I Loved You More Read Online Free PDF Page A

kiss.
    â€œWhat?” I say.
    â€œWe had to break,” Hank says, “After what you read, none of us could breathe, let alone speak.”

       2.
    First date
    SOMETIME IN THE NEXT WEEK FOLLOWING URSULA Crohn’s party, Hank called me. At first, I couldn’t believe it was the Maroni . I didn’t have anything written down, so I didn’t know what to say to him. I’m lost without text. Plus telephones freak me out. At a certain point, I took a deep breath and pictured myself back on that stool a thousand stories up on the Persian carpet in front of the fireplace at Ursula’s artist’s loft and looked right into Hank’s black eyes as he spoke to me. What he had said that night had really shocked me. The fact that people couldn’t speak or even breathe once I had finished reading was preposterous, and I’d looked hard into Hank’s eyes for bullshit. But there was no bullshit.
    Usually we have to hide a little when we risk saying something true to someone we don’t know. So I looked for Hank to make himself distant, for irony, for where he would go in himself so he could say something raw like that and still have protection. Propinquity. But it wasn’t only his body that was too close, the spirit inside him that made him say what he said was way close, too. It was a feeling I’d never felt before. Hank’s black eyes, the way they took me in. How looked at I felt. Suddenly I was a child and Hank was a real old man with cataracts and mostly blind so he was unaware of himself looking, or I was a child and Hank was a child too, and since we were children we could simply look. Felt big. The way Buddha, or Jesus, or Rumi might feel.
    Then less than a week later, there we were on the phone,and Hank and I were just two awkward guys who didn’t know each other, trying to have a conversation. So I suggested he come over to my apartment that Friday.
    Silence on his end of the phone. Then:
    â€œI’ll have to talk to Mythryxis,” Hank said.
    â€œMa … what?”
    â€œMyth … rix … is,” Hank said.
    â€œWho’s that?” I said.
    â€œShe’s a fellow traveler of mine,” he said.
    MYTHRYXIS, HANK’S GIRLFRIEND . I never got her real name. And I never met her. All’s I knew was she lived in New Jersey and she was a nurse. The whole time I knew Hank he always had a woman, and it was always just one woman, until, that is, he found another. For some reason, though, I got the feeling that Mythryxis was the girlfriend, maybe his first love from college, and she was waiting for Hank to marry her.
    Mythryxis only lasted maybe those first six months I knew Hank. I always tried to get Hank to talk about her, but you know Hank. Kept his cards close to his chest. When he did talk about her, she sounded more like a student of his – not a writing student but like somebody broken he’d taken under his wing and was taking special care of. Then one night, after I asked, Hank just up and said that Mythryxis had moved on. Said it like she’d graduated. Like she was a doctor now instead of a nurse. I turned to look at Hank when he said that, into his black eyes. By six months, I thought we knew a lot about each other, and so when he said that I made a special point of looking at him, because right then I realized I didn’t have a clue about him and Mythryxis. We were sitting on the stoop of 211 East Fifth Street. The night was muggy and from under the stairs you could smell the piss. McSorley’s was just two blocks away and the way those boys drank they never could make it very far. The air was so thick in the mercury vapor light you could damn near set your beer can on it. Hank and I were brown-bagging a couple Rolling Rocks. Ihad my boombox in my window and we were listening to those eighties tunes that still can stop my heart. Sussudio , Blondie’s Rapture. Every time you go away, you take a