j

You can hardly count it, but under what criteria does one count? and only the simple writer, and only the simple reader, thinks it is about counting.

This is a Montana blizzard of my youth, which lasted as long I suppose as the youths of most men these days, which lasts perhaps even into the now.

She was quite a bit older than I was, twice as grown up, and where we always found ourselves was hovering in the doorway of her fifth floor apartment in a big brick building near the university. We’d hug and sometimes she’d hold and if you were still enough you could feel her gently kissing your neck but I hardly ever felt still at those times.

I was afraid of her. I suppose that fear was based on some subconscious wisdom, some instinct. I wanted badly to be in her, but at some level I must have also known I’d be in over my head.

This was a beautiful woman, athletic, smart. There was a picture, the only one I had of her, standing on a tennis court. You could see her stomach, the slight ripple of muscle there. It was the only time I tried to show a girl off to my father, putting that picture down in front of him, but his response was non-committal.

And she wasn’t my girl. In fact, she was some other man’s.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t get it, at least not right away. The door was open, but she wasn’t going to stand there with it in her hand forever. By the time I came around, it was too late. I tell that to women now, when they don’t move forward at the right time and then later want whatever kind of bonding might have been available; I say, Our time has passed.

I knew her best through the winter and it wasn’t until spring until I tried to act but by then the moment was gone. There was a night at a house of which she was taking care; we watched a film and she put her legs, bare, in my lap, and I sat very still. It was snowing. I can’t remember the movie. I don’t think we finished. Somehow we ended up dancing, holding each other and moving our feet and whispering as if we weren’t alone though we were. The house belonged to a screenwriter, a man who had just been paid a lot. What I remember of it best is his collection of laser discs, at a time when I’d not known they exist.

We danced in some room I can’t picture. I was telling her about my prom. I don’t know why. I suppose because I didn’t know what to say. There were her lips on my neck again, just a kiss, the way once a straight male friend kissed my neck when he was going to travel to Australia and be gone for a year, leaving me to guard over his girlfriend—which I did, whom I did not touch—the kind of kiss that can be just an expression of some kind of affection.

We went to our separate bedrooms. Mine was upstairs.

Later, in the spring, when we were past hope (there was never real hope for anything real between us; I was simply under-prepared), she said, I kept waiting for you to come down.

And I told her, I kept waiting for you to come up.

I remember that long night. The ceiling, the tightness in my neck, the snow outside the window.

In the beginning, I never really went into her apartment. Those early nights of winter. The steps went down the outside of the building, and I run away from her and down them, my feet loud against the steel, and I’d run off across the field of snow to my own place, trying to understand what was going on, or maybe trying not to. Wanting to be breathless and tired.

Later, she gave me a book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I still have it. In the front cover, she has written: I simply want to give you something I love.

We would lie on her couch and I would read it out loud to her.

She is sick, maybe fevered, and the winter won’t wane, and I still don’t know if she wants this or not, but I move my hand up her bare leg. Maybe my hand moves itself. I keep reading and move my fingers beneath her shorts. A blanket is covering us. We’re still. In an impossibly brief amount of time, I’m touching her x. I’ve felt others, but none like this, perhaps because the others I could conceive of; this one, hers, it is the truly unknown, and yet I am in the process of beginning to know it.

I am not ready.

She moans and her weight relaxes completely into me.

I keep reading, and I move my hand away, back down her leg.

With most things, it is forward or backward. There is rarely such a state between two people as absolute stagnation. My fingers do not go inside. They go back down her leg.

Later, I’d dwell on it. I’d tell my friend, D, that I wish I’d had the courage. That if I’d slept with j, there would at least be something solid to hold onto, a rock in my memory—I’ve always been afraid of what I’ll lose in forgetting—but it has turned out not to be true. I remember her, those January evenings, the falling snow, the way she felt, what little I felt of her, I remember it, enough of it, I do.