<Everyone is mixed. you are so silly sometimes>
<No, I mean there was more than this. No matter how one feels as a man, there is an undeniable eroticism (and a discomfort, I grant you) to sit and witness as a woman sends off her husband in order to be with you.>
<To argue her husband’s case!>
<In any case! (pauses) Only that?>
<Are you hurt? You are, aren’t you? All these years and still the pouting need to know...some things cannot be known. Why would you imagine that I had any sense what I meant from moment to moment? A twenty-seven year old girl!>
<Twenty-six. You looked so lovingly upon him when he went.>
<My husband and child. Your child also. I loved them. I held your hand thereafter. Made you tea and pirogi. At some point touched your face. >
<I know exactly. That space upon my cheek forever burns with your touch. (She laughs aloud, pokes at his biceps hard enough that it aches.) I knew also it was nothing. Or not that, not nothing. Rather a different way of life, a different life. A more cultured existence, something more European.>
<We were living in a shack full of trash and broken toys. Not far from where I boiled the tea there was a tub of sour clothes soaking in detergent stolen from neighboring cottages. I was never so bereft, not even in Poland. These illusions of yours. You want to make me into your own vision of what you think your past was. I greeted you as women greet their friends. Is that erotic? Yes and no. It is life, my friend, how life is lived by some women.>
<And some men?>
<Yes, I think so. Some men. Though I haven’t known any. You... you are among the nearest to what is possible for a man. Thus even now I sought you out.>
<And then also.>
<Yes, and then. Is there something wrong in this? In acting upon what one feels?>
<Of course not. I never claimed you were wrong, then or now. Just that from moment to moment I could not be certain whether I was being seduced or sold something.>
<Nor did I claim you were wrong then either, my lovely friend. Nothing is certain. Not then, not now. The same tub which soaked sour shirts and worn jeans sometimes also held a few delicate things, a lacy white brassiere I fished from a sack of smelly donated throwaways, a pair of cheap loden K-mart tights I loved against my white legs. We lead our lives by instants in the same places.>
<Still I loved you.>
<And I loved you. Though whether for your sad self or what you offered my husband and me I cannot say. It was love nonetheless. It is love now.>