What He's Poised to Do

About a month ago, you and I met for drinks. We were not the only ones meeting. Since we stopped sleeping together, we have worked hard to construct a social structure around us that will permit us to remain in each other’s company. We have one or two mutual friends in business (my business) or in the art world (your art world). I have continued to collect, a pursuit that stretches my wife to the bounds of her indifference, and so she permits me to go out by myself and sit with what she calls the “albinic syba-rites.” At some point there is no dividend in following her language. Even if someone had called my wife and reported exactly who was sitting around the table, it would not arouse suspicion. A fifty-year-old collector with a sixty-year-old gallery owner, a forty-year-old journalist, and a thirty-year-old painter? The composition was perfect.

At this particular drink, you were nervous. Or rather: we were nervous, but you were showing it. We had been through a month of not speaking, and then a month of speaking every day, and then a day when you called me to say that you could not go through another month like it. “But it’s making me happy,” I said.

You sighed. “It’s making me miserable. I love talking to you. But I don’t talk to a man every day unless I’m sleeping with him.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not okay,” you said.

The next night was the drink. You should have been asking the gallery owner about his fall shows. I should have been talking to the journalist and trying to extract the names of next season’s hot prospects. Instead, we spoke mainly to each other. At one point, the waitress asked us if we wanted more drinks, and I ordered for you. I am sorry. It was instinct. It doesn’t matter, anyway. No one noticed, not even the journalist, and after the second round of drinks, the conversation broadened, and there was nothing left for the others to notice. Around eleven, the party broke up. I wanted to walk with you a few blocks uptown before I got in a cab. You said no. It was cold outside. You wanted to go home and go to sleep. I insisted, and prevailed; we sat in a small restaurant and you drank coffee. “You didn’t even come to the show,” I said. I had converted one of my vacant apartments into a gallery, and I was showing work by Spanish painters I had collected over the years. The journalist had called it “a small show that produces large pleasures.”

“I was busy,” you said.

“You weren’t busy,” I said. “There was a woman there who said she had been at a drink with you just a half hour before.”

“I didn’t feel like coming,” you said. “I think that maybe you acquired some of those paintings because they reminded you of me.”

“What?” I said. “That’s idiotic.” But it was not idiotic. There was one portrait in particular, painted by a seventy-year-old Castilian, that looked almost exactly like you. If you had mentioned it specifically, I would have lied and said that I had owned that painting for years. I was not proud that you had turned my head far enough that I was buying paintings that looked like you.

“Maybe,” you said. She looked defeated. “All I know is that I didn’t want to be there, and I don’t really want to be here.”

“The show was important to me,” I said. “I would have liked it if you had made an appearance.”

“I know,” you said. “I’m sorry.” You looked like you might cry.

“I thought we were going to try to do well by one another,” I said. “If we’re not, then there are many other things we should discuss.”

“Like what?” you said.

“Like the new man,” I said. You had been to Los Angeles for a show of your work, and while you were there, you had started sleeping with a young doctor. He came to visit at least once a month, and while you told me without provocation that you weren’t in love with him, you also made it clear that you had no intention of ending things. It seemed that he was the perfect lover, at least for the moment. He did not live where you lived. He did not see you often enough, or for long enough, for you to grow bored, or to feel afraid that you were not feeling love—or worse, that you were. The perfection had a cost, which is that he was not in any true sense a real person. He was a coat you bought off the rack, an unsuperlative fashion statement. He was an appurtenance. When I told you that, your face darkened. You did not like me using my wife’s words.

“That’s it,” you said, and got into a taxicab. The evening had begun light and ended with a thud. I went home. I slipped into bed. My wife was there, which was a rarity those days. Her work must have ended early. She slid back toward me. It was warm in the bed. That was where I belonged, and I told myself that until I believed it.

Dear X,