This story is a song because the heart doesn’t use words; it resonates, and the mind does its best to interpret and transcribe. Though this tale is from years ago, the song did not age. I don’t always hear it, but then I pick up a book and see a dedication to me in his rewriting of one of the book’s narratives…
Christmas is coming
and I'm trying to think of
what to inscribe in this book
for Laura
I thought of starting off
by saying that it's really
a very beautiful exchange of
values when Laura puts
her clothes on in the morning
and she is brand new
and even though you've seen
her put her clothes on before
each time is different
and each time adds
something to the last
and you know
that once again
it's morning and
you are with
someone you
love
K
E
Y
The Key Man. Aptly nicknamed by my favorite teacher, mentor, and friend, who was part of the Parkway school program that we were all being educated in, or had graduated from. He and I had attended different units in different parts of the city, and he was a bit older than me. The nickname was a clever reference to his actual name, a unique one, and also to the part he played in my life.
I met him at a party, we were loosely being set up. My high school friend knew I was nursing a broken heart and was trying to shake me out of my gloominess. She said that she had gone on a date with him and they didn’t click, but she thought that he and I might. Parties tended to bring out my awkwardness, so I went out and sat by the Koi pond. He came out with his camera and started taking pictures of me. I’m guessing they were not the candid shots he was hoping for since his sardonic remark was “how moody.”
I liked him. He was smart and funny and creative and affectionate. He saw me. He was open to me. Little by little, his kindness, generosity, wit, and loving nature restored me, seduced me, and delighted me. We were compatible animals. And I did fall in love with him.
When he was not away at school, he lived in his parents’ home. Making a good impression on an Italian or Jewish mother when you are dating her prince is important, and I most certainly did not complete that task successfully. I’m pretty sure her vote from the very first moment I entered her home was a no; I was not good enough. With my eccentric vintage thriftstore-chic wardrobe, and my unfiltered answers, especially regarding choosing not to go to college since the only thing I wanted to do was paint, and my parents saw that as an impractical luxury.
I felt like a peasant in her eyes, knowing that my parents could not have paid for any college, regardless of what I studied. Both immigrants, my mother, an unpaid homemaker committed to raising children, of which I was the fifth and last, and my father, on early retirement, due to disability, from his insurance sales job. Essentially, I was on my own.
Ultimately, I was banned from sleeping on the premises of his parents’ home for using a particular bathtub to wash up in, forgetting that it had developed a leak. Since I had been informed of it a few weeks before, I guess unconsciously I assumed it was fixed. This branded me as not being very bright, or perhaps just thoughtless. No point in trying to argue my case; I had no right to.
Before it happened I truly enjoyed the time I was able to spend in this part of his world, his room on the third floor of his family home: laughing, explaining our philosophies, having sex, then waking up with a smile, and washing up (in the aforementioned tub) before heading down to the kitchen to hear an explanation of why his toast must be burnt before applying the cottage cheese and agreeing that this particular cantaloupe we were sharing was one of the best, and finding a good cantaloupe is too rare a phenomena.
I remember some very happy days traveling to Boston to visit him—at his place on “Myrtle, rhymes with turtle” as he would say—when he was at school.
We maintained an open relationship, since he was in college in Boston and I was at work in Philadelphia (it was the promiscuous 70s), but when I came to stay with him, or he was in Philadelphia, no one else existed but the two of us.
We were both Bohemians in our own way. His interests were music, writing, and film. He liked to experiment with sound and video. My interests were visual art through drawing and painting, creating unique fashions for myself, and writing.
The critical part of him sometimes mocked me in a way that was often very blunt. I had a notebook I carried with me all the time and scribbled ideas for poems and stories in it. He once grabbed it from me and read part of it and said, “girl, you can’t write for shit.” Several months later, I showed him a poem I wrote about a woman jumping in front of the subway train I was on. His previous declaration was amended to “girl, you really can write.”
We had different ideas on religion and spirit, neither related to the ones in which we were raised, that we were not demonstrative in, but I remember both of us standing on a rocky beach near Boston, each throwing a stone of our past year of sins into the waves to observe Rosh Hashanah. This was the first time I saw him tear up, and it made my heart swell.
On one of our first adventurous dates, in Boston, I think, his inner cranky bear emerged. I went sailing with him. It was the first time I had ever been on a sailboat with anyone, anywhere, and he did nothing but yell at me the whole time because I didn’t know what to do or how to instantly understand and follow his orders.
That beast was balanced by the beauty in our other adventures together—and there were many in Boston, certainly, but mostly in New York.
After graduation, I helped him pack up and move to a loft in Soho. We enjoyed easy access to art installations, films by Truffaut, Buniel, Bergman, performances by Don Cherry and Sun Ra, Elvis Costello in Tribeca, walks to whatever was up at CBGB’s, browsing record stores, delivering his tapes, and enjoying all kinds of food. Japanese was a favorite, but I remember razor clams in Chinatown, Luna in Little Italy, and the original Ray’s Famous. Since I would often stay with him for a month, give or take, I would look for day work like cleaning jobs to contribute to expenses.
Sometimes we would go on independent adventures and report our findings when we got back. Staying at home in his loft was fun too. Reading stories to each other, sharing music, and sharing ideas…
I was into nature religion. For him, music was religion, and he taught me much about his gods. He gave me a broader vision on music, on art, and on life. I gave him a heart grown three sizes larger, filled with my love. Evidenced by his encryptions: the king of hearts playing card flanking my nakedness in his place, to greet me when I awoke so I would not forget; and the sweet things he would say: once while replacing a lost button on his shirt, and feeling homespun I guess, I asked him if he wanted children, his response was “two by you girl, two by you.”
