In L.A., Love is Essential

Part I

Alright love. I have to run. Where to? Well, nowhere, but I’ve been in here for way too long.

He is running dangerously low on pesos. I don’t know how much the Internet cafe costs, but the hour and a half he has spent on me, I savor. He will be off soon, out of Catemaco, on to Veracruz, and then to Puebla, at some point returning to his Quaker apartment in Mexico City. I was supposed to have visited him there. He had emailed me excited and anxious with everywhere he wanted to take me, and all the things he knew he just had to show me. But, I didn’t go. In some bleak, heartbreaking moment in between our goodbye in May and my expected arrival in August, I realized with leaden resolve that I simply could not go. I needed to disappoint him the way he had disappointed me so many times before. I needed to somehow break the spell.

***

You sound different. Something’s changed...

The instant message flashes onto my screen and my heart sinks. We had been through this question and answer session already this summer and nothing had come out of it. Last time he told me he didn’t know what was different and that he had to go. I ask him again how I sound different.

My stomach knots up as I wait for his reply to appear in the little box, staring out my window at the Golden Gate, the sunset setting it on fire and throwing gold and pink and purple over the surfaces of my room. Nerves turn my palms sweaty. My heart thumps pathetically fast as I try to ignore the computer screen.

I don’t know...more mature? More serious? More reserved?

So, he has not found me out, after all. 

He has not realized that the reason I sound different is because I am trying with every inch of my being to not love him. That I am trying to leave him behind because it is simply too painful to keep wanting him, and receive only somedays and eventuallys in return for my nows. That I have to move on because I have to not feel that he is the other half of me—that I am incomplete without him.

I’ve been trying to figure it out.

Elation washes over me. It is almost as good as being loved fully back by him, to know that he is contemplating my moods while on a rickety overstuffed bus in Chiapas or sipping a cafe con leche in Veracruz. There is an historic cafe, he tells me, legendary because you order more to drink by clinking your spoon on your cup. He thinks it is fantastic. Of course I do too. 

I can see him sitting there at the Internet cafe in Catemaco, scruffy and worn. He has been traveling for days by bus through southern Mexico. He is unshaven, wearing jeans that could probably stand on their own, and a belt and sandals woven in Chiapas. Because of course he is. If I could stand in front of him at that very moment, I know I would fall in love with him all over again. 

I lie and say I do not know. It’s been a weird summer.

He switches the topic gracefully, getting out of a potentially massive heart to heart by saying that whatever it is, he can’t wait to see me. I can almost hear his sigh of relief 2,652 miles away.

Want to know what I got you for your birthday?

I say “No” only because then I will only find out what it is when I see him. Maybe the suspense will bring our reunion closer, faster. Maybe when I see him, I will finally get the closure I need. Maybe when I see him, I will fall into him and I all over again the minute he is there standing before me with his head tilted back as he laughs, flashing me his crooked grin.

I thought of you when I saw it, without noticing it, and then it was like of course, this is tight. And it’s not instantly recognizable as Mexican, but it is. It’s almost Gatsbyian.

Gatsby was/is our passion. We would lie in his double bed at two in the morning, when we were supposed to be doing real work or catching up on much needed sleep, and read aloud to each other. We read over and over until those magical passages were ingrained in our memories, our eyes lit up in the dim light, thrilled down to our lightly touching sock-covered toes, drunk on adjectives and each other. At parties, barely hearing the generic rap blasting around us, we would whisper to each other smiling like mischievous 10 year olds.

Gastby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree.

“‘Orchid of a woman!’” we’d exclaim. “How did he do it?” 

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. 

“‘Wild tonic,’” we’d gasp breathlessly, “Wild tonic. It’s just too fabulous.” 

What he could have possibly bought me that would conjure up both Mexico and Gatsby, I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I can’t wait to see it, I tell him.

Soon. LA. The Sunset Strip baby, The Viper Room. I’ll be a producer like Vince Vaughn in Swingers, and you’ll be my Dorothy. Deal?

I stop myself from telling him he’s got it all wrong. Deal, I say.

***

He sends me an email that consists solely of a phone number. A cell phone? His apartment phone? I have no idea. I immediately close my email and breathe a sigh of relief.

He is back. Really back. Not just back in the country, but doing laundry and smelling milk cartons and going to the bank home.

With only ten digits he tells me everything I need to know: he misses me and he wants to talk to me. 

But, the question for both of us is: Do I want to talk to him?

***

“Hello?”

And there he is, after all that.

“Hiiiii,” I say, making sure he knows it’s me.

“Hello hello!”

It was us. We were back. For the moment my nervousness fades. We talk and talk and talk. We tell each other as much as we can over the phone. It is just unreasonable to think he can tell me all about Mexico in one conversation. It is ridiculous to think I can talk about all the things that have changed in my life in one go.

“It is really good to hear your voice,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s good to hear you too,” I reply.

“Too long,” he says.

Yes, too long.

It had been too long.

***

At The Formosa we grin at each other over half drunk beers, tripping over words to tell the other everything, anything, all of it. Five months, one postcard, three phone calls, and one 45 minute plane ride.

There we were.
Together.