I wish I could cry when I had time to cry. Crying at inappropriate moments seems to be my bailiwick in ripe middle-age. Driving up to the teller window at the bank is not an appropriate to cry. My mouth opens to speak and then suddenly cracks around a sudden onslaught of tears. That’s humiliating. Some poor young girl, who can wear tight fitting tops and look good in too much silver, tries to either ignore me or be overtly kind; either reaction adds to my weeping fit. All the while my mind calm and cool is pacing out sentences such as, ‘just what the hell is the matter with you?’
The solution? I go home, shut the door, ignore the loud party the neighbors are throwing in the apartment below me and tell myself to cry. Cry to your heart’s content. Nothing.
I often wonder what it would be like to take on a lover again. When I was young, making love was so simple, I would just pretend he was someone else and the climax was spectacular. Admittedly, the afterglow was decidedly flat.
I have always been a realist. I understood then as I do now that if you choose a lover for the effect, then one must be ready for the reality of non-committal after glow. In short, one-night stands (all I was interested in) didn’t know how to act after love. He either smoked, paced the floor, hands shaking, worried about his wife, or he went for a glass of water and fell asleep on the couch. There are other stories, all of them just as boring.
Taking on a lover now may be interesting. I don’t have the strength to lie anymore, so what would brutal, honest love making be like? Would I cry? If so, one of two things would happen. He would put his pants on backward trying to get away from me or make me tea and pat my head. Either way, the circumstances remind me of the bank teller in the tight top and too much silver, and I know I’d laugh like a bitch. Men don’t understand laughter.
Love without the dogged-dread of commitment is like losing at musical chairs. I remember only once playing musical chairs as a child. I don’t suppose that’s played in the western world anymore–all of our political correctness not allowing anyone to standalone, cast out, moved over to the side. Now we all just stand on one side of the room or the other, and no music plays at all. Safer anyway, I suppose, like allowing the lover to spend the night on one’s couch and feel relief when he’s not there in the morning.
So there I sit in my apartment, a party down below and me allowing myself to cry and feeling noncommittal. I think about turning on my computer and watching a French film and I think about making myself an omelet and I think about adopting a cat. Nothing. But tomorrow when I’m sitting at my job and thinking about what I did the evening before, I’ll want to weep at how pathetic I must have appeared to no one there, yet feel relief that no one is there.
So rather than think, I walk to the bar and drink sticky sweet sherry because I can’t think of what to order and watch the band play songs they don’t know. I see a face I pass during the day and he nods my way, too bored or too shy to come say hello or too relieved to be in a crowd alone. This, I think, is how post modernist love making was born; no musical chairs, no mistakes, no crime and no tears.