Day 3

January 2, 2010
10 PM

I’m sitting at the corner of the bar with Molly and we are drinking Smithwicks again and talking about pregnancy and sperm donors.

“One of our friends is pregnant,” I announce. “But I can’t tell you who it is.”

“Can I guess?” Molly asks,

“No, because if you guess right you’ll know from the look on my face and, really, no one’s supposed to know.”

But Molly guesses anyway, and is right on the very first try, and suddenly we are both hooting with glee and raising our glasses in honor of this person we love who is going to be such an incredible parent, and to all the people in our lives who are taking the strange and brave risk of bringing new life into our weird broken world.

My surprise lover from the other night walks in with an impossibly beautiful woman on his arm. I am lit up with amusement and the gratifying pride I sometimes feel when I see my lovers with beautiful people; and then I become acutely aware of my ratty hair, the moth-eaten fisherman sweater I’ve been wearing since the mid-‘90s.

Oh well, I think.

They come over to join us, and Molly saves us all from awkwardness by regaling us with stories of the time she and my lover took a trip to the Festivals Internationales in Lafayette in a rattly van with an aging white hippie and two young black hippies. Of course this segues into tales of overdose and teenage rebellion, and somehow I find myself telling the story of how I accidentally sent a pornographic text message to my mother and ultimately broke into her house to erase it from her cellphone before she saw it, and we are all laughing, and the beautiful woman laughs loud and long and I’m thinking this isn’t so bad.

The Mohawk dude is here again, eating what looks like a brownie at the bar.

My lover rubs up against my knee.

“We’re writing an article together,” the beautiful woman explains. It is about platonic friends and lovers, how it is generally a bad idea to thrust your platonic friends upon your lovers. “Interesting,” Molly says, glancing around at the dynamics in our little corner. “Tell us more about that.” My lover’s thumb is at the small of my back and my hips feel taut, like wires.

Then something sad happens, which is that the beautiful woman, who is also evidently a teacher, starts telling us that her students are really horrible people. They are thugs and killers and rapists, she says. They’ve got hardened rocks where their souls should be. They are, she has figured out, barely human, and they have only passed the high-stakes tests the state gives every year out of the sheer willpower and tenacity of this woman and her brilliant co-teacher. And now the beautiful woman is looking for bartending jobs.

And my lover’s kind of laughing at the story because it is funny, it is, and Molly continues to be graceful and sympathetic, and says all the right things, about how the beautiful woman has a hard, hard job and how the world has totally thrown away any investment in these kids and it’s too much for any individual to handle or fix, and I nod and agree because I live the same fight in so many ways and constantly work to conserve my own humanity and the dignity of my patients, who are continually thrown away by every aspect of our society, and there’s so much more I wish I could add to this conversation to validate this woman’s experience: her full-hearted desires to make things better for people and then her deep sense of failure; but now’s not the time and I look down at the bar and I don’t say anything for a long time. Ultimately the thing I’m saddest about is how the world has set it up so that mostly, our only defense against utter brutality is a hardening of our hearts, and how so many of our deeply courageous loving fierce fighting people have seen parts of themselves die because we haven’t done a good enough job as a people of building a culture where we can both struggle deeply and keep our humanity intact.

Molly and I will spend the rest of the evening talking about our commitments to cultivate love and joy and optimism in our work and our movements, and before too long I will start feeling better and slightly inspired, but before all that my lover and his companion, perhaps sensing our dejection, make motions to leave. After giving me a long scratchy hug he follows her out, and the last thing I see is the soft leather of her beautiful bag, grazing her hip slightly before the door closes them out into the deep blue night.

I take a long pull from my Smithwicks.

“They are talking about you right now,” Molly says.

I nod. Maybe.