begun to turn yellow and red. Soon it will be autumn.
Why do I have to think of Alex now?
I rang him up when I went to live in London four years later. His phone number was not difficult to find, and I could hear that his first reaction was one of pleasure. But when I suggested a meeting, he backed off. Said it wouldn’t be wise, what with my work and all. A week later he turned up, unannounced. We spent the weekend in bed, and I don’t believe I have it in me to be happier than during those few days, even though at the end of them he told me that he was getting married again.
That evening I wrote him a letter. What I needed to say was that I loved him and wanted him to marry me. For the first and only time in my life I laid claim to another person, a man. Nothing by return of post; nothing within the week. Then, a small parcel and inside it a small box and inside the box a gray pebble, the size of a child’s fist. No note, nothing. His answer to my question was engraved in the pebble: “&”.
I have never seen Alex again or spoken to him. There is nothing left to say. I understood what he tried to say, and the pebble is among my most treasured possessions. I broke my heart over him and went back to having sex instead of making love, this time with Ciaran, a man whose wife and child were not dead. For a while I smoked a lot of dope and got little writing done, then I had a sort of breakdown and got no writing done at all. Dark days.
So lost am I in memories that when I hear faint grunts and moans echoing between the trees, I at first think I am hallucinating. That, in turn, worries me enough to make me tread more carefully and to survey the gray-green stillness around me. I have only taken one more turning of the way when off to the left, behind a huge uprooted tree, there is movement. The rhythmic movement and sound of hips smacking against each other.
One of the many things my dope-hazy affair with Ciaran taught me is a certain sang-froid in relation to casual sex. If you start sleeping with the owner of the house in which you share the top-floor apartment with a fellow student, and in which he lives with his wife and new baby on the second floor and runs a second-hand record store on the first floor, and if his wife not only knows about your affair but even claims to condone it, and if you spend an increasing number of evenings in their sitting room, smoking weed, eating Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, and making out with your landlord, occasionally his friend and, on one best-forgotten occasion, even his younger brother, you do not flinch when you come across a copulating couple in the woods. I try not to step onto any dry twigs and make myself scarce.
“What the hell!”
Like birds flushed from a thicket, two bodies rush out of the undergrowth in front of me, limbs flailing, giggling, out of breath. They are as startled by my sudden appearance on the scene as I am by theirs, and it would be hard to tell which of us is more mortified when Logan Williams, the aggravating redhead from my Comedy class, and I recognize each other.
“Oh, shit!” He bites his lip, but the cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone in his blood spurs him on. “Dr. L.! What the fuck are you doing here?”
His companion, a blond hippy in a corduroy mini skirt and a grass-stained t-shirt, giggles and pulls him along, but as in class, Logan wants to see how I react to his provocation. I give him a sour smile and nonchalantly lean against the tree to my left.
“Not what you’re doing here, fucking. Run along now. I hope you’re using condoms!” I shout after them as they scurry off, giggling again.
What point is there in trying to teach this swaggering bundle of muscles and spermatic cords the subtleties of Renaissance poetry? He embodies the force of nature that comedy seeks to represent and tame, and while he is driven by the sexual energy of youth, he is not at all interested in its representation. And why should he be? Except that someone is forking out thirty thousand dollars a