The beige pants, sweater, skin, hair. Could a boy look more like a wall? With pale eyes and a plaid collar, the wall keeps sliding over to me. But I once leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away, as The National sings. Leave me be, Wallboy.

I'd like to be here right now.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I won. Well, "won" in the sense that he finally came knocking. Banging, really. And I let him in; for the night. For whatever reason, after seeing me at work one morning, he called me 12 hours later and said, effectively, "I want you. Now." So, ok. Come get me. And we fucked, and it was good. About as good as I thought it would be, and about as good as it can be when there are no acknowledged feelings. So, catharsis. This thing between us that I had tried to will into being all summer, which had only ended in frustration and rejection, was finally consummated. What unmitigated relief I felt in the morning!  I nearly thanked him. 

But it's gone nowhere since. I didn't think it would, really, but I guess I've hoped. I keep seeing him now, because he suddenly keeps turning up at dinners and brunches-- in my neighborhood no less. He looks at me across the table and I can't read him. I look back, trying to be equally opaque. And all I do is wonder, why don't you want more? Not even more romantically, but physically at least? It's pissing me off. Is he withholding? Or is he just satisfied and indifferent? What is it between us that feels like a contest of wills? He seems to want to be around me, but isn't cultivating anything. That's not true. With his increased presence, I think he wants me to want him. But it's apparently all he wants. And I think it's for his own vanity. It's perverse-- on the one hand I should be flattered, that I'm of enough value that he wants my regard and my attention. But I struggle to feel flattered. Instead, I'm back to feeling frustrated. I want more involvement, I guess, and I can't have it. Why can't I just let this go? Why am I giving him what HE wants, when he won't give me what I want? Of course, he doesn't know that I'm giving him what he wants. He doesn't know I'm thinking about him. He sees me living my life, active, busy, vivacious. He doesn't see my feathers are ruffled. But he must know, a little. He ignored a flirtatious email from me a week after. At brunch an hour later, I tried not to let my surprise and disappointment show. 

His audacity is galling; he demands my attention but feels no obligation to heed my signals. Except for that first time we fooled around, drunk from the work bake-off, he ignores or rejects my advances. Since then, all our encounters are on his terms. "You're not fair," I told him when he called. "It's true," he replied. "I'm unfair." Two weeks later at dinner, when a new acquaintance asked if he had a girlfriend, he replied with some diffidence, "I'm selfish and self-absorbed." He knows what he is. He doesn't apologize for it. And he's not budging. So my task is to not push against an unmovable object. But this is creating such tension in me. It's eroding my win!  Perhaps that is what he wants. To regain the power he lost when he gave in to desire a month ago.

I'm haunted by the self-taken FB photo he posted recently. Not by the sweet-faced girl nuzzling him, but by the ebullience in his eyes and smile. "Look at me," he seems to say. "I've got it made right now." It's akin to what I imagined I must have been projecting at dinner, only mine wasn't attached to the male gaze; just to my own self-sufficient joie de vivre, from being at delicious dinner with friends-- happy, confident, living my life well. That's something I'm proud of, at least. His sense of agency seems tied to his success with women, however small and fleeting and even insignificant. 

He's taken to texting me. "merry xmas, even though you're a jesus hater ;)." is what I got two days after Christmas, while he was home with his family. "Next time he texts," my friend Dan suggested, "You should just write back, 'What do you want?'" Maybe.

Anyway, I'm feeling attachment, which I have to just accept and respect for a minute. I want to receive something. I want to be given pleasure and affection. I can pass through this, the foul belly of the beast, and get back to focusing on giving. It's interesting that I'm not more frustrated this time by someone not wanting what I offer him. I remember so acutely the pain of being with J and feeling his resistance to everything I wanted to give him. It was overwhelming. But this time I'm not insistently wanting to give to the guy. I think I understand it's not worth it to force your offerings on someone. I finally appreciate how widely enjoyed I am, how easy it is to find people who want what you have to offer, actually. Why should I care to impose myself on someone? And I suppose I also understand that he enjoys me very much. It's just that beyond a certain point, he won't. And that's his problem, not mine. It's not even a problem. It's a prerogative. We don't get to decide who wants us; nor why, when or how much.

I wanted to write my way back to gratitude; I think I succeeded. He wanted me, he gave me attention and pleasure for one full night, he released me from the struggle I felt over our unfinished business. For all that validation, I am grateful. Pleasure, as always, is fleeting. But frustration can be, too. Nothing endures. Not even pain. 

Once upon a time, he was a newlywed and I a newlysingle. He was about to move abroad for his wife's job, his own job prospects uncertain, and I was trying to piece my self back together, the fate of my heart even more uncertain. We teetered on the brink of an affair, leaning heavily into unspoken emotions. But I pulled back and he left. A messy fall averted, integrity mostly preserved.

