Tang Wei Min and Me

I want to make a photograph like this painting.  It looks old, but it is not.  It was painted by Tang Wei Min, born 1971 in China.  The painting is titled "Moon Night."

I am right and I am wrong about the balm of lonely hours.  I am certain of it.  The longing for companionship is of the ideal type, and it is rarely found.  Even then, things are mutable.  It is an illusion that is nice for awhile.  But the exciting hours dull and become routine or worse.

And given the chance, we would repeat.

So I did what I told myself (and you) I would do, and after work I went out.  I called a friend to meet me, but the friend never showed, so I sat at the bar of a fancy dive and ate alone.  I am not bad at this and was even better than that last night as I did not look about wondering how I appeared to the beautiful women who passed by in a Friday night procession.  And I knew how I appeared to the others.  Rather, I was among the throng pure and simple.

On my way there, walking down the Boulevard past the sidewalk tables and open air cafes, I was surprised to hear my name called out.  I turned around and saw a fellow I used to know from a gym years and years ago.  He had married and had a gaggle of kids settling down with his dowdy wife and becoming a blob himself.  I would see them riding their bikes around the neighborhood in a row, helmets cinched tightly, everyone looking grim with concentration.  He had served a couple terms as City Commissioner by then and gave me only passing acknowledgment in a vaguely formal way.  He didn't want to chit-chat.

And so there he was spread out casually at a cafe table with a small group drinking wine.

"I want you to meet my friend Catherine," he said nodding to the woman who was not his wife beside him.  He looked pleased.  She was a pleasant girl, I thought, for she beamed a smile to me that was unlike the demure thing his wife would always produce.  I had to take it all in quickly trying to make some sense of what was happening.

"Well hello old friend," I said, not having much to follow with.  "You still going to the gym?"

The young woman to whom I'd been introduced continued to smile and shook her head no as he said, "Yes, some."

By then, I had exhausted the well.  Of course I wanted to ask him, "What happened to your wife and kids," being naturally curious, but I have also been socialized somewhat and put the cap on that for awhile.

Why me? I wondered as I waved goodbye with a "nice to meet you," to Catherine.  I was surprised he still knew my name.

But he was proud and happy, I guess, maybe for the first time in a long while.  I was sad for him and his troubles and the long hours of wondering what to do, but happy for him, too, having found someone to sit with him on a summer's night at a cafe table for all to see.  There were so many questions to wonder.  Did they want children?  Would he do that all again?  Did he think it would all be different this time?

I thought about this for a minute sitting alone at the bar eating a bowl of ceviche and listening to three men to my left talk about their old sexual exploits as if they happened last week.  The loudest and most crass of the three business-looking men talked in some hideous way about some woman he had. . . well, I don't want to retell his stinking tale.  In a bit, though, he talked about his wife of twenty-three years.

I am too romantic about all this and, perhaps, am what I used to mistakenly think of as too "feminine."  I know now that I have been wrong, that the notion of being romantic is not a feminine one at all.  Most women I meet think my ideas just silly if not wrong.  But that has been the mistake, I think, that I have always made.

Dinner done, I walked back to my car down the Boulevard of broken and would-be lovers feeling not so bad that I was going home.  It was early, but I was tired and knew I had nothing left for the night.  Retracing my steps, I saw my acquaintance still sitting at the same table with his friends.  Catherine looked up and gave a big, wide smile.  She was happy.

The woman in the painting haunts me.  It is my romantic addiction to such things as the image in this painting, perhaps, that makes me right and wrong.  I don't know if Tang Wei Min meant for the title of the painting to refer to the poem by Du Fu (Tu Fu) of the same name.

"The moon this night in Fu county,
Is watched alone from her chamber door.
The tenderness of son and daughter,
Wil not yet know of Chang An.
Her soft hair moistened by a fragrant mist,
Her smooth-white shoulders chilled in the pure light.
When shall we recline by humble curtains,
Both our eyes dried of tears?"

The feminist perspective on all of this, of course, is not quite as romantic.  Some are available online.  But I think I'll forego that this morning.  It is late and I have other things to do.