insomnia and optimism (illustrated with shoes and satchels)
Sunday 22 April 2007 | I like a cookie
(Y por que? Because I wrote to Mandarin, “What do I think—if I have the perfect leather satchel and platform pumps I won’t get completely overwhelmed at the State School? I’ll be the envy of the entire department? All will love me and despair?” Apparently. NB that Froogle is abruptly “Product Search” which is bafflingly non-catchy and unbranded; I can only think something else much less popular was called by the same name, some candy or popsicle or something, and thus G••gl• has had to change it.)
Yesterday the Brujo came back from Chama, where he’d been gone three days on an opera project. For some reason these days and nights felt interminable, maybe because I didn’t sleep during them. He called, plaintively requesting my presence, so I drove over to his place in late morning to find him looking gray-eyed and devastating in “laundry clothes” 
(ruined oxford and jeans), standing up in his socks playing the Korg. He gamely took me through his various distinctive themes for the two different fourth-graders’ operas—the first involving secret agents, medieval knights and cowboys, and the second with aliens, superheros and football players—I may be confusing them—each special-interest group with its own apposite musical signature. His fingers strong and slender on the keys. Somehow we managed to make it through folding laundry, eating Thai food, intense and amused conversation covering multiple topics in several installments, an impromptu drive around Santa Fe looking for a post box and even a trip to the panaderia for dulce de leche empañadas, all before falling into bed and ripping each other’s clothes off. That latter is kind of metaphoric, as the clothes-hating Brujo always strips to the skin practically the second the front door is closed.
I offer you this not-so-well-written love scene from Anne Lamott’s Rosie by way of illustration, or perhaps comparison, or perhaps just revulsion and bewilderment. (Why does Carolyn See call Rosie “a masterpiece,” and Lamott “a novelist of genius”? On a bad day See’s an infinitely more interesting writer.) You’ll notice that Lamott seems to have some kind of breast thing, at least in this passage. I’m air-breaking, shaking my head and mentally editing even as I type. Really only two short sentences are even remotely pertinent, and are why I’m inflicting this stuff on us.
He undressed her in the bedroom and stared in awe at her large, large [no, no] breasts, touched them tentatively, not breathing. Then he unzipped her jeans and pulled them slowly down. “God, you have a beautiful body.” She lay down on the bed [taking an active role], and he pulled off her boots, and pulled off her pants, and pulled off her socks. [Beautifully sequential!] Then he kicked off his sneakers and sat down beside her, running his fingernails softly from her shoulder to her knees. They smiled, both shy, and he tore off his clothes. [Okay, so I know I just committed the same sin, but why don’t people in books ever just take off their clothes?]
No one had ever licked her neck. [She doesn’t get out much.] He traced the line of her jaw with his wet, warm tongue; electricity flowed through her. [Because he didn’t have one of those dry, cold tongues….] He was tender, verbal, aroused. He ate her alive.
A long [aha] time later he put his warm face between her breasts [they’re back], nuzzling, while she stroked his soft, fluffy hair, absent and happy. “These are the biggest ever for James Atterbury,” he said. She burst out laughing. [Because he refers to himself in the third person? Or because he doesn’t get out much?]
You are too good to be true.
“You are a lover,” he said.
It’s now three in the morning and yet once again I’m bolt awake, even after two Tylenol and one whole Rozerem and another big meal, fish tacos with Baja-style avocado-lime mayonnaise and, yes, mango licuados, after which we dropped by High Mayhem to admire its now slightly sterile space, post-remodel, but left after maybe ten minutes, yawning and giggling. How much more insomnia can I survive? Should I ask the Cool Psychiatrist for a round of Ambien? I left the Brujo’s place so I wouldn’t wake him fully, him groggily murmuring made-up rhymes and, while I was groping for my clothes in the dark, abruptly commanding, “Touch my foot! Touch it!” I obligingly felt through the bedclothes, down the length of his naked calf. “Isn’t it hot? It’s so hot!” I agreed that it was indeed quite warm and, taking the hint, turned down the radiator before slipping out the door into the frosted, black-starred night. And drove home to my house, parking down on the dirt road so as not to wake the neighbors 
and turning off his Pluto-car, the little white Honda belonging to him who, gentle faithless reader, this very afternoon, absolutely ate me alive.
And whenever I feel the sharp hot spasms of guilt, as I do, over quote taking him away from Santa Fe and his music community and sponsor and friends and and and and and, I try to recall him sitting opposite me in La Montañita all but yelling his decision. I know it hasn’t been up to me; I know this is his choice, and that unlike others in my past he won’t rub my face in it or blame me should it not work out for him; for us.
I’m fearful about teaching this fall primarily because in the past it’s been so draining, so damaging and so unrewarding (ever flunk 14 out of 16 students? makes you very popular with the dean). The Brujo suggested I simply pretend I’d never taught before. “That way you’d be scared a little, in anticipation, but also excited.” I stared at him, astounded by the brilliance of this idea. Just pretend those seven hellish semesters…never…happened. Right.
Can’t I do the same with reference to the five years of my marriage? Or the pyrotechnically destructive year-long affair which followed? Since, in our idiosyncratic gnostic-AA-Buddhist-bruja vocabulary, they’re not happening right now anyway. “Right now,” he said wisely over fiery pad prik something or another, “the only thing happening is we’re eating Thai food.”
He then suggested taking a weekend trip to Tartarus to house-hunt together. “Would you really want to do that?” “Are you kidding?”
I realize that hoping, dreaming and anticipating aren’t, well, cool, in either of that word’s two senses. I guess I think I’m supposed to be all remote and savvy and world-weary, shrugging in cynical mental acceptance of the psychosexual disasters to come; 
or spiritually emptied and limpid, in clarity abandoned even of optimism, aware of no experience beyond this breath, “cool and peaceful” as the precepts direct. But good things can happen, which I tend to forget as a shopworn former-hopeless-romantic. Maybe a little old-school looking-forward-to wouldn’t hurt, just as a sort of tonic or corrective?
So I could let myself be a little scared and worried; a little guilty; and a little nervous; but also…excited.
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