Giddy and laughing, I was with a very dear friend with whom I had only exchanged a total of two words before this, and that too in a microbial genetics symposium, so you can guess the level of that conversation! But that night, she was my best friend. We hugged, we laughed, we sang 'Only Girl' on top of our lungs and we flirted with bar-tenders. We haven't spoken since, but that is quite another story. My environs, at first, made me unhappy. It was semi-dark, crowded and people were boorish. But, my clothes were complimented and I met so many people I knew! Even strangers talked and talked and talked and flirted. I was warm and rubicund with the attention. Some of it was unwelcome, but, hey, it's a night on the town, right? Maybe that wasn't meant to be an ass-grab, maybe it was an accident, and accidents happen. Such thrilling ones are especially welcome! I have no qualms in admitting that I loved being one of the belles of the ball. It was heady and intoxicating, like so much else that evening.
I have now discovered that boisterousness/revelry are in inverse proportionality to qualms/inhibitions. Of course, this has been well postulated and documented, but I was certain that it wouldn't apply to me. Why should it? Level-headed and sensible that I am! Laugh with me, please, I urge you! It was around the time that my boisterousness had reached its upper-limit (following that my qualms were only constitutively present) that I met Morris Townsend: handsome, urbane, vain and witty. Just like the Morris Townsend of the novel. He stilled the air, and I felt like a child. The conversation was lively and flirtatious, and I felt his vanity seep into me. I was the chosen one! The one who Morris lavished with all his attention. I felt his vanity seep into me, and I felt handsome, urbane, vain and witty. The lightest of touches, the act of leaning against one's shoulder, the ticklish whispers, I found my rapacious flesh hungering for more. Then, it seemed alright. Natural, even.
Having traded the smoky seductiveness for a short walk in the snow followed by a cavernous carnality of an apartment/office, there was just a slight ripple in the illusory joys that the evening had afforded. Morris Townsend had picked a Catherine Sloper after all, and suddenly, I was abandoned out in the snow with nowhere to go, and my mind yearning for sleep and warmth. I hurriedly called Hamlet who rescued me, and took me home. I don't what would have become of me if Hamlet were not around. I still think with the warmest gratitude of his mock-anger and his, "Fuck, no. You're staying here." when I insisted on returning to the dorm.
But return, I did. In the previous night's clothes. My residents, who saw me, knew exactly what may have chanc'd....
I hate this post. I hate it so much. It's so overdone, with its imagery and nod to Henry James. I always do this! I always intellectualize-dramatize something that doesn't deserve to be so. Poor Gossip Guy and his growing pains! This and worse happens to guys my age, and yet they don't compose jeremiads about it. I hate this post, but I am going to publish it because I have already written so much. God knows, I haven't been inspired to write about anything in the past month. Maybe it's break and the silence it brings that has allowed me to reflect on this. It has festered long enough, and aerial and silly as it was, it was also important to me, as all rites of passage are. How did I want this story to culminate? With grace. All I ask for is grace. The grace that comes with calling someone a cab, or waiting with them till their friend shows up. It seems facile to complain that I wasn't being treated, well, like a human being. Tragically, every time one of us makes that comment, we are, actually, being treated in the same way that people treat one another.
My two consciences: Hamlet and Verlaine will have very different takes on this. Hamlet has already stated and re-stated how unfair it was, and how I must be careful and not compromise my standards. Verlaine has told me to thicken my skin for the ingénue has a relatively low mortality in the world out there. My two consciences are right: I need to keep my eyes open and thicken my skin. In the meanwhile, I shall stay in. I am almost afraid to go out again. The incident, whatever it was, to me, has a damning beauty to it. It is not like the extended-release agony of Option B, it is a montage in black-and-white of a noire lust-story that ends in the snow. I am doing it again! But I need this! I need to elevate my joys and disappointments so that they may carry some worth to me when I look back. Futility, when swathed in voile and scented with a splash of jasmine and patchouli, has so much more grace.
Fatica d'amore, tristezza
Tu chiami una vita
Che dentro, profonda, ha nomi
Di cieli e giardini
E fosse mia carne
Che il dono di male transforma
Di cieli e giardini.
Until the next time,
GossipGuy.
