Saturday, December 9, 2023

The Best Books I Read in 2023

Resuming an interrupted tradition: the year's highlights, listed alphabetically, by author. With a pride of place given to 2023's revelations, lodestars: Annie Ernaux, Jon Fosse, and Clarice Lispector:

Fiction and Poetry

By Annie Ernaux

A Man's Place

A Woman's Story

Simple Passion

The Years

The Young Man


By Jon Fosse

Aliss at the Fire

Morning and Evening

Scenes from a Childhood

The Shining

Trilogy


By Clarice Lispector

Near to the Wild Heart

The Hour of the Star

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crónicas


Only Yesterday, by S. Y. Agnon

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley

Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart 

The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton

Swag, by Elmore Leonard

Paradais, by Fernanda Melchor

Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Dream Story, by Arthur Schnitzler

Selected Poems, by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Chilean Poet, by Alejandro Zambra


NonFiction

The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine N. Aron

Nothing Personal, by James Baldwin

Faith, Hope, and Carnage, by Nick Cave

Existential Kink, by Carolyn Elliot

The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Maté

Life's Work, by David Milch

The 12 Week Year, by Brian P. Moran

Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami

Existentialists and Mystics, by Iris Murdoch

Come as You Are, by Emily Nagoski

Letter to a Young Poet, by Maria Rainer Rilke (trans. by Damion Searls)

The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin

La Seduction, by Elaine Sciolino

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

La Femme

She's at his window, smoking. Her hair up. Wearing a simple dress, green, tight-fitting, showing a figure that would be the envy of many women half her age. Black combat boots, black glasses.

Abruptly: "Putain!" She's trembling with outrage, looking down at the street. She releases a torrent of curses in French out the window.

"What's up?" he says. He goes to her.

She points with the hand holding her cigarette. "That man. With the dog. He just kicked it. It does nothing!" More cursing in French. Below, walking down the middle of the street, a man with a leashed dog, small, white, at his heel – of course he can hear her. But he doesn't look up. "It's helpless," she says, "and he does that. It can do nothing!"

He touches her hair, her back. She's shaking.

"I don't like it," she says. "It's terrible."

~

Stories require beginnings. For him, this story begins with how she walks. Because, he thinks, she doesn't really walk. He can't come up with the word for it. Glides? No, because there's weight to it. Sashays? No, it's not ostentatious. Flows? No, it's mindful, joyous, playful.

He gives up. He sums it up for himself: She walks like a woman.

~

Close to his age – more than once she's told him: "I am not your age" – they share a belief in privacy's sacredness. So: much he'll never share. Death, after all, gives life meaning; and some moments matter by belonging only to those who lived them.

~

It doesn't occur to him that at every moment she's seducing him and wants to be seduced by him, that for her all of this is a bore if it's just about fucking or love. It has to be playful, a game. He thinks it's a foregone conclusion that they'll end up in bed, this being New York, at their ages; he sits on his couch, having another drink, as if waiting for the hour to strike when on cue from a stage director simultaneously they stand up, walk to the bedroom, and act out the sex scene.

On the couch across from him she asks herself, What is he doing? Another drink? Sitting there? Does he see me? Why is he talking about buying a bicycle? Is he going to touch me before we go to the bedroom? Is he going to look at me in a manner that shows desire? Will he soon move next to me, kiss my neck? 

The next morning she tells him, "If I ever have to take my dress off myself in this apartment again, I will never come back."

Probably she's decided she'll never come back anyway. But she leaves curious about the creature – he appears to be a man – she'd just told goodbye. Maybe patience is in order, she thinks. I don't know what just happened. Does he?

~

She says, "Just tell me what you want, and I'll say 'yes' or 'no'. That's it."

He sits there silently.

She asks, "Do you know what you want?"

More silence.

She says, "You don't know what you want."

