The Write Thing

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.

Friday, 6.30 pm - He calls. Will we meet tonight? Yes, why not? This is neutral territory for her, an empty jungle of opportunity to seize. They only met once before, biblically, over a year ago. Now he’s moving to Madrid. She will remain in Buenos Aires, at least for now. He’s married. She’s not. She opens the door and peeks to check whether she’s not dreaming. He has made plans so many times before…but the family, the fear, the lack of habit for a plan, all made it difficult for him to find the way of going to her as he had wanted.
They talk, and have a shower together, before making love for the first time. Their bodies feel so natural against each other, so familiar and comfortable. The pizza arrives, four inches larger than his sex. They eat, they touch and she watches him, aroused once more.
He will wait for her in bed later, and will ask whether he can spend the night. She will say yes, she would have offered, but did not dare. They make love in that unusual and unique connection they generate out of an odd, unmeant encounter, populated by the ancestral layers of skin they have shared in their unrevealed, common past. He stays over, oddly enough, taking up so little space in the bed that he is almost unnoticeable. He may have snored, she may have heard him…
The next meeting may or may not ever happen. She will probably guess what makes him so strange and so necessary. She can have sex with men, but she cannot love them. They both know what a woman tastes and feels like, even while he is not aware that she does. He cannot fall in love with her, and be destroyed by the force of her untamed nature. She cannot be other than his peer, even when he ignores everything about her. He calls her his friend, but she is his lover. The way he wants it, the way he dreams it…no questions asked, no expectations…simply his girl Friday.