Soulmatery
Liko never felt more of an inept ass than during the first fifteen minutes of a therapy session.
“Hello,” Brenda would say as Liko sat down.
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
Of course Liko would promptly reply fine, all right, doing okay, not bad. Or the very British not too bad, all things considered.
Of course, Brenda would say nothing. Continue to sit silent and receptive until Liko stopped squirming and sighing, and hit on something to talk about.
“This attraction to Dane is so odd,” he said now. “It’s intense and physical and…and want-y, but I feel no urgency to act on it. Always when I’ve had sex with men, it’s been so frank and immediate. Urge there. Act on it. Urge gone. Have beers. With Dane, I’m more interested in the beers.”
“I see.”
“I’ve tried to honestly ask myself if I’m falling in love, and the honest answer seems to be not yet. It’s not purely sexual. It’s not romantic. I seem to be falling into deep friendship. Or into soulmatery. Sorry, I’m inventing a lot of words here.”
Brenda smiled. “They’re extremely accurate words, even if you wouldn’t find them in a dictionary.”
“Whatever I’m falling into, the point is I’m intensely aware of the process in the way I typically am when I’m falling in love.” He smiled sheepishly. “If memory serves. It’s been a while.”
“I think sometimes as adults, we’re surprised we can find and make new friends. Like we all carry around a weird psychological rule that all friends must be picked by the end of college. The roster is set and finalized.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“Ties into what we were talking about last month,” she said, turning back a few pages in her notebook. “Opportunities still existing. Experiences you have yet to live. People to meet.”
“Mysteries to solve.”
She smiled. Silence coiled around the little room and Liko concentrated on not being intimidated by it.
He was still reeling from the feel of Dane in his lap last night, and the strange, strong emotions it evoked.
The memory sat in his heart like a small nuclear reactor, giving off a quiet, efficient hum of power.
A rhythmic drone like spiritual white noise: my friend, I have a friend, my friend is here, my friend did a great thing for me, I can count on my friend, soon I will see my friend.
Liko had been drawing on it all day. He didn’t want to talk about it. He felt it didn’t need to be talked about.
“I like Dane’s energy,” he finally said.
“He’s non-binary so he has things… Traits, behaviors, mannerisms whatever.
They strike me—and I admit this is my own culturally brainwashed perspective about gender—as masculine.
But he’s physically demonstrative and affectionate, and he has a tenderness that strikes me—again, binary-programmed me—as feminine.
So on one hand, he’s a typical male friend who clowns around with me.
We work on the farm, we hang out having beers, talking about shit.
He’s become a really close mate. A new friend.
“On the other hand, he’s a mate who touches me. A lot. And I like it. It’s flirtatious as fuck sometimes, but it hasn’t turned sexual. Yet. I’m trying not to think ahead. I like being right here.”
“It sounds like a good, stable place.”
“Dane has a way of letting people know where they are, what they’re about, what’s going on, and what he needs. It’s hard to explain. I guess I’m badly communicating that his communication is really top notch. I don’t think I’ve yet to feel that I’m not in the picture or don’t know what’s going on.”
He went on rambling out loud, Brenda continued her smiles and precipitating comments and encouraging silences. Sometimes the ramble would crash into a deeper insight. Sometimes Liko’s mouth finally admitted it was talking around the issue bothering him.
“I never came out to Kyle,” he blurted. “We never got past the phase where anything linking sex and one’s parents was revolting.
Plus the years between fourteen and sixteen, it was all about the fallout from the divorce.
All of his anger at the disruption of his life, adjusting to the routine of shuffling between houses, the holiday schedule and the possessions in two places.
He got really guarded and surly, didn’t want to talk about anything personal.
He never shared if he was smoldering over a girl.
I think we had one really good chat about consent.
We were driving somewhere. And maybe a couple months before he died he told me he thought one of his buddies might be gay, but he wasn’t sure… ”
Liko lifted up his hands and let them fall.
