Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:15:27 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Don't Forget You Love Me 3

My father died a broken man not long after my mother divorced him. For
several years after that I lived with her and a sister who was a few
years younger than I was, and who was, in everything about her, a
stranger to me. We forged no bonds beneath the ritually prescribed
family behavior and socially constructed emotions imposed upon us.
When our family configuration exploded, those bonds shattered, too.

Once a willingly obedient son who sought beforehand to fulfill my
mother's wishes ere she spoke them, by my eighteenth year I had become
a problem to her, always arguing with her and bitter in my resentment
of the way she had begun to live after my father's death. A new man
stayed over at our house each weekend until a steady one insinuated
himself and was all too frequently bedded down with her on the
fold-out couch in the living room, the room I had to pass through in
order to reach my room. To see her in bra and panties, her body no
longer young and firm, and sitting on his lap at five on a Saturday
afternoon, as they held their drinks and caressed, made inside of me
an agony of writhing.

It was not loyalty to my father that impelled my disgust at her
behavior but a squeamish jealousy. She was betraying not him with her
drunken parties with this rough and pasty man, but me.

I was not the son she wanted. I did not take the initiative she wished
I would. She said she had no one to help her bear her burden,
financially or emotionally, and she was afraid of the power she knew
she had over me. She tried to restrain it, to redirect it.

It was a power that she had used for years to bend me willingly to her
will. It had begun to prove treacherous. Instead of giving her
hegemony over me, it was turning her into someone upon whom unwanted
demands were placed.

She was angry at me for not showing the kind of independence, the kind
of capabilities by which she would know I had been released from her
grip (and she from mine, too, although she did not say it). And it
would help her, too, to ease her burden. But no! She was annoyed that
I wanted her to cling to, seeing it as a weakness and a fault. She was
angry that I had not let her go. She could not live like that, with
that kind of burden.

She meant me.

She reproached me for my sullenness and wept in anger, resentful that
I had so little concern for her happiness and would begrudge her what
little she managed to get.

But what about mine? the silent scream erupted in its cage inside me,
and did not break loose from within me.

I was ashamed to say it, but I meant it anyhow.

I felt it again in the face of Daniel's silence. He was blocking me
out. Without a sense of his perceiving and receiving me, I had no
existence of my own.

It was already a week things had been like this. That's a long time. I
was feeling bewildered and betrayed, angry and guilty.

It had begun with that question that always went along with a sudden
transformation of his disposition. What was I going to do now? How was
I going to change my life? I could not wait for the world to change,
when, all together, we would create the social equivalent of manna
from the sky to live on. I had to do something now, discover who I
really was, what I wanted to do, and how I would go about doing it and
becoming somebody.

I don't know, I said.

Not knowing is not an option, Daniel said.

Can we talk about it in the morning? I said, circling his bare nipple
with the tip of a finger and pouting seductively.

That was something that usually drew him to me. Now it did not. He
frowned and shook me off.

Are you angry? I asked.

No, he said.

But you are not happy with me.

No, he said. Go to sleep.

With a heavy heart I lay beside him feeling the emptiness of the space
between us as he turned from me.

In the morning, with a hang-dog look, with sad cow eyes, I looked at
him imploringly and knew by nothing more than how he did not yield
that he had hardened his heart to me, against me.

Something cold began to spread inside me.

You ask too much of me, I said.

Those are the conditions, he said.

In the panic of isolation nothing came to me that might free me from
the incapacity that was like the embrace of paralysis.

You are asking too much of me.

But what about mine?

I repeated the words to myself regretfully.

I was not surprised when he did not come home that evening without
even having called to tell me he would not.

I was unable to eat or concentrate on anything. Nor was I able, when I
lay down still clothed, to sink into a sleep.

I rose and went down into the street.

It was a hot night and I was dizzy and depressed. I threw on a pair of
short cut jeans, a floppy sleeveless thing, and a pair of water
buffalo sandals.

The street lights glared -- amber, sulfur, green, blue, and red.
Reality was elsewhere. I had smoked before I went down, and I was
riding on it now as I made my way slowly through the crowd of guys
displaying themselves. The Zen paradox was that I was magnetic because
I was too low to be part of it. I did not care. I was not looking for
anything. Quite the opposite.

You look lost.

It was a guy a little taller than me. He wore a tight, sleeveless,
black tank top with thin string straps and old jeans that were tight
fitting, too. They were worn, and faded -- decorated with rips and
raggedy blue white threads.

He was strong with gracefully prominent but hardly bulging muscles.

No, I said. I'm not. I just don't like where I am.

Maybe we can fix that? He smiled.

It was a cheesy come-on.

But it got the point across.

I shouldn't, I said.

He embraced me and cupped me in a strong hand without hurting me at
all and looked into my eyes.

I exhaled.

But you will.

Yes, I said.

He took me with a kiss there in the street.

I had pleased him by making him feel his power.

Power. I had none.

Bullshit, Daniel had said when I said that to him. You don't want to harness it.

This is about power, Daniel said that night. That's what love is. Love
is an active creation of an interdependent mutual power.

So? I said, feeling intimidated, knowing what he was going to say next
and that it was true.

Until you bring something, I'm withholding, too.

That's spiteful, I thought, but kept it to myself. Then the thought
metamorphosed into its opposite.

I want him to nourish me, I thought, but I refuse to nourish him -- by
not nourishing myself. What do I give to him besides taking from him?
Need is an offering that demands. It is not a gift.

Michael, that was the name of the guy I went home with the night
Daniel did not come home, snapped his fingers.

You went away.

