Dad grills salmon and Mom poaches it in white wine sauce. Either way, it's delicious. We had some last night with three kinds of vegetables for dinner, and this is a sign of how the simplest food is also usually the best. To accompany the fish, we each picked a wine and I cracked open a 2006 Red Bicyclette Rose. I like roses, those hybrids between the chilled white and room-temperature red, and I remember drinking a great deal of an excellent Ohio vintage last summer in Geneva-on-the-Lake during the Rostan family reunion, at first out of a desire to escape my personal embarrassment as Dad read out loud "And the Sailor Sails Away," my immensely sappy poetic portrait of the eight siblings written at age fourteen (when nothing I wrote was above average and most of it was horribly, horribly pretentious), then from shared joy as we celebrated our time together. (Marc gave me an excellent talking-to in between.)
My best poetry was written when I had a way to focus my subjects, and I simplified my language to make it unflourished, more direct, more conversational. The last poems I wrote were in 2006, one for my cousin's wedding, another for a gathering at a house in Jamaica Plain where the residents loved October, which happens to be my second-favorite month. December is the first, thanks to Christmas and worldwide sensations of love and peace and the promise that a year of accomplishment is giving way to a year of new discoveries and a renewed, just maybe, chance for one and all to change for the better, but October, the month of my birth, is also the most beautiful month if you're in the right spots, with the temperatures just right and the leaves turning gold against auburn-tinged trees and skies.
The girls who lived in Jamaica Plain loved October. They also loved to cook giant pots of soup and hold parties where everyone in attendance had to bring a vegetarian contribution to the giant pots of soup, and we would eat with salad and bread and cheese and some kind of dessert. Their house was at the end of a street right off the T stop, a nondescript shopping plaza giving way to a lane full of shadows, where their residence was always a beacon, glowing, welcoming, apart from the surroundings. We would eat by candlelight and play Carole King and Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens on the record player and have the longest, deepest conversations…I remember an argument about C. S. Lewis where I was pro and an atheistic religion scholar was con.
Three of them. The one who first insisted I come there left soon after for the greener pastures of Allston and was replaced…I remember spending 45 minutes at her apartment one day to get a VCR we needed so Mike and I could watch Flash Gordon, only she had to take a shower and fix her dress and face before we could make the return trip.
Now, the main three hostesses, two of them went to Europe with me, one a charming bisexual, the other a gregarious powerhouse talent who starred in the one good film I directed the whole time I was at Emerson. She knew how to act Strindberg better than anyone I've ever met. The third, who replaced the insister…
And here's where the world of impressions left on the mind comes into play. I was reading Jacques Lacan today and he was musing on how we create our own reality but then must negotiate between this false image and actual existence. Existence, however, is the lifeblood of our delusional id, the most random things blowing up into our greatest importance.
The third I met the very first night I ever ate in the Emerson Dining Hall. We did not speak again for two years, but when I came to that house and introduced myself, she knew me already. She remembered me from that long ago, and that was the younger, insecure, much-overweight Andrew Rostan who did that. The more we talked over the soup and wine, the more I grew entranced, and she was the first woman where I ever had the nerve to ask her number.
We saw each other regularly until I left for Los Angeles. Not that we ever dated, but we did go out once for my birthday, and I bought her flowers when she made her big starring debut on the Emerson Stage…she was, IS, one hell of an actress. She wasn't beautiful in the conventional sense, but she had large, just-sharper-than-doe eyes and a curvy nose and soft brown hair and I couldn't help but be attracted to her seriously.
Not that I ever did a damn thing about it, because this was still Andrew-before-diagnosis-and-correction. We spent all this time as intimate as you could get without being a couple (at least in my personally biased perception) and she never had a boyfriend, at least none worth telling me about, but I could never bring myself to take the next step. The same paralytic fear of ruining the friendship where I finally learned that it doesn't make a difference in the long run, that the fear is worse than the deed.
She is still my friend and one of the highest people I regard, and we talk on the phone every few months, though last time our signal was lost and I called her back and she STILL hasn't called me back. But she's there and thriving and I'm here and thriving. The distance, though smaller, remains long. Do I still care for her? Yes...maybe not as strong as before, but still. Would I seize the opportunity if the stars aligned again? Possibly. But the opportunity may not come, probably won't come, and who knows what she thinks of me now. Besides, I'mheading for a new world as something of a new person, a person much more attuned to himself thanever, and I want the chance to meet women (and men...a guy needs friends)as the closest to the real me I've ever been. Not that I'll ever forget her. As Woody Allen said, "it's all gone except for my memories."
Memories of light moments of happiness from my final days, and of taking the Orange Line out to a cozy kitchen…where Red Bicyclette was consumed each and every time.
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