“I swear, it was like trying to exist in a phone booth with a cactus. Whenever he softened up and did come to me with something personal, vulnerable or private, I went into listen-only mode. I did what you do: Oh? Huh. Wow. Tell me more. Are you worried about your friend, do you think he’s safe?
It wasn’t the time to make it about me. Not the immediate time, and not the time in his life. ”
Now his eyes stung and the back of his throat ached. “He died when so much of our interaction was butting heads. When I was still just his nagging old man and not a confidant, or even someone who actually knew a thing or two. We never got a chance to be equals.”
“You were robbed,” Brenda said. “No other word suffices. Not only robbed of seeing Kyle do, see, learn, experience and become so many beautiful things, but robbed of him getting to know you better.”
“Christ,” Liko whispered, as it all came pouring into his eyes.
“Teens are narcissists, no two ways about it. But you were on track to a beautiful phase of life when your adult son would stop fighting his old man, and start talking man-to-man. I know you would’ve gotten to that phase with Kyle because you knew how to go into listen-only mode when it mattered.
You got into that booth with the cactus.
You got pierced, stabbed and scratched, but you kept making a safe place for his feelings and worries.
You cultivated a magnificent field of trust and compassion, and then you were robbed of everything that might have grown there.
The fruits of all your parenting efforts were stolen from you. These are not things easily endured.”
She didn’t often go into a monologue, but when she did, it always pinned Liko to the couch. He hung on her words, impaled, nodding vigorously as the tears dripped down his face.
“He died not knowing something important about me,” he said, yanking a tissue from the box.
“I know he knows now, but it’s no consolation because I can’t see him knowing now.
I don’t get to have those man-to-man sessions over beers.
I don’t even get to have a fucking beer with him. They stole the beer, Brenda.”
“Do you ever talk out loud and tell him things?” she asked. “Play both parts of the conversation?”
“I try,” Liko said. “But it’s hard to…” His hand turned over, fingers trying to pick his meaning out of the air.
“Hard to make a man out of him. Hard to hear him engage in a truly mature way. Again, because it feels like we argued so much those last two years of his life. It’s hard to imagine him saying, Wow, tell me more.
How’d that make you feel, Dad? Were you worried about how Nan and Grandpa would take it? ”
“Well, if you’re amenable to an assignment,” Brenda said, “maybe in the next month you can meditate on memories, however small, of when you and Kyle had good talks. The chat in the car about consent. What made it a good one?”
“All right,” Liko said absently.
“You’re in the shitty position of having to invent the adult version of your son,” she said. “I don’t want to make it sound like an artificial intelligence Kyle, crafted from your own memories, will be any kind of substitute for the experiences you were robbed of.”
“But my memories are all I got,” Liko said. He closed his eyes, weary to his bones, wishing for the umpteenth time he could pull a handle and eject himself from the grief jet.
The Colony of Grief, he thought, envisioning it painted on the side of gleaming fuselage.
“Use memories to create a future I was robbed of,” he said. “I’ll give it a shot. I’m going over to the cemetery after this anyway.”
Another session was folded up and put away, another three balls of soaked Kleenex thrown in the bin. The bill would come by email. Insurance would cover a couple of bucks. And life went on.
Liko went to the cemetery, but neither meditated on memories, nor had a heart-to-heart chat with the gravestone.
He managed, “Hey, kid,” then crouched on his heels and hung his cheekbones over his thumbs, fingers at his hairline.
He didn’t weep, didn’t speak, didn’t move.
Barely thinking, he balanced, feet wobbling in the soft dirt where grass struggled to grow, and breathed through the fire in his throat and the break in his heart.
Then he left.
He drove past his house for a quick look-see.
He’d rented it to a professional couple from Manhattan and so far, they’d only called him once, when the ice maker in the fridge got jammed.
The house looked trim, neat and shipshape.
The whiskey barrel by the mailbox overflowed with a profusion of annuals and trailing vines.
Nothing more to see or do, so he went home.
Leaving my house to go home, he thought. My friend is waiting for me. With my duck. And my intravenous drinky-poo.
