Queen vs. Knave: 1-0

Jason spoke the Queen's Spanish, sabes? Down to the lisps and g's. He spoke it like foam riding a wave and -- as love is waged upon the skeins of language -- he had me at the first wink and whisper. However, I didn't betray the tremor of my heart and held him off for four dates, relinquishing all my love and body to him only then. Jason loved me too - my Mexican accent, my dark brown eyes flecked with yellows. We fell for each other sooner than we should have and, although we never discussed it, we hummed. We were brilliant together.

Not that this is a love story precisely (anyhow, I prefer to reserve the details of our love for us). Themes have a way of turtling on you. What at first looks like sex-no-strings-attached becomes life-long love. The surreal and even silly have a way of evolving into realistic sobriety. Tales of youth suddenly capsize and death shows itself, the sheen of the bare hull - a thin film of water pouring off - of the boat.

We only lasted four months, two days and seven hours beyond that fourth date. In a sense it was my fault, but Jason decided ultimately that he couldn't be with me and said as much and with such floreo that I believe, no, I know but regret admitting, that I thanked him for it -- thanked him for what I couldn't say then but can just now on this flight away, the Atlantic a darkness below me.

He wasn't your typical ex-pat. He wasn't your typical anything for that matter. He had black hair that I could tie into his nipple ring if he bent his head forward just a nudge. He had large hazel eyes and a lionesque nose. He was tall and large in so many ways, except his relatively thin and pale lips. He was often a head taller than everyone else in the subway, but that isn't what made him remarkable.

Eccentricities usually being those character textures most often discovered later rather than earlier, I first encountered Jason's eccentricities -- immediately understanding that his were even more rarefied than usual -- the morning before we first slept together. We had come back to his apartment, in the Chueca neighborhood, about seven in the morning after a Saturday night marcha in Malasana, a great neighborhood for dancing in the center of Madrid.

He had a very respectable one bedroom apartment with a large, narrow living area into which we entered. Large windows and a glass door looked out onto the street. To the left was a small kitchen and directly ahead, two doors, the left door opened partially onto a large bathroom. Jason brought me, led by the hand, directly into the bedroom. His touch was cool and moist from the mist-threatening-rain outside.

His bedroom was fastidiously clean. The bed was turned down. There was a shelf topped with framed pictures and filled with crisp-edged contemporary novels. The bureau's drawers were all closed. The armoire doors were decorated with florid hinges and also remained closed.

Beside his bed, he turned and faced me, sitting me down by placing his left hand gently on my shoulder. I was feeling quite magnetic and leaned my shoulder up into his broad-palmed hand. Looking up at him, he asked me then if I minded waiting for him a few minutes, that he really wanted to be with me, but that he had to do something and hoped I would still be in the mood when he came back. He told me he would be back shortly; I understood it would be a rather long wait.

He walked out of the bedroom, easing the door shut behind him.
I took a better look at his room.

The first picture was taken on a beach. Jason stood in swimming trunks between two women -- his sisters I presumed. They all stood arm in arm, but slightly apart in the manner I imagined siblings might. Loving distance. The second picture was of his parents. They both wore dashikis. They stood in front of a locomotive and train that proclaimed Santa Fe. Their smiles were Jason's composite split. Their lips were equally thin, the ends of his rising sharply, the smile of hers tooth-populous. The third picture disturbed me. It was of a young man I didn't recognize. His smile didn't rise to the photographic occasion, as did his sisters' and parents'. When I looked at them, his eyes deepened with something I didn't recognize then. His full lips barely turned. A melancholy attended his whole being, a current that enveloped his body in the photograph, a mixture of bewilderment and recognition, as if he had just seen his friend in a dream, a friend not quite his friend, the friend wearing a suit he would never wear, with the wrong hair, the wrong nose. The bewilderment was not unlike the instant when I see somebody I recognize imperfectly, only to discover I thought I saw somebody from another continent entirely and who couldn't possibly be in this city. It was the smoulder of that instant before the terrible rush of nostalgia.

Naturally, I wanted to know who this was, knowing already it was a lover sorely missed. So I turned to consider the books. Two travel guides to Spain. Any number of English language novels, not one of which was from the U.S. He had Byatt, Atwood, Naipaul, Ondaatje, Rushdie, Ducornet, and, oddly, a shelf dedicated to P.G. Wodehouse.

