Near Love Stories
by J. B. Hogan

A Near Love Story

Long Distance Call

They took the ten-thirty hydrofoil from Playa del Carmen to Cozumel. She sat next to the window staring out at the sea they bounced over. He sat next to her on the aisle, quietly looking at her profile. Although she was nearly twenty years his junior, she had a grown quality about her, a kind of mature serenity that always surprised him. And there was a melancholy side to her that belied her age and her considerable early success. Feeling his gaze on her, she turned his way briefly and gave him a little smile. A smile all the sadder to him for her obvious effort to make it seem kind and offhand. She turned back to the window but he continued looking at her.

She had a lovely profile, from her strong jawline and slightly pouty mouth to her round, reddish cheeks and button nose. From her high cheekbones and sparkling, intelligent green eyes to her forehead and curly brown hair that fell gently down to her collar. When he looked at her this way, it felt as if he could see into her soul-a cool and beautiful place-and he could not imagine why she was with him. He sensed at times like this that she could never love him as he did her-the age and life experience between them were too great-but he didn't care. It was enough for him just to be with her. To have her turn that smile on him, those sad wonderful eyes.

They had spent two days in Playa del Carmen-his favorite place because it had not yet been completely overdeveloped-and two lovely evenings. Evenings spent strolling Playa's sandy little streets, stopping at touristy outdoor restaurants for tacos and pizza and beer. During the days, they went for long walks on the beach and when she had wanted, needed to be alone, he let her go.

If he had learned anything in his life, he felt, it was to give your partner all the freedom they required. Including the freedom never to come back; to leave with another lover, to go from you forever. That pain would be almost unendurable he knew; but when you loved with all of your being, you would do whatever the object of your love needed. You would not make yourself a slave and you would not be a fool for long, but you would let that person do what they had to do.

She looked over at him again and smiled and he took her hand, gently linking his fingers with hers, transmitting as much affection as he possibly could by touch alone. She squeezed his hand back and although she then turned away to the window, he felt that his heart would explode from the intensity of his love for her.

Feeling that way reminded him of the first two times he had seen her, when he had stood in the back of the crowd, anonymous, already in love, not yet able to reach her on her level, listening to that overwhelmingly beautiful voice. He recalled how he felt, as he had just now, that his heart would explode from love for her and that his spirit, trapped in the melancholia of failed creativity, would connect to hers in some transcendent way.

Transcendent, soul. Those were words, ideas that he didn't even believe in. Such was the power of her spirit-yet another concept he didn't accept-that she lifted him above his materialistic humanism. He believed in nothing, not in God, nor soul, nor spirit, nor love unending. Yet she was the embodiment of all those things. If they had ever existed in a person, they existed in her. He sometimes joked that the religious songs she sang were not just the culmination of two thousand years of Christianity but the whole point of it. It had all happened, the martyrdoms, the slaughters, the great works of belief and the horrible acts of faith, just so that this most beautiful of voices could sing about it.