He calls. We talk. I tell him I prefer texts because I am busy. So then he texts and asks me out. I say yes. He will pick me up on a Saturday morning. I am beside myself that morning. What will I wear? I throw clothes on the bed, huge discarded piles of everything I own. I strew shoes across my perfect apartment. Godzilla watches me from his tank; he has never seen me so nervous. I settle on the most innocuous clothes—a sweatshirt, jeans. I cannot bear the thought that this man might see he has unsettled me.
He picks me up. The sun is shining. We drive toward the water. I had thought we would have lunch, see a movie. Instead he says he wants to walk the Golden Gate Bridge with me. I’ve never done this. It’s always seemed the dominion of tourists. We park and walk along the bridge. Water crashes blue-green under our feet. We hang our heads over the edge and watch the ocean dashing itself against the rocks, breaking itself into a million silver bits. We turn to look up into the sparkling sky, the arches of the bridge stretching high into the air above our heads. I point to the other side and say, “That way is Asia!” Excited as a school kid, he laughs and grabs my hand. We walk along in the most perfect silence, our heartbeats in synch, our bodies reaching out to each other, our nostrils flared to catch each other’s scent.
*
Later he kisses me slowly and carefully. I feel the tightly wound cocoon of myself loosen and begin to unravel, but it is months before I am convinced into his bed. When he enters me, I hold on to his shoulders and weep. Here are memories under the skin that are being released. But for him I can bear them. He asks with his eyes if he should stop and I shake my head and hold on harder and his tongue shoots out and licks away my tears and I sob until he comes. Just before we fall asleep, I whisper, “If you leave, I will die.” He’s mostly asleep, but he kisses my eyelids, whispers, “Never.” Sated, still and calm, I fall asleep with him still softening inside me.
*
It is astounding, the way we fit together. And there must be some alchemy that happens in sleep on that first night, because this is how we sleep from that day on. My back cleaved to his front, his lips against my shoulder, his long body curved around mine. He holds my wrist between his fingers, his thumb on my pulse. Our moving and shifting in darkness is always choreographed—an elbow accommodated, a neck nuzzled, knees folded into each other. There is never an expanse of sheet between us. Always just the sacred resting of these two bodies entwined.
*
We learn each other’s lives. He grew up in West Virginia, a place that feels as exotic to me as Sri Lanka must feel to him. I say, “Coal? Isn’t that what you have there?”
He laughs. “Yes, but my dad is a doctor. We lived in Charleston. It was as big as a city gets out there, but I wanted out as soon as possible. So I did what all the kids do. I packed up and went to art school in New York.” He says he went to a place called Cooper Union. I don’t know what this means until I look it up later and realize it’s the best art school in the country, that they accept only a handful of the most talented young applicants every year. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. He makes a wry face, says, “New York … all of that. It didn’t end well for me.” He won’t tell me more. I let it be. We all have our secrets.
For money he works as an art handler. There are five of them in the company. All young artists, driven and talented but forced to handle other people’s work to survive. They drive to rich people’s houses in Marin, in Pacific Heights, to install the private collections. The most expensive collections are in the houses where Broadway meets the Presidio, he says. He tells me about a house perched over the city that feels exactly like stepping into an eighteenth-century Italian villa. Another house is so modern that walking in, one is greeted by a cement wall and a huge photograph of a woman pissing into a man’s upturned mouth. He has put up displays at MOMA, at the De Young, at the Asian Art Museum. “What’s the most incredible thing you’ve touched?” I ask.
“The Monets,” he says. “To be that close. To see the brushstrokes…” He shakes his head and has no words for what it felt like to be that close to genius.
All around his bedroom are large and small canvases of his; others are stacked under his bed. He pulls them out to show me and I see the progression of his thoughts and talent. The early paintings are crowded and full of color. Later his style is simpler and cleaner, more graphic and beautiful, intensely emotional. One painting I love shows a young girl standing in an open doorway holding out a letter, a stork taking it from her hand. Overhead a whole gaggle of birds is flying past. It’s called Special Delivery, he says. It’s a metaphor for a young girl’s losing her virginity, becoming pregnant. I hadn’t seen it. They are messages, I realize. Each canvas a short story. He shows me piece after piece after piece. He asks, “What do you think? Do you like them?” Yes, of course, I like everything about him. Already I am a mirror. He is the image.
We talk for hours into the night; we show up to work bedraggled but shiny-eyed, like religious converts or victims of starvation. Friends are forgotten, work is a hindrance. I cannot remember the last time I went into the dahlia garden, but then what is blossoming in my life is so much more imperative.