BRADLEY AARON LONG
I can’t remember how I met you, but I remember how we became this. I remember the afternoon by the black piano in summer in the quiet of The Noble Red when I bent toward you or you bent toward me, and the whole world bent between us and I kissed you. I discovered what had terrified me. In the tenderness of your lips the whole world ended.
I did not plan to be anything or anybody, I did not plan to be unusual or take a stand. I do not want parades. Maybe there should be parades. I don’t want to go on marches. I do not want to be without you. This is the only thing I want, the press of my forehead to yours, our lips to each others in bed, or on the street.
In bed we press feet to feet, knees to knees, knead the palms of our hands into each other’s. Lock legs, Lock arms, lock tongues. We are like living sticks rubbing together for that greater heat.
I am not political. I mean, I was a very little political. I had sentimental leanings toward the hippies. I had a semi longing for the Sixties. But if telling the world I love you is political, then I am political. It is winter, but I picture spring in Jefferson Park where the cherry blossoms are all on the tree, and there is that bridge, and we are standing on it and the little stream shoots under us, the one that leads to the river, and I lean down and press my head to yours, press my hands into yours. I look into your eyes so you know me, know how I feel.
I am silent long enough for you to talk. You say nothing. Good, say nothing, you’ve earned that right so that I can say there is a real moment, one I can’t remember, and then a realer than real moment when I think of how I met you. You are in those white linen pants and that white dress shirt, and Lake Michigan looks almost Caribbean so that, even though you are the color of caramel or of a good cup of coffee you seem gloriously black against the electric blue of water, the glowing blue of sky. You are coming to me from the sea, or am I coming to you?
“Coming, coming, coming, like that first time. Fuck, we were kids together, weren’t we? I was thirty, you were twenty three, and like teenagers we lay on the bed in jeans and tee shirts, making out and holding back, not going here, not going there, and you know what? I felt just like a virgin, and I think I wanted to be a virgin for you. I wanted to be your baby. I didn’t want to fuck and fuck it up. Make it like all of those other times with all of those others, where I wanted to be touched and never quite was.
So I say, “Let’s live here, together. Let me find out, in time, how much it would cost, look into a lease?” And you say, “We can do that today.”
I say I wanna make a home with you, and you say you wanna make a home with me too, and after all the waiting, why wait any longer?
Sentimentally, I want to make love to you again in my old bed, or in your old bed in your parents’ house, like that very first time when I was as eager to undress as someone in a heated room on a summer day when they see a pool. I wanted to be real for the first time with you, not to hold anything back, to give you everything.
That first time I was in you, there was the miracle of stupid old me, six foot three, rejoicing in ejaculation, love surrendering to orgasm, spurting joy made liquid,
God forgive me. I want to be a virgin for you. God forgive me. You are everything, and some of the things I took you through were unworthy of you. We came together in a strange kind of heaven. I longed for…. I was full of longing. I would have killed myself if you hadn’t taken me in that night. I know it now. If we had gone our separate ways I would have driven off a bridge. Now I understand the fragile line between choosing life and choosing death.
Every moment, but especially that moment I loved to drive into you. That night, pot and poppers, liquor and infinite arms, infinite embraces, endless love and absolute mercy came to me under twinkling amber lights in the form of sex. You and Cody were my fucking guardian angels, fucking angels. Fucking… And in the end, like a good angel, there is Cody, hair like chocolate, leaning there, pointing to you, telling me, so stupid, and you so stubborn, “This is home. This is your home.” Like a golden angel he did it, and like a golden ange, in the grey and white morning he leaves us alone, and he is gone.
In the morning we repeat what we began. Every time we come together, face to face, lips to lips, hands closing in hands, belly pressed to belly, is like what they used to say in church. How do you call it? A sacrament. And this last moment is the first moment, is the first moment as we come together on the second floor in that old apartment, making love, as the winter sun shines across us hot as summer, and we simmer together, my love, my one, my Jawarhalal Nehru Alexander.
“You’re coming with us,” Brad Long announced.
For the first time, Brad was full of happiness at the thought of his baby. He thought, maybe all of this confusion happened just so a new life that wouldn’t give a damn about his twisted emotions or his coming to understand his feelings for Nehru, or Marissa’s momentary love for him could enter the world unscathed. Nehru would be the godfather, and all of this mess that had made this new life would only be a bookend. There would be a boy or a girl who would live his or her own life, fall in love or not, who owed nothing to them or their story.
This happiness made Brad happy for Hale Weathertop who seemed to be making Marissa quite happy. This happiness made him tell Cody, as he threw him in his van, “You’re coming with us.”
Nehru got into the backseat. He wanted Cody to ride shotgun. Nehru now realized how often he’d been unhappy, but he was so very happy right now and that happiness could make room for Cody.
