The Science of Distancing
- Biology
His kitchen. Grey hesitant light. Morning at the second story twin house in the suburbs of Boston. He serves a simple breakfast. Breakfast is always simple. Coffee, French bread, goat cheese served on blue, mostly unmatched, china. We eat quietly among the click of forks and spoons. The hiss of the espresso pot intersects careful, occasional conversation. Words spare and sparing as though their value needs protection. The local radio station plays a rebroadcast of energetic Klezmer music which he experienced last Tuesday in an auditorium of predominantly older Jews. He says that there was a warm feeling of community. And then quiet consumes the morning again.
I cross and re-cross my legs at the banquette wedged into the east corner of his kitchen and overlooking the garden planted and tended by his downstairs neighbors. Cosmos, dahlia, coreopsis. Sun loving bloomers, their heads turned skyward absorbing what gathering rays shone down. A stack of New Yorkers, months of them, are piled up on the bench next to me. Tilted and threatening to slide to the floor, they, too, need tending, and I straighten them until they are lined up evenly. I resist the urge to arrange them chronologically.
He wonders aloud whether to read the poems, at least. One thing remains in common.
We met at a poetry conference in Tahoe. I had taken the Zephyr to California, traveling across the country from Philadelphia. He flew in from Boston or whatever city required his attendance at a conference on public health. It was far from love at first sight.
Now, we almost touch, both of us reaching across the table. I feel the heat of his body as he leans in to offer the knife to me. The moment waits, wanting something more. His nearness warms my skin. Slow moment of anticipation. But it passes like the morning sun. All potential. Blooming into the day. Becoming cloudy and uncertain.
- Chemistry
Morning insists that Bryant Park tinge with dawn colors. Despite a beginning of promise, we sit silently and wait for words. Stumble over a drab moment and a somber meal. Watch our breakfast cloud untouched in the gathering light. This restrained ritual placates our need for conversation.
Today, we know the taste of distance. We bar the bright horizon from our sight, the effect of squinting into the sun or closing our eyes to the reality time no longer considers worthy of stalling. We are each absorbed, distanced in our own thoughts. Mine consider how the sun tarnishes this morning’s cut pears in today’s knowing heat.
Last night we played at caring, at honing the razor edge of love. But there ensues the sureness of night receding. Moonlight teases with its scrim of illusion, then fades from the sill, and we face the moment of untwining and covering our bodies with night-tangled sheets. The wine remains on the bedside table; vestiges coat the glass with acridity.
The walk to Bryant Park was brisk. His steps outpaced mine. Distance is a skill at which we are practiced. It was early, and the sun’s first rays had not yet broken through the encompassing reminder of last evening. Manhattan sidewalks and buildings conspire, their stony greys a weighty enclosure pressing self-conscious memories against my skull.
We know our routine: coffee and sweet rolls from Le Pain Quotidien. Bosc pears, coddled in waxed paper from a nearby produce grocer. We slice them with care, small luminous treasures to whet our taste for living. I watch the glisten turn hazy in an air of stillness until one of us speaks and interrupts the chorus and cries of birds in the fine spray of the park’s fountain. Light plays its tricks, glinting sparks and showering haloes. We are not suited to such favors as light would bestow. Instead, we wear the day’s sunlight with discomfort, and love, a size too great, drapes our shoulders with indifference.
- Physics
The two of us lie among the battered, grey rocks on the strewn shore. The fisherman’s line is cast, trawls Buzzards Bay as the boat tips through the faint wave’s troughs. Then, there was the child’s dress caught by a rush of shore breeze, billowing bright summer spinnaker against the blue surrounding sky. Sun ignites the edges of the blown cotton with bursts of light. I catch it with my camera, sun-spotting the scene in diagonals of radiance.
How the day pinwheels pictures, snaps one vista then another. Life appears as though captured images, luminous in the camera’s viewfinder. A photographic array, the white light fractures prismatic, the colors of living nailed to the sky, and as we watch the rise and fall of a catching tide, feel the shear of wind, we think we understand these forces, formulas that govern our spinning earth. That govern ourselves.
Lunch sits in a basket tabled on the flat rock between us. Farmer’s cheese and a dark bread, grainy mustard in a small crock, cornichons, chardonnay disguised in travel mugs. A scene well-set. Always the accoutrements of what plays at love. Wanting more, allusive and shiny bright.
Sun overhead, the day heats and fine beads of sweat form on his forehead. His eyes closed, his breath shallow, he twitches slightly as though dreaming. What he dreams will remain inaccessible, and we retreat more and more to regions unmoved by the velocity of life. We’ve become unbound to the laws of matter, the pull of attraction. We are bodies honed by a slow erosion, just as sand is suspended for a moment in a watery shallow then is sucked into the bay on ebb currents. Like the sand, love disappears in increments. We are habituated to the acceleration of time. Heedless, we tumble on and like particles accrete to stars, we bind ourselves to loss.
published in Citron Review