Dreaming About X-Boyfriends

I dreamed about George ________ last night. Or rather, I lived with him in a place called Sleep for weeks or months. It was quite peculiar.

First, I talked with Max on the phone. I'd been working so hard all day that I really didn't have purchase on my own thoughts, and so our conversation devolved into a series of Berkeley vignettes –

"… And now I'm walking by a park –"

"Ho Chin Minh Park?"

"I don't know Ho Chi Minh Park. I'm at Russell and MLK Drive –"

"Oh, right. Near the high school. I can never call it MLK Drive. It will always be Grove Street to me –"

"And then later tonight, we're going to meet some friends at a little restaurant. Le Bateau Ivre –"

"Oh, my God! I had my first and only waitressing job at Le Bateau Ivre! I lasted maybe a week. I was the world's worst waitress! I was constantly dropping food platters on customers!"

"Did you really? How funny!" Max said.

When I lived in Berkeley, Le Bateau Ivre had just opened.

And now it's 35 years later…

Talking to Max filled me with an emotion that can only be described as saudade, I suppose. This intense, stylized longing for a place in my life that is so distant from who and what I am now that it might as well be something I made up. In that, of course, I am hardly unique. It's an odyssey the vast majority of human beings on the planet make, from what they once were to what they unwittingly become. But it crushed me with melancholy.

Max lives in exactly the same neighborhood I lived when I was his age.

"Text me pictures of Berkeley," I begged him on the phone.

He said he would.

But he won't.

I think that conversation with Max is why I dreamed about George.

###

In the dream, George and I met up and immediately went back to being lovers. Sex with George was exactly the way I remember it being. We coupled like otters on a riverbank, lusty and sleek and uncomplicated, and he took me to a party, which turned out to be a launch party for a film he was producing. The dream was quite complicated and transpired over a period of several weeks so it had worked its way to, We are reasonably content with one another, we should consider staying with one another, when I finally awoke –

Of course, we were in our twenties in the dream. In our twenties, but not in our twenties, of course, because the intervening 35 years had taken place. But in the dream, we were still young and beautiful. And I remembered another photograph in my old photo album, George and I sunbathing naked on his roof. My breasts were bare and he had a semi-erection, not because we were messing around but because he was sitting in the sun. My kids just thought that was the most disgusting photograph in the world. I suppose I can understand that, but it was still a beautiful and rather innocent photograph.

Parenthetically, after Eleanor posted that photograph on Facebook of us sitting in our Paris apartment several months ago, I actually Google-stalked George. He's a surgeon now, practicing in a Houston suburb. He lists his hobbies as "playing croquette." There was a small photo of him too, and he's developed a double chin above which his Cupid's bow mouth looks quite ridiculous. I'm sure he has that same mildness and sweetness of disposition he always had, and I'm equally sure he never dreams of me.

I'm doomed to be invisible. To get smaller and smaller and smaller in other people's memories and my own sense of myself. Karmic retribution, I suppose, for being tall and loud and self-involved for most of my life. One of these days, I won't even be there when I wake up. I'll be someone else entirely.