out."

Ouch.

It wasn't as if I thought that any man who touched me after Yves died was going to suffer his fate. I knew well enough that while lightning could strike the same place twice, I could be reasonably sure that it wasn't going to. It was more the sense of how can I imbue this act, this sexual act that means so much to me, with any kind of meaning now? When it has become the last thing that someone did, this sex, this mingling of bodies, of fluids? Jesus. There's always been a part of me that has tried to make sex something sacred. Not with everybody, of course. Sometimes, a fuck is just a fuck. But there have been times in my life when I have tried to bring myself closer to awe, to the whole, through sex. I don't mean finding my whole self. I am a whole self. I don't need to be completed by another person. I mean the whole as in that sense that there is something larger than oneself. That my body is this tiny, insignificant speck on a tiny planet in a vast universe. Hiking in the woods gets me to that place. So does sex. Some sex.

So, I had fucked other men after Yves died. But each time, it didn't really feel as if I was all there. Each time, I thought about him, and silently compared what was going on in that bed with what had gone on in his.

I don't feel as if I'm supposed to remain chaste. I did want to be Miss Havisham … for about five minutes. But I'm too much of the earth to let myself get stuck in a world without physical contact.

Instinctively, I knew what I was going to need to put me back into the center of my body. I needed to be with someone with whom I had a history, even if the story was more Grimm than Mother Goose. I chose a man about whom I had once written in my journal: "His loyalty lasts only as long as his refractory periods." But I had also written in the month after Yves died that "the urge to fuck is urgent. I am hungry, restless. I need to be pinned down, fucked while I scream and cry. I need the catharsis. I want rough sex. I want to be spanked. I need to be put back into my body, to be reconnected to the carnal, the breathing, the living. I am living with a ghost. I love that ghost and I don't want to give him up, but he cannot touch me. I miss him so much." Short, choppy, childlike sentences that demanded something of the world that seemed unattainable. As it turned out, the one person who I knew was capable of giving me what I sought played Hamlet, until, sick to death of the hesitation on his part, I told him to go fuck himself.

Winter of 2006 got off to a slow start. Many times, snow has fallen in November-sometimes even before Halloween-but November and December were mild. Grey. Bare trees, yellow grass, dull skies; I moved through a monochromatic world with a face contorted with grief palsy. I rarely cried. Instead, my face just felt set in a default position of "not:" Not happy. Not interested. Not here.

I scribbled notes. Months later, I keep finding them. Some are in my journal. Some are on my desktop computer at work. Some are on my laptop. Some are on pads of paper. It's bizarre, because there are some notes that I don't remember writing down. Clearly, I was functioning. I continued to teach, and care for my children, and perform the quotidian tasks that define us as social beings. But part of my brain had obviously checked out. Reading the little notes I find is like finding postcards from the dead. Here's something I wrote sometime in late November:

I feel as if I've dropped a box of marbles on a hardwood floor. They're rolling everywhere. They are my memories of Yves. I'm afraid I won't be able to gather them all up, that some will never be found again. Maybe years later, when someone is renovating the house, they'll find a single cat's eye underneath a floorboard and someone will wonder at its significance.

I remembered something today. There's a bag in my closet that I haven't opened in over five months. It's a silver-colored, heavy plastic bag, the kind of bag that you get from a clothing store. It was apparently a bag that Yves' mother had in her laundry room, or had been picked up off Yves' floor. Inside the bag are three items of clothing. When we went out to dinner that night, I was wearing black boots, black slacks, a red lycra camisole, a black cardigan, and pink silky panties.

At his apartment, he quickly stripped me down to my camisole and panties, and he laid me down on the bed. I was not passive; we were kissing, I remember, kissing and crab-walking together back through the hallway and around the corner and into his bedroom and then he lifted me up onto his bed. His bed was not up on a platform supported by legs, rather, the platform was suspended among four chains that were attached to intricately carved plates in the ceiling. He had told me that he had designed the bed, and it kind of felt like sleeping like that rock-a-bye baby in her treetop cradle.

Once I was on the bed, however, Yves managed to pull my clothes off, save my camisole and panties, and there I lay, reclining on my elbows as I observed him stripping off his pants and socks and sweater. He was in a teeshirt and jockey briefs, and he lay down beside me, kissed my face, my neck, my collar bone, his fingers tracing my skin. He shimmied his fingers underneath the legband of my panties, and I remember that I laughed because there was no mistaking how much I wanted him.

I have pulled the panties, the camisole, and the tee-shirt out of the bag. I bury my nose in them, and I can smell him in the clothes. I can smell just the tiniest hint of the perfume I wore that night, and I can smell the tobacco, and then, there's something else. It's not laundry soap, because that's there, too. And it's not death, because he was naked when he died. I bring the tee-shirt up to my face and I breathe in hard. A blow lands on my solar plexus, and for just an instant, I think that I can't breathe.

Migraine pain carves through my right cheekbone, my right eye. I see a picture of the Soviet flag, and I wonder what the association is. And then I remember: migraine is like "hammer and sickle" pain.

I fold up the tee-shirt, and shove the panties and camisole down into the bag, roll it up tightly, put it back in the closet.

A note. This is probably (I never say never) the last essay you'll see from me for a while. I have decided that this book, which is burning a hole through me and is forcing me to write and write and write, will be born this summer. I am in transitional labor, and all I can do is hold on and wait for the moment that I get to push.

I don't know if I should post this. It is SO private, and yet, this is the story that I have to tell.

So, this is TTFN, not GBCW. I'll see y'all later.

Much, much love. Lorraine

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