Four years later, he arrives in New York for a visit. He is separated, and we are having dinner.

I had not realized it had been more than two and a half years since we had last seen each other. I wasn't surprised, though, to hear that his marriage is ending. I am so sorry, I say. But I recall the late night chats we'd had, brimming with sexual tension, when we said we weren't sure we believed in monogamy. I remember thinking that that philosophy had different implications for him than for me. As far as I knew, his wife certainly believed in monogamy. 

The conversation over dinner veers quickly into relationship territory. Particularly my feelings on relationships. I talk and talk and he asks questions as I develop a steady buzz off the Tuscan red; he is many beers ahead. Do I want to be married? I don't think so. I'm not sure I believe in long-term monogamy. Me neither, he says. Not that that's why the marriage ended. His job demands constant travel, and he never achieved the work-life balance he claims to have wanted; the balance she expected before they started a family. How could he want children when he's never around, she had asked. 

Do you want children? It's not a goal. Why not? I have reasons. Like, there's my brother. It was tough growing up. I like my freedom. I feel like I just got it and I don't want to give it up yet. But you would make a great mother. Yeah, so? But someone who looks like you should procreate. Flattering, thanks. But not a good enough reason.

But don't you feel lonely? Don't you feel that people need a companion? No, I don't really feel lonely. And I don't think everyone needs one main companion. I have many companions. Anyway, I thought we kind of didn't believe in monogamy!

Actually, I offer, I could see myself getting married at 60. He laughs. I'm serious, I say. He looks at me strangely, as though no one on Earth would ever say this. I find myself starting to feel defensive. Rather than rhetorically challenged, I feel personally challenged. 

Would you move somewhere else for someone? Ah, is that it... Am I being screened? I tell him I sort of feel like I am auditioning. No, no, of course not! I'm sorry. But it doesn't really seem like he is trying to understand my positions. 

As for his own, he seems conflicted, on the one hand still doubting the viability of monogamy, on the other appreciating the emotional and social satisfaction of having one significant other. It gives you a certain status, he opines. And that is true. In his professional world-- the world of my father's, incidentally --it is unusual to be a single person after 30. I tell him I sympathize with this. It must be hard to live as an expat in the developing world, where you may be invited to dinner parties, but there is no singles' scene. You may as well live in an American suburb.

It occurs to me that this is not my predicament. Being single in New York is a protected status. Most people are here to develop careers, and you have the opportunity to socialize with people younger than you, so that even as you lose peers to family life, your world does not have to shrink.  In the last five years I have patiently (painstakingly, at first) reestablished my life as a single person. Work can be very intense for stretches, which I enjoy. I adore time alone, but am also surrounded by friends. I have, I explain, intimate friendships. Perhaps this is why I don't feel lonely coming home to an empty apartment sometimes. If I didn't have those connections, and if I traveled months out of the year only to return to an empty house, I suspect I would also feel unfulfilled. But, I tell him, this is not my predicament. 

I just can't believe you are not taken, he says later while folded into a couch in a dim bar. I sigh inside. He doesn't know it, but this is the language of 'singlism,' a form of discrimination I had no idea existed until recently. It is the kind of remark that implies that being single is not a choice, but a circumstance. My unattached status is not, then, the logical result of my ideals, feelings or choices, but some failure of the universe to deliver a man who ought to have snapped me off the shelf by now. He has understood nothing I have said. And he wants to kiss me. 

These swells of grief creep up and wash over me. They're brief but happen several times a day. What can I do? I had no business getting attached to this person, but I did. And disconnecting desire from its latest object feels like snapping a dental root. You're losing that tooth, it has to go, but that one piece of connective tissue hasn't disintegrated. It resists. You should yank. You don't want to.

It's weird, the way I can ache for someone I never really knew all that well. It's probably unhealthy, but people do it all the time. Why shouldn't I?

Every step they take in their relationship and life together just reminds me that you and I did not get this far, and never will.

I make a habit of looking at the name and photo on the taxi licenses of my cab drivers. Tonight I did a double-take when I read the name "Amadou Diallo." First it was confusing, and then it was sad. Amadou Diallo was brutally gunned down by NYC police over a decade ago. And then I was curious- how many Amadou Diallos are there in the world? Is there just one other one in New York? Turns out someone already investigated: 

"There are no less than 106 Amadou Diallos driving yellow taxis and livery cabs in New York City." 

"Reached by telephone, Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of the late Amadou Diallo, estimated that in her hometown, some 80 percent of the people are named Diallo."

Amadou Lives at Marie Runyon's Dinner Table

Color me educated!