~

There is between them, he soon senses, a basic incompatibility. The experience of being with her, a French woman, nothing girl-ish about her, comfortable in her body, her freedom no longer arising from rebellion, is new to him: This is not at all like being with S. or N., he thinks, who both felt to him like – were – soulmates. This woman is otherness. He's almost painfully uncomfortable around her. Often he doesn't feel like an adult, talking with her, holding her.

So the question quickly presents itself: Do I flee?

When she tells him for the first time – there will be other times, weeks and months later – that they are not going to be a romantic couple, he says, "We're something new to each other. Incompatible in some way. So we can decide to run from that newness, that incompatibility, or we can find it interesting. Explore it. Maybe with a sense of humor. I find being with you interesting because I've never known anyone like you. I don't want to run away from this because I don't understand it. I want to check it out. Give it a chance."

She contemplates him with bemusement – maybe, too, with curiosity. He reads her expression as saying, What a strange creature, this guy. He doesn't get it. He has no idea what I'll do to him.

He later wonders: That inability to get it, to get them, was that innocence, stupidity, desperation? Or was he onto something – the idea that their disconnect as a couple made spending time together fascinating?

~

Monday morning: by text she asks him how his day is going. He replies: A difficult email from my ex last night. I'm low today, to be honest.

I'll be over this afternoon, she answers. I'm in the West Village having lunch with a friend. I'll see you after.

When she arrives, she says, "Time for a party." She's brought everything they'll need.

They don't go to sleep that night. Hours of conversation, some of it intense: family, childhood, past loves, New York. The disappointments and recklessness of youth. The sense that something was lost along the way, something irrecoverable, that they never expected their lives to turn out like this.

They take turns picking songs for the stereo, sometimes they dance; often they sit at the window sharing a cigarette. She'd arrived in a dress; now she wears his pajamas.

After two days together, on Wednesday afternoon, she goes home. She'd missed the morning's work meeting. They are both exhausted.

At the door he says, "Thank you."

"It's no good to stay sad," she says. "You have to enjoy your life." 

~

The woman had told him from the beginning that she was seeing other men. Her dog, the love of her life, had recently passed away; she was working less: it was for her a time of freedom. Liberté as if emblazoned across her heart.

Finally, after more than three months, after spending most of those three months with him, she tells him, "I'm going away for the weekend. To Milwaukee."

"With B___?" he asks.

"Yes."

"What about me? Do you still want to see me?"

"Not romantically, no. Not anymore. But as friends."

"You're making a mistake," he says. "I'm a good thing in your life."

She says nothing.

Walking home, he wonders that he ever thought he'd hold on to her. He sees now that he had failed, despite every effort, to make his desperation hers.

~

With the woman's blessing, M., the woman's best friend, contacts him. They agree to meet for coffee. M. tells him, "Watch French films from the '60s and '70s. I'll send you a list. The Lovers. Jules and Jim. Love in the Afternoon. The Soft Skin – movies like those. Watch the body language. The way the man looks at the woman, touches her, communicates desire. This is the culture we grew up in. This is what we expect – what we need – from a man. It's very hard for a French woman to date in this country. Maybe if you study the films, you'll understand."

~

They agree to go to dinner. H., his youngest son's best friend, 23, has just moved to New York and will join them.

Before dinner, a drink at Sugar Monk. As usual, he drinks quickly, finishing a second glass of wine; her second glass, when H. arrives, has barely been touched.

Their dinner reservation – two blocks away – is in five minutes. He says to H., "Do you want to help her finish her drink?"

"Sure," H. says, and he reaches over, picks up the glass of wine, and empties it into his mouth.

Five seconds of stunned silence. H. realizes he's made a mistake.

She says, "Oh. My. God."

H. says, "Ah-oh."

She says, "That was a glass of Bordeaux."

"I'm sorry," H. says.

She says, "This is not a shot of tequila."

H. looks at him. H. says, "I sinned."

"No," he says, "you just became an enemy of France."

