BRIEFLY, FOREVER

Lee Houck

 

 

 

 

 

In the summer of 1998, I was working in Vermont as an unpaid and mostly underfed puppeteer. Everyone was hanging out around the fire, rolling cigarettes, rolling joints; the moon stretched the shadows into long thin lines. I watched the oddly matched couples slink away from the light, their tangled silhouettes growing dimmer and dimmer. It suddenly occurred to me that the people who I would find myself hanging out with for the rest of my life would be people who voted for the Democratic candidate because he was the lesser evil. Some of them would write in Angela Davis. Some of them would not vote at all. They would dress in unfashionable clothing, drink whisky from plastic cups in their living rooms, and go contra dancing. They would drink expensive coffee carried across borders by Fulbright scholars and drive cheap cars.

It occurred to me, when I found myself alone, staring at the cooling embers, that I had made a mistake. At some point in my life, years earlier perhaps, I had decided what kind of people I would meet, what kind of theater I was going to create, and how much or how little I was going to get emotionally involved.

There at the fire, I asked myself: What happens if you give in to it?

If you laugh at all the jokes, slather your arms in papier mâché and printing ink, devour the over-toasted granola, skip laundry, skip the shower, skip the telephone calls, go to the too-late parties, go skinny-dipping, go to town and be stared at by the locals.

And what happened after all that, after diving in, was this:

He was one of about ten students who had come to Vermont from a theater school in Mexico City. They were dancers, singers, actors, and sometime musicians who spoke varying degrees of English, who I met in a line, one after another, repeating my name then theirs back to them, not remembering a single one. He was barely taller than me, with a thinner build. His English was terrible; I spoke no Spanish. We carried a dictionary with us, and learned a truncated way of flipping through the pages to get the nouns and crudely miming the actions. My flashlight broke, it was too dark to fix it, and we kissed for the first time. We fooled around in his tent under blankets, army issue, heavy and brown. We woke up, covered in wool fuzz that was indelibly stuck to our bodies where they had been moist with lube—hands, nipples, crotches. The next evening, after the first full day of performances (from about ten in the morning to eight at night) we actually fell asleep during sex. We’d had little to eat all day, carrying giant puppets across the fields all that afternoon, and after rolling around in the tent for about fifteen minutes at nearly one in the morning, we paused to breathe (or paused to hear what our bodies were feeling, like you can do during sex) and fell right asleep. Neither of us could remember who did so first.

Some other puppeteers, a Parisian woman and her Canadian boyfriend, drove us to Boston, where my charming Mexican’s second cousin lived with his American wife, a nurse who cooked amazing dinners. We bought a plant for their apartment. We slept on the pullout bed in the living room, and he was afraid that she’d walk in on us sleeping, cuddling together on one side of the bed. We took a shower together in their bathroom and, though I’d seen him naked a dozen times, he asked me to look away when he undressed. We cooked elaborate dinners with our puppeteer friends, with spicy corn salad, leeks in crème fraiche, plum-glazed pork loin, and perfect French bread from the Jewish bakery.

We came to my New York apartment, shared my twin-sized bed, and that was when he prayed—on his knees, right there on the floor of my bedroom, both of us naked, my erection suddenly deflating—before giving me a blow job. He had to go back to Mexico on September third. He would take a bus to the Newark Airport.

We knew what it was. I wouldn’t write him. I wouldn’t call him. It was simply going to be over. He left at nearly four o’clock in the morning. I was still asleep.

I won’t tell you his name, though I remember it completely—it’s like a secret that I keep to myself, or a place I keep sentimental things hidden. I remember carrying cardboard and papier mâché puppets across the freshly mowed dairy fields littered with garlic peel and paint flecks. I remember lying in the cold grass at midnight, pointing out constellations. I remember his breath on my neck as I lay awake all night, worrying what it would be like after he was gone, my beautiful Mexican theater student with whom I briefly, and perhaps forever, fell in love.