My Friend Says I Should Be Thinking about…

I am making an exception for the tree that fell in the storm. And the guy I hired to clean up the tree. And the limbs he left plunged deep in the yard. And the shape they make: a V.

Everyone agrees. Restaurant workers are very exposed.

On Tuesdays late, so 3 a.m., I sign into a Zoom where we sit around and read Lacan’s The Psychoses. I am googling “what is masked intimacy?”

Cool your jets. Cool your jets. This is the phrase I most often think in regards to Leila Olive. And then. Cuddle with her. Something else with her. Ask her “Does this feel good? How about this?”

I don’t really see the need to think about masked intimacy yet. Leila Olive works in a restaurant all the time and has a boyfriend and yeah, she’s bi, and I’ve only seen her once. During the pandemic. In December.

First my ex was a watercolor above the fireplace. Then I moved her to the kitchen. I knew she’d hate that. But she’d like it better than being listed for sale on Etsy.

Having the hots for artists is a recurring problem for me.

When people say “recurring problem,” do we actually mean “chronic desire”?

There’s a squirrel on the V and he’s eating a nut. I’m just reporting the facts.

This summer I had a weather phobia. No, worse than that. My partner—you can have more than one—had to look up the weather every day. If it was going to rain or storm, I got on the floor between the sofa and coffee table and put a sofa cushion over my head.

You could lie in the bathtub covered by sofa cushions, my therapist suggested.

It is very unlikely you will die from a tree crushing you during a storm.

All this medical in the pandemic is reminding you of your childhood. You did not have much choice.

But I know the truth: Zelda Fitzgerald went to a party. She was getting drunk and watching Scott flirt and she called the fire department. The party carried on. This was in the 1920s. She had been to several parties, was rich, from Montgomery, died right up the road from here in Asheville, North Carolina.

Finally, I got on Buspirone and then I didn’t care about the tree that I knew would fall and which did fall, but not on my house, and I didn’t care about my lungs and I stopped taking the X-rays out of the closet to have a look at myself.

Are you practicing masked intimacy? Best I can figure you wear a mask and take off all your clothes. I don’t take off all my clothes for anybody. It’s not my thing. I like to have a long cape or tee shirt or latex thigh-highs still on me.

One person is not talking to me about masked intimacy at all: Leila Olive. The subject has not come up. Twice she said, I’ll get tested for you. She said, Send it to me. Send it to meeeeee. She said, I missed ya today at work. And, Ugh yr so hot I love you. The next morning: So embarrassing. I was drinking tequila.

Hey. Cool your jets.

You’re thinking I have Leila Olive on a pedestal and you’re right. I can hardly go anywhere outside my brain. But this isn’t Ancient Greece, so I do not imagine her cast in marble on a column in front of a temple.

More like on a blue velvet chaise lounge in a living room—not mine: there’s a guy here, he’s my partner; this is not for him—where she’s wearing whatever she wants and bored by the poem she’s reading.

When Auden said, Every critic should state his Eden, he was basically saying, Every poet should taste her Leila Olive.

She goes into work at 3 p.m. and gets off at 10 p.m. and sometimes makes $500 in tips.

I cannot actually imagine kissing Leila Olive through a mask. Okay, I have imagined it. If we must do it, we must. But I would like a pair of small  copper-handled scissors nearby so we can cut the parts out of our masks for our lips. You’re thinking, “That defeats the purpose.”

But there’s not a purpose here. This is not a business meeting.

So many red flags I could build a castle behind them.

Zelda’s at the party and she’s flirting too. She has forgotten about calling the fire department. She’s talking about jazz to someone in that way white women have of wanting, so badly, to be conversant in Black aesthetic. The firemen arrive.

Nothing seems to be on fire. “Who called the fire department?” some guy shouts, relieved to finally have a thing to say at a party. “I did,” Zelda says, and then that guy, for the rest of his miserable life, tells everyone he talked to Zelda Fitzgerald once at a party.

I did not know my own heart around Leila Olive in the before times. I thought she was standoffish, very smart, and of course I, and everyone in the room, recognized her beauty. I did not ever think of kissing her.

She does not champion her own beauty. Does it grieve her? Has she come to grief? Will she come to grief? Am I going to be involved here, somewhere, in this coming or this grieving?

Let’s say you’re right and I did think of kissing Leila Olive. It was so far back in my mind that it was like one of those Lacanian books. I would’ve had to look my index up to find the page of the kiss I imagined.

Index fingers are highly underrated. Trigger, slick, button, quick.

“I did,” Zelda says. “Where’s the fire?” this one fireman asks. And Zelda points to her heart. “It’s here. It’s right here,” she says.

I don’t know. I’d wear a mask and go to coffee with her. I’d wear a mask and go to her place. I’d wear a mask and watch a movie. I’d wear a mask and say, “Plz take off your mask” and she’d say, “We really shouldn’t be doing this.”

That’s the phrase people use right before they really want to do something.

It wouldn’t be sad without the ending. But you have to know the ending. For once, you get to know the ending. Zelda was in a waiting room. In Asheville, North Carolina. A waiting room for electroshock therapy. That’s when the fire broke out.

Did she know, in advance, at the party, that there would be a fire and she would need those firemen?

Auden wrote privately to a friend, Of course, I know Sappho’s work has homosexual valences. But it’s not time.

On man-time, it matters who presides over the money and the weaponry. On crip-time, I send a GIF of two women kissing. She hearts it.

Source: Poetry (April 2021)