Everything I know about the house on Coleman Drive I carry around in my heart. Its nondescript split level brick facade, its lattice enclosed front porch, the chimney rising straight out of the roof of the entry foyer, then up close against the second story. After all these years the house still holds stories, mysteries, dreams for me, All magic now, those dreams remain forever unchanged, Like music, ethereal.

I had driven past the house many times. Whenever work or fancy took me in that general direction I made it my business to pass by and make sure it was all still there, perhaps waiting for those lovers to reemerge, re-enter the story, unchanged by time.

From the birds eye the little community in which the house stood probably stretched a few miles in each direction; from the child’s eye it literally went on forever in the twisting and turning of its narrow macadam streets, streets without sidewalks, streets which when first made were barren of trees, houses the same, all standing stark against the potato fields from which they had grown, each with a nuclear family, one mother, one father, two children, sometimes one of each and sometimes both the same…..

“And I grew up there too,

I came up from the bottom without a clue,

I was raised in the local petting zoo,

Darling , in the real world these might be hunting you,

Lion and Tiger and Hong Kong flu.”

I lived on Charles Street, not very far from the house on Coleman Drive. I went back there once, hesitant, I rang the doorbell and a young woman appeared, she was younger than I, a mother with two children, just as it always has been. I said “I grew up in this house, I was just curious to see it again”, and Something in my manner must have disarmed her because she graciously invited me in. I felt like a giant coming in through that front door. Like Alice through the looking glass, everything was so small, tiny staircase that I used to slide down leading up to tiny bedrooms where my sister and I had grown, and the big room, my parents room, with the huge queen size bed that sometimes fit the four of us when we needed to squeeze in warm beside them and ease our fears, how could that tiny room ever have accommodated us all. Impossible memory. My room? I wanted to duck my head. Two tiny frame windows, one facing West and one facing North, the North window overlooking the roof of the garage, the garage roof pitched to 45 degrees, This roof, strange, was a haven for me, often late at night, feeling poetic, depressed I would climb out my window and sit at the peak under that great dome of stars, the heavens that opened out over my roof every night, where I sat, long after midnight, mystified by the wonder of it all, questioning where the God might be in all that, teenage nutcase, fragile, beautiful child. The roof was my ladder, my escape route, out into the night. What I was thinking of half the time, I wouldn’t know. I guess I was some kind of midnight adventurer, a Cyrano of the suburbs, a musketeer without compatriots, a poet of the stars, and calling me silently, calling me on, the other of this story, love unrequited, my love. How lucky we, how beautiful, young love, how painfully lovely.

So, two points of light in the firmament from which I hope to fix my position, celestial blip-blop, worked out in theory before I ever came on the scene. Hard science. There is he over here, there is she over there, There is movement on the surface of planet earth. There is movement. Neither you nor I can change one second of that past. Thank god for small blessings. That’s what I want to say.

What does conversation sound like when Conversation has long since played out, sound and memory played out, deep in the recesses of the heart. Is it the sound of whispering, two lovers whispering, afraid to be found out, the sound of heat driving two beating hearts, the sound of breathing, breath, the sound of sweating, sweat, the sound as two lovers move, holding tight, skin like one skin, every cell intense, alive, shivering, a lovers conversation, once in time, now in memory, and remembered. What could have kept him from the house on Coleman drive? Not discovery, not fire and brimstone, not the cops, not the neighbors dead asleep in there own versions of the American dream, not night sounds, not the soulful trilling of whippoorwills, not the ghostly shadows of the trees, not midnight bat wing over his head, nor the moon’s pale ethereal light.

In the moonlight under her window, tiny pebbles dug from her garden, strike the glass. Explosive sound to him, alone in the dead of night, and to her in the recesses of her room, waiting, and within moments the front door swinging open, she taking him by the hand, in her tiny hand, and leading him tiptoe up the stairs. Can you believe this could be so? Silently up the stairs while the grandfather clock in the hall tick tocked each second out so loud it covered the padding of their footsteps from the rest of the world. Hold your breath, don’t breath, place each step carefully, into the room, her room, her bed. Often they fucked each other, dangerously, into sleep, exhausted, spent, delicious sleep, curled warm around each other, like pythons, like puppies. Warm, safe, dreaming, waking, dreaming, drugged. Love so powerful, narcotic. And then they would have to tear it all apart. Wrenching free of each other, as if they couldn’t breathe. “I have to go” he said, “Let me up, it’s daylight, I have to go home”. She clung to him always, knowing he had to leave, not letting him go. Not wanting him to go. One last kiss, deep kiss, desperate kiss, then back down the stairs, feet as light as feathers, out into the still morning air.

“I ran all the way home

Just to say I’m sorry

What can I say, I ran all the way.”

In the Long Island dream of the fifties they played it tough, two hearts as tender as spring shoots, tender as flower petals, played it tough, dungaree cuffs rolled, hair slicked back, pony-tail sexy, baby doll dreamers, cigarettes cupped to the inside of the hand, motorcycle boot tuff, shirtsleeves rolled, even a tattoo, in the world before tattoo. Tough. But of course not tough enough, not tough at all. Baby’s in the woods.

They were in love. In those days when you were in love you got engaged, so they became engaged. They were babies, engaged. They exchanged gifts, a ring, cufflinks…….they plaited their troth, whatever that meant. Their parents were happy. If these kids don’t get married they’ll be trouble. Too much heat with those two. And of course they were right. She had already told him once, early on that she was pregnant. He, terrified had broken off the relationship, she jumped up and down to miscarry the child, her friends helped her she said, and finally it was gone, relief, it was gone….but it was never really gone for him.

