Fulsome Intermissions

I sometimes enjoy hanging out in the bathroom in the dark, or semi light from the main length of the studio, my flaccid buttocks sucked into the ceramic, always hating not having apple cheeks that draw a man's eyes, but I don't, although I got a few able-bodied lovers anyway because men are pigs, and my vagina is roomy. I never had an orgasm during sexual intercourse, though I came close with one of my husbands, and I see the more adept of you connecting the dots, and saying "oh," and beginning to understand why my former iconic sociopathic superior unnerved me so profoundly by going off on my relatively mild poem for Tassoni, all of 12 years ago now. Still laboring on my senator draft, I am beginning to feel like Sir Philip Sidney laboring over his Apologia, adamant that poetic lies involve deeper metaphorical truths, although my argument is demanding that institutional patronizing be eliminated. Of course I studied Sidney with  my Irish demi-god, and I remember distinctly what Jerry said in his deconstruction of the word "admire," although Jerry would not; he had a bad time at our university, with a crippled devotee dogging his one heel, and his conflict with the deans on the other. I know little about that but can surmise a great deal, knowing the character of the school, knowing Jerry as he was then, a little over my age now.

The best, briefest years of my life, but I was miserable then as well, and never listened to anybody, not the nursing students, not David Ward, about what they thought about my (clinical) depression. Dr. Ward was off a degree or two anyway, according to Dr. Rubel, who I counseled with shortly after the exchange of campuses, but with age, fault lines erode deeper grooves. Jerry, being a brilliant Shakespearean, kept his brilliant mouth shut, and when all was said, and all was done, he was the better man for having the discipline not to either lecture me or give in to my need for sexual worship. Today it would not matter. My body is old, my breasts are fallen and uneven, sore on the side, my hips in pain, my sex drive in half baked embers. but I mean this not mattering in a more complex sense than lack of physical consummation  Even if he had wanted to, Jerry could not have given me what I wanted in a partnership with him. I was too young then, and far too bitter now. I have rather lived the last stanza of my poem for him, and think about him every day, as an abstraction, narcissistically, after my fashion, the way you think about ice cream, but this is an easy escape hatch. How would things have fared with changing diapers, monitoring pace makers? Loving a memory is another way of admitting defeat in the world. A pair bonding to be lived with was deprived me, except in a very brief mismatch with a man like my grandfather, and it is too late now

I never told anyone anyone I loved them without feeling another consequence, another set of sentiments entirely. My father rejected my desire for his love. Dad I love you. Why? he asked, angry at my mother, angry at my brain damage, my father never struck me, but punished me, just the same. I am 50 and he is nearly 80, and that dynamic is still between us. I pay a price to love mio padre.

I never said it to Tassoni either. Oh, I stuck my foot in it-- wore my dazzled please fuck me heart on my sleeve, but I lounged on one side of my dorm, he the other. Tassoni, I like you. I like you too Joanne, he said, both of us meaning two different things, both in denial. he that he would have to reject the naive little cripple, me, that I could win an Italian boy like him! My father hated Tassoni, which always surprised me, and I never really emailed it to Linda either, though I was screaming, and on the verge of a psychotic break, one which I basically swam back from on my own, I still had the presence of mind to be conditional, lashing at her, but lashing with "I thought I had--" and that isn't exactly a declaration meaning that I did, and it absolutely never came out of my mouth with Frank, couldn't. The man was blind to the fact that I really did not want him, sexually, or otherwise.

I am not sure if I loved Pat; my mother said I did not, but my mother had her affairs, and I mine, and I am not entirely sure. I made him leave me and then lost my dignity. Mmm, but I did get over it, and resist what I want to say about who or what I only ever loved, because I know it is a fiction, my own personal mythology, and a falsehood, but I also know I do not have long before something bad happens again, and my will cannot fend off more and more constraint on my independence, and my need to make some last declaration is hard on my heels, because I am a damn jackass who has always been the student of perpetual motion.

I may be hard on you, but I am as equally cruel to myself, rest assured. Shakespeare does not write a pro forma romance with Romeo & Juliet; he is ambivalent about the good of passion.