This All Happened
January
1 Lydia leans back to laugh at something Wilf Jardine says. Her breasts are the closest thing to Wilf, and he is looking down her taut white throat. Lydia’s teeth and lips a crescent of broken apple. Offering up her breasts and throat to Wilf. She wants to go elsewhere after the midnight fireworks, and that ambition to persist, I have decided, is drawing me to her.
A toast! and Max Wareham hands me a brandy. Max is naked under a pale raglan. I steady myself against the back of a chair. I love Max. This year I must confess all to Max. And in the periphery Lydia is still entranced by Wilf. Can I love a woman who is so entranced? Wilf lurches to me, kisses me, and I want to smack Wilf for being powerful in Lydia’s eyes. I want to make sure my forearm catches his chin in the followthrough. Wilf Jardine’s short white hair and suit jacket are doused in peppermint schnapps. He’s apologizing for wolfing down Lydia. That’s what he is, a wolf. Wilf the white-haired, ravenous wolf. He clinks my glass when the clock hands meet at twelve, and Max cries out, To Old Year’s Night! I watch pearls of liquor spinning out before my brandy snifter smashes on the hardwood. Wet splinters across all the shoes. All Shoes Night. And Alex, our hostess, says, Nobody move.
Alex Fleming, in a black sleeveless number, brushes our feet with a straw broom. She pushes flakes of wet glass into a yellow pan. She sweeps the toes of my black shoes a little extra, first act of the new year. Swipes at my knees, brush handle between my legs, and Max my dear friend Max is dancing barefoot in a raincoat.
Alex, just minutes before, had fingered the dust on the windowsill and said, drunkenly, Gabriel, you shagger. She pressed a thigh against the outside of my knee and I could see down the entire front of her black number. Imagine, she’s all of twenty-six and pressing me. She said, If I could get my claws into you. She gave me her entire eye. What I mean is she threw herself at me with one eye. And while I did not lurch, I did not decline.
Maisie Pye grabs my elbow and steers me back to Lydia.
Lydia leans on my shoulder. Wilf, she says. Wilf said, Any chance of a Christmas fling?
Me: Wilf said that?
Make you jealous?
Wilf Wilf fuck you Wilf.
Lydia and I rock against the fridge, Max opening the door for the last few beers. There’s a garbage bucket full of ice cubes and broken beer bottles, and Max Wareham, when he spoke to me almost naked, spreading lapels to show his fat nipples, Max had a sliver of brown glass hanging from his lip the size of a number-fourteen wet fly. He says, I know youre the apple of someone’s eye, Gabe.
I love you, man.
Max: I love you too, man. He pauses, almost in deep sorrow. He says, Hard to say I love you without adding man.
Me: You love me?
Max considers this.
I’m talking to Lydia, Max.
I love you anyway, man. I love you unconditionally, and you can leave off the man. Pretend I never said it.
I’m thinking, Never ask the one you love: Do you love me? Lydia: I love you, darling.
The ghost of burnt fireworks hovers over the water.
Max, as we wait for a cab, makes angel’s wings in the garden. His shaved head in the snow. Lydia pulls up the collar of her astrakhan, holds me tight. I want her head to sink deep inside my chest.
2 Words Lydia has for life are want, crave, desire, yearn, and who wouldnt want these words, but they do frighten me. The appetites. They are good for an actor to possess. Lydia is a good actor and a filmmaker, though she is not meticulous in her technique. The frame is full of life and love. In life she cares for colour, quality of fabric, but if there’s a rent under the arm, she hardly notices. I have seen her orchestrate the actions of a hundred crew and cast. Giving direction is her normal bent. It’s what attracts and detracts.