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Welcome to Boston


Today was my first full day in Massachusetts. I spent the morning getting lost again and again by car, while trying to run some errands. But as a result I made peace with the U-turn and bought a box of Jello Pudding Pops with French on it, so it was not all in vain.

After the agitation of driving in circles all morning, this evening, I decided to go for a long walk, and just be. No iPod. No real place to go. I had a scoop of Coconut Butterfinger ice cream at Christina's, and looked in the windows of the billion furniture stores on Mass Ave, and ended up on a bench by the river to finish Philip Roth's Everyman and watch the sunset. As rowers sculled by and the water sparkled in the fading light, I read the following:
"Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her out to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so and you're so unaware of your charm." "There's so much to learn," she said while he accompanied her home in the taxi; when he replied softly, without a trace of the urgency he felt, "I'll teach you," she had to cover her face with her hands. "I'm blushing. I blush," she said. "Who doesn't?" he told her, and he believed that she'd blushed because she thought he was referring not to the subject of their conversation--all the art she'd never seen--but to sexual ardor, as indeed he was. He wasn't thinking in the taxi of showing her the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum but of her long fingers and her wide mouth, though soon enough he'd take her not just to the Metropolitan but to the Modern, the Frick, and the Guggenheim. He remembered her removing her bathing suit out of sight in the dunes. He remembered them, later in the afternoon, swimming back together across the bay. He remembered how everything about this candid, unaffected woman was so unpredictably exciting. He remembered the nobility of her straightness. Against her own grain, she sparkled. He recalled telling her, "I can't live without you," and Phoebe's replying, "Nobody has ever said that to me before," and his admitting, "I've never said it before myself."
For a moment, this broke my resolve to just be, because if I am honest, I have to admit--I want that so badly.

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