Tedious, early May—I was in no mood to set off and ramble when they came by. She was leaving Monday, a delightful series of impulses awaited her: heat, precipitation, a whole night in a twin bed with a stranger. As such, it was the right thing for me to do, to say goodbye. I heard her travelling laughter before I saw they had arrived downstairs. Notes, clear as water, from passing birds. We were finally coming upon the weather where it was possible to leave both the front and back door open, hollowing the apartment. Song crossing from end to end, conducting sound like one great wind instrument.
She and Alexander were several drinks ahead and therefore far more pleasant between each other than I. We all dawdled.
“Your eyes are very wide and very beautiful. Very gentle and very much like a doe,” she told me abruptly.
I nodded. Half-sincere responses followed. We had not seen each other since the winter, in December, when she had allowed me to take her portrait for a middling sort of publication.
“In January, I stopped wearing my glasses,” I offered.
I hoped to exhibit increasing sincerity upon finding some liquor but came up only with pale ale. It was enough to set off. To stop the staring across at each other under the entryway light. We were headed to meet Léo. Complete the symmetry, between her, he, him, and I. I had not seen him since last August. Not for any reason resembling disfavour; I quite liked Léo, his candour and simplicity, his lighting playfulness. He was good for her. Much better than anyone had ever been. I always thought there was something greater going on behind his eyes. Of course, this was not verifiable.
Still—together—they were a total work of art. Vivid and good-looking. Tall and lithe. Radiant and wild-haired. He: carrying in his speech something of a captivating accent. She: a complete force of nature. Both were in possession of impossibly long, precious, winding names.
Léonard. Bendición. Eliot. T.S. Maria-Christina. Elliot. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Our Lady. Of Guadalupe and Lourdes. Of Perpetual Help and Astonishment. Ardent, Enduring, Absurd.
They were absurd! Unfastened, warm-hearted, without reservations. Young, romantic, perhaps imaginative in a way I believed I was. Nubile, roving, and seamless in a way I knew I was not. Free or otherwise gliding across some surface.
They led us under a brimming moon, and through three parks, and inside two closed convenience stores, and upwards on a set of swings. We talked of very little that was not old.
“Will he join you in Madrid?” I asked when we sat in a hexagonal tower alone.
She nodded. Great golden boughs arch over our heads against a blue dusk.
“Before he goes back to school. He wants to study architecture now. He’s always hiding all these drawings of real Vitruvian men.”
I nodded. Why not? Her eyes were like two suns. I put my head in the crux of my arm. We listened to some distant thrumming. The unseeable but doubtless currents. Aphoristic combinations of letters tried to bridge the dull sociability of my mouth with my mind. To signify through sounds and tones is a remarkable abstraction.
“What do you think you’ll do after next year?” She asks me.
“Nothing. A few strokes, a million things.”
We returned. Walked tightrope on a dry fountain's edge. Reformed our quadrilateral. Pampas grass coming together. A single moving image. The night was becoming cold despite the continual languid drinking. Walking along, we played Dylan, L'Arpeggiata, Handel. Talked nonsense, talked sere, talked in concentric circles. Up, up! On, on. Wordlessly, Léo offers me a cigarette. On other nights, I have accepted in mimetic fashion. Tonight, nothing passed between us. They bring us back to Léo's apartment. A long, tall corridor at the top of eight flights of stairs and past sixteen blue doors and upon twenty-seven hundred blue and white tiles.
Sitting inside, a formation of a clumsy shape, we play Harmonium, Marty Robbin's, Joan Baez—that tremor! That voice like a bell! Too drawn and beautiful for us both. Then, the Velvet Underground. "Stephanie Says."
“This song always makes me think of you,” I tell her abruptly.
She smiles. I turn my attention to a thick clumsy bronze after Brâncuși’s Bird in Space. Léo’s friend, an amateur filmmaker that I have met on at least three occasions, who is staying here for one night before his flight home tomorrow, blankly asks me who I am. I take when I am offered a dry and bitter liquor. I sit in the singular wake of a silver lamp which forms a perfect hyperbola. I wonder why it hangs so low given Léo’s lanking height. I appreciate fourteen beautifully bound celadon volumes of Stendhal in the corner, next to nineteen mauve Tolstoy’s.
“Take any one you’d like,” Léo offers.
I decline. I am questioning whether Tolstoy has even written nineteen books of such a length.
We all turn to a cleaved stone sculpture of a bull fighter in the centre of the room. She and Léo dance beside it, discussing a triptych they enjoy diffusely. Alexander reminds the filmmaker of his name. The room is spinning like a top. Red, red, red, warm. They show me the painting holding the centre of their passion in this moment. A chalk depiction of all Seven Deadly Sins. They see what I saw but see it differently than I.
A knock at the door startles everyone. A sixth person arrives—but only the third who is staying here for just one night. He was an entirely artless Masaccio angel. The linen of his shirt was far too nice for his operating sensibilities on linen.
I lie down. I am now seeing two angels. My body is a live-wire. How easy is the manipulation of the universe! Someone calls me over, there is no way I can move to meet them.
Lay, Lady, Lay.
Masaccio coos to me.
Somewhere under the music I discern her voice. She is imagining a deeper, endless black velvet above her head. Masaccio tosses her a tennis ball. He speaks immaculate and prophetic:
“We seek everywhere the unconditioned, and always find only the conditioned.”
She rolls her eyes, takes a draw from a water-pipe, passes it to the filmmaker. Pure, white wind. Away and away! I join Léo at the window. He is searching for some move to some jazz. Some proof of life on the pavement. Some modal kind of headway.
She joins us both. Head falling back out the window.
“This may not happen again,” she says seriously.
That, I knew, was the definite human pattern. Just as quickly as she came, she went. Such was her way. Music would play and Felina would whirl. Riding alone! The plane of dreams.
Lay, Lady, Lay.
I’m absent-minded again on successions. Watching them all. Holding them still. Strange, how they had so little form to their thoughts. Duration. Before any rational articulation.
“I dream of a world full of musicians. With room for everyone, pleasant things, the deep, deep sea.”
Those great golden boughs arch above us. We return to somewhere we have not yet been. Muddled. Free-wheeling.
Does the theory of language really present the dynamics of the spiritual world?
I think that still all these thoughts must terminate in absolute foundation. I give her my hand. I wish her good luck. She laughs.