Aloe Vera
A sort of love story.
The chemical smell of the green aftersun gel always brought it back. That country, that city, otherwise always a phantasm.
Not that she used it. She didn’t need to. It was useless anyway—he knew from experience. Not even pleasantly pointless like some other creams and lotions, hinting at secret worlds of hidden luxury, just out of sight. Whatever luxury it promised was undone by the undernotes of various unpronounceable petroleum byproducts.
He still had the bottle from that day at Brighton, the last day, tucked away behind the wooden door under his bathroom sink. Still cracked it open now and then when he got too much sun, a sort of cargo-cult ritual, always careful not to fully exhaust its contents. He had never considered himself a sentimental man, yet perhaps by form of rebuke that aspect of himself that he most despised inhered tenaciously in the most inconsequential totems.
The end was baked into their little rendezvous from the beginning, the very beginning in the highly-acclaimed noodle bar downtown. He had plenty of chances to avoid it. When she first explained the nature of her circumstances, after several days of duly escalating flirtatiousness, he almost called it off. Of course he should have. On the day of the first date, one of the first really sultry days of June, the low angle early evening sun in his eyes as he took the corner onto the avenue, he almost turned around and went home. Of course he could have. From the sidewalk he saw her inside the restaurant, circling through the grimy wood-panelled rooms. Swivelling her large and dignified head on a long neck like an anxious bird, sweeping her black eyes across the tables. Looking for him, seeking the living flesh behind a few well-curated photos. He could simply choose to not walk through the door. To remain a sort of pixelated ghost, to fail to congeal out of the sweaty crowd, to refuse to become a real boy bearing—what? Love? A story for her friends back in Berkeley?
From his voyeuristic vantage he imagined she looked naive and confused, an impression he later came to attribute not so much to her studied innocence, which he learned to respect and then to treasure, but rather to the maneuvers of his own guilty conscience. Walk away, and you don’t have to answer for it, any of it, or what comes after. The deal the city offers, again and again. In such moments of decision all the loathing he felt for this place turned in against himself and the weight of it balanced on a point somewhere just below his sternum. He was not yet deluded enough to confuse this nauseating pressure for the stirrings of love, but she was beautiful, and he ached for touch. Touch and even more so—if he was being honest, which he rarely was—a little chaos.
So he could have, he should have, and maybe he almost did—but he didn’t. A life wreathed in a glittering panoply of almosts. Which is precisely—not a life. Leaving, staying, falling in love, dying, emigrating: categories of things not governed by almosts. The important things happen or they don’t.
And when, after an evening of tepid broth, eaten too quickly, and difficult conversation that never quite found its footing, and the annoying crush of eavesdropping strangers, he didn’t try to take her home, or even kiss her—even the lamely-proffered goodbye hug felt both too perfunctory and too intimate—it was not out of some secret store of gentlemanliness nor any forethought of grief. It was because he felt she was distant, if not totally uninterested, and though she was indeed beautiful he felt little desire, and in her detachment he recognized the shadow of his own relief.
By the time of the beach trip two months later both had come to understand that something unexpected and therefore dangerous had happened. Some wrong turn on their internal maps, up till then sighted with solid theodolite precision. The governing documents of love that were supposed to grant them safe passage through certain murky and anarchic territories, which had been tenderly drafted in soaring sunlit rooms of marble and brass, which carefully accounted for all eventualities, lay under their feet on the train car floor, soaking through and disintegrating with rainwater and spilled coffee and piss. Occasionally he looked in her dark eyes and tried to read her map but he could not.
On the train they had sat shoulder to shoulder in silence like old pensioners on holiday. Through the battered windows the bright morning rooftops dancing past. This was a new thing. They had always met in the dark, savoring the long hot July nights, the way the night’s formlessness made a mockery of time. He took her to the riverside to see the fireworks and she took him to the theater he couldn’t afford. In the strange crowds of midtown where he never felt at home he risked his most flamboyant linen blazer and she walked with her long feathery fingers wrapped contentedly around the crook of his elbow. She wore a cherry red dress that shocked with its garish brilliance against the night, as well as its frank sensuality, elegant but unabashed. In a world of tired and overexposed flesh he felt himself caught off guard and helpless before this kind of veiled carnality, and once more he understood that her supposed naiveté was merely a reflection of his own. When he wore the blazer again three years later he found the faded ticket stubs floating in the breast pocket, shrunken by time like some drowned remnant of the Titanic preserved by unfathomable pressure of salt water.
Most of all they walked, through all the worlds the night contained. She lugged her bulky DSLR everywhere like the tourist she was but the images she confronted him with were not the clichés of a dilettante but the organic, pulsing face of the city he for too long saw only as dead brick and lurching machine. If they reveled in each other, and he felt sometimes that they did, this deepening chord could not break out of its own silent vigil; it pooled and steeped in long miles of silence as each made their moves in a dance that neither of them would admit to leading.
The silence was almost but never quite comfortable. It was born less of intimacy and more of a fear of shattering an illusion both were convinced that the other was on the brink of breaking. It was born of that timelessness of night in which two people can rest, and be still. On the train in the glare of the morning he found he was still nervous around her, anxious over how to carry the conversation across these newfound bridges of time, which flowed again, resurrecting the disquiet of looming ultimatums. If she felt the same, he could never be sure. He could never judge the meaning of her inscrutable interiority, her sharp but aloof avian observation.
Later, on the long train ride home, her head bobbing asleep on his shoulder, a gesture in which he hoped to detect the stirrings of a truly unguarded affection, he felt, with some unease, the rising heat of his burned skin. How shyly, and ineffectually, they had applied each others’ sunscreen. Gingerly patting each others’ shoulders in front of the ugly concrete slab changing rooms in full view of God and the whole world. In the blaring sun these intimate gestures feeling forced and even absurd, judged by billions of passing spectators.
By York Street station even his light cotton shirt was a torture against his skin, and walking was a trial. They cancelled their dinner plans, picked up Lebanese takeout, and procured aloe vera from the corner drugstore. They lay on her comically small bed half-listening to her roommate’s TV while she worked the sickly-smelling stuff into his shoulders. This time, free from the sun’s vengeful judgment, in the secretness of the tenement, her hands moved surely, finally finding, in this chaste attention, their misplaced voice.
They lay together like that for a long time. Many hours. Neither moved, for movement is the handmaid of time, and calls to it like struggling prey to a predator. The sun set and the stars rose over the deepening evening and the perpetual cacophony of the cars and the people below receded from consciousness. The silence was there with them, it lay among them and blessed them, but it had changed, it listened and did not intrude. When they spoke—and they did speak now—they spoke much about the past and not at all about the future. The future, for her, was distant, unwritten, and exciting, though now it would be colored by something she had not foreseen and did not yet have the words to express. The future, for him, which he surely already knew even as he felt powerless before its tide, was precisely this: to come to consciousness again and again from the fugue state of daily life, awakened into a past more real than the nebulous present, standing barefoot on the linoleum floor of yet another bathroom in yet another rented flat in yet another foreign city alongside yet another endless sea, holding a bottle of cold gel in a burned and amnesiac hand.