sofas and the wooden table that fills in the space of the square
are like one thing, one huge, heavy thing, bedlike. You can
get laid anywhere in this room but on the floor. There is a
sound system of incredible sophistication: four speakers, two
on the floor, two hanging from the ceiling, he can virtually
mix his own records by adjusting dials. He has an extra pack
of cigarettes there for me, my brand not his. There is a bowl
of grass. We sit. He gets me a drink, vodka with ice. He has my
brand. He drinks Scotch. I am very nervous. I don’t take off my
coat. I sit and drink. The whisper of the telephone will not do
here. He has to speak up. I am sitting on the far edge of a sofa,
as far away as I can get. He is squarely in the middle of the
middle sofa. He has his bare feet up on the large square low
table that the sofas surround. The sofas and table are inexplicable. I have my coat on. I smoke feverishly. Little philosophers of repression: it is not desire. I am wearing my heaviest motorcycle
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boots, my plainest black T-shirt, my basic denim, hanging,
ragged. He wears denim, a leather belt, a white undershirt. His
eyes sort of stare in at his moustache. We smoke. We drink. I
am waiting for the woman from Nicaragua. I am hot. I take
off my coat. I put it beside me, between him and me, a pile, an
obstacle, not subtle. I drink. We chitchat. There is sofa everywhere. One cannot stand or walk around. It is for lying down on. I ask when the woman is coming. Oh, he says, not missing a
beat, she just called a while back, I tried to get you but you had
left already, she couldn’t make it tonight but the next time she is
back in the country we will get together, I want you to meet my
sister too. A grown-up woman cannot pretend to be a virgin.
*
He knows what I love and what I need and what I do not
have. He knows I love music. He knows I live in the cold, in
the wind. He knows I haven’t been able to buy steak. He puts
on music. His record collection is sublime: it is an ecstasy for
me: the sound embraces and pierces: his taste is exquisite: he
makes me a concert: we don’t have to talk: I am happy in the
music: he leaves me alone and makes dinner, runs out now
and then to change the music, each piece more beautiful, more
haunting, more brilliant than the one before it: he knows music:
he educates me tastefully and then leaves me to listen. He
interrupts to tell me stories about himself, how when he was
sick certain pieces of music healed him, the story is long and
boring, I listen quietly feigning interest, he will now play those
pieces for me: they could make the dead walk: they are the
deepest layers of sex, the deepest sensual circles transmuted to
formal beauty, ordered, repeated in unspeakably beautiful
patterns, sound on sound, sound inside sound, sounds weaved,
sounds pulling the body into an involuntary happiness unrelated to human time, real life, or narrative detail: sounds deeper than sex: sounds entirely perfect and piercing. He
doesn’t put on one record and leave it. He changes, weaves,
composes, interlaces: just enough, just not quite enough, it
