I ALWAYS SAY I LOVE YOU FIRST by Bob Hill
I want to tell you about a day in late August of 2009. It is just past noon, and this is a clear day, a gorgeous day with almost zero headwind. I am sitting on the street-level deck of an Upper East Side coffee shop named M. Rohrs’. M. Rohrs’ is located just off of 86th and 2nd. The traffic is moving briskly throughout this part of town, and that is because the city has settled into a malaise, an annual two-week period that bridges the divide between true summer and the academic fall. This is a quiet time in New York City. This is a bittersweet time that is meant to usher in new things. When I think of this time, I tend to think of the outer boroughs, and I tend to think of the vacant parking spaces along open streets. I tend to think of the downtown and of the West Village. I tend to think of the Meatpacking District, and of the West Side Highway. I tend to think of the docks, and of the rhythmic plunging of waves against cement. I tend to think of the Rockaways and of City Island, where the steel and the asphalt give way to front lawns, to grass and rock and, eventually, to sea. For whatever reason, I tend to think of all these places as existing short of sundown, within some cosmic frequency that is perennially wave-jumping between the outgoing sax of HAIM’s “Summer Girl” and the opening strains of “White Dress” by Lana Del Rey.The outside deck at M. Rohrs’ runs empty. I am joined now by a girl named Zuzana. Zuzana is from Prague, but she has traveled to the US on a working visa for the summer. Zuzana is cute and unpretentious and she is engaging in a way that exudes charm. Every now and again, Zuzana will attempt to teach me Czech phrases, but I have struggled to retain these in the way that I have retained bits and pieces of Italian and German and Spanish and French. Zuzana is affectionate. Zuzana looks at me with what one might refer to as the petal-dust eyes. On July 4th, a week after the two of us first met, Zuzana agreed to go watch the fireworks with me along the Hudson River. Only we never made it to the Hudson River. We stopped off instead inside a corner bar where we got wasted while listening to the jukebox. Our songs played out to the sonic echo of pyrotechnics. Our songs played out to an electrified sky. Zuzana and I do not demand a great deal of each other. Our interests hedge toward the mundane … dinner and a movie. Last week we went to The Metropolitan, where we sat by a window and discussed Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters while gazing out across Central Park. The two of us prefer to stay at home and eat takeout. The two of us prefer to sit along the esplanade and read. The two of us prefer to have ravenous sex, the kind where the windows shake and the walls run damp with perspiration. On nights, and there have been a handful of them, when I have slid my arm from beneath Zuzana’s shoulders, only to tiptoe into the kitchen where I can write, Zuzana will appear several minutes later, her face cast in the ghostly glow of my computer screen. “Why do you need to do this now?” Zuzana will ask me. On certain nights, I will allow Zuzana to lead me by the hand back into the bedroom. On certain other nights, I will convince Zuzana that she should just go back to sleep. Zuzana and I are similar in certain ways, yet we are not similar enough to justify anything beyond what we have been doing. And it is because of this that I have decided to break things off. There is someone else, a woman who has been away for most of the summer. This woman and I had gone out a couple of times back in the spring, and while I am uncertain whether we are meant to be friends or something more, I also recognize that this woman is inbound, and that Zuzana is outbound, and that the city moves too quickly for anyone to stand in wait until he can be sure. Entire theses have been written about this, which is to say the meet-cute world of serial dating in a metropolis, about the ill effects of trading up or swiping down. Lipstick Jungle. Guinea Pig of Love. Throughout Gotham Proper, any long-term commitment takes on the auspices of a surrender. Exchanging vows signals the beginning of a slow and steady drift toward the suburbs, toward North Jersey, toward Long Island, toward the crimson edge of everything that had drawn one toward Valhalla in the first place. Among the undesirables—And I include myself among those ranks—dating in New York City serves as a reminder that we will always be the underclass, and that we will never be well-suited to the pass/fail immediacy of surface apps. And so we demure. Either that or we search for an outlet, and whereas that outlet might provide us with fulfillment, it might also provide us with an excuse. It's not about me, it's about the work, and so on … even though the work is almost inevitably about us, for better or for ill.