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(Continued from April 30, 2004.)
Back from my sojourn abroad, adjusted one again to local time, I wander to the bistro down the street for lunch -- and, I hope, a chance to make an actual date for mojitos and who knows what all with Nikki. Sure enough, she's there, happy to see me. She gives me a list of mojitos ingredients; I assure her the mint has run wild and needs using, give her my phone number, tell her my schedule for the week to come. She promises to call.
Odd as it may seem to you -- odd as it seems to me -- I've never had a girlfriend from this neighborhood, nor indeed from anywhere within a five-mile radius of where I've lived for over half my life. (I'm not counting one woman I slept with only once, or another I got into bed with two or three times but never managed to connect with, or another who moved into the neighborhood some years after we shared a one-night stand.)
In fact, in the past 30 years I've only had two girlfriends who actually lived in this city when we started seeing each other -- LastEx and someone with whom I had a short affair that ended badly (altogether my fault). The others lived elsewhere, the closest of them across the state line in a suburb an hour and half's drive from here, the rest a plane or train trip away, or at least a half-day's drive. This pattern goes back as far as grad school -- with a few exceptions, I've involved myself with women I couldn't get to know gradually, incrementally, over time, through the normal progression of friendship to dating to budding romance to sexual exploration to cohabitation. In a few cases we managed something approximating that, though it wasn't easy at long distance. But in most we plunged precipitously into living together, with predictably disastrous results.
I've had periods where this worked to my advantage, I should add. The happiest and most fulfilling passage of my sexual life -- aside from my first year with one lover in 1988-89, and a spring in Berkeley, California in '74 with a sweet brunette -- was circa '86-87. A lovely young WASP from another city drove up every two weeks for a weekend of intense sex and food; a ripe middle-aged Jewish woman with a teenager's body, from across town, wanted to play several times a week; and a slim Japanese-American critter from Cleveland and I would get it on now and then in her town, in mine, or at professional conferences where we frequently found ourselves in joint attendance. I remember one delirious week in which all three were in town, and I literally went from bed to bed, consecutively. Timing is everything, as they say.
It couldn't last, of course. And didn't. Moreover, though it was fun for a time, it would have worn thin. I'm a homebody, and a one-man dog. So the idea of a steady girlfriend who lives nearby -- pretty much standard for most guys -- stands for me as both a goal and, in my experience, an exotic dream. I can't explain this out-of-town, long-distance-relationship karma. I swear it's no desideratum; I've never turned away from something proximate, or deliberately and knowingly looked for something out of reach. Still, the net result is a romantic/erotic lifetime spent in probably doomed involvements with women who, in a literal and geographic sense, couldn't dependably be there for me in the early phases of our relationships (and vice versa). Which may explain all those endings. Fruit of the poisoned tree, as the lawyers say.
So among the things I yearn for is the ability to drop by my girlfriend's place unexpectedly, or to have her pop over for dinner at a moment's notice. Not too much to ask, methinks; but somehow, in my case, this has achieved the status of the unattainable.
As Churchy LaFemme, the bayou turtle of Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, used to say, "Anything handy is pretty favorite." I know just what he means.
More to come . . .
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