Intimacy

From the Hamptons we headed off to Cold Spring.

The house in Cold Spring, the town itself, was starting to feel like a second home.

The owners, who lived in Seattle couldn't decide whether to sell the place or keep it for themselves but, until the time a decision was made, they kept finding work for the Mormon to do. The house was an anomaly in that town. The lines on the outside were harsh and modern. From the front, there were barely any windows; just narrow slits on the side. The rest of the town was filled with more traditions, Victorian homes. The inside of this house was modern as well. A steel spiral staircase was the first thing you saw when you walked into the house. The walls were cold and white. The furnishings were sparse and only what was necessary. But in the living room, one wall was entirely windowed and the view of the town and the mountain stretched endlessly before you. Being February, the view was of naked trees and bare mountains. It always seemed to be brilliantly blue in the mornings turning to an oppressive grey by afternoon. But it was always beautiful.

One day the Mormon asked me if I wanted to go to the museum in Beacon. The Dia. I said sure. I had never heard of it, let alone been.

The Dia is in a big, cold warehouse. It's all modern/contemporary art, which isn't really my thing. Bare and broken light bulbs spread across the floor and entitled "Ideas" is not art that speaks to me. Ironic art most often isn't.

There are many rooms in the old warehouse but you walk into a wall of Andy Warhol self-portraits. His own face silk-screened in different colors across a twenty-five foot expanse. Red Andy, Green Andy, Blue Andy. Yellow Andy. All with the same bored expression. All with the same disheveled wig. Different colors, same face. Is that the point? Is that all we are? The same face with different expressions. We appear to change but underneath it all, we don't really?

The Mormon told me once he used to drive out to this gay cruising spot in Salt Lake City, Utah. He wouldn't pick any one up because he was too afraid. He would just watch it happen. I thought of this staring at the face of Andy Warhol; a man who made excess and exhibitionism standard. Standard for New York and other big cities. That excess didn't reach into the land of the Mormons. I turned around and the Mormon was taking pictures of me in front of the Warhols. And I thought, I'm so much more like Warhol than the Mormon. The Mormon can hardly talk to his family any more because they don't support his "lifestyle." They think he'll suffer for eternity in Mormon hell, whatever that is. He goes to these sexual compulsive anonymous meetings every week to deal with...what, exactly? Intimacy is the word that keeps coming up over and over again. The computer. Images on the computer are a way of escaping intimacy. Sex is and isn't intimacy. It depends on how you approach it.

We strolled the other rooms and then headed back to the house in Cold Spring. There we fells asleep on the couch in the living room looking out at the mountains without a worry in the world.

I woke, up on top of him, to him kissing me. I stood, my back to the open window, the grey sky, leafless branches and naked mountains behind me and slowly began to undress. He looked at me with passion, with hunger, with...fear. I knew in that moment that I was somehow a braver person than he'd ever met. I don't know how or why I knew that. But the knowledge washed over me like a clean rain and I felt the power of it. For the first time in this relationship there was an exchange of power. And I lay myself on top him and let it melt away.