I don’t remember the first time I saw Peony. In some sense that’s fitting. She comes into focus in those long-ago memories gradually. There’s no precise beginning, no clear flash or recognition. But somehow or another, there she is, walking beside me, either across the street from the high school to the grungy taco stand, or to the bus station after school. What did two kids that young have to talk about? I don’t know, but we found much. Probably I was trying to impress her, knowing all the time that it was hopeless. I had so few tools with which to work, and she seemed far ahead of me. Not in the too-worldly, to-soon way of a lot of kids I knew, though. It wasn’t like that. It’s just that she was like a real grownup, or at least what I imagined a real grownup might be. She was nothing like the desperate approximations of grownups that half of us were. She was her own.
And yet today I saw a photograph of her from back then. I’ve seen it before. She’s fifteen, dressed as a pirate, and she is entirely a child. There’s a somber innocence in her eyes that I’ve come to know much later in life: the still-deeper depths that you find within a small, serious human. It’s undoubtedly her but it’s hard to reconcile with my memory, in which she’s forever regal and self-possessed, ever a powerful foil to my fumbling attempts at charm. But then I was only a kid, too. I had the same sort of eyes. I feel great love when I see that picture, but there’s nothing erotic in it. It’s half nostalgic, half protective. Unlike the other kids we never did anything physical with one another back then and I’m glad of that now. We wouldn’t have known how not to hurt each other.
So she appears like that, in my memory, as though she slipped alongside me and began walking, maybe in silence. Perhaps that’s how it happened. I see her walking just a step ahead, with a longer stride than mine. And me with the crooked lope that I’ve never quite lost, having to work a bit to keep up.
Now, it’s like she said, but then again it’s a little different. I’m not drinking. I’ve done this before but something’s different. I prefer not to say that I’ve quit drinking. I’d rather say that I’ve started to live sober, which means a lot of things. Most of all it means that I’m engaged in a project of integrating the things that I’ve spent the last year and more trying hard to drink away. When Peony and I came together back in the days of those early memories it had a purity, but when we returned together years later we had to burn half the world. I lit the match, and I burned a lot of things I loved. The shame isn’t gone, or even much lessened. But my role now is to look it in the face, sit down with it, listen to it. I don’t know where, if anywhere, that will take me, but I’ve put enough together to realize that what’s done is done. Everything you do is permanent. Every choice you make is forever. The past is instantly fixed and can’t ever be unmade. So that’s that. It’s real, it’s indelible, it’s part of my life and part of the lives of everyone I inflicted it on. That doesn’t mean I get out of dealing with it. On the contrary, I’ll be dealing with it from here on out, and I’m not the only one, but it’s time to really start doing that. So that’s the job. And I can’t do it drunk. I owe that much to the people I’ve hurt. I owe it to myself.
I’ve always hated closing time. When they start stacking chairs I can’t get out fast enough. But the bars won’t ever close, not really. There’s no “my life” without bar life. I know the intricacies of every bar. I can tell you whether one’s functioning well or not, and guess with pretty good accuracy whether it’s making money. Bar life goes on, and I’ll be in once in a while if only to sip a club soda; my profession demands it. But fundamentally I’m doing something else now. The bar will understand. I hope, gentle reader, that you will too. And anyway it’s like Peony said: we’re not in parallel bars very often anymore. We’re on the couch now, more often, or working across from each other at our favorite coffee shop, or folding laundry and doing the ten thousand other things that men and women do in real life. Real life, though. That’s the thing. We’re slowly passing through the looking glass from imagined to real, and it’s startling. It’s so astonishing, what she looks like when she’s drying dishes, when her hair is a certain way. Or when she’s proofing my work and something makes her giggle. She met my father recently and he said that she had a sparkle. She does. More and more often, she catches the light just so. And it’s not in high drama, and it’s less when she’s onstage. It’s just when she’s her. It’s just when she’s here.
Something about that night a few weeks ago, though. I can’t get it out of my head. I wrote about the night on the train, and the long walk at night on the glassed-in bridge above the highway. It sticks with me, an image that somehow contains the story. It’s something about that traffic tearing away below, red taillights receding toward the city, receding like time itself, perpetually here and yet instantly gone. Gone out of reach like memory. Gone out of reach like your own unredeemable sins. And yet for all that, somehow, not even very far away, there’s the figure of her. I’ll have to work a bit to catch up, but she’s there. There in the flesh, there for real, doing nothing more nor less heroic than leading me home. A tall, lithe woman, raven haired. Walking ahead.
Parallel Bars 