If You Knew Then What I Know Now (23 page)

After my ex moved in with his new boyfriend, and we were trying to be friends, my friend Margaret told me she didn't understand. “All the gay men I know stay close with their exes.” She's divorced and would be happy to never hear from
that
man again. “Isn't that hard?” I'd just told her the latest thing my ex had mentioned during a phone conversation that I had taken personally. “I don't know why you'd want to hear that,” she said. I wanted to say, but didn't, that I was probably still in love with him. And I wanted to say, but didn't, that strange as it was, there was something comforting in how our past loves collaborate with our present. And I wanted to say, but also didn't, that spending so much time feeling ashamed of who we are must bear on the ways we love each other—it just has to. But I wasn't sure, so I told her I didn't want to let go because finding love with a man has been so rare and hard.

I'm in bed with him, the new man, my face on his back, thinking about that conversation with her months before this night, and the only thing I know about love is that I don't know anything. Whatever I've learned is lost when we're like this, and I'm falling asleep against him in the spot where I'll wake in the morning, when he'll leave for another month of us away from each other. “What are we doing?” is the question always under everything, the one I can't ask. One answer could be “reinventing love,” but that's only one. Tonight, we've had dinner at the place where we always have dinner. We've eaten
cookie dough Blizzards—he insisted we order the largest size as he always does. We've curled together on the sofa, easing into each other and sleep, before bed.
What are we doing?
Not one of us knows.

I push my chest into his back, tuck my knees into the crook of his bent knees. My mouth only a few inches behind his neck so I can smell his shampoo. Lying on my side, I curl one arm over him and he squeezes my hand in his. My other arm slides under the pillow under his head, and shoves forward across the mattress. It's the perfect way to sleep with a man, yet it still feels new every single time. But as soon as my body slides into place, fitting the way that only one key's grooves are carved smooth for only one lock, a memory opens for the first time in ten years. Another bed, another man, another pillow, another back. That older guy I dated, the one who asked for the bites, he taught me this, word by patient word. Put your arm here, he said, tugging my wrist. Push this one under. Scoot closer. Closer. Now pull your knees into me. There. That's it.

RYAN VAN METER grew up in Missouri and studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Chicago for ten years and worked in advertising. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in
The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters,
and
Fourth Genre,
among others, and selected for anthologies including
Best American Essays 2009.
In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.

© 2011 by Ryan Van Meter

 

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Van Meter, Ryan, 1975-

eISBN : 978-1-936-74740-5

1. Van Meter, Ryan, 1975---Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, American--21st century--Biography. 3. Gay men--United States--Biography. I. Title.

PS3622.A585495Z46 2011

814'.6--dc22

[B]

2010025148

 

 

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