It was an evening they had planned, privately, in the sequester
of their thoughts for years before it could or should have
happened. They had been involved with others, and there was
satisfaction in the waiting, and tension—he had never before
acknowledged he could be content with indefinite apprehension.
Daydreaming, he took pleasure in their brief meetings on the
astral plane, entwined among the stars. Relating this while
walking, he saw her smile, and without looking at him
said only if those stars floated and burned through the saline
and spongy almonds of his amygdala. Then, suddenly aware
she may have wounded, she said that she, too, had had her
rendezvous with him, in the furthest physical crevasses
of her fleshly brain, via the electrical impulses that were her
dreams, and that was good enough. That was what was actual,
because it sprang from the facticity of her body, and it was enough.
Until it wasn’t. Enough. Until the day—the afternoon—when
they could no longer pretend it was not going to happen. They
made their excuses, their exits, gently made their way toward each
other, reducing themselves—their hopes and plans and ways
of being—to a simple theatre of one man and one woman.
They reduced the stage to a cultivated garden of glances,
abstractions, euphemisms, and a chasm, the bottom of which was
a silence that swallowed all intentions. In this enactment of the
story, the garden of their imagining is also known as Tompkins
Square Park. As in the common tale, the garden is plagued
with serpents, but they need be concerned with only two,
the twins, Experience and Recrimination, who bid them fumble
and grope through inarticulate dark in the hope that their love was
a form of light, something they could read by. Something they
could learn. They resolved to be uncertain scholars of the inevitable,
but, in the concordances of language, progress is circular, if at all.
Which brought them back to each other, to feed that hunger
to know and be known, but all they could do was gesture through
the billowing space they saw and felt as a full and cerulean sky, full
of distant, glittering lights, words and stars that were like the Milky
Way they wanted to believe was love, a love that loomed—as they
sat on the bench in the park that Sunday afternoon—like a galaxy
between them. Then, remembering that there was much for them
to do, they set off for the room, a friend’s empty studio, where they
worked their way to each other over the course of the evening—
him trying this, her asking for that, each coming to realize what
they had felt was substantial, was made of substance. Hours later,
they lay exhausted, spent, and nothing remained, except the hunger.