At the beginning, they were like anybody else. They were wrestling with the notion of what a man and a woman together are supposed to be, and their respective notions were wrestling with each other, knowing that the best they could hope for was a light and gentle wrestling, which it was. You couldn’t run from those notions, and you couldn’t spend all your effort on trying to knock them down either. They went back to when you were a boy and a girl, and you might knock down that boy and girl in the process. The dream was always going to be part of it, and one thing that was good to do was to know that from the start.
They told each other stories of when they were a boy and a girl, and that was a time when they could lay back and say, this is life. This is the life I expected. The one thing they were both sure of was that their notions included stories of when they were a boy and a girl. He listened to a story of when she was a girl and he thought, there she is, but also: there I am. Maybe she was in Chicago when it happened and I was in Seattle, but still: there I am, knowing that something was happening in the world, knowing that the world was more than my street and my city, but not knowing what that more than was. There it is, that’s exactly what it was, it was a girl in Chicago and it was a story like that.
You have to bring the boy along and you have to bring the girl along, but if it’s the four of you walking down the street when somebody across the street can only see the two, then I guess the man and the woman should lead the way, looking at the children with wisdom as they run up ahead and fall back behind, which is what they did. They are children, they said, this is what they do. The daytime was theirs – the quick, sudden movements of all those little animals that love the sun. And the night time belonged to the man and the woman. Children become lost in the day, and they are taken by surprise by the night. The man and the woman did not want to be taken by surprise. It was who they were. They knew what a night could contain. How do you love the sun and not be taken by surprise when it goes down? They asked each other, but they had already asked themselves, so that when they asked each other, it did not have to be a question. It could be a statement. Here is the question I am, they could say.
If the timing was right, if their places in the world were right, they could have stopped at any point along the way and called it love. There was no apex, there was no mountain they had to climb at whose top was the place where they could call it love. The view from up there was just an articulation of something they felt down on the ground. Is that me, they asked themselves, or is that the boy and the girl? You had to bring them along, but you had to tuck them to sleep before you lay down yourself, so what did that make your bed? Was it the place the boy and the girl dreamed of or not?
The problem was that the man and the woman knew sorrow. That was who they had laid down with many times before and whom they had gotten a familiarity with. The dream asked them to treat that sorrow as new. It asked for an articulation of depths the way the day time asked for an articulation of heights. What if I have been trying to make those into the same thing? the man and the woman said.
They did not want to think that they had somehow overshot love, that they had tried so hard to become the dream that now they could not separate it from who they were in order to place it outside and to long for it. The boy and the girl would’ve looked at each other and they would not have needed to release something inside themselves to long. The man and the woman wondered if they could release and not need to release as well.
Outside a flower shop, the man stood and looked at the flowers for sale. She was in another city, and he knew that he could use the telephone or a computer to have flowers delivered to where she was. But that was not what buying flowers for a woman was. It was walking into the store and looking at the flowers and looking for what she would like. It was taking them to the woman behind the counter, who would smile as she wrapped them in paper. It was standing and waiting there excitedly, with the expectation of walking back down the street holding flowers.
Was the whole thing a conversation between himself and the boy? Sometimes it could seem like it was. Don’t think it through, something inside him said, but it was not so much that he wanted to think it through as he wanted to think it to the very tip of the moment. A man walking down the street holding flowers was truly walking down the street. It was just what he was trying to be all the time.
If only the boy could see me, he thought when he was with her. If only the girl could see me, she thought when she was with him. It was not to impress the boy and the girl. It was to say hello to them. They hadn’t seen them in a while. They always will have not seen them in a while, not like that at least. And they will have to keep two conversations going at once. It’s really the only way to do it, is to keep two conversations going at once, because the man is interested in meeting the girl and the woman is interested in meeting the boy.
And they were like any man and woman – they still had moments when they thought that the way to be a man and to be a woman was to say that that boy and girl were gone. It takes all our strength to be a man and woman, how are we supposed to have anything left over? And they would look up to see that they were asking a sky that had been the same sky for a boy and a girl, and they would aspire again to carry time, so that when they met again, it would be like two rivers flowing together, having much to tell about where they had been.
But there was something else. As they remembered the boy and the girl, they remembered they were not alone, that they had not been alone at any point along the way, that the way that people became alive and important when the boy and the girl had some space to breathe – the way the woman who wrapped the flowers in paper became alive enough to be part of the dream – was a truth, and as a truth, it became a question of how to keep it in their hands to hold. And as a man and a woman who were not a boy and a girl, they knew that where it came from was only one of the places where it could come from, that it was a perfectly legitimate place for it to come from, and if they wanted to go ahead and give and receive flowers accordingly, that was a perfectly fine thing to do, but the impulse to give and receive them was them. It was him as much as it was her and it was her as much as it was him. They were oceans that each other could swim in and think they knew, and they did. A man and a woman could only do what they could do in an ocean, which was to swim, sometimes able to look down to see its depths, but mostly having to move to stay afloat. To walk down the street holding flowers was to move and to see those depths at the same time. All she wanted from him just then was to walk down the street holding flowers. And it happened that he couldn’t do it because she was in another city, but he could write a poem about how the flower shop near his house did not deliver, and he wasn’t going to buy any flowers that he couldn’t pick out and see and watch the woman at the counter wrap in paper herself, and he could give her the poem and that would be the next best thing, maybe even good enough that she could see the flowers he would be picking from, and the shop, and the woman who wrapped them in paper. You swim in the entire ocean when you swim in the ocean, he thought. You swim in the entire Pacific or Atlantic or Indian or Arctic, remembering what the boy had learned in school, and those are all connected anyway, so you swim in the whole thing when you swim in it. And you would always be a swimmer, and so would she, whether you set out to be an ocean or not. As a boy he had been scared of oceans, scared of their size. Boy, he thought, I sure had my head screwed on right in those days. And he thought of how it would be nice to tell her about that fear one day.
