ON VACATION...

It's kind of strange and wonderful to look back and think of all that's happened since the Goat went off on vacation in February, leaving me twisting in the wind, completely snared but equally completely uncertain whether our contact was anything more than an evening's whim to him... Now, I leave with three very powerful words echoing in my ears, and a certain amusement at his having to wait three weeks to see me. You know, I am just enough of a bastard to feel a certain satisfaction at the thought of him on at least one tenterhook...

C

It's almost incredible to me. I had reached a point at New Year's where I was frankly ready to bed anything less off-putting than a skunk, so our little Lenten tryst was a fairly overwhelming surprise. And here we are, five months later, in some kind of reciprocal relationship, and I have gone from the deepest point of hopelessness to giddy happiness. I keep telling myself that it could end just as easily in six weeks as in six months, and that there is certainly no guarantee that it will go any further than that, but I still live in hope that this is something longer-lasting. If not, I will have to start dealing with what is an obvious tendency to put all my eggs in one basket at the first opportunity...

C

The first night I was here, my hosts gathered the extended family around, and I spoke about my journey of the last years with the multitudes assembled around the bonfire in the backyard. It was, I think, the first time I had felt free to speak so openly in a group, but I have known most of my friends in the circle for over thirty years, and we are just far enough apart that we don't see each other very often -- at most every couple of years. All the people I had met as children or young adults on my first journey to their neck of the woods now have children of their own, some of them nearly as old as they were then...

C

So, quite aside from my own story, there was a certain amount of what Arthur Miller calls "time bends" -- which I have come to interpret as the equivalent of the "bends" you get from diving, but coming in this case from the sudden confrontation with the passage of time made concrete for the first time. There is a kind of double vision in seeing people in the same place but thirty years older that I think is weird enough to deserve the title "bends."

C

The following day I went on an outing with one of the first men I fell hopelessly in love with. He is, as so many of them were, hopelessly straight, and though it had been billed as a chance for the two of us to catch up -- and there had been some fairly heavy correspondence after my coming out -- somehow our outing now involved his wife, a psychologist who kept bringing her professional view of things to bear, which I found rather off-putting. I don't know whether he had invited her along as protection, or whether she had decided that she didn't trust me -- or perhaps her husband? -- quite enough to let us sail off on our own. Maybe she just has a phobia of being left out of any group; I can certainly understand that, as I spent a lot of my childhood on the outside trying to get in... In any case, she would have had nothing to worry about, and now she does: I found spending six hours in her company, though it was all perfectly pleasant, really tiring. It was a good reminder, though, that this man, whom I tend to idealize, had in fact chosen this woman out of all of Eve's daughters, and that does make me think. He certainly isn't someone I could really imagine living with now... or is he...? could I...?

C

Naaaaaaaaaaaah.

C

Well, love is called blind for a reason, and I am living proof of that, presently if not historically. I am beginning to weary of hearing how my wife and I somehow represented "the perfect couple." I was pretty happy pretty much all of the time, but the idea that we had taken on this official role in other people's heads is kind of a mind-boggler. I suppose we all project things onto other people which would surprise the people involved... but the "perfect couple" thing is always trotted out in a tone of disappointment, as if we had somehow hurt them, and almost as if that were the important aspect of what had happened.

C

I am doing my usual penance for not having planned my trip ahead of time, scrambling to make appointments and make sense of the limited time I have available, and I'm not doing so well. I used to be able to organize things. Maybe I was never very good at organizing myself. Maybe it's just getting a bit worse with age.

C

My hosts have a great calling plan, so that even though my own cell phone doesn't work here, I can call the Goat with frequency without worrying about the cost, which is really nice. Like most people who live in a very attractive spot, he spends a lot of the summer playing host to a succession of people who think nothing of descending for a week at a time, and he has just been through a couple of crowded weeks, and more people arrived yesterday. I haven't given much thought to cutting him any slack myself, but then I think I have a pretty good claim on his time. So, on the other hand, do most of his guests, who are all friends from various previous periods of his life.

C

Maybe that's what I am having trouble taking on board: just how much of his life there is of which I know nothing, or next to nothing. To the people who have known the Goat for a decade or more, I am only the latest in a string of men with whom he has "connected." I am more aware of that perhaps even than necessary, myself, but it doesn't help to realize that other people look at me the same way...

C

Well, I am still happy enough for two.

Let a shadow or two fall on my happiness.

While it lasts, it's strong enough to deal with more than that.

Hang in there, all.

C