The Whole of Human History

It is not unusual that mind goes over what happened that night and tries to invent new solutions; better, more beautiful endings.

           Sometimes, it ends like this: you slam the door, just as you did that night, but instead of staying behind I run out the door and after you, into the pouring rain. (Even though I remember that it wasn’t raining that night, but, after all, this is a more beautiful version of my own creation and imagination and I adore the imagery of you with wet hair and soaking clothes clinging just so to your body.) I kiss you right there in the middle of the street and don’t give a damn who sees because in this perfect and ideal fantasy of mine no one can hurt us.

           The rain turns to sugar water on your lips.

           Sometimes, you don’t even make it to the door; I take you into my arms right in the middle of the kitchen and don’t let go. This particular fantasy branches out in three different directions from this moment. The first possibility is, if you struggle against me, the movement of your body, so close to mine, is not genuine. A pretense that says; I don’t want you to know that I want you. I don’t want you to feel that and to know that and to understand that. I don’t. I do. Like the tide, followed by a feigned resignation. Of the three, this one is the most true to your character. I can hear the tilt of your voice as you say; “You’re a bastard, Freddie Highsmith” and you mean the words, but I love the taste of them.

The second possibility, however, is my favorite. When I hold you fast, you pull me even closer, impossibly so. When you call me a bastard, you really mean; I love you, and you say that too, later and between deep gasping breaths, the smell of sex making the air thick and impossible to say much else.

The third branch is my least favorite. I don’t let go, but then I do, I have to, because you shove me from you. Before you turn your back to me I see the look of disdain written across your features. Not hate, never hate, I’m not worthy of even that. Hatred brings a certain gravitas to the moment, to the person it’s directed towards. You matter, it says. I could live with that, but not the disdain that says just how little you think of me. And I believe that the fear of seeing that is what kept me rooted to to the spot long after you slammed the door of my flat, back in What Really Happened.   

           And then, on darker, more bitter nights, I don’t go after you at all. Like in reality, I stand in the center of the room and do nothing for a long time before turning off the lights. I go to bed alone not knowing that you had vanished into the night, never to be seen again and I spend my life wondering what happened to you, like Susan does about Julia, getting that same look on my face she sometimes does too.

           Maybe I move on, maybe I don’t, I still can’t let my mind wander that far, I need to bring it back to the truth.

Because what really happens is this: After several weeks, I see you at Connie’s again.

But before that, this:

In the interim, I was cleaning the bar at closing. The normally dim lights were brightened, and the only other people left were a few stragglers; Susan and Julia among them, and Mags and her band, who were packing up their instruments. I paid them no mind.

I felt a presence in front of me. I looked up; it was Richard, the bassist. He smiled warmly.

He wasn’t like you, and maybe that’s why I could easily imagine a life with him, even if it wasn’t a perfect one.

           There were two nights where it was different.

I didn’t see you come in.

Looking back on that first night, it was like the climax of the war, of the bombings, of the air-raid sirens so loud not even Mag’s thundering voice could drown it out. But tonight was quiet inside Connie’s.

Peggy is in front of me and is telling me about Walt Whitman and asking if I had ever read him. She has one hand on the drink which I just poured her and the other in Colleen’s lap. Colleen simply stares at her, happy to listen to her lover speak, happy to be near her, to maintain this little touch. I try to be happy for them, for all the lovers in the world, I can’t stop wishing it was you across from me.

Think of something and it shall appear.       

           “Whiskey on the rocks.” You say, and it startles me back into reality. You say it without meeting my eyes or even looking at me. I will never know how you could always act so ambivalent back then. I didn’t see you come over, you weren’t there, and then you were, just like that, just like a ghost.

           In the days of not seeing you, I had wondered if you had made up your mind to disappear, leave London all together in the same way you came to it; running away from a former lover in the dead of night.

