Seen

I saw her for the first time about nine months ago.  I was sitting in the back of a large room as people slowly filed in for a conference.  I had given up on love, or rather on personally falling in love, ever again, and being a romantic, that rather negated much physical attraction as well.  I mean, I like the shape and movement of things, but it is the soul into which I want to fall.  Soul--what a stupid word.  I just don't have another to mean the intellectual and emotional makeup of a person, the thoughts and beliefs and tastes that are always so beautiful at first and which later on become so befuddling.

When she walked in, I turned to my friends and colleagues sitting next to me and said, "There's my new girlfriend."

"Which one?" someone asked.

"It's obvious," said another.

It was obvious.  She was my type.  She had blondish long hair that was done up in a sort of braid.  She wore a long dress that was stylish but hippyish at the same time.  Her spine was straight, her skin smooth.  I couldn't quit watching her as she moved through the room.  She came closer and closer and I began to fidget.  She sat in the chair next to mine.

I turned to the woman next to me who knew immediately which woman I had been talking about. I can say anything to her no matter how wrong or off-color, and she will laugh.  Her own life is weirder than mine, I think.  She has secrets.

"Oh sweet Jesus, fuck me!  I can't stand this.  I will surely have a heart attack and die.  Is she looking at me?  Do you think she loves me?  I will give you a thousand dollars to put a spell on her and make her love me.  Is she looking?  What is she doing?"

"I don't think she knows you're there."

In the two hours we were in that room, she didn't acknowledge me, even when I spoke to her.  That's what I get, I thought.  Why would she.

It turned out that she worked in another part of the factory and somehow I found myself walking through that corridor from time to time.  I'd see her, but she never saw me.  Or so it seemed.  One day, I ran into her in the parking lot.  We were both just getting to work.

"Are you just coming in?" she asked.

"Yea.  I'm a little late.  I'm usually a little late.  It worries me something terrible, but I can't seem to do anything about it.  I hate being told what to do.  I try.  Every day I try, but when I am driving in and I see what time it is, my heart sinks, and I begin a litany of 'oh shits' that end with 'I can't believe it.'  Then I have to sneak in and try not to alert my boss.  He's cool, but he gets here loooong before I do."

"Gee," she said, "you don't seem the type."  She chuckled.

It was the first time I realized that she knew who I was.

Skip ahead.  Yesterday she came to my office.  She wanted to see two large photos I have there, she said.  She sat down.  And it began.

I am crazy, of course.  Even younger woman have lives, husbands, children, stupid things.  What makes us want what we want?  I can't tell you.  I know that there is something terribly irrational about it, though, and we can't help liking what we like even if it is bad to like it.  I have fewer illusions than I once had.  I won't say none.  We live by illusions, I think, and are full of them.  I should say, then, that I don't think I am deluding myself as much any more.  I want to say, "Tell your husband that you want to have a boyfriend.  You can stay married and raise your children.  Tell him that conventional marriages don't work, that they are dead and defunct, that you will be happier and will be a better wife if you have a boyfriend.  Tell him he will be happier, too.  Tell him he will be jealous, but that he won't need to be, but tell him that his jealousy will fuel his imagination, that his libido will go wild, that you will fuck like monkeys because of it.  Tell him it is what he needs and what you need, too.  I don't want to marry you.  I just want to look at you and smell you and trace the outline of your body with my fingers.  I want to lick and nibble you until you fall apart.  I want to go to dinners and have cocktails and tell you all my stories and hear all of yours until we tire of one another.  And when we do, you will still be married and will still have your family and hopefully you will have no regrets."

That is what I want to tell her today, but that would be premature.  It would be worse than that, I'm afraid.  It would be fatal.  But it would all be true.  We would tire of one another as people always do when all the stories are told and the familiarity that was once a comfort becomes a burden.  And I know I don't want to help a married woman go behind her husband's back.  Nope, I am not that type which is O.K. by me.

But I am pretty sure she will not be bringing back the signed husband's consent form that I will make up for her today.  It will be merely a symbolic gesture on my part.  And by this evening, I will be back to my steady life cooking dinner for one and sharing it with the cat.

But I have been "seen" and that is something.  It may not be enough. . . but it is something.