Exploring any topic with him—why certain couples are drawn to one another, how best to portray the Holocaust on film, how despised difference (blacks, Jews, gays) could also be celebrated identity—tended to widen and deepen rills of thought into brooks and rivers, serotonin sluicing through them, producing an almost transcendent high.
He exuded the ‘don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass’ freedom I deeply wished to make my own. Our love was built on prior bonds of friendship we’d shared for several years prior.
And then, he was familiar. His capacity for rapture, so like my mother’s, could climax in involuntary tears at a poem, film or piece of music that struck him as exquisite. His sense of duty and off beat machismo, so like my father’s, grounded him and led him to excel in a competitive profession.
Solitude was never as sweet as when I knew I’d see him soon or when I was working in his study catching snatches of him singing old blues standards downstairs in the kitchen. It reiterated a recurring childhood scene of winter afternoons, lying in the dusk beneath the baby grand, awaiting inspiration for melodies I’d then bang out on the keyboard. Essential to this “composing” was my mother’s presence in the kitchen down the hall. Her nearness without threat of interference spurred my efforts to sit there and try out my notes.
So what could go wrong?