~

Of course they remain friends. Now and then they laugh together, share a drink, perhaps hold each other. They are adults, after all. A woman and a man. Whose paths – lives – have crossed in this sleepless city, summer over, fall descending: now they discover each other's autumnal selves, sweatered, scarved, seeking and sometimes finding warmth beneath Harlem's cooling sky.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Together

Together we came to the edge of the city, walked a few of its blocks, carrying in our different ways the flame of life. We were learning to care for that flame – learning not to die. The city swirled around us, all four of its seasons seeming to happen at once, inside us. Its music happening, and we were – you especially – adding to it. In one of its little apartments you sang, and I sang too, after my fashion, our singing joining the city's ongoing euphony.

 

Much of my singing you couldn't hear. It happened while you were sleeping, while looking at you for a moment at peace, touching your hair. That’s the way of love: in the end, it’s a private affair.

 

Now, still at the city's edge, we part. I see you striding away, not looking back, the wind rain sun snow all happening around you, wind rain sun snow in your hair, and above me too, while I watch you go. Older, slower, it takes me time, is taking me a long time, to turn away, to walk with my flame deeper into the city, another long block, toward whatever awaits at its heart.

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Tree and Spider

A few days after she left I ordered a tree planted in the barren space in front of my stoop. The city soon put there a "Greenspire" Little Leaf Linden, its tag said. For a while I watered it, but I soon saw that I didn't need to. It was doing fine.

Looking at it earlier tonight, I imagined 20 or 30 years from now, long after I’ve left this city, on my last legs, coming back to see the tree. And finding it like the other trees along 123rd as at home here as I once was. Giving shade to those who pass by it without noticing it. The days of its first New York City spring still held within its roots.

 

Later I came upstairs and leaning over the stove smoking, in a position all too familiar to me because consoling for the last four months, saw a spider, small, a pale yellow, descending by way of its filament, dropping in front of me. And I thought to kill it. But I wondered, What if it’s God? So I blew on it, and it fell onto the stove, seeming to glow against the stove’s blackness, and I watched while it made its way along the stove’s seam to its edge, where it descended again by its filament to the floor and disappeared.


Friday, June 2, 2023

Mockingbird

Time a blur – but a couple weeks –

Let’s say – after you left a

Northern mockingbird took up residence

Outside the window where you used to

Smoke and began his or her – I’m going to say her –

Now nightly marathon singing – starting as you

Often would around midnight and continuing

Until I don't know what hour – I always

Fall asleep before she’s finished. So

That’s a difference. Also

Her singing never makes me sad – maybe

There’s no sense while she sings

This song might be the last –

Friday, May 5, 2023

A Letter to My Father Fifteen Months after His Passing

​​April – May 2023

 

Dear Dad,

        I thought I saw you on the subway today. You were standing halfway down the car, near one of the doors, reading. Your head bowed over the book in that particular way you had. Looking as you looked maybe fifteen years ago – your hair and goatee still dark, your shoulders thicker. Balanced on your feet. Wearing a blazer over a plaid shirt.

       I wanted to go to you. But I stayed seated, glancing over now and then, tears in my eyes. I’ve been going through a rough patch lately and it would have been a consolation to be taken into your arms and held. You always knew how to hold your children. In your arms, I could feel your gratitude for me, which always made me feel lucky – lucky to have you as my father and lucky to be alive.

        Despite these hard times, I haven’t stopped feeling lucky. A gift, I think, from you and from Mom. I’ve known people, know people, who don’t feel that way about living, about their lives. Yet even when life has me feeling battered – you know the feeling I’m talking about – I look at it with wonder and gratitude. You and Mom, our family, and my boys, and the people I’ve loved – including two who, in different ways, have recently left my life – and my friends, and my work, my travels, and the places I’ve lived, now in Harlem, this sacred place, so like you in many respects: strange, full of life, self-destructive, endlessly creative, wild – unlike anywhere else on earth. As you were unlike anyone else on earth. You would have liked my neighborhood, made many friends. It makes me sad that we didn’t get to spend time here together. I can imagine you at some of my favorite spots – Maison Harlem, Osteria Laura, Mess Hall, Sugar Monk. Talking to everyone, fitting right in, better at that than I’ll ever be.