           But no, of course you had come back; you were too stubborn to run away, and we had limited places to run to, people like you and I, and a part of that was making peace with former lovers, pushing the past aside, or ignoring it all together for some semblance of peace. We were going with the later route, clearly.

I poured you your drink and passed it over to you, and I prayed to every god in all of history that you didn’t see the way my hands trembled. You took the glass without a word and disappeared again. Like nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing had.          

I couldn’t bear the notion of Nothing.

Richard, I had come to know, was like the sun, warm, bright, but could be obscured by the clouds of circumstance, like his wife.

You, on the other hand, were like the moon. Surrounded on all sides by an impenetrable darkness, cold and radiating nothing.

But I didn’t know then that I was the ocean and was bound to need you, to love you, to move and shape the course of my life around needing you, around loving you.

There are a great many worse things to center your life around, but there are precious fewer than you. This I know now.

Loving you wasn’t easy, but I don’t think love counts if it’s easy.

           Richard didn’t love me either, but not in the same way that you did. When you didn’t love me, you didn’t love anyone, you were afraid of ties and roots and kept everyone at a safe distance. Richard loved, but he did not love me.

It made it easier, I guess, for both of us. We both knew we weren't going to last, but at the same time, wanted desperately not to be alone. 

We were each so horribly not what the other wanted.

           But it was the Blitz, and we made do with unhappiness. We carried on.

Seeing you was a regular occurrence after that first night. Soon, we settled back into a certain monotony. You would constantly tease me about watering down the drinks, and, by now, I think enough years have gone by that I can admit I was. Rationing made things hard.

I was pouring Susan and Julia a drink when you came stumbling up to the bar, already piss drunk. “Ladies, I know we all love this shithole dive, but the bartenders can be stingy!” you made sure to raise your voice so that I heard you. I glanced at your direction, knowing that you wanted me to, and I met your teasing expression with one of my own.

So this was how it was going to be from now on? Teasing across the bar about how much of a disastrous mistake the two of us together had been?

Friendship? Or at least something like it.

How inadequate, because, after all these years, I still believed you were the best mistake that has ever happened to me.

           I knew then, intrinsically there was always going to be a part of me that yearned for an identical part of you. I believe that the first time I touched you I left an imprint on you, and you left one on me. That you were bound to be a lighthouse and I the ship that would traverse the seas to find you again is only natural and fair in accordance to the way the world spins on its axis.

A few years go by. I still see you around, more and more. The war ends, Richard moves away. Something about starting over with his wife. I hope he found what he was looking for when he was with me in the end. 

It’s 1949 and I’m on the precipice of something new.

It’s also the second night when things were different.

You come into Connie’s and order a whisky on the rocks like you always do. I watch as your throat constricts as you drink, watch even as you avoid watching me. We’re playing a game and I’m sorely losing.

“I’ve been reading.” You say, a few hours later, at the point in the night when everyone around us is either too drunk or too amorous to ever pay me much mind. You hadn’t moved once the entire night. Like you were waiting for a moment to talk to me.

I hoped.

“What have you been reading?” I asked, wiping my hands on a dishcloth.

You shrugged. “This and that. It’s been an ongoing development with me. I just thought you should know.”

“Careful, James, or I’ll start to think that you care about what I think of you.”

“Maybe I do care.”

The game is over. Stalemate.

I stare at you for a moment, a million fragments of questions in my head, but none of them able to come to fruition or coherency.

 All I can come up with is: “Why?” as in, why now, why after all these years, why me, why why why why.

You smirk a little at that, like Old James, not this New and Confusing James, and you say: “Why not?”

“Freddie!” Colleen calls from the other end of the bar, saving me from answering right away “A refill on this, please!”

When I come back to you, you’re serious again. I’m starting to get used to this serious James, I think.

“Shakespeare. Sonnet 166, do you know it?” You ask and I’m grateful you’ve changed the subject to something I know the answer to.

“‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.’ I know it, why?.”

