A Collection of Brevities by Patrick Summers

Author:Patrick Summers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Contenti Press
Published: 2024-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Brevities (Alta)

Anyone seriously delving into a book about Joey will want to answer a simple question: how did Gene not know about Joey’s father, about Giuseppe? The truth is no less true for being quite unbelievable: he never asked. I was intimate with Gene for a short time; we were at most a collection of brevities. Giuseppe was my unquestioned extension of life, but Gene never knew about him. Then there was Tom, whom neither Gene nor Giuseppe knew about. I can’t tell you how these realities fight with how I planned to live my life, and how utterly at odds my actions are with my religious convictions. Gene never physically excited me, but I always felt him attempting to love, almost yearning to feel something for me or anyone, in those moments before he was close to release. I loved him for the surface of his attempt, even when he was humiliating me. That he never succeeded in loving should not overshadow his desire to fleetingly try. The will to love overshadows everything. I was so unmoored through the whole of my young life that I had no one I could talk to about any of this. I could not take my problems to a priest and confess double adultery, could I? Nor could I have left Giuseppe up in the country all alone pining for me.

I envied Joey’s sexual life, as I know that after he was out from the clutches of Perry I think he had quite a good time. I worried about him being alone all those years, but now he has his Ben and they certainly seemed a pile of sex. Now he has made me a grandmother of sorts, I guess. I don’t know quite what to do with that information, because I was not party to anything emotional about it. I was informed, over the phone, of a surrogacy—hardly the kind of romance one needs to feel like a grandmother. I envied Joey because he seemed to love sex so much. I did, too, most of the time, but it also seemed to cause no end of problems in my life. It didn’t occur to me that Giuseppe and I were having sex in New York; it sounds so ordinary. I certainly wasn’t raped, as my mother’s narrative constantly told. I simply gave myself to a feeling of possibility, and I loved being close to him, loved hearing and seeing him feel the kind of pleasure he felt.

I was well into my forties before I had a truly spiritual orgasm, something that caused me enormous shame for a long time. The truth is, it simply never occurred to me that there should be something more. Oh, some of the movies in those years sounded exactly like my own feelings, and a few lines could have been uttered in my own life—“It went flat when I told it to. I didn’t think to ask for more” when Eleanor of Aquitaine is asked in The Lion in Winter if the English Channel had parted for her crossing.

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