        I confess that it’s taken me a while to mourn losing you. I did mourn, but not like this. I’m not sure why grief has gone like that for me. Maybe it’s not uncommon. It’s taken over a year – really, it’s taken me being alone, finally. I know I was carrying some anger towards you for a long time, as children do sometimes. I never understood, for example, why you would never call me. If we were to speak, I had to reach out to you. And other things I didn’t understand – still don’t, never will, I guess. But right now they feel unimportant. Imagining that I knew enough of your life to judge things about you that I didn’t understand – ridiculous. You were and always will be one of the most mysterious people I’ve ever known, maybe the most mysterious, and it makes no sense to judge a mystery. I’ve been learning that lesson pretty forcefully in my own life lately. Maybe that’s why the grief has finally arrived.

        I’m calling it grief, and it has been that, but also I’ve been feeling a sense of wonder, thinking about you, even awe, as if I’m a boy again, the boy I was for so many years, who saw you as larger than life, as a kind of titan. As a force of nature who had figured something out about how to live life, really live it. Not in the way most people do but with an ongoing need to be as big as life itself, as if that were possible. You seemed to make the world shake – there might have been something Californian about that, which could explain why you were so bewildering to people in Utah, for instance – but really just about anywhere you went. A human earthquake. I know you felt like an earthquake to me throughout my childhood, my youth. And I loved it. It made me proud that my father, in whatever company, always seemed like the father.

        I don’t know if that would make sense to others, but it makes sense to me. Especially now. Of all your children, I had the most time with you during the formidable years of your youth, and it always felt to me like intentionally or not you kept pulling me, your quieter, bookish son, into life. In some ways you still do that. I know I wouldn’t have moved to Harlem if I hadn’t been your son. It could be that I moved here to continue to get, by whatever means, the too-much-life that I was lucky enough to feel at your side for so many years. New York City has become your surrogate, reminding me, as you did, that life is to be lived, whatever the cost.

        The cost, as you knew from your own experience, has been high. I called what I’m going through a rough patch. But really it’s been a kind of desolation. It seems like over the past couple of years I’ve undertaken a project of self-destruction, slowly dismantling myself in ways that seem both baffling and necessary. Following some kind of maybe unreliable but expedient intuition, making decisions – if they can be called decisions – that to others, including my sons, were no doubt bewildering. The kinds of things a person might do who feels they don’t deserve to be happy. But the kinds of things I’ve had to do because I’m your son and I’m going to live, and to live properly some parts of me had to be – still have to be – demolished.

        That’s sounds melodramatic. It is – but I’m ok with that. You were melodramatic about your life, and that always seemed to me more honest that stoicism or caution or humility.

        You were never humble not because you thought you were better than anyone else – a problem I have – but because you didn’t have time for it. There were people to meet and places to go and experiences to be tracked down and seized and gone through, come what may. I don’t have your courage, but in my lesser way, I’ve been reckless, willing to suffer, in a manner that feels right because you modeled it. I’ve tried to model that for my sons as well, and I love to see that same hunger for life in them. The same need for the unknown, for beauty – a rejection of passivity, of obedience, of convention. Of course they’ve gotten a good dose of that will-to-live from their mother, too; from the two of us, they’ve inherited qualities that you embodied: aliveness, curiosity, courage in the face of misunderstanding, and generosity with love. Lincoln, Zach, and Sam love life, they fiercely love the people who matter to them, and they respect their time on this earth. They aren’t going to let it go to waste. Yes, in this regard, they are your grandsons.

