YEARS AGO A New Orleans friend named Chris Smither wrote a song called "Love You Like a Man," a fierce, intensely physical encomium detailing what his woman needs, what she's not going to find elsewhere and what he can do if she'd only give him the chance; these days, Chris says up in Boston where he lives now, he performs it chiefly as a nostalgia piece.
However we might laugh it off, over time our lives' landmark days become more commemorative than celebratory. Passing yearsfind us able to care passionately about less and less. Less becomes what we're capable of as well, physically, emotionally-andfinally what we hope for, what we believe still possible.
No: not the precis of another heady discussion with Deborah O'Neil, though it might have been. And though Deborah was directly responsible. For as I came to spend more and more time with her, within myself I sensed all manner of rumblings and unsettlings, felt systems I'd thought shut down for good start kicking over again.
Lights flare, dim, dim further still-and finally catch. The survivors let out a long breath.
The long-disused engine turns over once, again, stalls with power surging audibly towards it before stuttering into full bloom. The castaways will be able to escape after all.
It's alive! spectators cry out in horror films.
Holy words.
Somehow we go on being given new chances.
– What I was thinking Sunday night (or Monday morning, whichever shore you watched from), having left Deborah's a little after one. Lying with body exhausted, mind chugging away, in a bamboolike shaft of moonlight.
Late that afternoon I'd come home and, on my hurried way towards a shower and new clothes, gone into the kitchen for a bottle of water only tofindrefrigerator, pantry and shelves stocked for the firsttime in years. With no one to cook for, I'd long ago given it up. I ate out or nibbled at plates of cheese, crackers, sausage, raw vegetables.
A note scrawled in huge printed letters across three sheets of 8 V amp; X 11 paper, taped to the refrigerator door like a child's school drawings put up on display, read: I FRIED YOUR LAST EGG FOR BREAKFAST.