“How do you know that? Do you take Latin?”
“No. I looked it up when I first read the poem. Want me to read it to you? I have the book right here.”
He read it in this very serious voice.
It’s about sex.
When he finished, we were completely silent for too long, so we laughed to clear the awkward.
Because it’s mentioned in the poem, we Googled the Chatterley ban and learned about D. H. Lawrence and the controversy surrounding his book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was apparently outlawed for being pornographic even though the synopsis sounded incredibly boring by today’s standards. Some websites say it’s about how you can’t truly be alive without having vivid sexual experiences. Others say it’s sexist or a male fantasy.
“Why would Booker tell you to read that poem?” Little Lex said.
“Maybe because it’s about more than sex. It’s about time, I think. And timing. And missing out on good things because of others’ beliefs.”
And then we talked about The Bubblegum Reaper some more and how Booker maybe was playing a role for us, because deep down inside that old man lived a sadness that paired well with the Larkin poem.
At some point during that first FaceTime conversation, I started to call my new friend Alex instead of Little Lex, and he didn’t correct me, which felt significant after reading the poem he traced.
Alex read me more Philip Larkin poems from the collection Booker had sent him in the mail as a present, and it was then that I realized the old man knew that Alex and I would be having a postdate talk and had planted “Annus Mirabilis” in my mind so that we would have a good discussion topic. Booker knew I’d look up and read anything he referenced or recommended, and so it felt as if the old man was playing some sort of chess match with young love and we were the pieces and Booker was winning.
We talked a lot about a poem called “High Windows,” which Alex read to me. At first I thought it, too, was about sex, but really it’s about how maybe there isn’t anything above us at all when we look up through a high window—and so maybe there is no god, no nothing, which sounds depressing, but Larkin makes it okay and even beautiful, which is sort of a relief.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked Alex.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t know, either.”
And then we talked about God for a long time—making a list of all the things that make you want to believe in God, like sunsets and lilies and chai tea with frothy steamed milk, and indie music and wild anonymous acts of charity and books and movies and poetry. But then we talked about all the things that make you give up on the idea of a god, like war and poverty and disease and psychopaths who shoot up people in movie theaters or malls, and friends who let you down and turn mean as they get older, and acne and the need for bathrooms, and stomaching the absurdity of a public school education—although Alex said he went to a private prep elementary school, and it had been even worse. “They taught us that we were better than everyone who wasn’t enrolled at our school, and we believed that. It was ugly.” When we were being honest, it was easier to fill the “No God” list, even though I got the feeling that we both didn’t want it to be that way.
Booker had told Alex about Charles Bukowski, too, and so we took turns reading each other Bukowski poems. Alex read me one called “Bluebird,” which I hadn’t heard before.
It was about hiding something beautiful deep inside you.
I loved it.
“Do you ever weep?” I asked Alex, because Bukowski says he doesn’t in the poem.
“Um,” he said, looking away from his iPhone camera lens. “Yes? I’m no Bukowski, I guess.”
For some reason I told him about what happened when I tried to kiss Mr. Graves and how I ended up sobbing in the nurse’s office on the bed behind the white curtain. Alex was the first person I told. And to my great surprise, it didn’t freak him out. He just listened, and then he said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” And it felt wonderful to get that secret out of me—to know that Alex didn’t hate me for telling the truth or think I was a whore or a freak.
Just to make sure, I said, “You must think that I’m a nymphomaniac—trying to kiss my teacher.”
“Sounds like you were just confused. I get confused all the time,” he said, which made me want to kiss Alex.
Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn’t want to become them, but we had no other role models—or “maps,” Alex kept saying. “My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn’t ever lead me anywhere.” And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn’t want to go—and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. It almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.
Toward the end of our epic phone conversation, Alex and I were just sort of lying there, looking at each other’s faces through the screens on our little machines, which sounds weird now but felt right—like we were both tired of being alone and therefore didn’t want to say good-bye.
Alex had a wonderful face.
I studied it pixel by pixel.
I could have looked at it forever.
“Let’s plug our phones in and sleep together,” he said. “We don’t have to say good-bye.”
“Okay.”
And so we drifted off to sleep without shutting off our phones, and it felt nice and safe to have him there with me.