Years later, whenever I thought about it, I only vaguely remembered the passion that had been there in the beginning. I recalled the weekend trip we had taken to Long Island and was able to reconstruct the glorious sense of communication between us. We had both felt we had never really talked to anyone before in our lives.
There was this amazing electricity between us. We even had moments of E.S.P. when the feelings were so intense; moments in the day when I would call him because I simply knew that he had something to say, times when he could grow horribly depressed and later find that something catastrophic had happened to me at exactly the same moment.
Often, our conversations were unintelligible to other people. We spoke in half sentences, glances, snorts. Sometimes one word could clarify an entire issue because our minds traveled immediately to the same conclusion from the same given point. We could predict the other’s reaction to any stimulus. And our minds, feeding on each other’s brightness, grew so alert in the excitement of our love that we could clarify a major philosophical issue in seconds
Once, at a party, someone had said, “My God, you two sound like you sat down and discussed everything in the world to make sure you agreed before you had sex!” And we had laughed because, indeed, we had existed in such intellectual, emotional and sexual harmony that it was inconceivable that we should disagree on anything.
But that was only half the story. The other half was the memories of the end. The time Teddy had threatened to burn the only copy of my novel. The time I had gotten so furious at him while driving I had actually tried to smash the car. The fist fight on Riverside Drive after I had called him a whore and he had ended up hitting me, giving me a bloody nose and then desperately trying to comfort me, sobbing, moaning, “Just get out of my life. Just leave me alone.”
Everything had gone so wrong. The love we had claimed was the most important thing in the world, the passion that would never die, the sex that would never end, the maturity that would come and guide us – it had all shattered in our hands and we had ended up, shouting at each other in a Chinese restaurant after I had furiously tossed water on his lo mein and the manager had thrown us out and he had run away from me on the street and I had chased him all the way up Broadway, screaming in the dark.