So, said the parents “Let them be married……they’ll do Ok”. But of course it was never to be. In those days with drugs first coming on the scene, With “On the Road” as the map, “the best minds of our generation, starving, hysterical naked; “I’m goin’ down that long lonesome road gal, where I’m bound I can’t tell and goodbye is too good a word gal, so I’ll just say fair thee well, when the rooster crows at the break of dawn, look out your window and I’ll be gone, you’re the reason I’m travelling on, but don’t think twice it’s all right.”

“So puzzle me that

That I sitting, sat

Watched a rainbow appear

And shimmering, falling, disappear.

With the snap of my fingers, Dat vus dat.”

Describe her?  You’re going to piss me off. It’s all about vocabulary, turn over a rock, and describe what you see. Creatures? No good. Bugs? I don’t think so. Well that’s a worm. Yeah sure, but how to describe the universe revealed, without vocabulary. There is a tree I know, I pass it almost every morning, how could I describe it to you. It stands no more than 4 feet off the ground, it is knarled confusion, it is an affront to geometry, no line is straight, it overarches itself like a lattice umbrella and heads back down toward the ground. It is ancient within whatever genetic lifespan defines it. And to protect it someone has lovingly surrounded it with a wire fence. At first I thought it might be dead, left there purely as sculpture but then I noticed tiny leaf buds at the extremities of its branches, its root system still pulling sustenance out of the alluvial mud, deep into the soil where everything is churning, alive. There was a little green sign attached to its trunk, and I read, incredulous, Elm. Simply three letters, Elm. But how could this describe an elm. Do you see what I mean. How about European Hornbeam, Turkish Filbert, Sycamore, Saucer magnolia, Norway Maple, Hackberry, black Cherry, Pin Oak, Columnar Beech, Bald Cypress, Thornless Honey Locust, London Plane tree, Ginkgo, All are part of the vocabulary of tree. So, describe her, describe me. Ask for our story in 100 words or less. Not even Tolstoy would be up to that task.

Describe her?  It’s like asking somebody what they do. “So, what do you do”? I usually refuse to answer. How could I describe myself like that. A one sentence shortcut to help you understand something I’ve been working on my entire life, something which is still not anywhere near being defined. In fact can never be defined, is always in flux, transition…..but you need an answer, Ok. I say real estate novelist. I smile to hide the feeling I have defiled myself. So, she. To describe her?  In what way? As her parts. As the sum of her parts. Delicate, hows that? Graceful. Size three in fashion terms. Two perfect breasts each of which you’d wish were cupped in your hands. High cheekbones, slightly Asian slant to the eyes. Like the Jews from the Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Khazaria, Kiev. Like my grandfather Joseph, even a little like me. Her expression? Slightly skeptical, wry, easy to smile, with a touch of sadness at the corners of the mouth. Eyes curious. Questioning. Laugh lines. Body? Like a puzzle piece. Cut perfectly to fit into mine. Her smell. It depends on the time of day. At night, buried under the covers, perspiring slightly, after making love, almost overpoweringly delicious, primal, you want to go everywhere, places that only lovers can go. Of course as she says, in the morning, all powdered and perfumed, she cleans up quite nicely. When she told me that I walked around smiling all day. What does that say about love? Remember, this all comes out of memory. Memory has blurred all the lines, like a Suerat, perfect blending of color from one object to the next. No sharp lines. No demarcation. Like a dream. Like love. Nothing really matters. Only the moment, in the moment is all.

What are their names.  Does it matter?  There is power in names, and the power in the names of lovers ten-fold so. And of course she was delicious beyond belief, in the slightly salty taste of her skin, giving off heat and musk like a tiny engine, and so, like a hummingbird he hovered close to her, she all flower, he reaching out with his tongue, licking along the elegant curve of her breast, and buried his face into the fold under her arm…they were both ever so slightly shivering. “Why are you smiling” he said. “I was remembering the first time you kissed me down there, how horrified I was, that maybe all those parental warnings were coming home to haunt me……pot smoking leading to pre marital sex leading to pregnancy, perversion, prostitution, venereal disease, insanity”. “who you been talking to”, he said.

The plane engines split the air over Old New York and the plane descending, dreamlike, frightening, huge, hanging precarious, miraculous, above the rush hour choked highway so close to the runways of  LaGuardia airport that planes seemed to be landing and cars taking off in the same space at the same time. Impossible you would say like Einstein turning a corner at seventy second and Broadway  distracted by the smell of grilling hot dogs assaulting his senses from “Papaya King” on the corner, thinking rationally as he turns his head to look……”could they be Kosher”, ……crashes into Isaac Newton rushing distractedly from the other direction and knocks him down, scattering Newton’s packages, groceries, vegetables, fruit, apples over the filthy ground. An apple rolls out onto broadway and is crushed under the wheels of a speeding yellow cab……Newton stunned reaches out his hand to Einstein for help.. ”Fucking vegetarians!”, Einstein says. The plane hangs in the air momentarily defying gravity…and in total control of time and space I can hold it there..And now the plane delicately touches down. It was carrying her of course. What would she look like, feel like, after 40 years had passed? but that is another story.

”what happens to them next?” she says…and please, kill the Einstein/ Newton thing, it’s distracting me. “Now please go on”.