further along (more history)

Time—years—passed, during which a pattern repeated itself, at varying intervals. We, LL and I, would begin to find the other approachable, then be drawn, as moths etc. into points of disputation, and end with someone, usually LL, because she would come down to my studio to talk things over, walking out. Then radio silence would descend like the proverbial pall, for an indeterminate, but usually lengthy, span. A great deal of characteristic narrative may be found at blogs composed, usually in a spirit of protest, during the period following the earlier narrative below and preceding and overlapping with the narrative attempted here. They have already been mentioned: suinolopxilef, squeasy, and privypage. The latter may be reached from the first, and the first pretty much has a Google page to itself, unsurprisingly.

I will take up the story at what remains for me a pivotal scene.

Nuit Blanche, a one-night all-night Toronto arts festival, had been the night before. She had dropped by to wish me good night as she was leaving for the festivities with friends. I would have loved to have tagged along, but knew it was pointless and it would likely have been offensive to ask. She was with three women, two young, and what I remember as an opulently appointed overweight man of indeterminate age. The other woman, LL’s age and friend from university, had shown herself as a congenially sexual woman, successfully so, and had flirted with me in our palmy early days; so I imagined her and LL to be, or hoping to be, collaborators in sexual adventure, particularly on such a night.

So the next day when LL greeted me cheerfully from the second-floor balcony, ready, it seemed, to take part in high-spirited banter, I fired back with jealous irony; quite possibly, I don’t recall, jealous anger. She, shocked and enraged, turned and left the nascent conversation; never ever to return. What I lost in that characteristically stupid moment I will most likely never even be able to guess; but it could easily, if I had been less irritable, ended congenially, and everything would not have been ruined. Forever. Even, perhaps, I might never have come down with cancer; because what follows, so congenial to cancer, would not have occurred.

That Winter she lived elsewhere. As she intended, I never found out where, but for the neighborhood. In late Spring I realized she was back, living in one of the recently vacated apartments, but still no word was spoken, in greeting or need.

For myself, it was my winter of deep misery. When LL disappeared I felt doubly abandoned, doubly alone.

Here it becomes necessary to backtrack; to speak of my father, his last years, and his end. And I imagine it best to devote a separate post to him.

Foreword to the Following

The story told below is, self-evidently, expressing the writer’s viewpoint. A modest effort at balance has been made, but the reader may more readily understand LL’s actions and feelings to the degree they may be clearly implied, than the writer, who to those more understanding will be seen the more clearly as a clown or a fool.

The likelihood is acknowledged, even embraced, in the cause of accuracy; as well, the knowledge on the writer’s part that such a likelihood exists as almost certainly something more than a likelihood.

I have not stressed sufficiently a central element in both the experience and my narrative: LL had and presumably still does, an intense sense of privacy. This lay behind her determined pervasive silence about large and important areas of her life that I found so endlessly frustrating, and encouraged a variety of suspicions that served to block my impulse to and desperate desire for intimacy.

This is not hard to deconstruct; we didn’t trust each other, clinging to our distrust as protection against emotional damage.

All this is, I suppose, simply to say that my effort to engage the reader’s sympathies should be watched carefully, and that LL has not taken part in the telling, nor, I’m sure, would she.

Finally, it is to say she is surely not nor will not be happy with my telling this story, because it has worked against her privacy. Because I strongly regard her notion of privacy as flawed, and because it was my best, perhaps my only way to put the pieces together in a way that made sense, I disregarded her privacy and wrote this account.

There is another episode to come, in which LL will play a significant role at the beginning, in a way I imagine she would be willing to find not invasive, and she will remain a presence, because she was more or less a presence, in her absence mostly, in my mind and heart throughout. But I expect she will move into the background and shadows.