        These are the things I’ve been thinking about lately, missing you terribly. Wishing I could call you and have you call me el primogénito upon hearing my voice, and knowing I could cry and tell you what I’m going through and you would reassure me, remind me that for you I’m extraordinary and going to be ok. And coming from you I would believe it. I would know it. You would turn my devastation – if that’s the word for it – into a necessary beginning: the beginning, again, of the rest of my life.

        Sometimes I’ve told myself since your passing – before, too – that you didn’t really understand me. That could be a way of defending myself against the idea that you understood me too well. That you saw in me enough of yourself that to watch me live was to watch yourself, continuing. Actually, I think that’s true of all your kids. We are you, continuing.

        The beauty of that idea is that it shows how various you were, that all of us, so different, contain your multiplicity, your complexity. Each of us carrying on different sides of you and showing how many lives you contained, how many lives you lived. Sometimes talking with my brothers and sisters I would wonder about how different you were with each of us. I would ask, Who is Dad, really? Too often failing to understand that you were all those different selves and that wasn’t something to lament but to treasure.

        I could go through each child and name the qualities that I think we’ve taken from you and, in our own ways, magnified. Or distilled to a neater, clearer essence. I have a habit – also learned from you – of diagnosing people and telling them, mostly in my head, about themselves. But I prefer tonight to honor another habit learned from you – and from Mom – of simply loving them.

 

~

 

        Today was one of the hard days. I’ve been having the unusual – for me – experience of sitting on my couch, looking out the window, and not really crying but just letting tears come in silence, not moving. And wondering at my loneliness, as I wondered at yours. Like you at certain times in your life, I find myself far from the people I most love. And I ask myself, How could this happen? Am I fool?

     Of course I’m a fool: I’m your son! But fools – if they’re not just fools – are rewarded for their foolishness with wisdom. And you were never just a fool, which gives me hope for myself. Your sense of humor, your unwillingness to stop living, to stop loving – those are not the qualities of a fool. Those are the qualities of a wise person who understands what matters in life. Who at some level, with the passage of time, looks back on his foolishness with a sense of indebtedness. Who rejects regret and self-loathing for compassion and laughter. That was one of your mysteries: even when you were at your lowest, you never stopped laughing. At life, at yourself, with your first-born son, while we watched each other re-make our lives.

 

~

 

        I guess this letter will be with me for a while, for when I need to talk to you. I haven’t seen you on the subway again, but oddly since that happened I’ve been seeing you everywhere. Not embodied as you were that day but embodied by people I’ve met, by experiences I’ve had, by this strange teeming city, which keeps on, as you did, and summons from me by some unnamable force – one of New York’s secrets – a similar ongoingness. Like you, it won’t let me quit. More than that, it has a way of knocking me over with joy. So much life! You keep showing up here and escorting me back into wonder.

     I’ve been doing a lot of writing again, which would make you happy. Poetry – your first love – and a memoir disguised as fiction and travel writing, because in New York you travel, every day. It’s a trip around the world to go to the corner bodega. To sit on the stoop outside my front door.

        This city feels haunted in the best possible way by your presence. Just when I most need you, you’re here.

 

~

 

        The NBA playoffs are under way and it upsets me I can’t call you to talk about the games. That you aren’t part of our group chats, where we troll each other and share outlandish opinions as if they’re self-evident facts and marvel at the beauty and unpredictability of this game we love. This game you and I played together since I was two.

        One of my first memories – and I’m not actually sure it’s a memory; it’s more likely just an image I saw in a picture – is sitting with you on the roof in El Paso and “helping you” – at the ripe old age of two – put up a basketball hoop. Am I making that up? I see it plainly, as if it happened yesterday.

     I don’t care if I’m making it up, to be honest: I want that first memory and refuse to be deprived of it.

