"So did you come back to Portland this time so you could be here on this particular date?"
Her question was a legitimate one. I wanted to be as accurate as possible in my response. I thought about it for a couple seconds, looking up at the towering outline of the Paramount Hotel across the street. Somewhere up on the fifth floor was the room we'd checked into just a few hours before.
"No," I said, "but it was certainly a nice coincidence, one that I wanted to take advantage of. I knew somehow I was supposed to come back here when I did. It just worked out this way."
It was as truthful an answer as I could formulate. I'd posed the same question to myself.
I usually didn't put any stock in the significance of such personal anniversaries, the ones that marked arbitrary round numbers of years having passed since an important moment in one's past. At least not anymore.
But in this case, I had decided I could leverage the coincidence of being here to my advantage, to put some kind of seal upon a renewal of my Oregon life narrative. This kind of thing was certainly a core feature of the way I traveled, purposefully laden with highly personal symbolic gestures, both small and large. Some folks plan parties and other festive events around gay themes. I plan voyages that way. It amuses me, and somehow makes it all the more enjoyable to regard my travels, and indeed my life, as some kind of serial performance art.
Before sunset, we had walked up the hill to the playground in the park where the swing set used to be. She stood at the railing of the fence, looking at the new equipment that had been installed. I leaned against the same railing looking the other direction, up at the windows of the apartment building across the street.
The folly of a couple college kids---it was a common story as old as humanity. It had long since stopped being about that original night, the date of which I remembered because of the numerical quirk of the calendar at the time. The details were unimportant except as mementos in my mind. It remained a symbolic marker of all the complications that had come after it.
"I need to correct something I said before. I said that it was the worst night of my life. But that's not accurate at all.
"Actually it was the best night of my life, at least at the time. It was as if everything in life, for a few fleeting hours, was as exquisitely perfect as I could ever want. It was painful only because of what happened after it, almost immediately afterwards.
"It was devastating. I felt cheated in some cosmic way. I spent years trying to get back to the feeling I had that night, wondering why it had to disappear so quickly. I tried to put it in my past, and told myself it had been an illusion. I distrusted my impression of it. I came to have contempt for my own feelings. I feared anything like it ever happening to me again.
"After a while it became a pleasant memory, like old letters in a drawer.
"But it found a way to resurface, more than once. But that only happened because I let it. I wanted it to come back. I welcomed it.
"Do you remember that old Star Trek movie with Malcolm Macdowell as the villain, where he falls into that space filament that makes you feel some kind of ultimate bliss? Then after he gets thrown out of it he spends the rest of his life obsessively trying to get back into it. He's even willing to destroy an entire solar system to get back there. In a way that's sort of how I felt...
"It was so hard to let go. Incredibly hard. It sounds so easy to say, 'just let go,' but when it's you trying to do the letting go, it can seem like the hardest thing in the world. Yet once you find the way to do it, it seems obvious in retrospect, the way you had to do it, like knowing the combination of a lock that you had to pick to open.
Now it seemed so long ago in the past. And it was all burned up in ashes. I had made sure of that, almost deliberately---yes, deliberately because I had thought I had no other option to escape it. It was the only way for us both to be free. There was no going back. But at least I could finally come back here and not feel the weight of it at every turn.
"Maybe I could have chosen to forget it all---everything. But I could never take the path of oblivion. I had to negotiate my own way, and keep it all in my memory.
"For whatever it has been, it is my life that I've lived, my story. I wouldn't trade it for the whole galaxy."When the server arrived, we ordered bourbon cocktails flavored with ginger, an ongoing inside joke between us, based on how we had met. Later we had a round of flavored Manhattans.
At one point the music playing inside the bar was a version of "Summer Samba." It was a very familiar tune to both of us, but we had forgotten the title and had to look it up on our smartphones from a fragment of the lyrics.
I told Red that I owned a guitar chord book of the songs of Antônio Carlos Jobim.
"Bossa nova is fun to play on the guitar," I said. "It uses lots of sixth and ninth chords, as well as seventh chords of course. You can move your hand up and down the fret board from one chord to another quite easily. It sounds instantly Brazilian. The rhythm, though, that's more difficult, at least for me."
When the night air grew chilly we went inside and took the elevator up to our hotel room. We stayed up late into the night, playing Brazilian music off Spotify. While Red played the songs she had chosen, I decided it was time to make the big leap and embrace a new technology. While she fiddled with her song, I downloaded my own version of Spotify, created an account, and loaded up my first tune in my new play list.
"My turn," I said.
No comments:
Post a Comment