Labor Day in Retrospect And so just as flowers need sunlight, water and fertilizer to grow, I suppose she needed me to come along and fuck her, then tell her I loved her, in order rise above the landscape of her particular brand of southern hospitality: the cabs of pickups, the spare bedroom, the dysfunctional bachelor pad in the basement of some relative's house, men who frequented topless joints, whorehouses, truckstops, men who drank too much, and smoked too much, and had too many tattoos and piercings in the weirdest places, men whose sexual orientation was, well, disoriented. And I suppose I needed her for something also. I would look for her in my email, finding her sometimes in the middle of the night. "Promise not to be judgmental?" she asked and I did. That was easy enough to do when I thought I didn't really care, she was a stranger, after all. I could be benevolent and she would, of course, promise the same, and I had so much to tell and so much time to tell it and no use for sleep, dreaded sleep. So we swapped tales, hers of scrabbling in the dirt with hillbillies in the woods in her annual rite of spring, of her drunken sometimes "lover", who seemed indifferent at times, in fact, most of the time, in fact, all of the time. And there was a husband too, a man "who doesn't have a jealous bone", thus their "open marriage", a man who was her "best friend", whose own best friend may have been the indifferent one, who frequently passed out in the spare room. Tales of wife swapping, group sex, and sexual tips from each new lover, shared between husband and wife. All of this was very foreign to me, "Must be a southern thaaang..." I told myself, even considered she might be making it up. My own story was of a Chinese woman who had left a good man, whom she did not love, for an abusive lover, a real gangster with a real gun, from whom I was able to steal her away (for which he tried to kill me, unsuccessfully); and of a ten year affair in a one-bedroom in Manhattan, where I kept some clothes in a closet and a spare drawer and hung a toothbrush in the bathroom; and of an abandoned wife and young children and a house crumbling in the burbs, and the wife got fat and dumpy and crumbled, herself, so to speak, a massive left-side stroke almost killing her and leaving her a bit addled and with trouble speaking, and when she was finally able to talk for the first time after a month in a hospital bed, she told me (first words, honest to God) "You are a bad man." All of this I admitted to the woman on the computer, who had promised not to be judgmental, in the middle of the night, and she was sympathetic, of course to my plight and offered me a soft shoulder of blue light in the sleepless before-dawn, all the while seeking my counsel in matters of the heart of her own. And then there was a trip to Chicago, a convention of sorts of people like myself and her, hopeless romantics who get it all down on paper. When I told her I would be going, she said she too would go, if it was alright with me. (Frankly I wasn't sure, but didn't see how I could say "no".) And so the plans were made and I was guaranteed to get laid with a woman I had known for a year, with a woman to whom I had told my worst secrets and dumbest dreams, but I had never seen. The four days in Chicago are a blur of animal thrashing and hotel room trashing, of feeling each other out, of me searching her sleeping face, trying to figure out what she was all about. This was a different woman from the one to whom I had been drawn by the electron flow on the speculation super highway. and yet, the sleeping face was the same one I had never seen but had known so well. Her lost innocence, her sleeping bridal shroud on this, our wedding night in a room that was strange to both of us in a city that was strange to both of us, where we were strangers to each other and ourselves. In a sudden surge of absurd passion and utter lack of discretion, I spoke those critical words to the sleeping face, trusting that she would not hear, but her eyes opened and she smiled and took me her asinine prisoner, sentencing me to two years for felony stupidity with a simple, "I love you, too." And in time, after that first premature ejaculation, I did come to love her or I believed I did, and I suppose that's the same thing. And she insisted that she loved me, but also loved her husband and their dysfunctional mutual friend, the latter being more a matter of sympathy than passion, and even that subsided after awhile. So, where did it all go wrong? Well, it was in the very beginning. That which starts bizarrely ends bizarrely and abruptly, I might add. The husband was amenable but cautious. After we smoked the weed of piece, he spelled out the law of the land and, as if to demonstrate his superior right of possession, he pulled down her halter and tweaked her left nipple before my very eyes. To him this was a gesture of sharing, I suppose, but to my competitive Yankee nature, this was a dare, to try and snatch her away. Two years of airplanes and long drives, cities both strange and familiar. Two years of three figure phone bills, email messages, colored envelopes carrying treasured mojo for our mutual shrines. Two years of hiking in the woods, margaritas in foreign bars, poetry readings, north and south. Two years and the prize was mine for the taking, and it was then that I demurred, because she had made me struggle for all that I had attained. So, as did the delinquent adolescent in the "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", I stopped just short of the finish line, called her to tell her I wouldn't be on the plane for the big weekend, and moved in with a woman who is fiercely monogamistic, jealous, and possessive, who dropped everything in a flash to go with me, threw heart and soul into it, cries at night out of the pure joy of love, and begs me every day to make her a baby, one with curly hair and blues eyes, another Chinese woman. And now I cannot think of the one I abandoned without thinking of her husband and his rules for the conduct of our monkey business. Didn't they expect that I would bend, stretch and break them, each in its turn, no matter how hip they thought they were? Don't tell me I can't have something without expecting me to try to take it, whether I really want it or not. And I cannot think of her without thinking of his life, and how he must have felt on Labor Day, a year ago, when I dumped his wife.