I had. At the first, when he entered me, it was pain, and I thought of
how it was with Daniel now. And pain made me think of power and the
excitement of surrender when I am overtaken by someone whom I cannot
resist.

I'm here, I said.

You better be, he said, because I'm going to take you where you've
never been before.

He caressed my throat. I threw open my mouth and I swallowed him the
way the waters of a lake swallow the rocks that describe its shore
line.

He held me and drew me around him. I took him in and he withdrew from
me and I thrust to meet him and bring him back into me with the
frenzied gyrations that had seized me.

I was back home and in bed before Daniel got home, if he was coming
home. It was later than that that I heard Daniel. He was with someone.
I could tell because there was whispering. Not whispering to keep
their presence secret but whispering because it was something like
three in the morning and the apartment was dark and their eyes had
become reluctant to be in the light and the mood was to keep your
voice soft.

I lay awake and heard their ecstasy. They were drunk. I pictured them
gazing into each other's eyes and exchanging adoration.

In the morning, they ignored me. The feeling was strong enough for me
not to intrude but to stay out of the way.

Doesn't he speak? Daniel's guest said as I prepared the sandwich
Daniel would take with him to the construction site he was checking on
at lunchtime.

It made me angry. It made me feel like I was being treated like a
girl. I don't mean that there is anything wrong with being a girl.
It's the way that girls are treated that I don't like.

Technically, he does, Daniel said, but when you don't have any
self-respect it is difficult really to have anything to say.

You didn't have to do that, I said when he came back alone that evening.

Why not?

Because it feels demeaning.

You'd rather have me nourish a false pride?

I did not say that.

He did not respond and I dropped it.

We did not say anything about how he had slept with somebody else last
night, and I did not say anything about Michael.

We both went out separately quite a few times. I don't know how active
Daniel was, but I had become insatiable and available, as I've already
said, magnetic. A loadstone, I was drawing lovers like flies and I
buzzed with the bunch of `em.

Then I found myself depleted, emotionally more than physically. I had
never realized how important feeling possessed was to me. Now, even
though I had plenty of bodies to press my own against or take to
myself, I was continuously aware that they were not Daniel. That
feeling was about something intangible, not only physical. Like the
explosion that ends reverie, the response to your partner is the
result of an intangible.

I began to cry one night when Daniel touched me and tenderly, it
seemed, called me a poor bastard. But he ignored it and went to bed.
Without discussing it, we established that we were sleeping in
separate bedrooms.

It was the oddest thing that exactly at this time I saw Emily when I
was wandering around the borders of Central Park late on a Friday
afternoon when I knew that Daniel had made a date that night to go to
the opera with a guy he met at a photo shoot for model apartments.

I was cheerful with her and secretly enjoyed that my apparent
disinterest in her brought out her friendliness to me. When ever I saw
her or thought of her, I wanted to possess her. But that was
impossible. She had no desire for me to possess her. And she had no
desire to possess me. Perhaps that was because she already had, did,
and found I was no bargain.

I knew it, she said when I told her, without going into it, about my
troubles with Daniel.

Knew what? I said.

That you liked guys the way a girl does. You got really angry when I said that.

I was trying to be...

...the person you weren't.

She kissed me on the lips and said Good-by.


I thought of just getting a menial job again and going back to some
little one room in Brooklyn.

But I was spoiled. I wanted to be in the center of things, the way the
moon is at night, irresponsible, not relying on itself for its own
lumination but fascinating every eye simply by reflecting whatever
energy the sun bestows upon it.

Why are you doing this? Finally one night I cried and took hold of the
two sides of Daniel's jacket.

With a sharp jerk of his elbows he pulled the cloth out of my hand.

You can leave if you don't like it, he said quietly and with hardly
any expression in his voice.

I don't understand how you can be both this person and the person you
used to be.

That's not my problem, he said.

I hated when anybody said that about anything, but when he said it
about me, it cut to the quick. I had to make believe I was not
bleeding. I had already seen that blood was nothing to him, nor the
wound from which it flows.

I rang Michael's bell. He was in. He remembered me. He was alone. He
was surprised.

I asked if it was ok if I came in.

He invited me in, and I got to the point. Can I crash here tonight?

Michael was a teaching assistant at NYU getting a doctorate in
filmmaking there. He agreed to let me stay in his place for a couple
of weeks, but I had to make myself small because he was finishing his
thesis and he had to have the room to write. So no drama.

That did not mean no sex.

I understood that Daniel had been right about me. I did not pull my
weight in the relationship. It was an old story.

But giving me the cold shoulder and freezing me out was not going to help.

Michael was not Daniel. He was a nice guy, good-looking, intelligent,
sometimes funny, a hard worker whose doctorate would be well-earned,
and he would be a good teacher. His students would like him, and he
had a tenure track appointment at CUNY lined up for the fall. But he
lacked Daniel's intensity, electricity, charisma, star power. You
could feel it. I could. I liked when he fucked me, but it did not turn
me inside out and blow me away the way Daniel had.

It doesn't matter, he said after I told him for the sake of honesty
how I felt. I'm not in love with you.

It hurt when he said that.

I had taken a job as a waiter in a club where it was chaos every
night, but the money was good and I was able to pay my share. Michael
had no problem with me staying on. It was not as it had been with
Daniel. How strange the difference! I was ok with Michael because he
really did not care about me, and I had lived in torment with Daniel
because he did.

That summer was hot in New York and I was quite torpid until about
three in the afternoon most days. I ought to have been doing something
during each day before my regular night shift, but I usually did not
get to bed before dawn or rise before noon, and I never knew where the
day had gone by the time I had to catch the cross town bus for the
club.

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