“I see,” Zuzana says after I have explained the situation. Zuzana runs one finger along the pattern of her dress. I sip my coffee, and then I begin to atone. “No,” Zuzana interrupts me. “She is coming and I am going, and so there is no need for you to say anything more.” Zuzana has shifted in her seat, and she is facing west now, toward 2nd Avenue. “Part of me just feels sorry for you,” Zuzana continues. "Based on what I have seen, I think you are going to keep on doing this whenever anybody attempts to get close to you. And I think that you are going to end up alone when you are in your fifties. By then it will be too late.” “Too late for what?” I say. Zuzana scoffs. Her jaw is set in such a way as to indicate that there will not be any further discussion. And so we allow for the white noise – a distant car horn, a whirling blender. I think that you are going to end up alone when you are in your fifties. I sidestep any display of emotion by generating a mental checklist of all the would-be baptisms, birthday dinners, wine tastings, graduations, church socials, bad art openings, group vacations, investment opportunities, weddings, funerals, hospital visits, housewarmings, engagement parties, holiday traditions, fishing trips, recitals, and general inclusiveness I will be able to avoid just by remaining unattached. I enjoy being in a relationship, I do, right up until the point at which a paramour’s friends or family begin to insist that I do not meet their standards. It’s not that I don’t think you’re a nice guy, the drunken sister of an ex-girlfriend once informed me. I’m just not sure whether you are the right guy for her. That comment burned, and it left its brand upon my id. Why not tell a man with pockmarked skin that he should have taken better care of his complexion as a teenager? I have spent the bulk of my adult life feeling as if I have been a burden upon the people whom I adore. I struggle with this, although I have struggled a great deal more with the idea that I am not the caliber of human being that others would like to receive at their front doors. The moment passes, and, eventually, it comes time for Zuzana and me to say our goodbyes. The two of us hug, a halfhearted hug that leaves one arm dangling like an empty windsock at our sides. Then a brief wave, and Zuzana heads uphill toward the 6 train. I, in turn, hightail it back to my apartment so that I can get some sleep. Around 7 PM, I set out toward Central Park. Once there, I follow the ellipse until it lets me off along the north side of the Delacorte Theater. The Delacorte is home to Milton Hebald's Romeo and Juliet sculpture. Whenever I think of Hebald’s sculpture, I tend to think of it in deep winter, with a 2-inch mound of snow accumulating along the back of Romeo’s head. I would die here, Hebald's bronzework seems to say. And it would not be a tragic death, to perish now, at the celestial height of all emotion. This is love as an act of bravery. Or is it love as an absolutely glorious mistake? Love as an elegy; the poison pill that lovers take. Elizabethans. I have mentioned another woman, and I am on my way to see that woman now. Besima. Besima is Canadian and she is a schoolteacher. Besima stands 5'9” and she is bookish and brilliant and she wears Louis Vuitton frames that bring out the accents in her cheeks. Besima and I met online. We exchanged emails. We shared our first date at a bar called David Copperfield’s, and, once there, I presented Besima with a copy of Oliver Twist (as a playful nod to the whole Dickensian motif). At the end of that night, Besima gave me a quick peck just before she disappeared into a taxi. Three weeks later, when Besima and I met up again, I leaned in to kiss her at the end of the night. Only this time the gesture seemed contrived, as if I had been seeking reassurance along a nonexistent front. Besima left to spend the summer in Ontario a few days after that. Tonight will be the first time that she and I have seen each other since. Besima and I have the potential to become great friends, which would be grand given that I need great friends. But our great friendship, which is to say our potential friendship—a friendship that will require several months before it can be cemented—that friendship is commensurate upon me understanding not to push things beyond their established limits. Historically, this has been an issue for me, and it has been an issue because I tend to view male-female relationships from a perspective of wins and losses. I am referring here to a negative trait, long-standing and hardwired, that finds its basis in my lack of self-esteem. I do not think myself attractive, and so I seek out others who can provide that validation for me. This harkens back to my childhood, and to my peer group, and to a suburban rejection of everything I held dear, if not the pedestrian idea that the brooding measure of a man has something to do with heterosexual prowess. I come from a place of Catholic guilt and shame and deflection (based on hypocrisy). I come from a place where people define themselves based on what other people insist that they should be. I want to be loved. No, what I want is to be wanted. No, what I want is to be someone who is perceived to be wanted. Whether that is true or not makes almost zero difference to me. I crave attention. I am a child of Eros. I grew up on the suburban myth of a big-city romance. As a teenager, I would idealize men and women based on movies like The Apartment and Manhattan and When Harry Met Sally. I came to envision love as resembling some sort of a thunderclap, an epiphany, a jolt from out of nowhere that went off like a starter pistol, precipitating a breakneck sprint along the uptown streets. Bring it in … and now cue the strings. Only none of that was