“I haven’t laid naked with someone and listened to music since college,” he told me. “And if someone told me then”—I felt sure he would make a comment about how much time passed before he would repeat this experience, a comment about how he’d expected to have a life full of listening to music with another nude person, but he didn’t—”that I’d have 60 hours of music on a computer with speakers the size of my fist, I would never have believed it.”
We had just had sex, and he admitted that part of him wanted us to have sex immediately once we were together (“To get it out of the way,” I laughed) so we could spend the rest of our time together talking without distraction. Haven’t I said it before? The sex is the excuse.
“I keep changing my mind about how old you are,” he said, as though this information was’t readily available. “When I first met you, I thought, ‘young.’ But as time goes on I think you either had the most culturally comprehensive upbringing ever, or you’re…”
“Old!” I said, hitting him.
“No one in their twenties could know as much as you do,” he said expansively, with certainty.
“How young is young?”
“26, 27. You had too much poise to be 24.”
I started laughing. “I’m 28. 28!”
“28,” he said, trying out the idea. “Okay…”
“Everyone’s always thought I’m older than I am,” I said. “Ever since I was a teenager.” I should be used to it by now but it always hurts my feelings. Not that I’m sure what good comes with seeming young, except that being young is supposed to be immunization against being undesirable or ugly.
“I am curious about what I’ll look like when I get older,” I ventured as he mulled over this information. “When I’m in my mid-forties. It must be strange to get so used to looking at a wrinkle-less face and then see something different in the mirror.”
I know he thinks about this kind of thing. He always brings up his age when we’re together. He’s not so old, but he’s noticing how old he is. He says he’s at the stage of his life where he thinks more about the past than about the future but I’ve always been that way, from my very first days of having enough scraps of memory to worry over.
His music was on shuffle. The original version of “True Colors” came on and he said, “This is one of the all-time great songs.”
“She has so many good ones.”
“And I remember when it first came out. I remember watching her on MTV, when MTV was new.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. We laid side by side in the dark, eyes open.
“Now children sing this in elementary school,” he said, and the simplicity of this, the accuracy of this—I can’t tell you. Instantly I heard them, I pictured them singing it, and it overwhelmed me. I felt as though I might cry. A bare quiet rushed over us and I was nearly certain that if I looked over at him, he would be.
