45.
“ ‘I want to be Queen.’ She laughed and trembled.”
-Arthur Rimbaud
Terms of attraction are too common to use in describing my first meeting with Christopher, or how he has changed, marred, really, my life. Attraction is what motivates people to read their horoscopes, scanning newsprint for a signal from the island of desire. Translated like that into words, though, the signal becomes impotent, a currency too insubstantial to compensate us for the burden of our expectations. What I want you to know about my relationship with Christopher is that he cured me of my superstition that God was spying on my thoughts all the time, and sometimes punishing me for moments of being too happy (a bastardization of that saying, “Pride goeth before the fall.”) I’d wanted, for example, to be a smoker, ever since I was a little girl who was given to precocious fits of pensiveness; I’d want to sit on the back porch and watch the sun set, but I would want to do it with a cigarette in one hand, that poignant final touch, that torch of mortality. What prevented me was the fear of reproval. When I became involved with Christopher, though, I saw the careening way Providence gave and withdrew itself, so willy-nilly. I was no longer afraid of God then, but of freedom, that thing that strips morality of its authority to organize outcomes.
I’d gone out wearing my padded bra the night I met him, with the resolve not to speak much, because I didn’t enjoy the other college kids I was stepping out with. They were too aesthetically undefined and gossipy for me, and I was waiting, with a faith like prayer, for a group of artistic people to recognize me as someone with potential, and decide to teach me how to live artfully.
Christopher was standing at the mouth of an alley, smoking the cigarette I’d been craving since I was nine. The people surrounding him were not the impoverished park-dwellers or the plain-looking high school pals he sometimes hung out with; they were the friends he was impressed with, who dyed their hair and dressed up as time travelers from past decades. Christopher took out his Zippo to light the cigarette of a girl in white go-go boots, and then that force that could not have been God (because at that moment I was thinking only, “Me, me. Me.”) urged his face towards my walking body, which can seem attractive because it is thin and long.
I have to get this just right, in case he reads it. The surprisingly demure way he put his hand on top of mine as we sat next to each other on the couch in the living room of his friend’s house, but also the constricted way he asked that friend “Are you going to give me a few dollars for those beers you drank?”
One of the boys put on an album they all liked and Christopher stood up on the couch and screamed along with the lyrics and the other boys in the room responded to him with such enthusiasm. The enthusiasm surprised me, because it seemed self-diminishing, like the other boys were bowing at his feet, and they were all such striking, cocky boys it seemed they should all be standing on pieces of furniture, undulating for adoration. But I was the only girl there and the only one who wasn’t drinking, plus I was a newcomer, so how could I begin to know how much those boys loved each other? The end of the song came and he shouted, “Thank you, New York! Good night!” and swatted at a chandelier which had originally been intended as an imperishable upside-down wedding cake for the imaginary newly-weds houses are built for. A few of the crystals dislodged from the chandelier and fell on or near the boys’ bodies and threw shards of reflected light on their faces and shirts. They looked up to watch Christopher jump in the air and scream, and they watched with equal attention when he sat back down and asked me softly, “Would you like a beer?” This tenderness of his, as an arm reached out to hand me a beer, the boys also noted with interest, as they faded one by one out of the room like the pink indentations from a seat belt slowly disappearing from one’s stomach.
I drank beer. I laughed when he asked me questions about myself because everything that’d taken place before this night seemed inane, all my school pictures in yearbooks just tiles on a bathroom floor, my parents and my home a sitcom that was being transmitted somewhere in space but I would never have to watch it again. His face was right there, on mine. Our mouths symbiotic wounds. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” is the refrain I scanned the radio for, from the very beginning of that period of youth when privacy is like a carnival. Before that, it was the sentiment that kept me riveted to my seat in front of the T.V. when the Wizard of Oz made its annual appearance, those four fast friends on the lam together, in a town in the middle of the sky: run away from home, little girl. What I thought Christopher was telling me was that there was something better out there, and beyond that, something even better.
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