When we were apart, we would write letters to each other often, between New York and Philadelphia, including drawings, photographs, and sometimes he would send me a train ticket, once addressing it to Laura Borealis and declaring it a one-way ticket to his heart.
In an attempt to give him a tangible expression of my gratitude, I scraped together a hundred bucks for him to spend on his travels with his parents. The idea was for him to treat himself, but instead, he brought me back a moon harp…generous to a fault.
A million things are still so very vivid in my memory, popping up in no particular order, meaningless to anyone but me: his dark sense of humor, “Etan Patz and the missing persons band;” his beat poetry, “Our love is stronger than dirt;” passing a huge painting in a gallery window of a donkey laying next to a naked woman and hugging her, his comment “that’s like me and you,” both hilarious and endearing; having a gun pulled on us when I chastised someone for almost running us over; a woman blowing a whistle and screaming in the street and me opening the window, leaning out and yelling that I was going to call the police. Her attacker ran away, and we brought her inside. She later brought me a rape whistle.
Then there was ”Don’t call me baby.” A phrase which he repeated to me numerous times as a joke after I said it to him one night at a party. I don’t remember my reason, only the physical circumstances. We were sitting next to each other on a bed, in a bedroom at the farmhouse where his friend had a yearly party, and he had a tape recorder on his lap.
I do remember a sad situation at a restaurant in Philadelphia. He wanted to break up, and I did not want to, and I think I was trying to talk him out of it. I do not remember the timing.
I also remember making a terrible mistake, one that would probably prompt anyone to want to have nothing to do with me. But he persevered. The guy having the party, supposedly his very close friend—let’s call him the eel, as he was both slippery and shocking—lived in Philadelphia, and we started hanging around as friends, but I allowed it to go too far.
Whatever possessed me to risk losing a good guy, a guy who made me happy, to indulge in being with someone who did not care for me and obviously did not really care for his friend either?
Nearly 5 decades later, as I confront my mortality and look back over my life, I think I understand. When Key and I met, I was coming off my very first heartbreak from the kind of love that feels like the stakes are life and death. It took a full five years to recover. I think unconsciously during those years, I was always searching for the sort of devastating passion that would somehow make me feel worthy to exist. Despite my adventures and lust for life, I did not truly feel that worthiness.
I think it also rendered me unable to really see people for their true worth, and Key had more worth in his little finger than the eel had in his whole body.
The theory is true that you cannot love anyone more than you love yourself, and cannot accept more love than you feel for yourself.
Unfortunately, I became pregnant and did not believe in abortion. Considering circumstances, it could have been by the eel, yet Key, prince that he was, did not abandon me. Instead, he gave me love and support and forgiveness.
I had a stillborn at 6 months and could not, at the time, identify who the father was, but believed it was the wrong guy.
I know that Key and I continued seeing each other even after the birth because I remember him making comments about the changes in my body one day when we were having a bath together, but I know he began seeing someone else more often, as I did in Philadelphia.
One thing I always felt was that with my need for space, I could only be committed to or marry someone who traveled a lot or who would not mind if I had my own room to retire to when I needed to decompress. Seems like the one man who may have been willing and able to do that was the man whom I had betrayed and hurt.
Key and I ended as lovers but remained friends and would occasionally talk on the phone, and sometimes see each other. Eventually, the woman he was seeing moved in with him, and I moved to Key West with the man who would become my son’s father.
We continued to communicate, mostly by phone. I was unhappy and sometimes frightened in the relationship I was in, and said that I wanted to leave and fly home. In his last letter to me, he said, “I live with a woman now who won’t sew the buttons on my shirt but I will always love you.”
I saved each and every one of his letters. No matter who I was with or what I was going through, I always had his letters. Maybe they were an island of safety in a stormy life.
The partner I chose to move away with revealed himself to be very jealous, and sometimes mean-spirited, and violent. So, sensing I was slightly hurt by something Key had done, encouraged me to send a very unnecessary and unkind postcard to him. Foolishly, I did, and I feel that it was this note that broke the friendship with him. No more phone calls.
My question now is: what is fate?
If my choices would have been different, would his have been? Or on some level had he already chosen that woman who wouldn’t sew buttons on his shirt—because she could provide something he needed to move forward that I could not? He has stayed with her and created a family and what appears to be a beautiful, happy life.
Had we continued, I imagine I would not have met the people I have met or had the experiences I have had, and I would not have had the many happy years with the particular son I have: an artist, scientist, healer, and explorer.
Who knows what would have been different in the Key Man’s life.
Over the last 45 years, I’ve only reached out to him maybe five times. I very rarely reach out because I don’t want to intrude where I’m not invited. And he does not reach out to me, ever.
But he sometimes comes to me in dreams. Last night, for the first time, we spoke extensively and warmly in my dream. He’s offered an end to the recurring nightmare I’ve had where I’m lost and in danger and can’t find my way home; after our talk, he showed me the way. I think his presence was there to tell me that everything works out as it should.
I usually keep my close friends forever. I miss his voice. If I could, I would tell him I am sorry about the eel, and I’m sorry about the harsh postcard. I would also let him know that the time spent with him was some of the happiest in my life, and my heart can still sing it… and I thank him.