An Old Man and His Memories - Part 5: Mexico City Encuentro

Looking Back at a Long Queer Life

(Note: Catch up on earlier parts of the story HERE.)

Once I’d heard from Gene that Russell now lived in Mexico City, I could not rest easy even in the beautiful house in beautiful Cuernavaca. As soon as I gracefully could, I went to find him. I could not attend to anything else until I did.

I stayed, not with the Harmons in their swank Reforma penthouse – though he cordially invited me (she, not so much, which forbode a possibly icy reception that I thought it best to avoid). Instead, I found digs more my style in a room of an art-filled house – much of the art Mexican and much of it exquisite – in La Condesa (Hipódromo more precisely) just off Parque Mexico, steps from Avenida Amsterdam, which encircled the park. The back balcony of my room looked onto a patio with walls painted brick red and dusky yellow, setting off the lush green of the tropical plants. From the front, I looked down to the equally lush and green promenade that ran all around the center of Amsterdam, perfect for evening paseos with lovers both current and past. There it was, along Amsterdam, that Russell arranged to have our lovers’ paseo – past lovers, it would be – of recollection, explanation, reconciliation.

I had walked by his shop and looked through the window and seen him there, with a customer, who felt at that moment, no doubt, that she mattered more to him than all else in the world. I remembered that feeling in his presence once upon a time myself. I thought of going in, but I knew that it was neither the time nor place for the meeting I wanted with him. And so I telephoned, and left a message with the shop assistant who answered, asking when we might get together – as old friends bridging the years.

He returned my call in the afternoon and left a message with my hostess, suggesting that we meet at the Foro Lindbergh, in the center of the park, toward sunset, when his shop had closed. Then we could go to dinner and catch up. He’d be wearing a red paper rose (he sold them in his shop) in case I did not remember what he looked like after so many years. (Oh, I remembered; how vividly I remembered!)

At 5, I stopped for churros and chocolate at a little place just outside the park – it seemed the perfect pastime on a perfect summer afternoon in an exotic city, as one anticipated a rendezvous with a former lover after many years. Or should that be encuentro, since we were in Mexico City instead of Paris? I hardly knew what I expected to come from our meeting, or even what I hoped for. After so many years, and with my new-found contentment in St. Louis (or was contentment too saccharine and trite a word?), surely I had no yearning that we might reunite. Even the utterly romantic, once so badly burned by romance before, must be too rational for such thoughts as that. And yet, as my rational fraction asked: Then why else did I even want such a revisit to the past?

And yet and yet and yet. And yet once again that Faulkner truth that the past is never really past as long as those of us who lived it are still alive to remember it, and long, even just a little, to have it back again.

The waiter brought my order – a cup of chocolate thick as Jell-o pudding and a long golden churro encrusted with sugar and cinnamon. Beautiful, with his black hair and dark eyes and flashing smile, he said “buen provecho” as he set the delights on the table before me. And he looked down at me with a lingering glance, a glance I’d seen many times before in many different cities, a glance as universal as music, for those who know how to interpret it.

Or maybe I only saw the glance because I wanted to see it so much, because I’d seen it less and less as the years passed, and something about this charged scenario – soon to be meeting an old lover to ask him directly at last why he had left me, after so many years of wondering – something about this appointment in this exotic city, with so much masculine beauty all around, made me long to think that such a glance could still find me, even now.

It was with such thoughts – and longings – that I passed the long minutes (stretching into hours) until we’d meet in the park. With such thoughts, and with watching, from my sidewalk table, the handsome dark young Mexican men coming and going along the street, at the end of their work days and the beginning of their enviable young nights.

As I sat over my cooling chocolate, growing even thicker as it cooled, and which I didn’t drink, stirring it slowly with a churro, which I didn’t eat, almost forgetting both as my mind traveled over geography and time, I began to wonder (and fear a little) what it would be like seeing Russell again, after so long – almost 10 years. I had changed, both in person and as a person. And, of course, he would have changed too.

The intensity of our short time together – not even two years, from the first chance meeting in Santa Fe to that last night after the opening in Houston – had burned an image of him into my mind – an image which had not changed in the 10 years since. An image that I had treasured, even at the times when I wished I could banish it forever.

Now that the image and the man had an appointment to keep, I almost gasped at the possibility that they would not have anything left in common, after so long apart.

As I sat there, I went so deeply into that other world, memory, that present and past became the same, for a little while at least. I made that reckless error of thinking back to the great loves of my life. Not so many: Clem, Our Cellist, Russell. How lucky I felt myself, that I could think of them as “great,” even though each in turn had brought pain that seemed almost as great as the love. There had also been other, lesser loves and pains, many of them – some that seemed so foolish now that I blushed remembering them – but those three were the great ones.

And now two of those had returned to me, not so much the great “passionate” loves they’d been in their first form, but still great in the sustaining way that makes even passion seem pale. Could it be possible that the same might be the case with Russell? Would I find soon that my third great love could come back to me too, the gold of mature comfort transformed by the refiner’s fire from the silver of youthful passion?

Though, of course, my time with Russell had not been in youth; and who knew if the Russel, with one “L,” I was about to meet might be so changed from the Russell I had known that I would not recognize him – even with the red paper rose?

By the time I’d come back from faraway and long ago, I’d sat at the table with my uneaten chocolate and churro so long that the other tables had all filled, and the waiter looked at me, not with that glance of “perhaps desire” that I’d almost convinced myself I’d seen before, as with that unmistakable look of agitation at a guest who’d overstayed his welcome. I tipped him well to make up for my heedlessness, and as I stood to leave, I smiled, and he smiled, and I thought I saw …

“No fool like an old fool,” I thought as I walked the short distance to the park, and I smiled an amused smile at myself that I could still entertain such young-man fantasies. Would that I could still entertain them even decades hence – and still smile knowing that they were fantasies.

And as I went into the Foro Lindberg, I saw Russel(l) far on the other side – saw first the red paper rose, of course, though even without the rose I thought I’d certainly have recognized him. Even after so many years.