It occurs to me now that we used to keep score on who read more. We actually kept score on everything: who knew what trivia; who dropped a glass; who had read a book and who hadn't; who devised a witty phrase. We'd keep tabs for a week, letting it drop when we thought of a better game and better score-keeping stratagem. Laughing once, when he had won a point, I told him that ultimately the score would come down to a difference of just and exactly one. He had asked me why and I teased him, saying that when I left him, because I no longer loved him, the board would read zero and one. Queen, knave. We laughed and held each other. I told him that I couldn't imagine us ever falling out of love and that we would be forever tied at zero. As if to confirm, he told me in a low voice, the many reasons he loved me, tabulating a score that rose and rose in my column, forging a list as if unfolding a fairy tale, in the gloaming of his room, one delicate word after another.

In his room, though, at the beginning of our dense and rapidly-progressing relationship, I noted that there wasn't a single book in Castilian. This I thought unusual given that he spoke it with such rich vocabulary. (I had first mistaken him for a Madrileño when we met.) I had figured that in part that must have been due to his extensive reading of the Literature. This did not seem to be the case.

A Rubik's cube sat wedged between Ducornet and Rushdie.

I began to wonder then where he had gotten to; looked at the back of the closed door. Was he cleaning up? Was he making a phone call? Whatever it was he was doing, I suddenly decided I would feel more comfortable, and less kept, in the living room. I stood up and walked to the door.

When I had stepped into the doorway, I saw that Jason was blindfolded with a red scarf and standing barefoot in the middle of the living room. On the hardwood floors, several dozen eggs lay randomly.

I watched in silence. I felt that he felt me enter the room, but wasn't recognizing that event. He lifted one foot and stretched it out before him, placing it down again far in front of him, jamming it firmly into the floor. He did it again with the other foot, walking toward the street-looking windows. He turned around and began to make his way back, only once correcting himself in mid-air and narrowly missing stepping firmly down upon an egg.

He later told me that the object was to roll the eggs out on the ground, memorize where they lay, blindfold yourself, and walk across the living room and back blind. He did this every morning without fail. He explained at length that a therapist had suggested some form of meditation, that he needed to let go. After the tragedy he wanted to control everything and had become obsessed by it. When he explained it, and coupled with his loss, I couldn't possibly think his game was strange or dysfunctional, but simply a form of mourning and even living. But standing there then, seeing him so compromised, made me suddenly sceptical of him. It seemed to be more like a psychotic break than any quotidian category I could find for it. The best rationale I came up with then was martial arts. Stepping around and through the eggs on the floor, his body moved with an ebb and flow that was not unlike Tai Chi, of which I knew nothing other than the covers of video boxes, and I wilfully decided to file it away as an obscure and silly martial art, hoping that Jason's liquid language would cool my concern, which it did, but only by stoking a hotter fire elsewhere.

When he had arrived back at my end of the living room, he squatted once, extended each leg once out to the side and then removed his blindfold, looking at me directly, not startled by my presence - although I felt sheepish and as if I were the transgressor. He said plainly, Those who resist control by others have little self-control.

Then I fucked him.

And the weeks passed.

His meditation with eggs -- which sounds more like a surrealist painting than anything else -- came to seem the most real experience in my life because four months, a day and four hours later, on the tenth of October -- Wednesday -- at eleven thirty in the morning, I sat in his car -- borrowed -- in the rain -- cat-dogs -- in front of the clinic to which I had been directed by my physician at the hospital. I was twenty-six. I had no diseases, had never had anything inflect upon my health more serious than a broken wrist - roller-blading -- or the chicken pox -- which, even at fourteen, was simply an inconvenience. Yet there I was, sitting in the car in the rain. I had never before considered what illnesses might have me in mind, except AIDS, and I was always careful and never tested positive. Cancer had seemed to be only a pale threat and only a concern when my prostate had aged. Who knew it was stalking everyone my age?

As for Jason's egg-dance -- meditation, he'd correct me -- it had become a daily habit -- practice -- a year before when his relationship ended, as they had known it would, with the guy in the picture. I had been right to worry about the picture, but was off by enough keen inches, they'd return to haunt me and prove they were all the difference in the world.

Alan, that portrait of him being the last, died on the terrible quilt of AIDS. He had loved Jason as devotedly and with as much imagination as any person could ask for. Jason had difficulty talking about him, although as a sign of our increasing intimacy, he would recount brief anecdotes about Alan in a sudden flurry and at the most unexpected of moments -- browsing shoes, brushing our teeth, walking through Retiro park, at a commercial during the TV show Compañeros, on the boat to Ibiza. Almost without exception he told these stories quickly, in a monotone and in the plainest language. Only once, when I was holding him, did he suddenly cry out my name with a terrible well of sadness and tell me a different story entirely.