 

~

 

        One of the last big gifts you gave us was a collection of your poetry, Dirt Road Epiphanies. I have it here on the little shelf next to my desk. Of late I’ve been putting together my own collection of poems, some of them 30 years old, inspired in part by your book. In this regard, too, you’ve been haunting me. Led me to see myself as you. This love for words you gave me – I was born, thanks to you, into a home filled with books; I grew up watching you read, one of your qualities that I took it upon myself to magnify. Books being in some ways – not all of them healthy, maybe – the first love of my life. They continue to be a sanctuary, as they were for you, and even more than basketball I miss talking to you about what I’m reading and hearing you tell me about what you’ve been reading, the two of us then going off to the bookstore or going online to buy each other’s books. A book club of two, for so many years.

        I continue that tradition with my sons. Whenever I speak with them, especially with Sam, we talk about what we’re reading. Which makes me really happy. I feel myself coming alive, returning to a love that you and I shared. 

        Right now I’m reading two great novels: Only Yesterday, by S. Y. Agnon, and Chilean Poet, by Alejandro Zambra. You would have loved both of them, especially Chilean Poet. Which you would have read in Spanish, of course. I’m reading other books too – like you, one or two books never enough. I’m pretty sure that any good book I read, for the rest of my life, I’ll think at some point about wanting to tell you about it and imagining how you would listen, as enthusiastic about it as me, and the next time we spoke you would tell that you’d bought it and read it or started reading it, four-colored pen in hand, underlining, circling, annotating.

 

~

 

        I was in CVS this morning down in Midtown, in search of a Mother’s Day card. And Don Henley came on over the store’s music system, “The Heart of the Matter.” Hearing it, my first thought was, Please, not this right now. Some of the lyrics being too on-point, at the moment.

        Then, I remembered driving with you to Salt Lake City, I forget why, and that song came on, and you started crying. This was when you were going through your divorce from Mom. I sat awkwardly next to you – I see the same patient awkwardness in my sons when I cry in front of them, as I did the other night during a Zoom call. It’s frightening – disorienting – to see a father cry, I guess, no matter how old we are.

        In the car, when the song was about over, you said, Eric, will you do me a favor?

        Of course, I said.

        I’d like you to play that song to your mom. It would mean a lot to me if you’d do that. I don’t think she’d listen to it if I asked her to, but if you play it for her, maybe she will.

        Yes, I’ll do that, I said.

        I don’t think I ever did. I knew she was angry with you, and maybe it seemed more important to me to honor her anger. I probably thought she needed it to survive. Forgiveness was for another day.

        Forgiveness – the song is about forgiveness, as you know, and I’ve had trouble with the concept of forgiveness for a while now. Maybe since reading, in The Writing of the Disaster, “To forgive is first to condemn.”

        I’ve decided that there isn’t anything to forgive between us, in part because I don’t think, as I said earlier, that I understand you, which means I can’t condemn you, to then forgive you. Who am I to set myself up as your judge? I’d rather be your son.

        I was glad, anyway, when the song ended, and I paid for the card I’d found and walked to the subway, stepped onto a car, and found myself next to a man standing beside a grocery cart full of garbage. Food scraps, empty bottles and cans – literally, a cart of trash. He stood with it as if he’d just gone shopping and was on his way home. And my fellow New Yorkers sat around him as if this were perfectly normal.

        I walked to the middle of the car and glanced at him now and then to be sure I was really seeing this. His nonchalant attitude soon made me smile. And suddenly again I saw him as you, as myself, as all of us. Each of us pushing around a cart of leftovers and scraps, guarding it because it’s ours – our life. The old meals, the empty bottles, the discarded Mother’s Day cards, and whatever else we’re holding onto, in one form or another. Baffling trash to everyone else, maybe, but precious to us. Some of it too precious or harmful and better left behind, no doubt – but our lives, in the end, taken with us wherever we go. We let go of what we should when we’re ready. This letter, which is a way of trying to summon you, might also be a way of letting go of you.

