I fell in love in New York. Not with New York, though I do have the makings of a small affair already with that city that I may need to break off before Los Angeles finds out and kicks me out of the house. Please don’t tell her–it’d break her heart. No. I fell in love in New York officially, though I’d been getting all the indications earlier that it was something serious. The trip there was entirely to ask her opinion on the subject and to see if she’d want to make a go of it, 3,000 miles and change between us notwithstanding. She was with me one hundred percent, and so now I’ll have to change all my business cards so they no longer read “I’m single, ladies, so get me on the way up!”
Her name is Emily.
But first, the Bay House portion of my trip. I went to the Bay House this weekend, compliments of the Clark family, whose wholesome and generous nature are keystones of the entire cabana experience. It’s a house on the Chesapeake Bay, though I’m never sure if it’s located on the Maryland or Delaware side. I think it’s Maryland, due to the fact that other than Baltimore, the state really has nothing else going for it, and a sister needs some charity from time to time. Delaware, on the other hand, has a really fantastic screen door industry (props to those who get the reference).
A typical bay weekend involves drinking, dancing, smoking, listening to rock ‘n’ roll, and even the occasional co-ed skinny dipping, which is all done, somehow, and ironically enough, with all Christian morals protected in a fuzzy lockbox of virtue, so it’s all mostly scandal-free, though we can be loud at three in the morning with several Cosmos and glasses of wine as social lubricant. Among friends, it makes any activity so frictionless we free slide over metaphor and cigar smoke as easily as Raul Castro on his brother’s dime.
This weekend, we had the added pleasure of a fourteen foot powered boat and a jet ski, which was fun enough for me until I realized the sun’s fun rays also contain a deadly toxin called Sunburn. I had lathered myself with lotion which supposedly has anti-sun agents working hard upon your skin, staging mini-battles right there on the epidermis. Unfortunately, the bloodshed and the lack of field coverage resulted in a slight reddening up my back, on my forearms and hands, and even on my legs. Fortunately, the attrition was not so terrible that I was in pain. The redness diminished after a few days and settled into one of my better tans. How ironic, or perhaps just pathetic, that I didn’t get a decent tan until going to the East Coast.
Saturday I smoked a vintage cigar, birthday compliments of Evil, and by vintage I mean sixteen years old.
AH-MAZING.
Combined with a sweet wine buzz, surrounded by wonderful friends, some of whom I’d not seen in over a year, with a great dinner tucked away, the Delaware shore of the bay glowing, lights out on the water blinking and undulating, and the night sky pierced by the occasional shooting star–the beginnings of the annual Perseid meteor shower, I believe–it was a captivating and perfect moment of pure ease, the kind of ease only a Gatsby in his happiest of moments could relate to. Those moments are fleeting, but while they last, they have the low treble of fluted leisure, a sublimity of sureness and comfort. You can’t take those moments with you into traffic–they pass like the wind with the first stopping of the flow–but you can write of them with fond remembrance, and know that there will be future bay weekends. It’s all a perspective thing.
The same thing goes for love at long distance. But this has gotten long without me knowing it, and the day stretches forward. I have a career to pursue, unfortunately. Tomorrow the next, and arguably more intriguing section of my journey to the East Coast. Until then…