We walked down Fifth Avenue one evening after our acting class, after a meal.  We couldn’t find the bus stop we needed.  After we’d walked awhile, it became comic; all the buses in New York City, and not one to take us home.  Finally I insisted that we take a cab.  The boy wanted us to keep seeking the bus.  It was the tail-end of rush hour, not the easiest time to find a taxi in that city, and dark.  We were giggling, arguing.  I wondered out loud if all people of his volk were so stubborn, and if that stubbornness could possibly match Irish hard-headedness.  We were playful, I petulant.

“Tell me you love me!”

“Ohhhhhhh, I love you so much!”

We laughed and got in a cab.

***

St. Valentine is buried in Dublin.  That is, the remains of a man generally said to be the saint whose feast is celebrated on 14 February are buried there, in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Whitefriar Street.  His tomb is--or was in my youth, at least--a popular place of prayer for young people seeking good luck and guidance in their tender affairs.  I remember as a young woman watching a handsome boy kneel there reverently after mass one evening--a Saturday, I suppose--and hoping that he would receive the desires of his heart.

I’ve never had much to say about Valentine’s Day.  I don’t understand the profound bitterness it seems to stir up in the hearts of some people, mostly single, but sometimes partnered, anymore than I understand the emphasis put on romantic performance on that day by those deeply in love.  It is, I suppose, simply another human thing outside of which I feel I stand, and outside of which I stood even in the long-ago days when someone went through the motions of taking me to dinner or for a drink to mark the occasion.  

I have spent the past few feasts of this saint in Parisian graveyards--Père Lachaise, Montmartre.  A friend who knows me well laughed when I first told her of my way of marking the day.  “Yes, that’s you,” she said.  “That suits.”  

I thought of myself, then, in my long black velvet coat, with my long, unruly dark hair, a woman alone with the feral cats and crows, wandering among the ruined charnel houses and shattered stained glass and broken prie-Dieux.

***

In a dream I sometimes have, I am standing in Montmartre, Pigalle behind me, looking up one of the long vistas of that necropolis.  In the middle distance I see my half-French father, in a suit and trenchcoat, his hands in his pockets.  He smiles the smile he had just for me, and raises his hand to wave.  Then he walks off among the tombs and disappears.

Sometimes, now, instead of my father, the boy appears, on the opposite side of that long path, a little closer to me, but still out of reach.  He wears his dark greatcoat and the long black scarf that was his and is now mine.  He smiles the smile I felt was just for me, and raises his hand to wave.

These places, not ghostly in my waking hours, my solace, my comfort, are now haunted in my dreams, by him.

***

This is that most clichéd of things, the love letter I will never send.  This is my Valentine’s missive to the boy, never to be seen by him, never to be thought of.  

There are far too many things I’d like to say to you to write them all down here, today, or in the coming days or months or years.  A lifetime’s worth--many, doubtless, that I would say and then wish unsaid almost immediately.  I have tried at times to convey things to you about my life and about the world as I see it that I have realised almost immediately you cannot possibly understand, not through any fault in your intellect, which is vast, or any fault in my speech, which is articulate enough, or even any barrier of language; you cannot understand them because you cannot even see them, their shape, their huge deformity, sometimes their loveliness.  They are simply too large or too far away for you to limn them.  You are too young, and too clean, right down to the soul of your bones, to grasp more than some parts of some things.  This is not just a function of the difference in our ages, but, and perhaps more, because I am removed in some way, distant and corrupt.  In some vital way, I cannot touch you.  Understand that that, in itself, is good; the remoteness and protection made possible by your innocence are things that I will never be likely to witness in this life again.

So I wish to tell you what I think you can know, and what I think I can say.

I want first, and above all, to thank you.  For the kindness you have shown me, and the beauty with which you have graced me, for the good humour and the tenderness and concern that have made me nearly upset with you at times because I no longer know what to do with such things when they are presented to me, particularly all at once.  For brushing your fingers against my cheek, for having your hand protectively at my back when I would walk in front of you, for holding onto me in ways literal and figurative.  For making me feel beautiful when I had the fewest defences.  For trying to teach me to dance.  For every damned small thing I cannot enumerate.  For turning your face to me like the sun.  You could bless anyone in this way, and I know that you have not; for some reason, you chose me.  And so I thank you.

Beyond that, I want to tell you what I have already told you, in different ways, although I am not sure if you have been able to hear me:  That your life will continue as it has been, golden, and that you will be equal to almost anything; that your great bond with your family, apparently uncomplicated by any but the smallest obstacles, will always buoy you; that you will always be surrounded by friends; that you will have what you want.  But I have told you too that I can see the way in which you guard your heart, and keep yourself unreachable to many, because I do not want you to think that I do not know.  This is the only hint of hardness or guile I’ve detected in you, and it keeps you safe, which is good, but it is something that can seep out and cover a person in a carapace with time.  That, too, may be good ultimately, because I can see on you a blossoming hunger for success, and you work in a field unparalleled for its vicious appetite in every corner, the field of film acting; your growing confidence in your physical beauty, your singular commitment to your work, your desire for recognition will require a hard, sheltering crown, and I have no doubt that you can construct one if you need it.  I also have no doubt that you will let nothing stand in the way of what you want, including romantic attachment, and so I wonder what the cost will be to you in the end, what you will pay to get what you want.  I will not be there to witness it, so I hope simply that those who will be will stand with you, near you, and not away from you at the end of your life.  I hope you will not grow into a casualty of what you desire, into someone who is seldom alone but often lonely.  I hope you will let yourself be held and cherished, because you have a sweet and passionate capacity for it that I have seldom seen.  Oh, you are beautiful, you shine, you have a charmed path before you; go down it mindfully, so that at its end it will be wide, alive, an entire city filled with people and things that are yours.  And know that I have been honoured beyond telling to see you at the beginning of the journey.

And finally, I want to tell you that I love you, in the most unreasonable, pointless, frustrating, costly way that a woman could possibly love a man.  Please understand what I mean when I say that I sometimes curse you for this, or curse God, or myself, because I have never sought to be in love and have never done well with it.  I do this even as I know that it is in no way your fault.  Love has always been like swimming to me, points of pleasure underscored by the danger of flagging and drowning while one waits to be cast out of a rich and greedy sea onto barren earth, gasping.  Yet from almost the moment I saw you, you imprinted yourself on me, and all I could do was deal with the consequences.  And I do, now, always; my emotional energy, already depleted by a long and difficult marriage and by my increasing inability to relate to other humans--something you could almost overcome in me, and oh, how I loved and hated you for that--is largely devoted to driving you from my mind and from my dreams, a siege so far fruitless.  I go even more cautiously among people now, because I cannot afford to be thus captured again, if such a thing were even possible.  And I write about you because I have to, because it is the only hope I have of making you into something I can contain and control, a sort of reverse transubstantiation of your overwhelming presence into ordinary elements.  This you have done to me, without intention, and with nothing like reciprocation, I realise.  This, your being, alone, has done to me.

This is my Valentine to you:  Your gift to me, returned.  An account of a scar, a deep bruise, something that leaves a permanent mark, reshapes the tissue beneath it.  I carry you as Keats carried the song of the nightingale at the end of his short life, as a wondrous, inviolable, remote testimony to something so far beyond me, so unaware of limitations and darkness and mortality that it is closer to God than it is to me. 

 

This is you woven into me, accompanying me everywhere, in my waking hours, in my dreams, down the long vistas of Montmartre, to the very end of my life.