“It’s the day before the day before Christmas. Don’t you dare be sad,” Nehru told him.
“Where are we going?”
“My cousin had the right of it,” Nehru said. “We’re going to the beach.”
The drive was over an hour on through white farmfields and Cody found himself having to take it on faith that a beach was anywhere, but at last they were in Ely, Michigan, in a town that had not even thought of being a beach town. They drove to the end of it, past an aqua colored .bungalow with a dark haired little boy and what may have been his sister playing in the snow, and then arrived at a pier and stood at the edge of massive water, grey white, stretching so far ahead, so far right and left, it seemed to stretch above them as well.
“This is….” Cody began. “Guys, thank you.”
Brad was in a fisherman’s cap and took out a cigarette to hand to Cody.
“We can catch a meal in that house,” he said.
“Just knock on the door?”
“I’ve got family there,” Brad said.
“Funny,” Nehru said, “I never thought of you as having family.”
“Will they mind?”
“If they do they’ll keep it to themselves.”
Anigel drove for the first part of the trip, and then around six they stopped at a diner and it had a strange feeling to it as if even the fluorescent lights were anticipating Christmas. Anigel wondered and stopped herself from asking Ross if he wondered too, had these people ever seen a Black person before. Sometimes she expected to be lynched when she traveled and wondered if they dared stop where they did. However, as witnessed by the lack of rope burn on their necks, they had come out fine so far, and they came out well here.
“You folks on the road getting home for Christmas?” the waitress asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ross said. He called all women ma’am. “We’ve been away, and we want to get home in time.”
“Well, you better hurry. I hear there’s snow, and it’s a good thing you came tonight. We close on Christmas Eve. We were open last year, and you should see what it’s like, so many people just trying to get home for Christmas. And then the saddest things, the folks that don’t have a home to go to for Christmas, who are on the road to keep life off their minds.”
Ross’s own mind turned to that. It was what had attracted him to the monasteries. He had heard on the radio about a woman who had become a nun. Her whole reason for entering the convent was because back in college she had anxiety issues, couldn’t sleep through the night, and sometimes she would sit at her window and see the lights come on in the convent and know the nuns were gathering for prayer. Somehow, she said, knowing that at the same time she was up these women were up and praying for her and people like her, gave her comfort, calmed her anxiety, and made her able to finally sleep.
When he and Anigel had come to Tabor Monastery, Anigel had unpacked her small things, made a cup of tea and sat at the window looking down on the valley. She had not stirred until Ross told her it was time for dinner. She was sociable when she came down to eat, kind even, but not interfering and not to be interfered with. She passionately wanted the silence she had found, and she had not showed up at any of the offices or the masses until this morning. Not so Ross. He immersed himself in the Liturgy of the Hours. He and Anigel stayed in the first hermitage, but there was another hermitage on a hill across from them, and then a small guesthouse. From all of these came the other seekers to pray the holy hours with the community, but it was Ross who got up at two in the morning for the long service of Vigils. It was then, as he half sang, half slept, as his mind, a little weary, drifted deep into the readings from the Church Fathers and the prophet Isaiah, and rolled down into some dreamless country that he thought… I am praying with those people, all of those people, the wretched, the ones who cannot sleep, the ones who feel alone, the ones who cannot go on. I was all of those, and now I am praying for them.
“Was I praying for this woman?” he thinks as the waitress pours them what Ross has decided will be the last cup of coffee. He decides he wasn’t, and if he wasn’t, he will. He’ll pray for this whole town. Ross once thought prayer was a work of the mind and the intellect. Then he thought it was a work of imagination. On the religious radio station back in East Sequoya, every morning at nine there was a space of fifteen minutes where prayer requests were read to slow and slightly sad music. Ross would try to imagine the various illnesses, put himself in the pain of whoever was suffering, picture them, feel truly sad. But prayer was as simple and as difficult as joining one’s own heart to someone and lifting them up. If you could not lift them up, sitting with them was more than enough.
Night was arriving in earnest as they left the diner and Lewis took over driving. Anigel was relieved for this and lay back to sleep. If they continued like this, in three hours they would be home.
Three hours later, Anigel Graciela Reyes was blinking and sitting up in the car, watching the dark road pass by. She looked at her watch, and then she looked at Ross.
“Where the fuck are we?”
They were not home.
“We’re on the road.”
“We’re not in Geschichte Falls.”
“Clearly not.”
Ross was not a person who felt the need to explain the obvious.
“Where the hell are we going?”
“To Walter.”
“Walter… Michigan?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You know what?” Ross said.
“What?”
“You ask a lot of damn questions.”
And Ross kept driving.