He confessed then that he had wanted to leave Alan. Two days before Alan got tested anonymously -- not a word to Jason -- Jason had decided that there wasn't enough in their eight month old, monogamous -- he was sure -- relationship to keep him passionate and in love and -- this being the key -- respectful of who Alan was.

This was two days before the dinner where Alan sat Jason down and told him, as I already knew, in a voice that began calmly, but rose in pitch until it was hysterical and, horrifyingly, giddy, told him that he had tested positive.

I can't imagine Jason's reaction to this -- an extensive silence? Did he bite his lower lip? Did he protest the results? Did he wax heroic and reassure Alan? I couldn't say, as Jason never revealed anything about this. The one thing I know for certain is that he did not tell Alan, as he had planned to and rehearsed for, that he wanted to leave him because he was no longer in love.

That Wednesday, in the late morning, gray and drizzling morosely, sitting in the car as the wipers ticked on delay, I knew that enough cosmic information had been revealed to me that I should know what would happen to me next, but couldn't exactly say what. I sensed a terminal presence, the quiver of one of the yarns in my life, Goya's Atropos pinching it between her fingers and on the verge of snipping with those terrible scissors. What I could not say, was whether or not the death would be metaphoric or literal.

Two men hurried by in the rain, holding newspapers over their heads. The parking brake on and the motor running still, one hand hung upon the steering wheel, I marvelled at how jaded humanity had become. We felt immortal; expected at least eighty years of good living, or, if we worked too hard and were a heart risk, forty otherwise. I was only twenty-six.

I suddenly wondered if Neanderthals, Visigoths, the Romans even the Cro-Magnon had the same diseases. They died much younger then, I felt confident in thinking. Even at the turn of the century the average was only forty and change. But this paltry trivia suddenly made me realize how little I knew. Only forty.

Only? I muttered out loud, answering myself.
A woman without an umbrella walked past the car.
I suddenly wondered if loitering were a crime, was there such a thing as Vehicular Loitering?

I shook my head; could not contain my thoughts; could not stay on task; maintain even emotions; be serious. I felt like a knave. I liked the word; said it out loud then extracted the key. Rain clotted the windshield. Checking for traffic, I opened the door and strolled to the building, my trembling hands pushed deep into my pockets for fear that they would flail otherwise. A man hurried across the street, hooding himself with his jacket. I suddenly wanted to yell at him. I wanted to pick up a stone and hurl it. I wanted to shout, It's only water, and, Why didn't you prepare? Where are your umbrellas?, for surely he had several.

I paused at the door to the clinic. I suddenly wondered how long Jason had been thinking of leaving me. I didn't know he wanted to, but suddenly I wondered if he was thinking that and if so how long he had been. I wanted to know what had been the first sign of his failing love with Alan.

I walked inside. People hate medical offices -- doctors, dentists, specialists. I love them. I always have, although not then, that Wednesday. Normally, I thought the chairs comfortable. They always have the junky magazines I never am willing to buy for myself. There's an air of camaraderie, an instinctual organizing against the bad stuffs behind the doors. But then, wet from the rain, I huddled to myself in a corner of the waiting room.

I didn't wait long. A nurse called my name and took me through a set of double doors that swung with that grand melodramatic sweep and closing slap-slap of hospitals and restaurants. We walked down a plain hallway; left the carpet behind in the waiting room. In a room with one of those doctor's office beds, with the sheet of ragged tear-away paper, she left me to change into a gown. I remember thinking, This is what everybody loves to joke about, this tissue.

I put the gown on, never having worn one. I was an innocent babe in the ways of healthcare. At one end of the bed, a large computer and machine loomed. It had a paddle that looked like what George Clooney used to use to revive his actor-patients when their heart went eeee. I said this out loud then: eeee.

A different nurse returned; gave me a curious look. I returned with a plain expression, almost immediately lost in the thought that there remained so much unexplored terrain. Even those cities of life that I had visited, even they were vague to me, streets barely known, parks never walked in, sidewalk food carts never sampled.

The nurse proceeded to lie me down on the table, punch at the computer keyboard, warn me curtly that the paddle would be cold, proceed with the ultrasound and, ultimately, empty her own face when she left without uttering a diagnostic syllable, telling me the doctor would be in shortly. While she searched inside me for clues, I found myself helplessly thinking of my sexual partners. I wasn't cataloguing them, nor was I consciously summoning any of their memories. Rather, they flooded me in a patient flow, one image and scene after another. I was cold and shrivelled there on the table, my mind taking me for an erotic tour of my past.

