Better Than I Can

I saw your car parked on some random street as I dropped off my son at his volunteer job. It’s been years, more than a decade, but my knees went weak when I saw the car. I recognized the stickers, but, really, I know what that car looks like better than I know most things. You probably don’t even own it anymore; who knows. Nonetheless, seeing it sent me careening through the past. For years, so many bad decisions followed seeing that car. Probably the worst decisions I’ve ever made. Things that make my soul shrink in on itself in shame. Things that make me wish I was a different person. I loved you, I think. I was full of emotion, but it's hard to know if that emotion was love. At the time, I was consumed with my idea of you. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to not have my heart full of you. After it was over, I still thought about you every day for years; if it wasn’t love it was still one of the strongest emotions I have ever felt. Even now I remember exactly what your shoulder looked like; the sound of disappointment in your voice; your hedging.

But was it love? You father died when you were young. I do the math and when we were together it was not the far off in the past. And how could something like that be in the past anyway? What did I really know about what you went through with your father’s death? What you carried with you? What you laid to rest and what you didn’t? I don’t know anything. I didn’t ask. I didn’t care enough about you as something other than the idea I created in my mind to ask you about your father and to listen to what you said. That wasn’t love. In those days I would see your car, and I would spiral into what I called love but was really an illusion meant to mask my own emptiness.

 

I began thinking about writing this because of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” When she repeats “It’s me, hi” the third time in the triplet in the middle of the song, the affect in her voice sounded so familiar. It reminded me of you and I seeing each other again after some debacle that should have ended the relationship but didn’t. That flat, resigned “hi” that I have heard more than once in your voice. I should have walked away from you. You should have walked away from me.

 

But the song that makes the most sense is Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers.” Her voice, the timbre and smoke of it, conveys so much. Sometimes relationships must end because they have gone far enough or because they don’t give enough or because we are better off without them. We held on to each other longer than we should have. We held on to each other even after doing so only made things worse. The last time we saw each other, months after our last breakup, was in the bathroom line in a bar that I had introduced you to but never expected to see you in. By the time I came out of the bathroom you were gone. I am grateful you did that because I probably would have gone on prolonging the thing we had, which was not love but was something anyway.

In This World

 I save my worst contempt for my mother. My father who has never played any kind of role in my life, who has never tried to contact me and who practically flinches every time he sees me, this man I have absolutely no feelings about. It’s my mom, the parent who in her own way tried, for whom I have all the anger and resentment.

 

I met my mom when I was almost 8. Like many Salvadoran parents she had left me with relatives when I was still a baby and went to the U.S. in search of opportunity. When she brought me to this country and away from everyone I had ever known it seemed good for a while. She made me food when I came home from school. She served it on a TV tray, and I sat in front of the TV watching cartoons in English. This lasted a few weeks. Then she disappeared into all kinds of jobs. By the time I was 10, I often made myself dinner and tried not think too much about the different men in my mom’s life.

 

Something happened in June of 1986 while I was in El Salvador. When I came back my mom and her husband where living somewhere new. A year or so later she tried to kill herself. I woke to her being wheeled out of our apartment. I visited her in the psych ward. While I was still in high school, she moved back to El Salvador, and I had to figure out life for myself from that point on.

 

A decade ago, she lived with me for a year because of some mistake she made, which is not worth going into here. At one point, she asked me how I got to be such a good cook, and I told her that since she wasn’t around a lot when I was a kid, I had to learn to cook things for myself. She said—and I swear that this was not a joke—” You’re welcome. Without me, who knows how you would have turned out.” I exploded. It’s one thing to never have gotten any kind of apology for abandoning me and leaving me an unprotected child twice. I accepted that she was no different than a lot of Salvadoran parents, as Óscar Martínez points out, for whom those kinds of choices are obvious and don’t need explanations, let alone apologies. But it was another thing to have her take credit for all the things that I did through my own grit and a lot of luck. I screamed at her, and we didn’t speak for a couple of days.

 

But if I think hard about it, it’s difficult to picture becoming who I have become in El Salvador, regardless of my grit and all the luck in the world. She brought me to this country, and everything else that happened after is the consequence of that action. My mom must feel all that contempt. And for doing the thing she thought was right, which was undoubtedly the right thing to do. I imagine how my children might feel about me some day and I wince. “In this world/it’s just us.” Well, it is, and it isn’t.

All Too Well

Went to dinner with an old friend tonight and we talked about memory. She lived in London for several months this year and left her wife for a few weeks to go to Paris by herself. She wanted to visit Paris and to think of her mother, who died recently. Paris was her mother’s favorite city and they had spent a lot of time there together. So this time she wandered through the city thinking about her mother, remembering her, speaking with her. She told me: “Casi caminé por toda la ciudad.” It was a lovely image, using space and memory to feel close to someone who is gone. I told her that I don’t know how I will feel about my mother when she dies. All my recollections of her, which are after all just afterimages of my experiences with her, are conflicted, ambivalent, and often bitter. But who knows? The future turns us all into fools.

 

Taylor Swift has created a flowering garden of songs about love, memory, and loss. She’s amazing. Her sincerity, in this insincere age, is always moving. In “All Too Well” she revisits the images of a relationship that has ended. And it’s the specificity of it which gives the song its pathos. The glasses, the twin sized bed, the tee ball team; these details ground the song. But at the same time the generality of it­— not the stuff that sounds cinematic (driving in a convertible in the falling autumn leaves) and so feels a little artificial— the generality of the pain of memory itself: “I remember it all too well.” It’s painful because it is so beautiful. All the things that had meant so much turned meaningless by the end of the relationship. It’s a curse to remember things like that.

