Other Four-Letter Words

Originally written Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Patrick and I were planning on heading out to the Applewood district this evening, hoping to figure out the address based on Trudy’s description of the surrounding area. It’s a mostly residential neighborhood, mostly small, old apartment buildings, with a strip of warehouses on the side toward the river. There’s a mix of working class families and poor starving artists who like the short walk to the main street (which isn’t actually called Main St, but I think I’ll refer to it as that here) and its strip of coffee shops, thrift stores, and laundromats with pubs attached.

Anyway, we were planning on heading out there but at the last minute he called me to say he had a cold, or the flu, or something making him want to cut his nose off and would I please come over and teach him how to turn the nerve endings off so he could do that. I told him no, but I’d come over and start training him to eject the germs from his system. Apparently, he’d caught something from his roommate Dennis, whom I’d suspected was becoming more than a roommate to him, and they as much as confirmed it to me this evening. Patrick is an open-minded young man, and college can often present options you don’t realize were there in other contexts. But I’ve been pleased to see that it doesn’t appear to be just a hooking-up thing. Watching the two of them interact is one of the sweetest experiences I’ve had with a pair of 18-year-old guys.

We’d started working on opening up communication with the white blood cells already, so this was merely an extension on that lesson (and I have to say that despite the complications the modern world has created with reducing attention spans and all that, there has certainly been an advantage in the medical field providing a more complete set of vocabulary and a more accurate sense of bodily function than we had in my student days). Of course we didn’t get terribly far for all our work tonight, but Patrick knows how long it will take before he can truly see results, and he did admit that working on it actively made him feel a little better, even if there was actually no improvement. At any rate, he wasn’t about to pull a Van Gogh on his sniffer anymore.

So he and Dennis said they’d told their parents about their relationship over Thanksgiving weekend. Dennis’s parents (who live in Massachusetts) were surprised, but he’s pretty certain they’ll adjust. Patrick’s parents blamed me. I don’t even know what Patrick has told them about me, but apparently they know 1) that I’m a woman who has had relationships with women, and 2) that I act as a mentor of some sort to their son. He tried to reason with them that it made little sense that a female mentor would “recruit” a male mentee in any way they were doubtless too scared to imagine, but they wouldn’t accept it. I suggested that they probably were just having a hard time processing it, and they need someplace to focus their blame. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, many times, from varying degrees of proximity.

I guess they were in a mushy mood tonight—they were sharing their first cold, after all—because they started asking about my love life. I suppose I can understand why they’d think I might have eons of romantic stories to tell. It’s not like Grey Orchid is a monastic order with a vow of celibacy. The Gifted, of course, are required to render ourselves infertile (the better to focus our energies on students, who are old enough not to require constant supervision and of whom, in the old days, there were usually more than one per educator), but the teachings are conspicuously mum about sex itself. I can certainly dredge up second-hand stories of amortal romance, souls who remained coupled as they moved from rebirth to rebirth, mortal loves lost as their old-souled mates lived on, and so forth.

My own have been rather pedestrian by comparison: I’ve had attachments and involvements, and eventually each one ends. Sex doesn’t get old (although sexual partners sometimes do), but there just aren’t many people who hold my attention, and over time, it’s not unusual to get pickier. In the early years, I had a series of marriages of convenience in order to function as a woman in Ming China, Renaissance Europe, and colonial America, but I haven’t had to do that in a long time, as circumstances become more and more amendable to unmarried women. I’ve had a few lifetime-long relationships (the other person’s lifetime, that is) that were indeed about love and sometimes passion, but for the most part finding a partner doesn’t consume me. Also, the various influences that drive the sense of urgency most people have about coupling—procreation and a sense of mortality—simply don’t apply to me. I operate on a different timeline.

The only one I’ve had that maybe once made a really good story was my first love, Kristina, back when I was still mortal. So I told them about that one. Unsurprisingly, they thought it was a fairy tale I’d made up. I’m so far removed from it that if it hadn’t led me to the School of the Grey Orchid, I’d probably think I made it up, too. Vicious vampire tyrant, forbidden love, attempted flight from said tyrant, said love kidnapped by tyrant’s lackeys, and a trading caravan with room for one more, bound for the Silk Road to China… followed by centuries of never-avenged guilt, naturally, since I was the one who put her in danger.

By now, those key words and phrases stand out much more to me than the experience itself does. It’s ceased to be reality and has become nothing but a story that I probably wouldn’t even remember if I weren’t asked to repeat it every so often. The emotions are still there when I recall her, from the ecstasy to the remorse, but the sights, sounds, and smells that used to be Stina are abstracted by those of the thousands of others I’ve known in between. My most exciting stories have little to do with romance, yet mortals seem to be more drawn to the stories of love and sex than to those of the Algonquin Round Table, or about my first husband’s circle of Elizabethan playwright friends, or about being a conductor on the