love

My weekend, starting Thursday. DC and NYC. AF, five new forearm tattoos, working on his game in a Brazilian bar far from Dupont Circle. Oversleeping by two hours a four hour meeting; getting a business school education in the remaining two hours. A six hour bus ride to the Manhattan Bridge filled with insane people: "You are SO SELFISH! You never CARE about the customer! I will never take the CHINA BUS again! How can you live with YOURSELF!?" for two of the six hours. CM and the Mermaid Inn before her girls' weekend out trip to - West Virginia? - talking about Marco in the Italian Foreign Service, Singapore, love. She gave me a pink scarf and hugged me. CH and SL trading measures in a karaoke duet; SL, bearing gifts, forgetting to sing into the microphone, reading nonfiction books with funny titles and underlining in all the heartbreaking places; falling asleep shivering on an aerobed wearing my shorts, jeans, two shirts, and a windbreaker and crawling into CH's bed in thready light in the morning to talk about waiting, ugliness of certain mixed facial compositions, love. A chilly picnic in the park filled with beautiful people, and two dogs; sweet ETK fresh from her own heartache, JJ with Bedford-Stuyvesant talking about job security and scaling the Great Wall, SGD running after Lola chasing squirrels after TO left for a jog and took his dog-disciplining talent with him, KC and SF wandering the length of the park (KC: "We're by the people wearing capes and hitting each other with rubber swords; where are you?") before finding the yellow tree, CY and DY and AY celebrating AY's birthday and job triumph and DY's introduction to New York, RK on beater bike with NI rolling up on Jerry Bruner's tiny folding bike and talking about the Bradley effect, TF getting a haircut in preparation for his upcoming appearance on Anderson Cooper's show (!), SK helping us relive 1L year with entertaining descriptions of Professors KW and AM, DR warning she was fat but being actually just as svelte and charming as always, with RS, quiet and tall and smiling, OZ welcomed in by phone from Menlo Park, LF riding up in a bike with modified bar ends talking about being a modern dancer moonlighting as a grad student and the shit font in her last apartment, maniacal AT literally running away from a conversation toward the scent of chocolate ("Is that chocolate you're offering??"), IB bringing a bottle of wine, calling me up afterward and apologizing for blurting out "I'm conservative. Or, at least, compared to all of you" at the end of the day. KC and I made fun of IB's brown pants and brown shoes but it was done with the spirit of love; together we've known him for thirty years. Saturday was warm in the slanted sunlight but freezing in the shade; we got up to move away from the shadow of the turned oak tree every half hour or so toward the end. Parting ways after the sun set. Walked through Prospect Park high on love taking pictures of red leaves and collecting a few to send off to Bavaria. 

Stern in her exquisitely decorated apartment on the southeast corner of the park. She said, "Wait, you need to meet my friend." For a moment I thought BA might be waiting in the bedroom, but then I saw this:

Stern, I love you. This is a BDSMy leather deliveryboy hat on a glass head on a pillow stuffed into a t-shirt with a reproduction of a portrait of Sarah Palin naked holding a shotgun, on top of a gold belt and empty black jeans. I almost screamed. We took turns pretending to make out with our new friend, took photos with pubic hair showing, then drank IB's wine while arranging her six diamond-shaped mirrored coasters into Stars of David tangrams. Stern poured out the wine into a water bottle which we snuck to our seats in the very back row of the Walter Kerr theater to watch Chekov's "The Seagull," where we peered down upon Peter Sarsgaard and Kristen Scott Thomas from directly overhead, a thousand feet away, drinking wine. We missed JH's show in Williamsburg but were treated to kids dancing on the subway shouting "Obama for yo' mama! Obama for yo' mama!" which Stern pointed out, not to the kids, ought to have been "Yo' mama for Obama!" We found RK on Driggs, sought shelter in a Mexican restaurant, and drank more wine and practiced obscene handshakes until it was time to leave, Stern for the L to the Q, RK and I for the G. I almost cried thinking about not seeing Stern for another few months, but disguised the sadness by thrusting my pelvis toward her when we hugged. Then RK and I stayed up until five talking about not hurting people's feelings, the definitions of "analog" and "digital" (RK speculated that "analog" meant the absence of...log?), an old acquaintance who has taken a high dive off the deep end, love. We'll have a family together at 37 (biological, I insist, we'll cut out a hole in a sheet) if neither of us succeed in the last. At noon we hurried out, met NI, bought pupusas and tacos and terrier-shaped cupcakes at the Brooklyn Flea, ran into some urban planners, and ate our purchases back in NI's exquisitely decorated studio. (NI has a three-foot tall sculpture that is an italicized Helvetica question mark propped in the corner, and ceramic mugs that have snouts printed on their bottoms so when you drink your face looks like a pig's.) We'd gathered to play a favorite game from the days we lived together - Unsafe At Any Speed Scrabble - but didn't, because NI had news for me. The news left me feeling punched in the stomach. I put on all my clothes and a scarf and gloves because after feeling punched I felt cold. Then I felt the feeling that Barack must feel when he hears McCain call him names and he just shakes his head gently and laughs. The news concerns a person who will no longer concern me. I wash my hands, I shake my head gently, I laugh.  Here is the closure a weak person was too discourteous to deliver. Life is funny, we said. C'est la vie. Holy OMFG shit, we said. Incest, I said. NI feels free and I am so happy for her. I'm going to be free, too, and you can be happy for me. RK brooded in a director's chair about, as always, how to be a good person in a tricky situation. He pretty much always does a good job. Broken Social Scene, I learned, played quietly from the laptop, and three cigarettes were smoked. I said the same things again and again and was not ready to leave when I had to go forth and catch the G. But I was not unhappy; I was relieved.

And that is the funny ending of the funny story, folks. It's a good story. It starts with love and ends with love, and then it starts again.