Smoke, or a Belated Account of a Memory

Occasionally I'll come across the following unfinished vignette among the drafts of blog posts I've never published. I can't even tell when exactly I wrote it, because the date has changed to the most recent time I opened the file. I can say that the events described would have been in 2005 or 2006. 

There's not much to the story other than what you see here. I  just now put an ending of sorts on it. But in actuality it's only a sketch in a longer narrative about a period in my life that I've yet to write—a house with so many doors and windows that I have no idea where to enter. Maybe this is a start.

***

It was just about exactly two years ago that I met a guy online who was doing reconstruction work in Iraq and was in DC for a training session. I guess you could say we had a little fling over the course of his few days here, though the fling was mostly composed of dinners and walks and e-mails commenting on past dinners and walks or setting up the next dinners and walks. Mostly.

Really, we only saw each other on three evenings, not even successive ones, so I'm exaggerating just a touch.

He was an extremely sweet guy with whom I had little in common, except for the wish to be company for someone who obviously was in need of—and appreciative of—that. Okay, maybe I wanted company, too.

He had been in Iraq for a year or so and had just signed up for another. He wasn't in the military, though he looked as if he could have been. (He got his hair cut by the military barbers.) He did administrative work—training Iraqi businesses owners in accounting, in which he had a degree. I'm pretty certain he was a Republican, though we both tried to avoid the topic of politics, and largely succeeded.

On our last night together, we went to his hotel room and he spent an hour or more showing me pictures of himself, his coworkers, and sights in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East—that bleak, ravaged, armored landscape we see in the paper and online every day. It was fascinating, and kind of unreal, to be looking at someone's computer and clicking through pictures he'd taken in a war zone. He had ridden down Baghdad's infamously violent Airport Road, which I read about again in yesterday's paper.

He had virtually no social life over there. I asked how the military crowd he worked and ate meals with was with his being gay, and he said they were cool, it wasn't much of an issue. I now think he probably wasn't out at all in his workplace.

With the passage of time, I've also started to suspect he might have been in the CIA.

The next morning, we exchanged e-mail addresses—it was a Monday, and I had to call work to say I hadn't slept well and would be late. I walked home from his hotel thinking we'd stay in touch, that maybe I'd be one of his few contacts with gay life for the rest of his time in the Middle East. My lips were raw—that I remember well. 

I e-mailed him right away to thank him, and at least once more after he would have been back in Iraq. He never replied.

Validation Is Always Welcome

I thought this recent article on men who shave their heads was surprisingly behind the curve for the trend-conscious New York Times, but I enjoyed it anyway—including the pictures. (This is not one of them.)

Smoke and Metal

"He was asking for memories, too young to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh."

These are two typically beautiful and apt sentences from a novel I finished last night, The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (about whom I've written before). It's largely about memory and versions of a life (one life in particular, that of a World War I poet); the mystery of what we can never know about someone because we're at the mercy of what he or she chooses to reveal; and the secrets that the satellites of people around that person keep, which we're often powerless to pry open.

Here's another passage that rang so true to me. This scene takes place in 1967, outdoors in the shadow of a party; Paul has never been with a man before, and Peter has more experience. They're in their early twenties.

"He'd brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter's hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking that the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter's head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man's wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him."

It's been only a little more than four years, but D. and I already have different memories of the night we met, even argue about the date (easily—and often—provable thanks to calendars and journals, but still). What I was wearing, whether we actually danced that night or the next, when we kissed for the first time. I've written about it (not here but in an unpublished essay), and even I discovered—after I finished the essay—that I'd misremembered important details (specifically when D. first met my parents).

I'm not sure I can say how any of it really happened, what's metal and what's smoke.

Foreign Countries

Greetings from Provincetown. The last time I was here, it was New Year's, the population closed in on itself for warmth. It's now the height of summer—tattoos breathing for the first time in months, vacation beards sprouting, people relaxing into each other and themselves. One of the notes in the guest book of our condo, from two men, adds a P.S.: "We held hands walking down the streets of Provincetown." A big duh to anyone who has been here more than once or who is from a big progressive city, but a revelation when you've never done it before anywhere. The same couple: "It's like coming to another country from our beautiful but conservative Maine."

D. and I saw the Swedish movie The Girl Who Played With Fire last night. Excellent, complex, disturbing, but as far from Ikea's cheerful dining rooms and entertainment centers as you could imagine. Though Ikea is, funnily enough, among the credits.