        So tonight – it’s actually early morning – I’m thinking that it would be good for me to end this letter. Maybe because I suspect that’s what you’d want. I can hear you telling me, Thank you, Eric, but it’s time for you to get back to your life. Telling me that you’re with me, always will be, and I can talk to you whenever I want or need to.

        But I don’t want to let go of this. There’s been so much loss in my life lately – or what’s felt like loss, but loss is another word for change – that I feel myself holding on to this, a conversation with you that has been a source of strength and reassurance. And has felt overdue. In which I’m finally letting myself grieve the fact that we will never speak again. I will never hear your voice again or feel your arms around me or hear your laughter, your expressions of love. I will never see you again, Dad – not on the subway, not anywhere. It seems impossible for that to be true. But it is true. You are gone.

        But not gone! You live on in memory; but far more than that, you live on in me, in my brothers and sisters, in their children, in my sons, in children yet to be born. In the lives of everyone you touched, changed forever, all of us so lucky to carry you with us. In our bodies, our souls. A legacy – your legacy – that makes your being gone impossible. Maybe that’s why my grief has taken the shape it has: I really don’t believe in your death. At your funeral, at the memorials we held after your passing, I saw you everywhere I looked, just as I saw you on the subway nearly a month ago and still see you, all the time. Especially when I look in the mirror. And when I look at the faces of my children, who will be here soon, and I will take them into my arms as you taught me to, wholeheartedly. Filled with gratitude. For them, for life, for you.

 

Love always, tu primogénito,

Eric


Saturday, April 15, 2023

The Django

Sitting again with you at the Django, waiting for Lucy and Grant to take the stage – our doppelgänger couple – you as from Day One the one for me despotically luminous creature in the room buy as if you're unhappy a double shot of vodka. Which you consume in a single swallow. So I order a bottle of wine and a second and by the end of the night we’re sharing what we can’t finish with table neighbors.

 

And you weren’t unhappy, not then, and not when dozing on my shoulder on the A Train, or in my arms in bed after maybe puking a bit. In the near-dawn while you slept I thought: They see us as allies, too, recognizing our surprise, gratitude, safety.


Those things don’t last but probably shouldn’t. The courageous being condemned to grief by their courage.

 

Still, listening half-drunk we knew we’d found what Lucy was singing about, what Grant played, and I suppose we knew we'd ruin it. But we listened long enough to forget what we feared and let ourselves become what we heard. The songs were right. Nothing else awaits.


Friday, April 7, 2023

The Universe Gives You What You Need

Sitting on the stoop last night around midnight, a warm night, or it had been, the wind now starting to blow, and a white BMW parked in front of me with two men seated drinking and listening to music, windows down.

 

I’m somewhere through a second or third cigarette when the man in the driver’s seat looks over at me and says, “How you doin?”

 

“Going through a breakup,” I say.

 

The man in the passenger seat gets out of the car and walks around, over to me. “Come here, man, have a drink.”

 

I come off the stoop and he gives me a plastic cup and pours out some tequila. “Thank you,” I say. Together we drink.

 

The man in the driver’s seat says, “What you want to hear?”

 

“My friend, whatever you’re feeling is fine,” I say.

 

He says, “I think you need some Phil Collins.”

 

I imagine he says this because I’m white. I say, “No, how about some Marvin Gaye.”

 

“Marvin Gaye? Ok, I got you.” He puts on Marvin Gaye and gets out of the car and we all have another drink.

 

I say, “You’ve been through it too, right?”

 

“Man, we all been through it,” the driver says. “How long?”

 

“Together a year and a half,” I say. “But I loved her for a lot longer than that.”

 

“Just happened?”

 

“It’s been happening,” I say. “Tonight it feels like it just happened.”

 

Marvin Gaye at that moment singing about blue teardrops, I hear, with the passenger singing along. I light another cigarette and we listen. The passenger stops singing and says, “You gotta keep on, just like the sun. Went down today and it’s night but in a few hours it’s gonna come back up. That how you gotta do. You will. I see it.”

