The Write Thing

There are moments in life when silence is all that is possible. In an odd, untimely way, I believe I had a severe case of this almost for the last two months. Lots of things are changing in my life right now. New doors are opening while others have closed apparently in a much more certain way than I would have imagined, or even liked. Oddly enough, it is in those times when writing becomes the obvious channel. However, I have not written — except for work reasons — for exactly 59 days.

I cannot possibly expect anyone who ever read this blog to even become aware of my return. Those generous souls who would now and then glance at the website for a peek into whatever oddity I would decide to indulge my keyboard into by now have probably given up all hope. Yes, lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. You would do the right thing by refraining from trusting an erratic author. Life is much more beautiful when you do not have to be surprised by other people’s changing moods.

If I were a good writer, I would be able to summarize in a concise text my whereabouts since I decided to put this blog in the freezer. Oh, well…I don’t think I can do that. Therefore, I will speak about the future, about new horizons, about uncertainty itself. Houston beckons, this time for a more permanent contract. What this means is a lot and nothing. It means I still have a job, and new challenges, but it does not bind anyone to anything — including myself. A few years ago, Houston had also seemed to be the place where I would be residing on a longer term basis. However, neither life nor I were ready for the jump, so the whole fantasy only materialized in a short story I wrote at the time and which I named “Letters from Houston”. It was written in Spanish…and I’ll never know why. Houston was on hold, and in a very particular fashion, I was coming out of my own personal limbo of indecision and non-living. Many things changed in the two years that passed since a first door to the US was closed, partially by H1-B quotas and partially by myself. I plunged into my own abyss, emerged half-victorious and wounded, and created my own re-birth, as Sylvia Plath would say beautifully at the end of that prodigious scene of The Bell Jar. I played around the limits of desire and succumbed to the demons of dysfunctional relationships, I naively believed it was possible to set free a repressed love and not pay the high cost of its loss, but I also learned to let go. I learned that letting go is the only way of healing, and the hardest.

Yes, I miss her sometimes…her laughter, her friendship, her beautiful eyes, and I secretly know there will be no letters from Houston, and no Copacabana Palace. We are no more anything, and it scares me to think that I always knew…because I wrote the end of my own story throughout the summers of her absence and my pain and I was right, even before she severed the bond to escape a friendship that now she feared.

Oh, but this posting was supposed to be about my future. Well, nothing is really about the future unless it comes from our own past. So I will raise a symbolic glass of champagne and toast to us, to the land of no regrets, to the bitter taste that time will turn into sweet vignettes of a youthful Paris…the world we knew before, dont je ne regrette rien

When celebrating particular moments of being, flowers and champagne become indispensable. I am not an expert in the former, having become almost famous for systematically killing them in their prime. However, I have learned quite a lot about the latter, and have gained my independence on its account. Only a few years ago, I was quite autonomous in meal-related matters  — setting the table, intervening in some light decision-making in the kitchen, and opening a well-researched bottle of wine. However, I was totally incapable of opening a bottle of champagne. I had an irrational fear of popping the cork in the wrong direction, or being second-guessed by the treacherous curved creature standing before me. That was an issue to be resolved by others, more well-versed souls in the field of Bacchus-oriented bliss. I would simply stand back, looking at the lucky volunteer in awe, and wondering if I would ever be able to do it myself. A part of me thought it charming that I should have that “Penelope Pitstop” aspect in me (the mention of this cartoon character is directly related to a very biased category across lesbianhood that I developed, and that I will expand upon in a later post). After all, the inability to open a bottle of champagne placed me in a precarious position of need for a more “manly” figure to take over the opening of life to a series of glass clicks and eyes forced to look into each other as a good luck charm.

In short, regardless of my efforts to make my event perfect, somebody else always had to inaugurate pleasure. Usually, there was somebody willing to take the role, so the need for being the leader did not arise for many years. In the meantime, I attentively listened to tips from the natural openers, who with a secure hand explained to me different methodologies for avoiding accidents and ensuring a clean excursion into one of the most perfect pleasures ever invented.

Eventually, I knew it would happen. One day, the person willing to take the lead might not be there, or I would simply not feel like celebrating the positive or the standard — new year parties, birthdays, etc. One day I knew I would also want to celebrate loss and failure, because they are part of life and we need to take them for what they are, bite the dust, and move on with at least some lesson learned. I also knew that there might not be anyone to accompany me in that venture, for who would want to celebrate the dark? Those who had once led gradually disappeared, absorbed into other obligations or misled into thinking they were happy elsewhere, in comfortable lives that smelled of order and structure more than chaos and growth.

