Dear Mr. You

by Mary -Louise Parker

  Dear Mentor,

  Before you, I’d catch a fish from time to time, but I needed someone to show me how to bait my hook in this one way.

  Most everything you said in the rehearsal room as a director was applicable to life. You said

  Let go of what happened last time

  And

  Start with what you know

  And

  Don’t expect a response

  Our first week rehearsing together, we were outside on a break and you asked me what my character did at night when she couldn’t sleep. I rattled off stuff I thought was super-interesting before I said, “and I feel like she’s the kind of person who . . .”

  I kept on, but something I’d said had given you a twitch. Your face was very close to mine and I remember the direction our bodies were facing in the courtyard, all of that. You put that one finger up, the index that you always gestured with by making those swirls in the air by your breastbone, like a kid swinging chewed-up gum around his finger, or the guy with headphones when you’re on television signaling to you to WRAP IT UP. I don’t know what that was about but I always found it endearing. Your fingers were small for a man, almost delicate, but your pirate’s swarthy complexion and that long wavy dark hair gave you an air of exotic sensuality. Had I met you in Paris, or Florence, I’m sure I would have asked you if you spoke English before launching in.

  You were nodding while I rambled and when I stopped you said

  Uh huh? All that is good? But I would be careful of thinking about people as “kinds of people”?

  I put my hand on that brick wall, just leaned there listening to you. It was humbling to hear a thing I thought I knew but really didn’t. I didn’t understand it in my bones yet, I couldn’t honor it properly, because I’d never had it broken down by someone with that kind of authority. I only needed it explained once by you to be able to adopt it as some kind of anthem. As far as I was concerned, you were holding a stone tablet and carrying a torch, reminding me that everyone is a mass of contradictions. There are no “types” of people.

  We had a lot of time together, relatively speaking. Years later I was stuck and needed help, and I called you to come and watch me. You were too ill to take the stairs backstage after the show, so I met you at your seat. It took great effort to stand, but you did, and said, I think I’ve solved your problem, because

  You keep saying you’re hungry but there is a doughnut in front of you and you don’t eat it

  You keep saying you’re cold but you take off your coat and throw it on the floor

  It was everything so basic and obvious that I’d categorically overlooked. I wanted to kick myself but you inspired me, got me excited to go strip away the baloney. I went back to the theater, wiped the slate, and turned those simple needs on high. I took it so far. I licked my fingers of every last trace of that doughnut and sucked them off like they were a delicacy. I shook the napkin into my mouth in case I missed any crumb, and I counted every penny in my coin purse, double-checking pennies in case they were dirty nickels, to see if I could buy one more doughnut. I buried myself so deeply inside my coat to fight the chill that a third of my face was obscured. I didn’t take my hands from my pockets or get off my chair until the room was warm, and when I took my coat off it felt like breakthrough molting. Those notes were rudimentary, but so rooted in survival that they gave me the inner velocity that allowed me to be perfectly still. I could hear my motor going, a car gunning in place.

  You said things with such deceptive simplicity that they might have been easy to dismiss if someone less charismatic and substantive had explained them. Some things you said I may not have understood initially, or ever, but I believed you anyway. When it came to the theater you were anointed with indisputable divinity.

  Michael came to visit you in the hospital and was taken aback to see you being wheeled into the ICU. He put his hand out and gently asked, “Are you all right?” You raised a brow and said, in that voice I could have poured on pancakes

  Well, apparently not

  In those days, intensive care was an immediate death sentence for any AIDS patient and that evening I guess there were a number of people in your room. Kevin and your mom were talking to the doctors, and Deb was there on your bed telling you things about the day so you could have someone to listen to and be less scared. She noticed that you had started to mimic her. A phrase like “Lillie is flying in from Texas” was repeated back as soon as she uttered it. She would say “Ralph pissed off a dog in the park” and you’d repeat it verbatim. You were parroting everything she said, and she was ragged and scared, and wondered why, why would you be sarcastic and torment her when there was clearly so little time left. She was fighting tears but tried to be calm and said why are you imitating me, is my talking upsetting you?

  And you said, softly,

  No. I’m trying to catch your rhythm. I want to catch your breath.

  It occurred to you to take someone’s tempo with you, since you’d be forced to let go of all hands at some point. You took the spaces with you. No way to take the voices you loved, they would have to stay behind, so you took the ellipses.

  She sat there talking with you repeating, I think because you knew what might actually last. What you were allowed to keep.

  Dear Young Leman,

  “I think about why it stopped. Why you left and what was truth? What was blind passion, and I don’t know, maybe the passion was the truth. Maybe the only thing that slipped away was the blind part.”

  That’s what you wrote after we were done and put away.

