Please remember: "Boardinghouse Reach" is a novel (not a memoir!)
And, besides, whatever events are recounted here happened a very long time ago...
And so it was that I found myself running side by side with my young Brazilian lover along the beach on a day of blue sky and cinematically beautiful white clouds in Litoral Norte, a three-hour drive away from his home in São Paulo. I told him, in my fractured Portuguese, that it was up to him to write the ending to our story, which we both agreed had all the qualities of a first-rate romantic film.
What I didn’t realize then was that it was my story, not his. Our time together was an episode—a juicy, delectable episode, without doubt. But only one of many delicious courses in the ongoing feast of what was to become the rest of my life.
He loved me mightily—and I was head over heels in love with him. But my handsome, soulful, educated, cultured, and highly intelligent Brazilian lover turned out to have a problem with alcohol and crushingly low self-esteem. There were simply too many emotional shackles tied around his ankles for him to take that leap off the cliff edge with me and fly.
I tried every way I could think of to release their hold on him, short of throwing away my own hard-won joy in flight to join him in a life that would have turned ugly very quickly were we to try to live it together. A handsome, brilliant, poetic, and thwarted man who changes with insidious regularity into an insulting bully—been there, done that.
All the same, I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have missed the experience of loving Emílio—and being loved by him—for all the world.
In the end of any relationship, what’s always hardest is letting go of your own dream of who you thought your beloved was (even as you separate yourself, with a healthy instinct for survival, from who he turned out to be).
I think the trick is not in finding the ideal partner but in becoming your own ideal life partner: making peace with the past, taking responsibility, filling oneself with gratitude and joy.
***
Three Cheers for the Short List
(or It Takes a Village To Keep a Woman Happy)
It's official: I'm giving up on finding Mr. Right.
I have an abundance—an embarrassment—of wonderful men in my life. But none of them has all five of the qualities my ideal partner would possess.
Four out of five is not bad, and makes for a good deal of fun, love and shared memories. But four out of five also means that there's something really important missing.
So, heaving a great sigh as I relinquish my romantic hopes and dreams, I'm setting my sites on a new goal. Forget about Mr. Right. I'm cutting a deal with the Right Brothers.
The theory goes like this: No one guy is going to have it all. (I've looked! I've tried!) But several men, working together as a tag-team, can give a woman everything she's ever wanted. Mold three fabulous but slightly incomplete men into one collective mate and you'll get at least a man and a half. What more could a woman ask for?
I can anticipate the scoffers out there who will say that no man would put up with such nonsense. A man, after all, wants a woman all to himself, right?
Wrong. Being part of a short list of men, rather than the one-and-only, relieves a bloke of the responsibility of trying to be everything and everyone to his lady love.
Some men do diapers, others change the oil cheerfully. Still another may have a black belt in romance. Some men make great money and get pleasure out of spending it on a woman. Others possess beautiful artistic souls. Another has the gift of making you laugh until you cry. One man has conversation to die for and has proven himself to be an ideal travel companion. Another is about as close as a person can get to being an angel without being dead.
Men are under tremendous pressure to exhibit as many as possible of these sometimes conflicting attributes. They hate feeling that they've let a woman down. No wonder they so often flee from commitment after a relationship reaches a certain point. They know they can't do anything but fail to live up to the woman's hopes of what they'll be for her. Far better to run away than fall short.
The co-boyfriend approach, a beautiful division of labor, solves all that. One of the other guys can fill in on the stuff you like least. If things are divided correctly, that's the very stuff he likes best. No one's complaining. Everybody's happy.
Of course, in these dangerous days, it's probably prudent to stipulate that only the guy at the top of the short list gets to sleep with the gal. But, as any Zen master can tell you, the journey is every bit as important as the destination. There is enjoyment to be found both in being at the top and striving to get there.
The short list lets men always be hunters rather than—perish the thought!— hunted. Handled properly, the situation has the potential to be a happy compromise for everyone involved.
At least, that's what I'm hoping.
“Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space” —Ferris Jabr, “The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet,” NY Times Magazine, 06/24/2024 Each Handful of Earth Is Holy Everything changes: a fundamental truth on which we can depend. Everything is alive—even the rocks: they breathe starlight. Life occurs in the spaces in between what seems lifeless. We know this now. Beneath the crust of Earth itself, a biome of rock-eating, living beings is teeming. We ourselves are flowers growing up from roots that mine the soil for sustenance: roots that tangle underground, that dance with worms even while we’re still alive. Each one of us borrowing a body for a span of time, an essence that will forever thrive in one form or another: making children, making poems, making chlorophyl, transforming the substance of ourselves into compost that will nurture other living things. We breathe gratitude into the atmosphere, into all the empty darkness beyond the edge of infinity. Fear of death is a needless anxiety: Everyone we’ve ever loved is still here, each of them as beautiful as a Botticelli angel or a goddess carved of onyx, with precious stones for eyes. Each handful of earth is holy. —copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick