Read Part I here.

A Wedding, A Marxist, and the Golems of our Youth

Oh, this godforsaken rock!

Places have memory, they have feeling, they invoke. What kind of naïve innocence do I have, the man who thinks he can return to the most beautiful place in the world and have no hold over memories, no mixed emotions, no yearning quality of holding on?

All around me it is green and windy and cold. I’ve been abandoned here at our new home.

 There’s some sparse little furniture, an Updike novel, and me. Five minutes ago I was outside. The thermometer has plummeted.

 It’s solidly spring in this tiny coastal town, but all I can think of is the first winter that I really spent here with a girl who was not meant for me.

She was young, very young. I met her when I was a playful cad closing in on thirty. She was a painfully young thing—a freshman at the local college.

 Her loves bordered on obsession, and they were (in order of importance) whales, cats, figure skating, and the French. 

On together mornings we would rise late, later than either of us normally would. When we finally did get out of bed it was usually due to external forces: a paper that was due, a lunch that we were already ridiculously late for, or an unexpected visitor. The reason for our delay was simple: her house had no heat. In the mornings the light would stream in, it would seem warm, yet a second out from the covers and we would discover exactly what a Maine winter was.

Sometimes we’d even have to wear our coats to bed. 

Once up we’d adjust to the day quickly. There was no undue pretense, no mulling about. Immediately she would jump into four or five layers of clothing and I would pull on at least a thick sweatshirt and some cords. It was so cold that we would have to wear gloves in the house. 

The best part of those mornings was, when in a rush, she’d not tie her hair back tightly. A dozen or so hairs would strand together and slip forward in front of her face. She would push them behind her ear only to have them reappear a moment later. This proved irresistible to me—somehow messy, unkempt, but so utterly natural that one couldn’t help be overwhelmed.

One night in mid-February she accompanied me to a wedding. My good fried Sol had decided to marry a townie, a refined and elegant recent high school graduate named Ingrid. I didn’t believe it, I couldn’t.

I had known Sol for years and he had known Ingrid for almost as long. They’d only begun dating a few months before and had already fled to Australia, where they spent a month on walkabout and had a commitment ceremony on a beach. Tonight’s wedding was a second elopement, one that could actually be considered legally binding.

At the wedding I drank and pontificated, my Marxian beard and stout figure loaning heft to all of my arguments. Sol’s friend Mariah referred to me as being “like a character in a Russian novel”.

 I did my best to take it as a compliment.

That night, shortly before the ceremony, Dominique and I met Sol and Ingrid for appetizers at a local pub called the Thirsty Whale. We ordered deep fried pickles and onion rings. Sol ate almost all the food, but no one really noticed. I was distracted. I kept asking them if they were sure about this, but they just kept smiling and giggling. I figured this to mean that maybe they weren’t ready for it, but I could also tell that they weren’t going to be dissuaded.

 There was nothing I could do.

It was snowing outside and we were the only people in the place. In the summer you wouldn’t be able to find a seat, but in the summer it was always madness in this town.

You couldn’t find a parking space, couldn’t walk down the street without being assaulted by your senses—by vendors, by tourists, old ladies with walkers. 

But around Halloween the place becomes a desert—a ghost town, with windows boarded up and the supermarket closing at eight. Once, as an experiment, a few of us stood together holding hands in the middle of Main Street on a particularly warm day in February. We wanted to see how long we could stand there, how long before a car came and broke our bond. I’d like to say that it was only a few seconds or a minute, but we stood there for a full quarter of an hour without even one car making its way down the nice, even tar. Finally, sensing futility in our mission, we walked on down the street, leaving our little game to anyone who wished to pick up the gauntlet.

No one did.

This was a night just as that had been- quiet. Eventually we left The Whale and caravanned over to Mariah’s parents’ house for the wedding. On the way there I waxed openly to Dominique about starting a pool. “How long would this marriage last?” I asked. “Six months? A year?”

I think of this now not only because I moved back to this rock yesterday, but also because recently I had occasion to see Sol and Ingrid. I was in Palm Beach playing Kato for a week with our mutual friend Augusta. 

We all decided to meet up for a weekend in Tampa.

Years have passed now. Ingrid is an impossible twenty-three and graduating from college. She is beautiful, well spoken- grown up! Sol is as Sol always was—perfectly rude, chipped, hilarious. We had dinner at a famous Cuban restaurant and drank pitchers of mojitos. Later we witnessed a mass baptism in our hotel pool. We laughed, took photos, and smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. We drank beer and wondered aloud if we would ever understand the present America as well as we all understood its history, its necessity.

The next morning we dined at a nearby Waffle Hut and said our goodbyes. On the drive back to Palm Beach I thought about how theirs, the most impossible of unions, was probably the happiest marriage that I’d ever encountered. They were smart, in love, full of each other, even more now than they had been the night of their wedding.

It struck me that maybe I’d never find the same thing. I love my girlfriend, but I am solitary in a way that Sol never was. I am stuck inside myself, assured that I have all that I really need, that anything else, anyone else, is really just an accessory to a fully developed persona.

My old friends all predict that I will be a bachelor for life or Larry King, a man who has been married and divorced something like nine times. I posit that I will be neither, for I am my own thing. Instead I will be a man loved but never quite understood. 

A man full of fear, yearning and insecurity. 

Except for by the people on this rock, for they are like me. To me they are like golems, ancient mythical creatures that come to life whenever I need to be reborn, to find that self I abandoned so long ago. They sew creative destruction. They make me feel young again, and really what else can an overweight thirty-three-year-old with commitment issues and a daily drinking habit really ask for?

My genuine hope is that they forever do their job. For if they abdicated, what would be left of me? Of my world? Frighteningly little I’m afraid. When we fall we head for home—our safe place. But that’s okay, because one can’t think too much about these things. Tonight they are battling, working for me, so I can sit here and write to you and polish off a bottle of red wine and smoke just as many cigarettes as I like.

For tonight, I am alone at the end of the world. And sometimes, when your life feels touched by melancholia and overrun with false starts, that is not such a bad place to be.
 

Timothy Rich is a freelance writer and former man about town. He is now a hermetic, insular, Stephen King loving, machete wielding islander who makes fun of handicapped dogs. He really brings nothing to the table.