real. In fact, it wasn’t even real to any of the writers who had originally imagined that it could be. A case in point. I remember reading a 1991 New York Times profile about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow that explained how they lived across from each other along opposite sides of Central Park. Whenever the two of them were on the phone, they could signal, wave and gesture, Woody from high atop his 5th Avenue penthouse and Mia from an upper-floor apartment along Central Park West. As a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs, this struck me as idyllic. As an aging cynic (with the added benefit of hindsight), it strikes me as emblematic of just how complicated any of these big-budget romances tend to be. I am close now. Besima and I have agreed to meet at an outdoor bar just off of Riverside Drive. Besima lives 1.5 miles north of that bar, a half-mile south of Columbia University, which seems appropriate, given that she is an academic. Besima arrived in New York City around the same time I did, which was 2006, when the country was still in its post-9/11 era. For a Canadian whose parents had emigrated to Ontario by way of Bosnia, adjusting was not easy. At the time, Besima could not purchase a cell phone in New York City without a background check, and she could not travel within the US freely. Her address and her employment status were both being monitored. She had applied for a green card, but the process kept getting delayed. Despite this, Besima immersed herself within the city, and she gravitated toward its pockets. Given the choice, Besima opted to teach in the public education systems of the Bronx and Harlem, as opposed to the more prestigious academies located south of 96th Street, and in Brooklyn.I make one final turn after which I can see Besima. I can see Besima sitting alone at a table in an otherwise deserted dining area. Unfortunately, my mind is still fixated on whether Besima and I are destined to be friends or something more. We are destined to be friends. My heart and my gut seem to be in agreement, and I am fairly certain that Besima has already arrived at that exact conclusion. The only issue is my ego. A fit of conquest. The need, yet again, to be perceived as a person who is wanted, as a person who keeps pace. I need clarity. I need to be able to comport my affairs in a binary manner so that my friends will not be confused. Or maybe I need to make new friends. And maybe I keep chasing all of the new friends away. Is a life about reporting back? It is not. Yet I know that I will have one drink before hedging the conversation toward a place that it should not be.
***
Zuzana. She existed in the middle of things, arriving as she did sixteen years after the first time that I had experienced true love and thirteen years before the place that I am now, which is alone. I am writing to you tonight from a one-bedroom walk-up which is situated directly across from a post office, roughly one half-block from a railway (but not a train station), and approximately two-tenths of a mile from the Lehigh River in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nothing happens here, and the townspeople prefer it that way. On an April night when the weather allows for the windows to remain ajar, one can hear the neighbors coughing from a hundred meters away, just as one can hear the diesel blast of the tractor trailers barreling hard across the I-80 bridge. This is not a place where I would have envisioned myself, nor am I the person whom I would have envisioned myself as becoming. I am a shipwreck, and I have washed ashore here. To some extent, I have been subsisting in exile, even though I am financially secure (at least for the time being), and I have a meaningful job at a company that emphasizes the right things. For me, exile exists as a place where, to quote the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, “not suffering [becomes] a form of suffering.” My life is calm here, but I prefer the chaos. I seldom reflect upon the periods in my life when fortunes soared and stasis ruled the day.A bit of context. When I left New York City, I had no money and no prospects. I had been sober for five years; I had not dated anybody for four. During the summer of 2017, I took to splitting my time between Manhattan and the Poconos. In short order, I had been offered a full-time job in the Poconos area, and at about the same time, I had met a woman there, as well. In the job, I saw an opportunity for stability. In the woman, I saw an opportunity for escape. But, oh, how much of love is dependent upon slanted truths and omitted details? It’s that old story wherein one partner says to the other, “Do not move here on account of me,” and the other partner insists that he or she had been planning on moving there all along. Only this woman and I, we were not partners so much as we were co-conspirators. Our first kiss felt arcane. It felt like witchcraft, or perhaps the beginning of some unholy alliance. The two of us were sitting by a fire in the backyard of a lakehouse, and the October breeze came rolling in from off the water, and the embers crackled, and the two of us got high, despite the fact that I would rarely get high even before I had gotten sober. I made a pass, and this woman rebuffed me. Shortly after, she