 

Which is different from what Modest Mouse says about the desire to forget: “I’ve done some things I want to forget but I can’t.” This speaks so much to me. All the things I’ve done that I’m too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about. That, because I can’t undo them, I wish I could not remember them. This is another kind of curse. To carry with you your shame in a place where no one can see it but that you can never forget is there.

 

In Yo, El Supremo a character says: “El hombre de buena memoria no recuerda nada porque no olvida nada” (A man who has a good memory doesn’t remember anything because he doesn’t forget anything.) The characters in this novel are extraordinarily smart but also full of shit and given to speaking in sophistries so I don’t really know how seriously the reader is supposed to take this statement. But I have thought a lot about it in the last couple of weeks. I’m given to saying that I have a memory like a steel trap. I say that because it’s a cliché that makes me laugh and because I sort of believe it. My head is full of memories. But maybe this isn’t remembering at all. Maybe it’s because all the things I like to recall, and all the memories I don’t like thinking about, and all the things I can’t forget are always just there.

Betrayals and Beginnings

Nancy, my first real girlfriend, took me to this little pond in the hills above the Arroyo Seco in Highland Park. Many years later I found out the place was called Ernest E. Debs Regional Park but at the time it I thought of it as some kind of wilderness. We hiked up for like 30 minutes and came over this hill to find a picturesque little pond, verdant and shadowy, unlike all the chaparral surrounding it. It was something out of Cather, like in Death Comes for the Archbishop, when Latour discovers a riparian hamlet in the middle of the southwestern desert. It was a perfect place for a new couple to spend time together—if you look it up in Google, the pictures of the pond show a couple (the arm of one over the other, the other contemplating the pond) sitting together.

 

Nancy brought a blanket and spread it out, and we sat there for many hours talking and kissing. Total bliss for a teenager who believed, as many teenagers must believe, that kissing was something that other people got to do and thus felt blessed by the moment. Eventually the day started to darken and we left, the ground all scrambled up beneath our blanket. I am sure we must have come back at some point, but I don’t remember. That first time, though, I will remember always.

 

I was telling Sofia, a friend of mine from those days, that story. I began: “Remember that little pond over Arroyo Seco?” She said: “Yeah, I took you there, remember?” Then I did remember. I remembered the whole thing! She took me up there and we talked about her boy troubles and her family troubles and so forth. I really wanted to make out with her but she didn’t want to make out with me and so I just enjoyed her company, and we did a bunch of stuff together. In the radiance of the memory of my visit with Nancy, I had completely forgotten that another girl had taken me there first, as I was to take other girls there later.

 

The best thing in popular music this year was Olivia Rodrigo. All of her songs made me smile every time they came on the radio. My favorite is “good 4 u” but the one that made me smile the most was “déjà vu.” Who can’t relate to that feeling, the betrayal of someone doing stuff with someone else that they did with you? But, honestly, there’s nothing more normal. Are you supposed to invent yourself for every new relationship? Are you supposed to come up with all new stuff when you date someone new? What if you happen to like the old stuff you did??

 

I like the places my old girlfriends have taken me. Places where, surely, their old boyfriends and girlfriends had taken them before. The place that fries fries in horse fat, the place that makes amazing cioppino, the observation deck at the De Young, and so on. I feel your pain, Olivia Rodrigo, but when you get over it, you will take other people on that car ride to Malibu.

Letting Go

We were at an academic conference in a little cold college town full of brick buildings that looked like abandoned orphanages. She was asking for directions in the lobby of the hotel as I was passing by and wanted to go where I was going. She went with me and we talked the whole way. And we talked the rest of the day and long into the night. We talked all the next day. And the day after that. We agreed on almost everything. We rolled our eyes at the same presentations, laughed at the same things. I thought her fascinating and brilliant and pretty. We wound up one night in a hotel room full of Brazilians talking about translations, something I know nothing about. One of them used a soccer metaphor to explain the perils of translating Adorno into Portuguese. All the Brazilians nodded their heads knowingly but we were both baffled. We talked about the people waiting for us back home. I don’t remember if she was married or was going to be married. I was already a dad. The days were dark and there was snow on the ground, and I’m not sure I’ve ever spent more time with one person over the course of a weekend just talking. Then we went back to where we were from.

A few years later we met again at the same conference, but this time it was in New Orleans. I waited for her at a window in a bar as she came walking up the street in a blue dress, smiling. That image stayed with me. And once again we talked and talked for the entire weekend as we walked everywhere. Can you miss someone you’ve only seen once in your life? Can you miss someone you avoided communicating with? Can you miss someone you know you should never see again? If so, then I missed her and realized how much I missed her during all those conversations. We stayed up late every night and afterward I would walk her to her hotel room, which was on the opposite end of the French Quarter from mine. On the last night we shopped for trinkets and had coffee and beignets with the rest of the tourists. She had bought herself a John Coltrane record, but as we were getting ready to get up she said that I should have it and put it in my hand. I said: “Too bad we never kissed.” And she said: “Yeah, it’s too bad.” And we hugged and I walked her back to her hotel room, said goodbye, and never saw her again.

This James Arthur song I hear often on the radio is about meeting someone and knowing right away that things are right. The song imagines this leading to a lifetime of happiness and love. And maybe it happens that way to some people. Or maybe all the complications of life get in the way of things going the way you imagine them. Perhaps the best love at first sight is the love that you never get to act on.