Spending the weekend with G.’s parents during my favorite time of year. House wrens warble like crazy, their songs bubbling out from under the eaves, the air muffled under the shifting beech, elm, and honey locust. Sumptuous dinners, interesting company—I feel more comfortable here than in my parents’ home—this is so much more the way they are supposed to live. A pack of corgies tumbling around the house, beautiful antiques from some great-aunt that are slightly beaten up, parents who are well-read, excellent hosts. And sensing also how this very graciousness muffles some adventurousness (or perhaps curiosity to absorb contradictions and accept the incompleteness of our century), realizing how I feel slightly more capable of doing so. Blessing or booby prize? Thinking about sucking your nipples and developing new fetishes.

XOXOXOXO The Nurse of Love

•

His letter doesn’t console me for his absence because it conveys little interest in seeing me, just in being seen: his melancholy, his beautiful youth. I shrug, weakened, empty of promise. I’m still in bed; it’s rush hour, eight in the morning. Cars boom as they pass below my window. No one knows what I put into my waiting.

I read his letter again, wondering how to match my charming, horny correspondent, whose wit enters from the side, with the man whose attributes I analyze in a plenitude that goes against understanding, naming them as reverently as a god’s—silky, strong, frail. What characterizes a god? His larger existence, an imperative that meaning stay with him, the mobility to retreat from the deep surrender he inspires. He governs my fantasies—his golden face convulses as it never does. I rustle and groan, a shallow orgasm with his approval in the form of his arousal. As I age I clench over my spasms instead of arching backwards from them. His naked skin expresses mortality and compassion. My last word when I die will be his name—to say it in the grandest setting.

•

I need L. to be only mine; for that to happen I must exhibit him and my desire. I call Tom, I call Kathy, I call my old friend Ed. In the theaters of their consciousness I stage my drama. That my love for L. is possible, actual. That my joy exists. Interaction shifts the ground of the finite. They create belief by responding to my story when I meet them in cafés, on street corners, on the phone; Margery turns the cosmos into the witness of her love.