Man on the trapeze April 4, 1985 (Good Thursday)


 

Her name is Jessica, not Jezebel or Judas, Jesus or Judith.

Pauly claims she’s 22 or 23; others say she is 19, maybe younger, stretching out the difference in ages between Pauly and her (Pauly just turned 36).

Pauly calls her beautiful, and she is, but in a quiet way, some much like Pauly’s previous girlfriend, Jane, I sometimes have to blink twice to think I’ve not traveled back in time.

Such similarities go to the root of Pauly, features that draw him in ways other women don’t.

Both women carry themselves with remarkable dignity, a Celtic royalty Paul finds irresistible, less so in Jessica than Jane, yet there in both, and perhaps as with Jane, Jessica will grow into it over time.

Maybe we just got to used to Jane, we forget what she was like back when Pauly first met her. If they are royalty, then Jane is queen, and Jessica a mere princess, fine and fancy (she even studies French) and has the “right kind of attitude, Pauly says – whatever that means.) and gets good grades in the right kinds of subjects such as business and accounting.

Despite these good points, Jessica has a hint of darkness – and tends to be very judgments, condemning the Sixties as a selfish time when the only good people were those who served in the military and perhaps fought in Vietnam. She rebels again our generation the way we rebelled against the generation before us, perhaps having a better view of those days when we and media boast about how great they were, musically, culturally and politically. She sees the failures we overlook, the Marxist manifestos, the radical pomp, the inability to actually accomplish anything, always tearing down, never building up. Perhaps this is partly whey she’s attracted to Pauly, since he had little use for the radical ranting and raving of the left, seeing many of the leaders as overly glorified.

But I sense another, deeper, more disturbing darkness in her that has little to do with politics or culture, but with the fact that she draws Pauly closer, but refuses to let go of another “boy” she is seeing at the same time, neither of them able to fully fulfill what she thinks of as the perfect man, so she takes a bit from one and then the other, and I sense pending doom when she eventually picks one over the other, and most likely it won’t be Pauly she picks.

Yet strange, this darkness appeals to me, as if I am watching a cruel yet magnificent mistress at play, manipulating Pauly, keeping him a float, suspending him in space, watching him swing from an emotional trapeze, letting him dangle until she decides when and if to let him go, watching him perform the way as fly might in a spider’s web before she makes up her mind to devour him to set him free, doing the same for her old boyfriend so that neither know which one will she will ultimately choose.

Pauly believes she will choose him. I know better, but can’t tell him that, knowing he will hate me for saying something so obvious aloud, since secretly, he knows it, too.

So, Pauly is a man in perpetual motion, his emotions swinging back and forth between overwhelming joy and total despair, the movement an unbearable torture he might not long endure, and she, from a distance, seeming to find amusement as his torment.

This is different from his time with Jane, the back and forth of some conflict that affected both of them, that seemed to be more of a choice of direction rather than people, he and she wishing to go different places, and pulled apart by their inability to find compromise, despite the intensity of love.

When Pauly gets high with me in his kitchen, he tells me he is convinced Jessica will dump him for the younger man, but then takes it back, saying she’s too smart for that.

I nod and try to provide him comfort for the deep wounds I know he will soon suffer, that I once suffered, that I have seen so many others suffer, Hank with his rich girl, Cynthia, Rocky with his opportunistic gold digger old woman, me with Louise, the first woman I ever loved.

In the end, Pauly will fall off the trapeze and we, his closest and dearest friends, must be there to catch him.




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