“‘O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.’” You continued. “I like it a lot, it reminds me of two people that I used to know.”

Then you stand up and walk away.

Before you disappear into the crowd, you look back just once to meet my gaze and I swear, it’s the first time you’ve done that in years. Maybe that is why I was struck like lightning when I met your gaze, but looking back, I feel like there was something there, some passion I had never seen before from you. You; the cool, flippant, unattached James McKinley, was transformed and this was a different set of eyes staring into mine.

I felt hot underneath my skin.

           I liked it.

You always knew how to seduce me far too well.

So I follow you to the bathroom, and there we are, fumbling with belt buckles and zippers and when I take you in my hand, finally, finally, it’s hardly romantic; so in reality, it feels like it always had; fine by me.

You press hot, open-mouthed kisses against my own mouth, hard and fierce and I think I taste blood in the back of my throat, but it could just be red-hot desire mixing with the sound of your gasps and moans I’m swallowing whole.

You make the words fall away from my thoughts until there is only feelings.

It’s sweaty and messy but oh so very us. 

“You certainly know who to make a man feel special, Freddie Highsmith, a master of seduction, truly.” You say, finally, and I thought perhaps things weren't that different this time around after all.

I don’t know what I would have done if that were true.

           But then, after our bathroom foray, after I try to make my way back to the bar, back to work, you pull me away, to the door instead. “I still have to work,” I say, even as I follow you. “I’ll lose my job.”

You turn around and raise your eyebrows at that. “Would that really be so bad?” It’s said with the same, teasing ambivalence you’ve served up to me a countless number of times before but something’s changed. It’s said like a joke that I’m in on, invited to sit at the table you’ve set out for me. 

You kiss me again, in the middle of the crowded floor.

           Across the room, I can hear Mags sing, and her deep, strong voice comes at me like from a dream;

“You don't know what love is

Until you've learned the meaning of the blues

Until you've loved a love you've had to lose

You don't know what love is

You don't know how lips hurt

Until you've kissed and had to pay the cost

Until you've flipped your heart and you have lost

You don't know what love is.”

And I think; I do. I do know. 

When you pull away, I sneak a quick glance at the stage, and my eyes meet Richard’s. He gives me a small nod from behind his bass. It is either sign of acquiescence, or of well-wishing, and I don’t have time to dwell on the meaning then, because you’re pulling at me to follow you, and I do. I just do.

And I know then that I would follow you anywhere, blindly. Happily.      

Then you do something you’ve never done before, not even in my fantasies; you take me to your flat. I don’t have time to decipher any meaning behind this action for your hands are on me in an instant, before the door is even completely closed behind us.

           Your mouth doesn’t taste like sugar water, but whiskey and saliva, and I think; it’s even better this way.    

I could get drunk just from tasting you.     

           Hours later, your hand is in my hair, pulling at the strands at the nape of my neck, not rough, as you had been doing just an hour before, but gently now, languidly, gazing up at me through half-lidded eyes. I turn my gaze from them to bury my face under your jawbone. I cannot see it in the dark of the room, it is not quite dawn yet after all, but I know from memory that here on the side of your neck is the placement of a visible blue vein. I had traced my tongue across it before, many, many times and only a short hour ago, and I did so now again.

Our own personal vena amoris. Wet with sweat. The taste of salt. Under the skin was a river that carried your life, and with it, the lives of all who had come before you up to the very beginning of everything, whatever that was.

           The whole of human history pulsed and flowed under a thin palisade of skin. Surely, this meant that your blood, on some metaphorical level if not a cosmic one, was mine as well.

           I repeat those words to you, because I liked the way they sounded and wanted to discover just how much better they would feel against your damp skin.

           “Ever the poet.” You whisper back, and there’s a smile in your voice. Then you say three more words, words that you said so simply and plainly, but they mean the world to me. “Tell me more.” You say. Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more.

That was when I knew you loved me.