the rix mix

When I found myself without a girlfriend for the first time in many years, a friend warned me that I should be cautious of any woman who was obviously crazy about me, because it just could mean she may be crazy. With foolish confidence, I filed the advice for later & immediately fell into an insane affair with a strawberry blonde schoolteacher I met at a party who was wearing an Irish lace shawl & a honeysuckle scent that made my knees weak. It was a great May romance for about three weeks, then dragged on painfully through most of the summer as her former boyfriend campaigned to get her back. I'm grateful he succeeded.

I only saw her once afterward, in Pier 1 a couple years later, where I was browsing Hawaiian shirts from Bangladesh with a new girlfriend. She drew me aside & asked if we would socialize with her & her "fiance" some time because all of his friends were gay couples. This amused me so much that I immediately took my girlfriend down the highway to Bennigan's & celebrated with Guinness, buffalo wings, & bacon & cheese potato skins. She was crazy & deliberately tore my heart up because I was vulnerable & she knew she could; she turned a weekend at the shore into a psycho-emotional nightmare, something everyone else who's walked the boards & beach with me understands is nearly impossible. But to her credit she inspired four or five really good poems I still like, danced with me at a wedding with champagne glasses balanced on our heads - astonishing a number of people who had never seen me happily liquored up, & finally handed me a reward every guy who's been treated badly by a woman wants but never expects by marrying the perfect man of her dreams (later confirmed through the grapevine).

Labels: love, sex