relented, but only if I would agree to take a sip of wine first. And so I did. If I wanted a second kiss, this woman contended, then I would need to smoke a cigarette with her. And so I did. At some point during that cigarette, this woman looked toward the fire and she said, “I’m gonna hurt you, Bob.” She said that with concern and she said it with forewarning, and I ignored her, and that is on me. By mid-November I had fallen in love with this woman, and I told her as much. She did not tell me that she loved me until two months later, when the two of us were lying in bed one afternoon. She had her back turned toward me, and she whispered the words as if they were an allocution, or a mea culpa. (She had admitted to sleeping with an ex of hers ten days prior.) Our relationship lasted from October until May, and there were several breakups in between. One night when it was all but decided, I went over to this woman’s house and we put her kids to bed, and we went downstairs and we sat in the living room and we watched TV. My heart felt light, and so I smiled, and this incensed her. “Whatever it is you’re feeling,” this woman said to me, “I don’t feel it.” – a comment that dug its nails into my psyche. When I went home, I wrote these words inside a notebook: People who are in need of saving should not develop a Messiah complex. It brings things low, and it breeds enablement. Our dismount was awkward, and it took place in stages. By early spring, the two of us were living seventy-five meters apart along the same street. We could wave to each other in lieu of texting. We could walk over to see each other in lieu of a phone call. Less than a month after this woman and I had called it quits, she took to seeing a woodcutter who lived one block away; a woodcutter who had also been the previous tenant in the apartment where I was the current lessee. I cursed the wind. I began to long for the city, where sorrow only lasts until one turns the corner. There are no soulmates in a metropolis. There are no soulmates anywhere, really. Soulmates are for platitudes. Soulmates are for small towns and bad fiction. Soulmates are for suburban stopovers where the talent pool is limited and where people marry for lack of knowing how else to proceed. In the wake of this affair, I felt unlovable, and, as such, I began to question whether I had been attempting to force love out of people before they could get up the energy to leave. I had a checkered past. I had objectified women. I had been a good boyfriend, but a bad bachelor, and it seemed as if all of that was beginning to pirouette its way back to me in streams.***
Nightfall, and I am looking out a tenth story window from inside the Hotel Richland. The Richland is located along the southern boundary of the Lower East Side. Tonight is Mischief Night, and I have been here for six days. I was initially scheduled to check out this morning, but I added an extra night due to a hangover, my second of this week. The first hangover was mild, and it occurred after a twelve hour binge in Greenwich Village. This second hangover carries with it a reminder of the old ways, of a melancholy that all but shrouded me throughout my thirties. I feel skittish. The only light in the room comes from the ghostly glow of the TV. I am wearing sweatpants and I have the heat turned up to seventy-two. There are fast-food wrappers crumpled up along an end table and there are breadcrumbs in the sheets. I have no cash left in my wallet. I withdrew $220 from my checking account during the overnight hours. This according to a pair of receipts.I feel spineless. I want to divebomb through this window. I want to sweep down low across the rooftops; I want to springboard over ledges. I want to glide my way through Chinatown, then veer left onto the Bowery, toward the colonnades, up through the arches, onto the bridge, where I can dematerialize into a ray of light that’ll cascade like so many particles into the river. I want that. I want to transcend. Only I am stuck here, a fool and his bad choices. I deal in self-deception. As such, I prefer to look out at things that cannot look back. Up here, there is no barrier between what is art and what is architecture, between what is progress and what is preservation. Up here, every bit of skyline is being bought up by the speculators. So many structures, a great many of them already living under the threat of demolition. Will you become a landmark or a relic? It is the quintessential question of aging. I can trace this back to its flashpoint, the glint of the muzzle. Toward the end of 2019, I began to allow myself a drink on occasion. I did this as a matter of ceremony after eight years off the sauce. Only now I am backsliding. I am giving in to the wrong impulses. I am wading into what are both bleak and terrestrial waters. Last night I turned a three hour outing with an old friend into a twelve hour trainwreck on my own. I have no wisdom to impart. I am not penning an advice column. The starch has faded, and my line has gone slack. I look forward to drinking these days. I spend two hours of every binge feeling charismatic, and then I spend the rest of those evenings chasing the glow. I am in the bars again, and being in the bars means barhopping, and, at least for me, that barhopping means a babbling stream of toxic chauvinism