It was easy to go without consuming any media when in New Haven. I arrived and was swept into a convertible. Maybe the radio was on, but I didn’t hear it — the wind was so strong. And then to a house, drinking PBR on the floor, changing our dresses; and then to a reception where I looked at tiny buildings — some of which were made by men, but none of which I could go inside of. And is a house ever a medium?

Breathing fresh air

There were martinis, a ride back to the country, the dusk. I think we played radio in the car, I can’t remember, I don’t think we did, and then at the country house I climbed a tree and remembered, once, how a dog had chased me up one in my youth, my glorious youth, when we were halfway between Greece and Albania — this was after the incident with the border guards, and the dirt road, and their little dog that followed us — and we were hiking to find a monastery, what we always seek, alone, to find, but not together and there were suddenly goats, everywhere, and the dogs roping them in and then the dogs were nipping at us and I climbed a tree — at least, a second later, after the dogs, I found myself up the tree, looking down at the triangles of their red mouths, and I could see that there was blood running down my leg and later, at the little Greek hospital, where the nurse gave me pills printed with the faces of little dogs — a coincidence, pain-killers — you told me that there had been a rope of fat coming out of my leg, where the dog had bit me. You said it was a yellow rope. I said I didn’t know I had fat in my leg down there, and then suddenly I remembered. Then we drove up a mountain, with me saying in the back, as the Toyota Yaris scraped over the river stones — that it was so bumpy I could feel my fat jiggling. And I felt, at the little stone house of a greek woman in whose kitchen we had pointed to a goat’s head and a clump of tomatoes to order lunch — that I couldn’t breathe, that we were so far up a mountain that there wasn’t any oxygen anymore, and you pointed to the little greek lady and said, “She’s breathing.”

Not your typical “Yale Man”

What did we want, when we were young, and did we get it? You graduated. That was the point of the weekend. You were kind to your parents. You admired hoppy beers and soft cheeses. We are old. But we are not so old. We tell the story of how I was bit by the dogs to a couple at the party — the parents of so and so, from Detroit. “I still have the scar,” I told them. But I was wearing pants and couldn’t roll up the leg far enough to show them.

Later, we sat by the gas fire I had switched on with a button. We ate cheese and grapes and wine and sausages. All the people were gone. We were all drunk. There had been eighty people there, your father said, there had been eighty people. And tomorrow there would be the dishes. I wanted to go back out to the lawn and run toward the water again and yet I didn’t want to, couldn’t stand up ever again. You passed out, on a bed above. I watched basketball with your brother. We talked about the band-aids the players wore. The band-aids were so obvious. They wanted to make a point, maybe, of having been fouled. That was the only reason I could think of, then.

But I thought of that only because we are always telling the story of our fouls. The dogs, the tree. We do it for the opposite reason, though, than the players do. We tell the stories of being hurt as if to say, each time, we never are. To the boy from Detroit, I said, “I always have the most insane adventures with her” and we tried, when smoking on your porch under the rain, to come up with a single one. I can think, now, of New Orleans in the days before the hurricane, sleeping on a porch on Magazine street, and of course I can now remember all of college’s fouls. But with you together we couldn’t. Those pasts always soaked-up by the current adventure, which grows out in every direction.

This adventure, maybe, was the rain against the car and listening to the Sea Shanties in the crowded bar, and the girl in a corset with sharpened teeth — really! — and the adventure of seeing you with your parents and your cat and how stable we seemed, eating cookies on your brother’s bed, with Justin and Ivy and Christian and Vincent. Feeling like Marie Antoinette, in a splendid castle, surrounded by maccaroons and toile. I am reading the Golden Notebook.

I gave you, for graduation, a miniature pair of scissors that fold up into a box. You can take the scissors out and use them, but it takes so long to get the blades out. By the time they’re out you don’t want to use them. By that time you have found another way to solve the problem, and it’s started raining, and the french-bread out there won’t be any good, the picnic is over, the grapes have rolled down the little green hill. The dog that was roped out there is free now. We must come in to a gas fire, and I flip on the little switch. The scissors go back, for now, in a small green box.