My living scar tissue over little brother ghosts is not all that complicated. Nicholas junior and I enmeshed with each other in an interlocking vehemence borne out of contempt, the shared experience of pain, which, as with most things human, realizes too late the blood bond binding one to the other. When he was dying, baby brother appealed to eldest sister to come to him, and I had no way to drop my caseload to get to him, hence the abandonment I carry, not beyond the realm of some of your experiences. Rick, as the once-and-never future executive father figure, attempted to release me from my albatross with his own mortality tale of a relative left hanging. Didn't work.
With Alexandra, though, my interaction with her was a series of smokescreens worthy of Jamesian contortion, and no, it was not about repressed homo-eroticism, so much as, once again, my need for confidential intimacy, such as that from a child to camp counselor. Our first telephone exchange made me hope for a literary friend. Not that she knew it. Our first meeting sent off strobe emergency lights in my head. I knew she was butch, spinster butch, but would not allow my mind to form the fact that here was an authority from which I shrank due to lesbian overtones. Did I walk away? No. Did I try to get under her skin? Not the way I did with my other larger than life personages, but once a cripple made is an invalid baked in a kiln, and I was disruptive to her reticence, a reticence she insisted upon. She was as closed as I am open, with invidious penetration. She was not Erik, the fucked up shit on a stick. She wasn't Josie Byzek. Alexandra had no apologies to make, yet I wasn't woman enough to close off my sycophant psychology, looking for Dante's Virgil, moral perversion as it might have been. What we saw and appreciated in each other was the weight and scourge of the sin we carried. It gave her a pursed and drawn demeanor, and it has wrought in me, over the years, a terse unpleasantness. If I had been more assured in myself, I would have cut her out of me, like gangrene, and this was the best literary editor I ever had, knotted by deep aesthetic affinity that penetrated the lack of personal closeness. And yes, I hear you. "Fuck this," you mutter, fleeing for the hills, with so much import I place on the thinnest filaments. "Tough shit." That's my response, at least for this morning.
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