 

The driver says, “And even now it’s night but you still got the stars. Just gotta look up.”

 

“And this,” I say, “us together.”

 

“Exactly,” the driver says. “You understand.”

 

The passenger says, “Man, you speak another language?”

 

“Spanish,” I say. “I lived in Argentina.”

 

“See,” he says, “I knew you spoke another language because you said that about us together.”

 

“I grew up Mormon,” I say. “Went there to save them and they saved me.”

 

“You were one of those accomplices or collaborators or whatever they call them,” the driver says.

 

“Missionaries,” the passenger says.

 

“That’s it, missionaries,” the driver says. He toasts the passenger with his empty cup and the passenger pours us another round.

 

“Came back,” I say, “and I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t God, which is what I thought I was when I went. Still don’t know what I am but that’s ok, I guess.”

 

“Man,” the driver says, “you know what you are, you a human being, just like us.”

 

“No more, no less,” the passenger says.

 

The driver points at the passenger and says, “This man here, he’s an inspirational speaker.”

 

“Just what I need tonight,” I say and we all laugh.

 

The passenger says, “I’ll tell you this, man. And I’m gonna tell you this because I think you can hear it and understand it. You can see for yourself if it applies to your situation, I don’t know. But in a relationship, we’re always tryin to turn the other person into something we know. Because we know how to deal with that. Usually that means we tryin to turn them into our parents. Probably the bad parent because we convinced somewhere inside them is the bad parent, and we gotta know if it’s there. The killer. So we try to bring it out. And if we do, we run because we knew all along we were right, they a killer. And if we don’t, we still run, because we scared. We got this new thing we don’t know how to deal with. So you got to figure out why she ran – she, right?”

 

“Yeah,” I say.

 

“So figure out why she ran. Because you turned into a killer or because you didn’t. If you turned into a killer, then you sittin on this stoop tonight is on you. And if you didn’t, then you be awright.”

 

“I think I turned into a killer,” I say.

 

“Or you was one all along,” the driver says.

 

“I started to let myself be mean to her,” I say.

 

“She was waitin for that,” the passenger says. “So there you go.”

 

“I need another drink,” I say.

 

“I got you,” the passenger says, and we all drink.

 

I say, “I thought I was trying to be something new in her life. Not one of her ex’s. Not her father or her mother. For her father she can do no wrong and for her mother she can do no right.”

 

“It’s like that with daughters sometimes, man,” the driver says.

 

“But there has to be another space,” I say. “A new space. I thought that's what I was trying to find.”

 

“There is,” the passenger says. “Love is like nature, my man, love has both life and death. Sometimes we think it has to be all life. And we give every drop of blood to keep it alive. But there’s death in love, too, and you gotta accept that. You can’t kill yourself tryin to keep it alive, that makes no sense. You just have to let it live and die and live, just let it flow, let it do what it do. We get told” – he points at all of us – “we gotta fix everything but in love there’s nothin to be fixed. You just let it flow through, like you standin in a river, because you are. The universe is a river you just gotta stand in. A river of life and death, a river of love because that’s what love is, life and death. You try to fix it, now you the killer. You tryin to fix somethin that wasn’t broken and never has been. The universe or this girl. The universe gives you what you need if you let it.”

 

We’re all quiet for a moment. I look at the driver. “Damn,” I say, “you weren’t lying.”

 

“I told you, man,” the driver says. “Inspirational speaker.”

 

“I gotta give you a hug, man,” I say, and the passenger and I hold each other.

 

“You be awright,” the passenger says.

 

“One more?” I ask.

 

“Hold up,” the driver says. He taps on his phone.

 

Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight,” starts up on the car stereo, Harlem-loud. We stand there for a while and listen.

 

Soon, tears on my cheeks, I say to the driver, “You were right. That is what I needed.”

 

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

 

“We've all been there, right?” I ask.

 

“What you talkin about, man?” the driver says. “We all there now.”