Lovers & Other Strangers
I will recall this as a happy time. I can do that. I doubt that Gloria can, will ever be able to. Why I keep the picture, this picture, in the drawer. Gloria never goes near the drawer. I think she knows why, even though she won’t say, but I think it would kill her, or close to.
Read MoreYou asked about what happened, so I tried to remember. Mama never talked about it, not to me at least. What’s here is what I pieced together, through overheard words, voices raised and lowered, looks—the shards stuck in a brain corner, wanting to merge, waiting for a stray sunbeam to strike the remnants from, say, pieces of broken glass, and suddenly, there’s a pattern.
Read MoreThe guy in the picture came back into my life like Marley’s ghost. Of course I knew that face. It was the lead picture in my exhibition in that winter of ’95. When I walked into the gallery, there he was, sitting by the window, an older guy in a trench coat looking like the wind would blow him into the Hudson. He stared, then motioned me to come over. I was surprised he knew who I was.
He answered my question without my asking: “I saw you back then. I got a good memory,” he said. Thirty years ago I was a kid.
Read MoreI loved her before I met her. It was this freak deal. She had lived in this place where I lived, but she lived there two or three people before I came.
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