I could not stay in their world, even though I would have liked it to be the only thing I understood. I needed to move on, celebrate my own passion and its hell. It was then that I knew I had to face my fears. The Monoprix was open until midnight, only meters away from the flat I had on rue Maubeuge. Several options were available, and I remember choosing some Taittinger or perhaps a variant of it. I put all the pieces of advice my mind had collected over the years in action, and let them interact to give my hand the gradual twist it needed in order to achieve the desired effect. I felt the cork gradually give in to the upward pull of my curved palm, countering the motion of the supporting hand (a key component in the strategy, according to my ex girlfriend, a former waitress). A soft fizz came out, with the desired intensity and a perfectly balanced mist. I had made it. I had conquered my independence.

Yesterday, I woke up in the small hours of the morning and was unable to fall back into sleep. Maybe it was the excitement of a busy weekend, in which I ran (or briskly walked my way through) my first 5K race and I almost blew a car tire when I added pressure to it — can anybody explain to me why in America, a country where even orgasms are digital, there is not a single tire pressure monitor with a regular display? Even Third-World Argentina has one, for God’s sakes!
Back to the exciting weekend. Well after my near-death experience, I had an appointment with two extremes of Superbowl celebration. One was an invitation from a work colleague, who is married to Jack, an artist here in Houston, and the other was a party with the office boys (age range: mid-twenties to late fifties) at a local bar, drinking beer and rooting for the Cardinals, the team that ended up losing an incredible game that I only understood 10% of.
So I arrive at 4.45 pm at the first party, which took place in another couple’s house, a fabulous and spacious two-story construction designed in a state-of-the-art fashion by the husband, a famous architect in town. The house is part of the art tour of the Heights, the hip and bohemian area of this city that would surprise the most skeptical visitors. I take my own little tour of the house, guided by my friend and one of the guests, the wondrous Loretta, a Croatian concert pianist that had drunk too many “fogs” — the infamous mysterious drink the party is named after. As an aside, after the tour, Loretta and I will agree that the closet in the main bedroom deserves a tour of its own — how can anyone be so tidy? Probably it’s an architect thing…

The party unfolds and I am introduced to most of the patrons of the arts in Houston, Museum directors, Film festival organizers, and the like. At one point, 62-year-old Botoxed Mary asks me what is my artistic specialty, and I start my speech on working for an oil and gas consulting firm. I can tell she is appalled and I only then realize that I should have lied…but she is too drunk to even get worried about my secular status, and I can always interject and say I used to be an amateur opera singer. That seems to relieve her while she looks at my neck and tells me I look so good for my age, as if I were in my mid-seventies. It dawns on me just then how much age matters in some circles…the reality of it becomes a burden and many feel compelled to find some surgical solution to the woe of growing old. At least Mary does look awesome at 62, although I personally think that has more to do with her post-menopause sexual drive than with the benefits of lifting and laser procedures — after all, she quite promptly tells me her man is nine years younger and that they go at it for hours.

In the sitting room we meet John, relaxing on the huge circular couch and sipping something as he quietly watches the game. When my friend asks him where he knows the host and hostess from, he simply says he saw there was a party going on, and he thought he might join in. I still think he was telling us the truth…Anyway, we are now halftime through the game. Now women want to pump up the volume and listen to the commercials and Bruce Springsteen is about to give a mini-performance. Venus and Mars, boys and girls, is a combination that never fails. Boys watch the game, women watch the commercials, but they all watch the Boss.

Taking my cue from the halftime call, I focus on keeping a ying-yang synchrony in my own reading of America’s biggest night event after Thanksgiving, and I leave for the Big Woodrow’s in Chimney Rock and Richmond Avenue, where my boys are hanging out. They are at a table outside, enjoying the weather in a mild Sunday evening and watching the LCD screens give a partial victory to the Steelers. As I arrive, the Steelers’ luck will change, and the Cardinals’ touchdown just a minute before the end of the game will light my workmates’ eyes with a glimmer of hope. A brief moment of joy. Only seconds later, the ghost of a tight victory vanishes before their eyes, as a yellow-clad boy holds the ball inside the court in a fantastic acrobatic move worthy of a ballet performance. The game is now irreversibly lost for the Cardinals, and hope gives way to a little frustration, although nobody is passionate enough in my eclectic group to get into a heated after-match argument — which I am secretly grateful for.

We all get into our cars and drive home. The night is over early in America, and I am in bed by 10.30…only to wake up a few hours later and amuse myself with the memory of a weekend to remember.