Lit Riffs by Matthew Miele Page A

seems to me now. I felt all the music you listened to was wrong, a betrayal—you’d quit liking the inane, clever stuff and moved on to music that felt postured and sexy instead. I felt you’d forgotten yourself, and I tried to show you what you’d forgotten. When I’d third around with you and your new Vietnamese girlfriend, I’d seek to remind you of our secret languages, our jokes—if they hadn’t worked on Bess they should at least still mean something to you—but those japes now fell flat, and you’d rebuff me, embarrassed.
    Of course the worse I fared, the harder I tried. For a while. Then that became our falling-out. I must have appeared so angry—this is painful speculation, now. Of course, what seemed so elaborately cultural or aesthetic to me at the time—I faulted you for hairstyle, music, Tu-Lin’s Asian-ness—all appears simply emotional in retrospect. I was threatened by the fact that you’d gone from pining for girls to having them, sure. But I’d also invested in you all my intimations of what I was about to surrender in myself, by growing up. By investing them in you I could make them something to loathe, rather than fear. Loathing was safer.
    Oh, the simple pain of growing up at different speeds!
    A page or two ago I supposed I was going to build back from this reminiscence, to some musings on your current quandary, your adult ambivalence about the commitments you entered when you married (I nearly wrote entered precociously , but that’s only the case by my retarded standard). But I find I’m reeling even deeper into the past. When I was seven or eight, years before you and I had met, my parents befriended a young couple, weirdly named August and Sincerely. I guess those were their hippie names—at least Sincerely’s must have been. August was a war resister. My parents had sort of adopted him during his trial, for he’d made the gesture of throwing himself an eighteenth birthday party in the office of his local draft board, a dippy bit of agitprop that got him singled out, two years later, for prosecution. Sincerely was a potter, with a muddy wheel and a redbrick kiln in the backyard of her apartment. She was blond and stolid and unpretentious, the kind of woman who’d impress me now as mannish, a lesbian perhaps, at least as a more plausible candidate for chumming around than for an attraction (I felt she was a woman, then, but she must have been barely twenty, if that).
    We’d visit Sincerely often during the six or eight months while August served out his sentence, sit in the backyard sipping ice tea she’d poured with clay-stained hands, and in that time I very simply—and articulately, to myself—fell in love. I was still presexual enough to isolate my feelings for Sincerely as romantic and pure. In stories like this one, children are supposed to get mixed up, and to imagine that adults will stop and wait for them to grow up, but I wasn’t confused for a moment. I understood that my love for Sincerely pertained to the idea of what kind of woman I meant to love in my future life as a man. I promised myself she would be exactly like Sincerely, and that when I met her, I would love her perfectly and resolutely, that I would be better to her than I have in fact ever been to anyone—than anyone’s ever been to anyone else.
    So my love wasn’t damaged by August’s return from jail (he’d never gone upstate, instead served his whole time in the Brooklyn House of Detention, on Atlantic Avenue). I didn’t even bother to resent his possession of Sincerely, which I saw as intrinsically flawed by grown-up sex and diffidence. August wasn’t a worthy rival, and so I just went on secretly loving Sincerely with my childish idealism. The moron-genius of my young self felt it knew better than any adult how to love, felt certain it wouldn’t blow the chance if it were given one. Not one day I’ve lived since has satisfied that standard. Of course, it is strange and sad for me now to