The Body of Brooklyn

Season of Love

...................................................................... SeasonofLove n my excursions into memory, those times when I will myself into the past, frequently I find myself at the door of the incipient . Those just-about-to-happen memories, whether they happened or not, pull me to an excruciating point of truth, demand that I try to arrange and rearrange details into a form that satis- fies, that seems to satisfy the need to see just what happened. Then comes the easy part: figuring out what it means. I was twenty, just out of college, talking to a friend on the telephone. Having gotten off early from work, a research job for a Manhattan foundation, I was enjoying the pleasing banter that comes from talking to someone at exactly the right intervals. This friend and I, some years earlier, had silently reached the understanding that we could not bond bosom to bosom as we had in early adolescence, but needed to stay within each other’s orbits. It was a warm afternoon; I paced the cool dark carpet of the first floor of my parents’ row house, saying and listening to familiar phrases, familiar names. I had an appointment to meet another friend, Richie Ernst, at Manhattan Beach for some basketball , but that was an hour away. I had time for pleasantries, for oldfriendtalk. The door to the staircase always needed planing. It was at the top of the stairs. The stairs themselves numbered twelve carpeted steps down and two to the right. This put you in the “playroom,” a misnomer since we never used it for anything but storage. The first floor of the house had been my grandparents’ apartment. When they died, the staircase became the connection to a sane level of space. My brother and I were liberated from one cramped room to two smallish rooms whose comparative space impressed us through our adolescences to the time we left home. The only vestige of the grandparent days down in our new I country was an enormous mirror that seemed to occupy half of one wall of the playroom. My mother yelled down, “Richie’s here.” “Send him down,” I said, thinking it odd that my friend should be here when I was to meet him there. The door to the staircase thudded open. Steps down the stairs. I continued talking but moved to where I could see my friend emerge. But he didn’t. Standing on the small landing was a young man, middle twenties, long blond hair in tresses, and piled high. His loose shirt was open, his chest hairless. We stood looking at each other for ten or twenty seconds. I did not know him. I said, “Hold on,” said it to the phone and set it down. I experienced a pure cognitive dissonance, unlike any confusion I had known. My mind started racing: friend of my brother, someone whom I didn’t recognize . . . nothing fit. Finally : “Do I know you?” He stepped down the two steps and walked toward me; he was a foot away. He extended his hand. Dazed, I shook it, and as I did he announced, calmly, pleased, “This is the season of love.” “Who are you?” “This is the season of love.” “Do I know you?” “This is the season of love.” “What do you want?” “This is the season of love.” He wanted me to turn around and look into my grandparents’ mirror . “Just look in the mirror,” he kept repeating, as though that would explain everything, as though I would see something, some sign, some manifestation of the season of love. Then there was silence, house silence, the non-noise of the inside of something. I trembled, and a sense of cognizance started returning. Even so, I contemplated looking into the mirror. It was a tantalizing charge, an almost attractive imperative . Not only that, but I have never excelled in physical confrontations , unless they called for passivity, pliancy. If the rule, clear, were that I was to give in, play dead, as a means of extrication, I could do that, did do that well. No one could have been robbed, hassled, bullied as much as I was, and escaped so relatively unscathed, without some acumen, some Eastern impulse that shut the systems down, yielded what was wanted, and went on its shaken but unbroken way. I Season of Love 121 had internalized a confrontational decorum, and felt it welling up, urging me to turn...