and wasted money and awkward rejections and shameful boasts. I lack control. The longer the night, the more compelled I feel to meet somebody, to end up dick-deep in some woman whose name I cannot recall. I pursue this not out of a need for companionship, but as a means of compensating for the extra hours spent desperate and semi-lucid and alone.Be aware that these are the fledgling stages, a series of unremarkable deviations. The skin loosens; the jowls sag. I do not lie so much as I omit details. I commit oversights. I go from running five days a week to running four. Minor variances, but they can lead to a place where the road narrows and there is nothing but the Valley of Gehenna below. I have struggled to reclaim my honor, and I have no interest in an about-face. I need to stop drinking. Nostalgia is for the discarded. Three days from today I will turn forty-nine, and as I enter year fifty, I have occasion to consider that the most gratifying period in my life took place between 2012 and 2016, an incandescent metamorphosis during which I was newly sober and entirely celibate and only sporadically employed, all while still living in New York. Those years felt like deliverance; they felt like nirvana. Those years felt like coasting through a sundrenched mist after a quarter-century spent charging into a headwind with a massive chute fused to my spine. I ate better upon getting sober, and I slept better, and I began to turn inward. I had divorced myself from the conceit that one needs a lover – or some ongoing bevy of sex partners – to make him feel whole. This past August, I received an email from an ex-girlfriend, Meghan, my first true love, and one of the two great loves of my life. Meghan and I were in a relationship from the spring of 1993 until the fall of 1995. I was young and she was younger, and we both had separate worlds we needed to explore. There was a breakup, and following that breakup, Meghan and I lost touch. For a time, I would hear things, that Meghan was doing well and that she had married well, and that she had settled long in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, there was no way of knowing. I had gone looking for Meghan online, only to discover she had the digital footprint of a person who does not want to be found. But then there was this email, and at the heart of it, a question: Would I be open to Meghan coming to visit me in the Poconos? I was, which is to say that I had accepted. And, thus, one night toward the end of summer, Meghan and I built a fire and we ate outdoors, and we worked through a quarter-century of gasp and void. It was the beginning of something, a reclamation. It was an eleven hour conversation that did not ebb until the dawn. Meghan has been to visit me a few times since that night. Earlier this week, she came here, to the Lower East Side, and the two of us spent a couple of days together. We walked through Little Italy and Tribeca and Washington Square. We went to the Whitney and the Met. We had dinner at the White Horse Tavern, after which we attended the fiction writer Sara Lippmann’s book launch at P&T Knitwear. After P&T, Meghan and I disappeared into the Village, where we got drunk, a good drunk, a warm drunk, the kind of drunk that makes me wish that I was capable of doing things in moderation. Meghan grounds me, and I am spellbound by her. I should also mention that Meghan has been tremendous for my psyche. When things went sour with that woman who had cheated on me, I stopped believing in myself. I took a header into the dark south. Intimacy, or at least the physical manifestation of it, is like a drug. It is like a mainline cocktail to the soul, the sudden removal of which can create a vacuum. I did not want to overcome that emptiness so much as I wanted to avenge it. I wanted to meet somebody, somebody who was fierce and smart and accomplished and who could make me seem attractive by association. And I did meet somebody like that eventually, only when I did, I resorted to drinking because I thought I needed to. This cheapened me, not only in my own eyes, but in the eyes of everyone who had supported me. I could go on for another ten paragraphs. I could expand on the idea of love and its apparent station in my life. I could comment on the age of androgyny and the inevitability of an asexual revolution; of the cultural shift from time management into energy supply. I could tell you that I like to think about love as a way of honoring the principled people in my orbit, but that I also like to think of it as a form of integrity. I could bring matters full-circle by explaining how Besima and I have become the closest of friends, how I met up with Besima this past Thursday, and how we went to see a movie at the Lincoln Square 13. I could run deep along any number of tangents, but instead I would simply like to impart that my life, at its most profound, has been about moving forward. And that my fears, at their most paralyzing, have arisen from remaining idle for too long. Companionship has been a struggle, particularly because I am selfish and I have an overwhelming indifference to remaining on my own. That aside, I feel privileged to be able to sit here and look out across Valhalla on a Saturday in late fall. There is more. There is an ocean. But the room is paid for, and we’ve got time.