She holds me tight. “I love you too.”
Have I told her I’ve loved her before? I’m not sure. One doesn’t track those three words with a new mother as one does with a new lover. And yet they’re just as meaningful. There are so many ways to love.
I separate from Lily by the Waterloo Tube station. We hug tightly outside a restaurant with an obscenely large portrait of Queen Elizabeth in its window. The crown of jewels atop her head glimmers behind the glass. Next to her face are brightly colored words.Breakfast. Dinner. Teas. Sweets. A young girl in tattered clothes stops outside. Stares at the queen’s image. Is she inspired by the queen’s opulence? Or perhaps shamed? Likely both.
I take the Tube to the newspaper office to place the ad. I’ve never felt so sure it’s the right day. I have something concrete to offer Oliver now. A home. A mother. A life. I imagine him somewhere in Buenos Aires. Looking just as he looked when I left him. Same soft face. Locks of brown hair. Blue eyes glowing orange as he reads my message. Addressed to Tchaikovsky from Walt Whitman. He heads straight to a travel agency. Asks for options on how to get to London. He doesn’t think through the decision. Doesn’t need to. He’s forgiven me. He’s ready for our life together to finally begin.
I see a tattoo parlor in Soho on my way home. Displays of elaborate designs. Dragons. Chinese characters. Arabic scripture.Astrological symbols. I go inside. I don’t know why exactly. I suppose it feels right. To mark myself for him. I can’t very well tattoo his name on my chest though. Not when he’s likely changed it dozens of times like me. I tell the tattoo artist I want a simple oval shape on my heart.
“Like an egg?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Like a capitalO.”
An O. For him. And for life. Which is a circle, after all. Always bringing us back. Familiar emotions. Frustrations that feel like old friends. A love that won’t let go of our hearts.
New York TimesClassified Ads
March 20, 1980
My dear Tchaikovsky,
It is the first spring of a new decade and the world is in bloom at last. I have finally found the time and place we have been waiting for. If you are still open to fulfilling your promise, meet me at theYoung Loversstatue in Festival Gardens in exactly one month, on the 20th day of April, 1980, at noon sharp and we can discuss the details. I hope you understand that I would never summon you were I not certain this is our time.
Your devoted Walt Whitman
Oliver. London. April. 1980.
The young lovers, like the boy who transformed me, are frozen in time. The bronze they’re sculpted from makes them appear ageless, genderless. Love, in its purest form, must be beyond age, time, gender, mustn’t it? I wish I had the answers. Seventy-seven years on this planet and I understand less than I used to about life’s biggest questions. Perhaps knowledge isn’t accrued over time. Sometimes I wonder if we’re smartest when we’re born. When we’re nothing but instinct. The young lovers, clutching each other tightly, don’t look like they knew much, other than how to love.
Is that all there is to learn in the end? Life’s one, only, and hardest lesson.
Bright yellow daffodils grow from the ground around the young lovers. A hint of spring sunshine gives them a technicolor sheen. The sun also lights Shams, or whatever he calls himself now, like a movie star. His brown skin glows with youth.
Are we young? Or old? I don’t know how to answer that question.
Do I love him? Hate him? No answer for that one either.
If I still loved him unconditionally and passionately, wouldn’t I run into his arms like he wants me to as he glances back at theSt. Paul’s cathedral clock? Then again, I’m here, aren’t I? I came, didn’t I? I couldn’t stay away.
The minute hand of the cathedral clock ticks forward: 12:01. I pull the straps of my backpack tighter. Make sure my synthesizer keyboard is safely on my back. It’s lighter than the accordion I relied on for decades. Playing music in Berlin U-Bahn stations. On the Miami Beach boardwalk. In the medina of Marrakech. Survival through music. Living off whatever money people threw into my hat. Francs and liras and dirhams. Exchanging currencies each time I escaped a farm, a city, a country. Exchanging my identity too. Being everyone and therefore no one. Feeling empty. Sometimes, not getting out of bed for days, weeks, months if I had enough food to survive. Then again, I always survive.
12:02. He taps his feet anxiously on the pavement. Leans over when no one’s looking and picks a single daffodil. Holds it close to his heart and whispers something to himself. A silent prayer, no doubt. That I’ll show up. That we’ll live happily ever after like he thought we would when he made me immortal.
There is another version of this moment. A fantasy as grand as a Tchaikovsky concerto. In this fiction, I do run into his open embrace. We clutch each other like the bronze young lovers. Declare our eternal love for each other. Live our endless days inseparably, dancing and laughing and kissing. That version would be the end of something. This is only the beginning.
12:03. His hair is different. Long on one side. Chopped short on the other. What’s left of it is dyed mauve. His tight, torn jeans reveal the smooth skin of his knees. He wears a blazer with large words on the back.The National Front Is an Affront.He’s the same person I knew sixty years ago. He’s also completely different.
The cathedral clock keeps moving forward, one minute at a time. He glances at it. Looks around at every face, wondering if it’s me. I keep myself safely hidden behind a tree. The cherry blossoms are in bloom. Mother always loved them more than any other flower. She would take me to the Esplanade to see them every spring. We would stare out at the Charles River as we bathed in the mesmerizing explosion of pink. The last time she took me was just before that fateful spring day when I met Shams. On that day she said to me,What makes the cherry blossoms so special is how ephemeral they are. They last such a short time.
I’m ashamed to say that I felt a pang of hurt in that moment. In my mind, I was wondering whether Mother appreciated Father and Liam more than me because they too lasted a short time in her life. Father died so young. Liam chose Yale instead of a closer university. My plan was to stay by her side forever.
I wouldn’t be a cherry blossom. I would be the perennial flower that would never go away. Until I had to. I left her and never spoke to her again. No matter how desperately I wanted to call and hear her voice.
“OLIVER!” Shams yells out my name. He sounds like Marlon Brando yelling out for Stella inA Streetcar Named Desire. “Oliver, are you out there? Oliver!” I was in Vienna when that movie came out. Saw it in a theater full of enthralled Austrians. I stayed in Vienna as long as I could, among people who cared for classical music as I do.
“OLIVER!” he roars.
“Oliver?” he asks.