Four months, a day and seven and a half hours after we first slept together, still on the tenth of October -- still on Wednesday -- at three in the afternoon, I sat in Jason's car again, feeling as if I had aged ten years.

I drove to the travel agency and bought a ticket on the spot. Then I walked back to our apartment. I waited for him to return. I compared myself to Alan helplessly and knew that if Jason stayed with me I would always wonder if he still loved me or just pitied me.

I would not cook dinner, not like Alan had, even though I was hungry. Or perhaps then it was nerves. Our bodies often misinform and maintain conspiratorial silences. Yet we still trust them.

When he had come home, I had still not decided whether I should tell him the truth, for fear of losing him, or lie, and risk hurting him if he discovered the truth or I died.

He came up behind me where I sat on the couch and began telling me about his day. Let him talk, I thought. This would provide me the oracular clues to decide on which direction to go.

He began to tell me about passing a store with a shelf of irons in it. The substance of what he said was that only after a couple of minutes window-browsing, comparing prices and aesthetics, did he realize this new tic of his -- he only then confessed -- was really about us and loving me. When he came around the couch and sat next to me, his jaw was squared and clenched.

I looked at him, a hole carving outward from the center of me, and I told him without the slightest of segues. In a neutral tone, in a flat register, I told him that two weeks previous I had a physical exam. I told him that it hadn't gone perfectly, that I had been referred, that the ultrasound turned up even more concern. I told him about the plane ticket home, about getting a second opinion with my doctor there, using the services that weren't out-of-plan and so expensive.

He didn't react. His jaw slackened and he didn't say a thing. I wanted to shout at him. Do you understand? I suppressed my anger.

We waited together on the couch like that, I remember, our thighs pressing together, and our bodies still bent in toward one another, but now, somehow, electric and stiffened.

I wanted to say, low-toned, acid thick in my voice, Why don't you go get your eggs?
I didn't.

Finally he said he needed to go for a walk.

I think I said, Fuck. I stood up and walked to the windows. I looked out at the street below. I wish I had seen a ray of hope out there, or at least a seed of dramatic irony, a couple walking arm in arm and laughing. I didn't see anyone. Jason took advantage of my turned-back and walked out the door. Then again, I might have said, Fuck you, not fuck, but I don't think I did.

When he came back it was lunch time. It was Thursday. I was writing him a note, telling him I didn't mean to, but had left the car in front of the travel agency, telling him I was going to catch my flight. I believe I wrote that time was of the essence. What an inane phrase!

When he walked in the door, I was still at the coffee table with the note. He walked in and looked over at me. I set the keys on top of the note. I stood up.

He told me then very little, but floridly dressed. He wooed me with why he couldn't possibly. I walked over to him, hands in my pockets, and said I understood. I did. He wooed me more. He came over and kissed me. He kissed my bottom lip. He leaned back again.

I walked into the bedroom and got my bag.

At the door he said something else. My head was buzzing. I told him thanks. And I meant it. There wasn't a thread of irony in my voice. I said again, sweetly, Thank you for everything. Then I walked out the door. Even as soon as I was walking down the steps I was repeating, murmuring to myself incredulously, Thank you?

I cursed him from the street and in the cab I thought of what I should have told him. I was eloquent and cutting. I was bitter and intelligent. By the time I had arrived at the airport I had regressed to the simplest phrases and curses.

Now the curses have fallen away, too. I see clearly, as if I have gotten over Jason. I wonder at that and am dubious. They say that to recover from a broken heart, you need at least as much time as the relationship endured. I can't say that this flight has taken over four months - this crossing of the Atlantic - but time is funny now, as if its weight has compressed and its density has approximated a meteor fallen from the sky - a soccer ball-sized meteor weighing more than a truck. Our time together - defined now by its absence and rich only privately, to me, in my mind - feels like years now. That Wednesday I went to the specialist - yesterday - feels easily as long. At the rate my sense of time is stretching out, I thought a half hour ago, I could never arrive, but the flight is arriving into Boston. The plane is descending. The attendants have taken their seats again. I know I can't begrudge Jason his youth, a year older than me, and I know why I thanked him as I walked out the door. He has his life ahead of him and he's already put one of his lover's to bed.

Contributor: Charli Valdez

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