My Octopus Boyfriend
I'll text you when we get there.
When I met Richard, he said, "I'm not a Cartesian. I feel no division between the body and the mind. I don't even think mind is confined to the brain. I think it's everywhere in the body and even outside us." I said, "Me too.” That was eighteen years ago. Today, my foot, or maybe my tentacle is having second thoughts. Richard would say, “The right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” He would say, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” I’m not the same person since Kamala’s face rose up in the sky.
In Maine, Richard and I traveled to Edinburgh in our minds. Today, he said, “I think we should go to the UK, anyway.” He had been saying he didn’t want to go home. He meant he had unfinished business there. He meant England was the wrong body for his mind.
He said, “In the winter, Edinburgh will be cold and dark. I think we should go to Dorset.” One day in Dorset, we were hiking above a giant cliff, and Richard had a low blood sugar. While he was recovering, we stretched out in grass and made a little tent with umbrellas. There are beaches in Dorset where everyone finds fossils. We found bupkis. I said, “We can always look for fossils.” Richard said, “It’s better to find a fossil than become a fossil. I think we should have an adventure.”
Monday, the roofers installed a new roof on our house, and it’s beautiful. We are making our house as beautiful as possible before who knows. Our contractor came by to plan the new siding. He’s writing a screenplay set in the 18th Century. Richard said, “Do you think about your writing when you’re working on a house?” He said, “I think about dialogue,” and I could see how the hammer and nail could make a kind of music.
I like to smell perfume under an ear, or on a wrist, or on a neck. How do birds discover seeds in a feeder? A woman who has given me plants from her small back garden gave me more plants today, and we sat in the shade on a bench and talked like friends because we were strangers without disappointments in each other. As she talked about her life, a layer of aloneness lifted off us, like the mystery of birds. I mentioned a show I had streamed about a young British doctor, who works in the hard-pressed National Health Service, and who in an early scene strips off his scrubs that are splashed with blood from the calamities of other people, and we see the front of him naked, and then he turns to look at himself in the mirror and we see the back of him naked, with his small, beautifully shaped boy’s ass, and the woman and I were reminded there are things in life you don’t grow tired of.
While Richard and I were in Maine, I spoke on the phone with my former shrink. I had been reading notes I’d written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I felt a wave of love for her fall over me. I told her she had helped me, although I am just about the last goat caught in a fence you could release the horns. She didn’t care that much about the fence or the horns. It’s the secret of a long relationship you don’t care that much. Yes, it was a job for her, and she had been paid to stick it out with me. I wish I’d been able to pay all the other people I’d known at the time.
When Joe Biden stepped down, I was surprised to see women on social wringing their hands and saying oh, what if Kamala is the wrong way to go, oh dear, oh dear. So you still think any old male fart with a tie must be an answer to every question? Didn't you see Ralph Bellamy in Rosemary's Baby? He was the soigné, gray-haired gynocologist who was also a minion of Satan. Here's a novel idea. You don't need to tell Kamala things you think are wrong with her or her campaign. You don’t need to make a list. Women have been listening to things you think are wrong with them for 10,000 years or so. We're all topped up. You can just love Kamala for what she is and help her win.
A friend of mine grew up in a tenement in the Bronx. The tenants talked to each other like the transplanted shtetl villagers they were. After one of the neighbors had a stroke, the others referred to her as “the chair.” It was the way Damon Wayans grew up in Harlem. Because of a deformed foot, he wore an orthopedic boot and kids in the ‘hood referred to him as “the shoe.” I love metonymy—a part of something standing for the whole. All language is metonymy in that a word is always not the thing it signifies. I love the way “the shoe” and “the chair” are part of tender memories for these people of a past way of life. When we, too, laugh at “the shoe” and “the chair,” we’re remembering something weird we love about our own culture. if you want to be funny about how the world works, you have to start with a picture of how the world works.
I’m saying this adventure Richard wants, I’m saying you have to split the body a little from the mind. The other day, I spoke to a younger friend who is waiting for her mother to die. She is waiting for her mother to die in order to come out from under the piano where she lives. I said how old is your mother, and my friend said the number that is my age. I said her mother would live another twenty years, at least, and my friend would need a different way to save her own life. In a story like this, I’m a glass bowl dropped on a tile floor, and out come the dustpan and the broom. I can see it progress, the rate of this story, and it may be a reason to become a foreigner, where I will understand nothing and therefore won’t be seen. I’m saying all my unfinished business is here.
If the place you are in is not a place you can stay, you will become any age and as small as you need to fit on the paper boat sailing away. “Text me when you get there,” everyone says. Or no one says. I would text everyone I’ve ever known we made it there. What if getting lost is not a comfortable experience? I can’t imagine that. Most of the things that have happened in my life I didn’t imagine.
Biz
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Love what you said about Kamala Harris. My sisters don't like her voice. I didn't used to, but now I'm happy to hear it. I would so prefer to hear her say whatever than to hear Trump say anything.
Yay! Kamala! Yay, Laurie!