A Brief Affair

We both knew it couldn’t last.

It had been a while since I tried my hand at a June/December romance. He was graying a bit, becoming squinty around the eyes. But so handsome, and worldly in that charming way of a gentleman who had lived.

People noticed us in the street. In the park, by the fountain and the cello player in front of the Academy of Sciences. Women would say hello. Men would recognize him, ask heartily who I was, pat him on the back. It was a little off-putting, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was happy.

He was wary at first, I think the ringing in his ears and his failing voice were beginning to make him question his virility. When a gentleman friend came to dinner with us, he puffed up. Defensive. Aggressive. Suspicious. Obstinate and demanding the next day, as I cleaned the dishes and he shuffled around underfoot.

He went through my belongings when I was out too long. I would come home to the insides of my purse disturbed. On rare occasions, my things lay in pieces all along the hallway and into the room we shared. Ripped paper. Torn plastic. Mangled tubes of cocoa butter. What was he looking for? What did he find? Funny how the mind forgets and this particular memory fades.

Strange to think now of how we played house, how we slipped into the lives of people long intimate. The Inner Sunset provided a comfortable blanket of fog that cocooned us safely inside of our own story. A place I never frequented before meeting him. A place worlds away from the hippies and pit bulls of the Haight or the pigeons and hipsters of the Mission. Here he became imprinted on me. The deep pools of his brown eyes. The soft way in which he called to me. The bridge of his nose against the curve of my calf.

We walked together every day. Many times a day. At first it was just a little, around the block, to work up an appetite and a reason to go back home and feel warm again. But our strolls soon grew longer. We went into Golden Gate Park, visiting the baseball diamond and looking in at the botanical gardens. I was training for a race at the time, and was used to speeding through in washes of greens and blues and browns. But he insisted on stopping, to smell the grass and the flowers and who knows what magical things awaiting just off the pathway. He tugged at me. Taught me to take my time. To smell and taste.

We both had someone else. His was in Hawaii on what we had begun to think of as an unending vacation. She had introduced us, before taking flight. “So nice to see you two becoming friends,” she would later write, from some mysterious beach so many miles away as we sat on the deck, gazing sleepily at each other in the glow of the afternoon. Mine, of course, was across the bridge, having her own adventures in the decks and gardens and wide goose down beds of Mill Valley.

In the end, when our time was up, there were no long goodbyes, no drawn-out gazes. I went out as if I would return and he padded off into the yard, to do whatever it is the older set does when they are left to their thoughts. I don’t see him anymore, except for that one time I ran hurriedly through the house, feeling I’d missed something, when his eyes followed me passively as I rushed in and out of those few rooms, checking water and food dishes, certain I was leaving something behind.

I still think of him. I think of how warm he was and how his breath barely disturbed his ribcage as he slept, on his side. I’ve dreamt of him. I’ve dreamt of running on the beach and falling together in the sand. I wonder if he dreams of me sometimes, his feet grabbing at somnolent earth the way he did when his body would forget that separation between dream and reality. Dreaming of running. Calling, barking hoarsely in the night. The same way his name lingers on my lips in the morning when I think today would be a good day for a long walk. Two syllables: Cody. Cody who would never be mine but would always have a piece of me.