Between Tides and Temperatures

This may be our last Saturday night out together for a while. We’ve been going to movies and visiting couples, and the latest is he thinks I’m getting too dependent on him and need to spend more time with my own friends. We go through phases of this, swinging back and forth, separate, together, clunk heads, fight, make up.

Now I see he’s writing about Cezanne, one of my new obsessions, although I discovered him on my own. (I’m out to prove here that I am not his “sidekick” as he claims people see me, though I admit I’m defensive because I know it is my tendency to hang back and wait for him to lead. I guess I was trained that way, and it’s hard to un-train myself, but of course I am a separate person even if I don’t always act that way, and of course he’s embarrassed too that he wants a sidekick and has trouble, finally, standing on his own without one.)

But he was right, I was getting isolated from my friends, so I went out with Cory last night to two Kurosawa films, and one was about two young lovers who wanted to marry but were broke and kept arguing about money, and it kept reminding me of us because we’ve been fighting about whether I should get a full-time job programming capitalists’ computers (he thinks he’ll thereby lose me ’cause he’s a quasi-hippie). Also, she kept trying to cheer him up when he was aggrieved and wouldn’t talk to her — well, we take turns at those roles. At the end she hugged him in the band shell after he pretended to conduct Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” I thought, “They’re going to make it,” as I do about us so often.

Next ferry departs in six minutes. I’ve never ridden the Staten Island ferry with him before. But he needs to meditate on the boat. We can’t meditate together because he uses a mantra, and I do an insight meditation. When we try to sit together, he gets a headache, and I feel like there’s a pair of headlights shining in my eyes. Still, it’s a bond, that we both meditate. And it was Sparrow who got me back into it after an eight-year hiatus.

Our sex has been good lately. It, too, has its phases. At first we had this mild S-M routine, but our therapist in London got me to stop trying to please him so much (I mean in life, not just in sex), and then the S-M stopped working. Now he’s the one obsessed with not trying to please me so much. It’s amazing how similar our neuroses are, even though they look totally different.

Another thing we have in common is, of course, writing. I’m more of a poet, and he’s more of a proseist, luckily, so the competition doesn’t get too cutthroat. Although I’m working on a novel now, about a mind-reading device that drastically alters twenty-first century society. We both want to alter this society, but Sparrow is more systematic about it (I mean political) than I. We write The 11th Street Ruse with this end in mind. I don’t know if it’s working, but it’s made us slightly (although pseudonymously) famous — more than forty subscribers already. This issue’s late because we decided to photocopy instead of mimeo it, and then Ira’s Xerox machine broke, but now it’s fixed, so the issue will be out quite soon.

And here comes Max Roach. Sparrow takes my hand. A strange feeling ran immediately in my body.