If he ever cared for me, and I think he did, it was in an atmosphere like a black, heavy night, wherein love suffuses the air and turns the dim, horizontal shape of a tree line into a distant prison wall.
I was in love with love and I would take it in whatever form was offered, from the sight of a young man offering his beloved a single rose under the bright sun in Central Park to the sound of the next pop song to top the charts to the smell of a man's possessions torched by a wronged woman. New York was full of love, wherever I went and, though I was swimming in it, giddily drinking more signs of love than I could possibly have imagined when I was that skinny daydreamer in Lansing, it wasn't enough.
When one is that empty, the constant pressure another's love creates becomes a welcome thing, making one smaller, with less room for one's interior vacuum.
Our first meeting was a romantic scene, complete with me in my role as server at Jean George's and him as the host of a business dinner, flanked by high-profile Wall Street men, the whole host of them white and fat, one balding pate indistinguishable from the next. Compared to his compadres, he was distinguished, if only because his gray hair was thick and the creased lines around his eyes made him appear to be constantly smiling. Every time I came up to the table with the next wine bottle I started at his left, like the well-trained monkey I was, serving him first, offering him the cork, waiting for him to swirl and sniff and sip the vintage and make a pronouncement. We sold them ten bottles of wine that night, starting at $100 for the first bottle and working up in price, if not in quality. Ten opportunities to smile, to flirt, to praise his choices.
He brought back a new batch of Wall Street men the following week and asked that I provide the service.
I had moved to New York in search of love, I had told myself but, even in Lansing, I knew my own secret desire, which was to find a particular kind of love, which would pull me high enough into the the city's sparkling skyline to look down into its avenues and see the crawling lights down below like glowworms setting their traps in an inverted cave. A successful sort of love, then, because I was taught that everything I do must be successful.
He was a successful businessman and I was a successful glowworm, but which of us was eaten once I'd trapped him?
The snow is settling over Lansing, inches and inches of cold insulation. My large, old house looks like a Victorian fairy tale; Santa Claus might land on the roof at any moment.
I was once suffused in love, inches and feet of cold insulation. The modern loft a silent, white expanse, more silent and white than Lansing after its first snow. There were no roses, no pop songs, nothing fierce enough to result in a fire of any kind, just me, perfecting my romantic role as server, and him, whom I served and called it love, whose presence pressed me into flat acceptance, who showed me the black night above Central Park and said it made him love the street lamps, the store signs, the lit shop windows, the headlights and taillights like glowworms stringing silk afterimages around my eyes.
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