"I am a good confidant. My secret is never advice, just listen. Repeat, ratify, sympathize, query but never give an opinion."
He did not look appalled, when he said that, nor superior, did not scoff, was not bored, did not care to overanalyze her. She was supposed to pick the cue and continue with her monologues. But there really was nothing more to say. They could go on, he and she, sitting quietly in a public park, holding hands, gazing at the sunset, sipping coke, with the streaks of gray broadening on their brows, while the familiar seasons came and went. Her fingers spoke to his fingers independently and in a language only flesh understands. She was ready to cover her sensibilities with a black sheet and give wholly, like a blind person to the sense of touch.
"I wasted my days with dreams, worries, empty fantasies and locked myself in affairs that had no future."
Only now as she spoke, did she realize, how lonely she had been, how oppressed by the fact that she seldom exchanged a word with anyone. He stretched beside her, strangely near and divinely distant, a cosmic illumination of the volume without a beginning and without an end.
"The past no longer exists and the future is yet to come. The conclusion is that nothing exists beyond the moment."
She talked and mused simultaneously, giving him a prolonged view of her meditative lashes. A light from the sunset beyond the clouds played about her hair. So entrancing in fact, was this phase of sentimental suspense. He experienced a new sensation, indefinable yet strong, as he went through an appalling catalogue of her faults, arriving at his conclusion that she wasn’t in the least attractive. And therein lay her charm. She was charmingly eccentric, the woman for sentimental parenthesis, not for commitments. The specimens he gathered into his museum of memories always had some mark of rare and chosen.
He was in his own way a philanthropic, not with money but with love. There was a chill moment of hesitance in her heart’s pulsing when he moved his fingers on her bare arms and she shrunk back.
" I only wish you would obey every whim of mind .."
He, like some diabolic spirit, had seemed to know exactly what her sensitive point was and had gone straight to it, with the purpose of ridiculing her and summarizing her secret self in all it’s foolish yearning. She felt painfully exposed, the fact that she was somehow not quite coarse enough to bow to her desires and yet not quite fine enough to transcend them.
"I want only beginnings .. the lightness that all beginnings have …"
Her voice rolled out in heavily muffled phrases, like something amplified through clouds. The phonetic seduction, enthralling him even more. He wished he had the language to enter her thoughts. We are recreated in the imagination of another person – by entering that person’s life as fully as possible. Entering it – imaginatively, intellectually, physically and emotionally with all the conflicts that is inevitable.
The fragrance of her body, the glow of her hair, the light of her eyes and the sadness of her face. Even she felt a pang of hunger. She had come back to life, with all its needs. A thought stirred in him as he moved closer toward her. He watched it rise in uneasy fascination. ‘She requires a lighter touch, a phrase that could delight and yet contain a barb to remind her that all beginnings have an end.’ She, ignorant of the language of his thoughts thus not distracted by the meaning of what that moment stood for, felt all the more keenly, the subtle bliss.
Night enclosed them in a velvet embrace. Time was imaginary. Hardly in a quarter of hour his words 'obey every whim’ had woven magic passes about her and with timid avidity she had surrendered to the sense of returning life. She seemed at last to cast off her haunting torment and abandon herself to the strange new sense of happiness and safety. That day was finished like the flipped page of a book. It would be ages before they would make it through the evening and back, retracing the way and then turning off.
---
Six months later in the same park, an edge of autumn was in the air. The sky was crimson in the east, a pale blue-gray above with hazy strokes of purple and grizzly clouds that blended into each other like water paints. She was sitting beside him, staring at nothing with the absorbed silence of a child or of a silver haired old lady engaged in memory. He tried to experience the reassuring tranquility of silence and decided, he would eventually have to speak. A word had to crack through the voluminous stillness she had created in their life. He wondered what it would be. The beginning of a new relationship in the same old setting? Everything, including the heap of dry leaves in each corner, proclaimed the world of bare beginnings. He had almost forgotten how soft her voice was.. her face a warm flower ..
He looked around trying to pick pieces of their short past, like fragments in the street. When his expression had grown so thin and so sour that it was about to split, he said in a voice meant to be sonorous.
"I tried to contact you every day, you did not take my calls, did not answer my mails."
She remained quiet and trim with her fashion-blank look.
"Why? Why?" It is not possible to describe how he said that. Half question, half echo, a total wondering what to say next.
Her expression remained calm, as the memory of an ardent winter evening, long gone by, dazzled her eyes … Her future would be burdened with long arrears of remembrance but she had to go. She could not resign herself to seeing him smudge the whiteness of her early illusions ..
"I don’t know why but sometimes I vanish"
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