Dane called as Liko was approaching the Tappan Zee. “Hey, you up for Maisie and Huff coming over for dinner?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because therapy can bring a fellow to his knees, so I wanted to check the level on your social tank.”
“You really are a Great Dane.”
“I’m just a veteran of the couch and cemetery. Either can send you back to bed for the rest of the day.”
“I do feel a little shredded,” Liko said. “But I haven’t seen the Jensens since the infamous New Year’s Eve party, and I remember them as lovely people. I think a drink and a dip in the pool will fill up the tank.”
“I can grill some steaks and get corn from Edholm’s?”
“I am happy to show up whenever and eat whatever. Boss me around tonight. You have permission. Back to the company we’ll be keeping, is there anything I should not ask Maisie? I mean, about her childhood or when she ran away?”
“Let’s see, we last left our teenage heroine being dramatically evacuated by chopper from her abusive home.”
“That’s right,” Liko said. “Yikes, I forgot this part. You said she was pregnant?”
“Yeah, and she ended up miscarrying. At least, that’s what she told me, and I mind my business.
It’s best if I summarize what happened between the chopper and her adulthood, and then we leave it alone unless she brings it up.
It’s definitely an interesting story, but not something she likes to talk about herself. I can tell you about it now.”
“Are you busy?”
“Nah, I’m icing my back.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, I just forgot to lift with my legs. So the boyfriend that got Maisie pregnant was a young, little-known musician who’d just signed with A&M Records. You never miss the obvious so I’m sure you know who I’m talking about.”
Liko stared at the windshield, his mind a blank. “We call this a pregnant pause,” he said.
“Dude. Come on.”
“Dude, tough day on the couch. Throw me a bone.”
“Think about my fireplace mantel.”
Liko did, picturing the stacked stone and the painting above the…
“Oh,” he said. “Her boyfriend was Gideon Perfect?”
“Don’t you love how this comes together so neatly?”
“I do.”
“Unfortunately, the story has a slightly sleazy start because when she ran away with him, Maisie was sixteen and Gideon was twenty-two.”
“Slightly is doing some heavy lifting here.”
“Hence her reluctance to talk about it these days. Bring it up and her expression goes all sheepish and uncomfortable, and Huff pinches the bridge of his nose like he can’t even.
Sure, it was the seventies, different time, blah blah.
But it wouldn’t fly today and you can’t help but project backward and think no consent, statutory rape, end of story, goodbye and cancel. ”
“So she lost the baby, dropped out of school and took off with him?”
“Yep. Followed him on tour, disguised as a groupie. I think there was a cover story that she was the daughter or sister of a roadie or something. It was on the extreme down-low because of course my father was looking for her. It was kind of a miracle they managed to keep it all secret until she was eighteen. If that tour bus ever got pulled over in the wrong state, holy fuck, it would’ve been bad. ”
“How long did they stay together?”
“Eight years.”
“Impressive.”
“They were in love,” Dane said. “Little by little, she became less his girlfriend and more of a best friend. Touring was a thrill, until it wasn’t.
Dropping out of high school was cool, until it wasn’t.
She was maturing, growing out of the lifestyle and eventually, out of the relationship.
She and Gideon loved each other. I think they’ll always love each other.
They talk every day. He’d do anything for her.
They’re soulmates, but they’re not life mates. So Maisie went home.”
“To New York?”
“Yeah. Ten years of touring around the world, she’d amassed quite a respectable art collection, which was being kept in storage.
She thought maybe she’d like to open a gallery someday.
But she only had a GED she’d earned on the road.
So she went to work at the bottom while going to college for art history. ”
“Who paid for her rent and education?”
Dane laughed. “If you miss this obvious answer, I’m hanging up.”
Liko laughed along. “Everyone should have a rich, older, rockstar soulmate.”
“It’s not what you do, it’s who you know. Anyway, lots of calendar pages blowing away in the wind. She eventually opened her first gallery in Manhattan. Then her second one in Norwalk. She was dividing her time between New York and Connecticut when I found her.”
“How did you find her anyway?”
“I have an excellent feeling you will hear that story tonight. So drive safely.”