Will There Be
Another Time

B was a non-verbal Jewish boy whom I found beautiful. He had great power in silence. You always wanted to know what he was thinking, while wondering what his approval might feel like. We were together for a year, when we were not even thirty. I'd met B a few years before I bought this swimsuit, and one of the things I discovered during our year-long affair was that he was a self-hating Jewish boy who didn't want to be from New Jersey, or have a mother who belonged to Hadassah and who spoiled him in every way she knew how to. He wanted the cold glamour of a semiotics-inspired art career in New York even though he wasn't an artist. He could never relax long enough to make anything. One of the things I helped my young friend with—wanted to help him with—was the fact of his Jewishness, and his beauty, and how he was part of something that wouldn't exist without him.

Even though we had broken up some months before, we couldn't separate. So, when the editor of a magazine I was then working for invited me to come and hang out at a place he had rented that summer, I asked to bring my former lover along, in addition to someone I had gone to school with who was visiting from abroad. Now I can see that inviting this group along was a way of running interference for myself; the guy I worked for liked me, and could maybe even love me, but why would I focus on that when I was so enthralled by avoidance, and no love at all?

When we arrived at my employer's place—it wasn't quite in the Hamptons—I took Ecstasy for the first time. I did not feel an overwhelming love for my fellow man once I took it; what I wanted to do was swim, and that's when I put on the bathing suit. My employer's property had a swimming pool on it. I did laps in the pool and felt embraced by the water, and by my own thinking about myself. I remember that after I went swimmig, we went to a club somewhere in the Hamptons, a gay club, and we danced to synthetic music and came back to the house where B and I shared a room, and where there was, once again, no love, which can sometimes increase desire. I remember manhandling B somewhat before finally falling asleep in separate beds. Separate beds, and different ideas of love.

The winter B and I parted, we took a last ditch trip to Paris, London, etc. "It'll be good for us," he said. I knew he wanted to break up but I went anyway because who was I without hope, no matter how that contradicted the facts? B spoke French—he had lived there for several years in his twenties—and when we moved into a hotel I didn't know what he'd been talking to the concierge about until we got to the room: he had requested double beds. Now we were in double beds in America and nothing had changed. I loved that which could not love me.

I bought that swimsuit at Cheap Jack's, on lower Broadway. It never occured to me that, because it was wool, it would be heavy to swim in. I bought the suit because I always loved the look of twenties bathing costumes, plus a man who became a great friend of mine for a time, loved pieces like the one I had on in the photograph. I put it out to dry while we went out to the club in the Hamptons, and it dripped and it dripped as I sat in that room trying to force love, if only B could accept it. My friend from abroad rented a car to get us back home and to take him on to Kennedy Airport, where he had to catch a late evening flight. I put a tape on that my best friend, who had died of AIDS the year before, had made for me. It had a Nico song on it, “60/40.” We were so tired on that long ago early evening after the Ecstasy of nothing that I forgot the tape in the car and freaked out because it was all that was left of someone who loved me.

Eventually I got the tape back. That guy—the guy who died—once bought himself a swimsuit like mine, but made by Armani, and in cotton. I remember his young body in his swimsuit. He's the one reason I don't really want to forget anything, no matter how hard I try.

Hilton Als is an American writer, curator, and theater critic.