The beautiful old apartment had windows on the east and west side of the room. This is an unusual feature for the city. To the cat sitter this was an enviable breezy luxury escape from the hot close humidity of Manhattan summers, but on this, coldest windiest night of the year, it wasn’t the greatest. The wind seemed to pass right through the windows. Nothing stops the wind.
The cat sitter looked for any available spare blankets as the wind howled outside. He put on his microfiber long underwear, his knit hat, his socks, till finally, with piles of double bed sized blankets folded two layers for his single sleeping, he drifted to dreamland.
She is getting into bed with him, she really is, she was here. She came for the warmth. He needed warmth. She needed warmth. His warm heart welcomed her.
(The same heart that had hardened itself when he had thought he needed to walk away, save her from the aging depleted self he had become. He couldn’t save his 19 year old mother from himself, but make up for it here.
It pained her to be saved. He couldn’t communicate these things to her. It was his worst mistake, a deeply regretful one after she had shown him what it feels like to have a lonely broken heart by cutting off all communication, freezing him out from his only real human contact. No she wouldn’t still be “friends”. It was a lesson he needed. It felt like a final, most important lesson that showed him what he was to women and what he had done to so many before her.)
But now here she was. Open again, forgiving, willing to share their warmth. The freeze in the world more unbearable than that of their fears. This was the real, living creature reality. The need more powerful than the abstract self hating cold fear of his ultimate impoverished death that he had let drive him to separate.
She enters the bed to the warmth of the moment and that is all that is necessary.
That is all they need. No performance toward physical ecstasy, or possession, is necessary or welcome. Touch, tenderness, and warmth is all that is. All that is ever really wanted, all that is really needed, all that is beyond the fear and the culturally confining notions of what a man and a woman are, ought to be, or want. Nothing that had separated them is there, and never is it to return. There is no time for it to return. There is no time. They are one. He doesn’t understand, but at the same time, completely understands, and knows why she is here.
He woke as usual alone, the blankets were too warm and sliding off the side of the bed. The old man used the bathroom as he did it more than once each night he returned to the bed cuddling within himself. It wasn’t sad.
She is here in his forever, warm within him. Somehow he knew she knows miles away, connected. He was not a man to keep anything other than to keep moving. He hardly wanted to keep any memories. He would hold this dream of the dream that she was as long as he could.
He wanted o more human touch in his life. They had shown one another that touch only really causes mutual pain. He has turned away from all the complications of making dreams of connection a wholesome reality in a world that has imploded. His final movements, attempts do escape that black hole.
The memory of soft skin, this dream reality is all he would ever dare to want again.
"Hearts shaped like valentines aren't at all the fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron and a twist to the iron at that. A streamlined heart, say, with a claw like a hammer's claw, better used for ripping than for tapping at old repairs that's what's needed to get by these days. It's the new style in hearts. The non-corrugated kind don't wear well any longer."
Nelson Algren from his 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm
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