  You were right. Temporary blindness is useful. How can we see anything when we’re so busy being seen? When we’re being whipped up into those soft peaks.

  It was sweet, being looked at by you. You were so young. We would spend hours calculating our age difference: “When I am Q you would still only be N and that will continue to suck,” I’d say. “But wait!” you’d say, sitting up suddenly. “When I will be P, you will be M! That’s not so terrible, right?” I’d try to picture it. “Maybe,” I’d say, “but you still won’t even have a yard. Or legitimate regrets. Do you even have your wisdom teeth?” You’d growl at me for ruining your idea. Threaten to bonk me with the champagne bottle. “Maybe when you’re this many?” I’d hold up fingers to indicate. “But by then I’ll be in a wheelchair.”

  “So what. I’ll push you around,” you’d lie back next to me, not needing to do anything other than roll over and put your hands behind the small of my back.

  I flew you to Denmark and you showed up with a backpack and a Shakespeare textbook. It was good there. We looked the same in age so no one knew. We could fall on each other in the park or ravage each other by the elevator bank in the hotel, right there. “Going down,” I said and you didn’t look to see if someone might be getting off because you were busy getting off yourself and didn’t care if we were caught. While you slammed into me I moaned too loudly, slid over, and pushed the call buttons with my hip. So used to hiding, a part of me wanted someone to catch us so I could say who cares. Who cares if I am hiding out in him, I thought. Go find your own dysfunction. Who cares if you loved me that well and you were that young. It wasn’t against the law. Unlikely to make it another two months, I savored it. Binged on it. I thought go ahead, rip me open, and while you are at it, rip up my life’s agenda into tiny pieces. It isn’t working out so well anyway.

  We went to the park after you got there because I wasn’t working that day and it was warm out. Approaching the hotel we could see the flags in front slapping each other around. My skirt blew up and you caught it and held it down; a sweet gesture of chivalry from you who’d just put your fingers inside of me on a park bench, and there it was, in that second. That was the man you would be one day, holding down a woman’s skirt in the wind, though by then you’d be able to buy drinks in any country. I knew in that instant I’d never know you as an older man, with reading glasses and a newspaper. That moment had been my glimpse. As we entered the hote
l you said

  Part of me would like to fuck you in a really expensive car and

  Part of me would like to fuck you in a really cheap car

  We lazed and read our books separately on the bed like two older people. I realize now that I was still terrifically young too, but you were so much younger.

  Close to midnight we woke and took a taxi to a Biergarten. In the cab you went on about how we can’t ever reach anything according to quantum physics; we can only really travel between two points. I said does that mean we have to walk once we get out of the taxi because I am tired from all the sex, and you said, no, listen, if I am here and you are there, I can come to you but it’s only half the distance of our two beginning points, and I said, okay. That’s far out? But I’m hungry. You can draw it for me later.

  We’d sit and draw diagrams about the weather with stick people. At your mother’s house during our second month of being improbable and nympho, she gave us watercolors and we sat painting the big wooden table she got in Finland when you were small. She showed me pictures of you when you were a baby and left us poems on our pillows when we stayed out late. I said, why are my feet always so cold here and she said, oh no, you have to do your socks this way, sit down, and she took off my shoes and socks and put them back on, her hands lingering over my feet, saying they looked like a dancer’s. She patted me on the head when we sat together, even though I was taller. She liked me, gave me that beautiful Christmas ornament and said, well, I never had a daughter. I thought this was odd at first, but now that it’s here in front of me, it seems, just . . . not at all odd.

  We sat outside with our beer and pizza that went untouched because we couldn’t eat knowing you’d leave tomorrow and I’d leave us after that. You asked me if I thought there was even the tiniest remote piece of me that thought we could keep going or be together again one day and I said yes. Then you said, well okay, is this just that thing, you know, where we aren’t together but we will never really be happy with who we end up with, and I could not answer because I didn’t want to lie a second time.

  You left and we talked on the phone two nights later when I was in Ireland, or Belgium, I can’t recall. We talked for two hours because for most of it you tried, do you remember doing this, for over half of that call, like an hour and a half of pleading, to get me to read the poem that I’d written you. I kept saying don’t, they aren’t meant to be performed, they’re meant to be held and read with your eyes, I won’t.

  You begged until you were crying and I said stop. I said do you remember that time you said something like, you could fairly lose yourself weeping on my bosom, or some phrase like that, that was more iambic than organic? You sounded like a guy in tights with a bow and arrow. You said, yeah, that’s me. Don’t remember me like that though. I actually already grew past that and am mortally embarrassed that I said it, thank you very much. I said shut your face and I will read you a verse and you said I love you and I said shut your face. But I know you do. And you know everything, I’ve told you before, okay, just listen and I will try. My voice was a little stiff at first but I started your poem.

