The First Warm Evening of the Year by Jamie M. Saul

that? I don’t mean clinically, I mean—”
    â€œJust what do you think it is that we’re both after?”
    â€œPassion,” I said. “When I was talking about wanting you to go crazy over an unreturned phone call, I was also talking about myself. I like this feeling, feeling a little bit crazy.”
    â€œBack at the Plaza, are we?”
    â€œI think you already have passion in your life,” I told him, “for your practice, your patients, really, and when you feel an attraction to someone—when you start to really care for someone, the other relationships are threatened. It creates, to use your word, conflict.”
    â€œWhich creates an emotional impotence?”
    â€œSo, it seems I’ve always known I wanted relationships with women who I’m dispassionate about,” I said, “or who are inaccessible, because anyone who tries to get close feels intrusive to me.”
    Alex said, “Which is one of the things you and Rita have in common.”
    â€œBut you want to feel close to someone,” I answered, “or so you say, except then you find it conflicting, so you distract yourself with your practice, which is the very thing that makes having what you want conflicting.”
    â€œDo you ever think that I’m content with that? So what if I commit myself to my profession? It’s still a vital aspect of life. I have my patients, and my friends when I have time for them.”
    â€œIf I said that to you, you’d say it’s just misdirected feelings,” I told him. “Substitutes for more substantial relationships. What some people do with their pets, or their mistresses. How’s that for an explanation?”
    Alex leaned on his side. “You at least always manage to have a girlfriend.”
    â€œVariations on Rita, that’s all,” I said.
    â€œThat’s nothing to dismiss.”
    â€œChoosing the wrong people?”
    â€œThey’re exactly the right people. For the kind of relationship you want.”
    â€œWhile you choose not to choose anyone at all. Why is that?”
    â€œMy reasons are my reasons,” he said, “just as yours are yours.”
    â€œWell, all of that’s changed as of a few days ago.”
    â€œYou’ve lost me.”
    â€œWhen I was younger,” I told him, “I was happy to be happy. When I got older, I was content to be content. But all of that changed when I was with Marian. Being content just isn’t satisfying anymore. It’s what I’ve been feeling for—you know, stagnating, stuck in the horse latitudes? That feeling’s been percolating for a while now, but I like thinking Marian’s made me realize that I want to go back there and be with her again.”
    â€œA woman who wants nothing to do with you.”
    â€œShe’s been living in perpetual mourning since her husband died,” I said. “And now she’s stuck in a dead-end, repressed relationship with her boyfriend.”
    â€œYou find that attractive?”
    â€œI find pulling her out of her emotional rut attractive.”
    â€œMaybe I should create my own myth of a broken heart,” he said.
    â€œThe man who got away?”
    â€œThe man who never was .” Alex got up to straighten a lampshade on the other side of the room, came back, and sat on the sofa. “It would seem,” he said, “that we’re talking about something a little more significant than former girlfriends and current ones.”
    I lay down on the floor, propped a pillow between my head and the bottom of the sofa.
    I said, “Maybe we should blame our parents.” And we both laughed.
    â€œYes. For being negligent enough to wait until we were both adults before leaving the city.”
    â€œWhat about early childhood influences?”
    â€œConvenient, but cowardly.”
    Alex asked if he could get me a beer or something, and walked out of the room. He came back with a