| The getaway cure for getaways |
[Aug. 14th, 2005|07:52 pm] |
Yesterday my friend Jim celebrated his 40th birthday in grand style, at a gorgeous tucked-away-in-the-trees house in Princeton where the pool ran warm, the pond beckoned from the backyard, the girls were pretty and the bartender stayed up later than I did.
I brought Jim fireworks–some of the long-held New Hampshire stash of 200-foot vertical fireballs, which we set off poolside before the midnight group cannonball dive. I spent most of the party in that pool, with and without a suit, in or out of light, alone and with company. We swam. We raced. We formed an impromptu but highly talented water-ballet group around 2AM and performed a complicated routine to a Coldplay song. We drank and ate cold fried chicken and assorted delicacies, smoked cigars and got poetic and danced the merengue and Jim appropriately blew out all 40 candles in his birthday suit. We all stayed the night, welcoming the next day with early nude swims, cider donuts, coffee, juice and more vodka.
At one point, at night when it was dark, I lay on a floating mattress and stared at the visible stars through the misty sky above the house. Music played from the screened patio indoors. A night-cloaked couple nuzzled in the water somewhere nearby. The sound of cicaidas was like a jet engine roaring all around me. I could have disappeared, and I did for about an hour into this watery refuge, quiet and still, unseen and unseeing.
I had been guarding against deep, reclusive bouts of introspection ever since I returned from the nightmarishly unrealized "vacation" visit to New Hampshire. Not that I want to keep my head in the sand, mind you. I know what the questions are that keep me awake, spinning possible answers. But it seemed like too much the flip side of last week's throat-grabbing drama to pull away from land so completely and far as it would have been easy to do just then.
Yes, I have things to figure out, romantically, career-wise, and about whether or not I have to relocate to make things happen for me. I was happy that night not to have a man with me - Will is still touring in Canada - so I could take a break from endlessly evaluating our situation, but when the sound of couples kissing broke through the soft slapping sounds of water against tile, I wished I had someone to share the moment with. I turned to my best friend, Jennifer, who had left her new significant other in New York.
She climbed aboard the raft, and we silently fixed our eyes on the stars.
Later, of course, I snapped out of it, and was my lively, shit-talking self again. Jennifer and I moaned in tandem about the way a friend's new television pilot pandered to a dumb audience, though the writer is miles smarter than his writing would seem. Made some new friends, including a sweet chap named Amon Tobin (not the Brazilian musician), his boyfriend Andy, and a guy named Graham who's better known as the Submissive Fox. I gabbed with Jim about two stories I'm writing - one about the creature called Swamp Baby; the other a tale of a two people who each let the other make decisions for them, and what they do when they are forced to make a big decision together.
Working it out in my mouth as I explained the plot to Jim, though, my mind wandered to the real people who inspired the stories. The indecision-maker, he and I hadn't talked in a long time. So long, I'd started putting it off myself,...not wanting to make a decision? It's never too far from the bone, stories like this. My stories.
Around one in the morning, my friend Sasse complained that I wouldn't let him tea-bag me in the pool (now, why he's so driven to do this I don't know, and as he's a gay man and I'm a straight chick, it moves further from my comprehension). I told him that I regarded tea-bagging as a romantic gesture, and not one that I could undertake lightly with someone I was not in love with.
Love was in the air, to be sure. But not for me.
The smoke from birthday candles and cigarettes, the scent of wet grass and chlorine sting, sure. But that's it. Enough for me then, at that moment. But not quite.
I told stories. I wove words. I did what I loved. But I slept alone, tangled in a thin sheet, dreaming of kisses that fell just short of my mouth. Below in the basement, above in the bedrooms, couples held each other drunk and close. An ex-lover of mine and his girl of over a year held fast to their thing. I looked on with envy, at everyone, when I couldn't stop myself I screwed my eyes tight in the shower so nothing could get out and nothing could get in.
I once told a lover that the things I enjoyed most in this world, those which I could never live without, were love, telling stories, and good food. Swimming, I'd said, would be a close fourth, but I could live without it if I had to. Not tonight though, I thought, and I walked out of the shower in a towel, down to the pool, slipped out of it and back down into the warm dark water and swam and swam and swam. I held my eyes open though there was nothing to see. |
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