  On some word that offended or stung, you let out an enormous sob and I waited and listened and then I tried to make it better. We ended up fighting, but our fights never had any blows, really. It was mostly pleading and a bit of shouting. Someone laughing while blowing their nose at the very end and then sex, but that night we went back and forth until I was crying too, saying it’s three in the morning here, I don’t remember my time zone or what language to use to ask for coffee in the morning, I have to be in a corset in two hours, please, I beg you, quit it.

  There was a letter waiting when I got home. The beginning was all about our future that didn’t happen, with a little girl asking me questions, who was, you said, the daughter we would have.

  The second half was stream of consciousness. You wrote all these possible scenarios, railing at time and sequence and all the things I’m tortured by now, and yes, I still have it. You made real sense in your spirals. The letter ended with you writing

  this is my word howled to the moon and spat into the sewer, you listen, just listen to the street and the sky and you’ll always hear me there because I caught you up close. I held you. good night

  Dear Poetry Man,

  When I got to my temporary apartment I’d barely finished counting the stains on the carpet when my phone started ringing. I thought it might be Søren so I dove for it. I remember his words precisely. He said he’d find someone with a car and get me in an hour when we would “go to the Starry Plough, have some beers, and listen to my friend sing so you can fall in love with him.” He said after that we could all get on with life.

  When we walked in there was only a small crowd. I vaguely remember a dart board, but what remains vivid is you. I’d never seen anything like you before, doing that dance that propelled you around the stage with your head and body tuned in and taking cues from two very different but harmonious rhythm sources. You were covering “Will It Go Round in Circles” and ripping it to shreds.

  That song ended and you had a sip of beer and sat on the edge of the stage. You waved to Søren while I fought to look neutral because I was taken with you and slightly enraged for no reason. Enraged is the wrong word, but I felt like I wanted to kick you in the shins and then make you banana bread. I wanted to key your car and take you out for dim sum. It was admiration, passion and that voice of yours all mushing together and disarming me, making me want to smash something and kiss someone.

  Meeting you in the parking lot after the show I told you I’d loved your version of “Feline.” You were sweet, quieter than I expected. It was dark out but up close your eyes were as soulful as your voice. They were the ordinary blue you see countless times a day though hardly ever in a pair of eyes. The color brought to mind simple things—uniforms and buttons—but to see that color staring back was new. They weren’t a color so much as an hour of the day.

  Do you remember going back to your parents’ house in Berkeley the next weekend and listening to music until the wee hours? We talked about poetry, and I didn’t know so many guys who were into H.D. and Carolyn Forché. That was the night I sat on Søren’s lit cigarette, which is, I mean, how or why did he leave it there, lit? I still remember how that burned and pretending it didn’t hurt when we were kissing on that couch. On the way home I wanted to stop for a band-aid, but no one had any cash.

  Eight years later you were playing to stadiums and I could now afford a first aid kit. I came home from shooting a music video and most of your band was in my hotel room with you, ordering extremely fancy champagne from room service. That night we dumped out all the candy from the minibar onto my bed at the Peninsula hotel and systematically ate it all while I listened to the horror stories of that one girl you were dating. I vowed to find you someone better as we fell asleep atop those empty Hershey wrappers. Years after that, on the day that a play I was doing was met with widespread hatred, you chased me around your hotel room in a robe reading a scathing review aloud while I held my hands over my ears. “Let’s demystify it,” you shouted, “it’s better to hear it! This guy hates you so much it’s almost funny!” Later while I sat crying on the couch you recounted the meanest attacks on your own work just to make me feel better. I almost got married to someone in your living room. And then I didn’t a few days after that.

  I won’t forget you sensing I was about to lose it one night at a restaurant when things were not good. Let’s get you out of here, you said, swooping me up and taking me all the way home. Most of all I see that narrow staircase to that apartment you rented by me when I was having a rough time. You literally moved around the corner. In the next couple of months you had to be away, you said, but you’d be home intermittently and wanted to be nearby if I needed anything.

  That first day I stood at the bottom of the stairs and started up, knowing there was someone at the top who cared enough to move his endless pieces of stereo equipment, countless Playbills,
and high-end cookware to a walk-up only steps away from me. I got to the top floor and you were moving stuff around. You said, hey did I ever burn you this bootleg of Rickie Lee Jones? You were holding a CD in one hand and a take-out menu in the other. Justin was there and he was leaning out the window, shouting at the delivery guy, “Are you Cozy Soup and Burg? No, I am coming down! Stay. Please.” He stuck his head back in the window and saw me there, “Hey baby, can you believe it’s snowing?”