Other

On East 88th Street you were taxis and limos, never the subway. You were the theatre, and cocktail parties for the Party. Your meetings became hundred-dollar bottles of vodka and champagne, and you’d come home bubbling and fall asleep on the couch, rather than on fire and up all night. You were exclusive, your friends were famous, rich, or famous and rich, and when you had to speak to someone like me you would freeze, not out of rudeness, but as if you were required to speak a foreign language, and terrified of making a mistake. You talked about your life as if it were something detachable from its surroundings, a thing you would plan and execute.

Were you always this other person, waiting to be born, some different self cut loose when they took a twelve-pound tumor from behind your stomach? You were always wild, a roamer, a sensation-seeker. But within some limits. After, you were as inconsiderate as a god.

Then, one weekend, maybe two weekends a month, you were fisherman’s trousers and a hoodie, books on the balcony, cigarettes in the freezer, watching movies with me. And I could imagine you as a Thai island, or as the cathedral on the cliffs at Sitges. The woods on the Lake, the Ramble in Central Park.

I thought I knew you on several occasions. Now I try to catch hold, and you slip like fish around my hand.