I know only two things about my friend’s most attentive, best lover: his name, and the wistful urgency in my friend’s nostalgia, the way her eyes grew wide and sparkled at the chance to say his name out loud, to call up memories of her time with him, more than two decades ago.
It’s a lyrical name, one requiring commitment and patience to say it slowly, all four syllables, the slight elongation of the third syllable, a name containing the “aaaahhhhh” I imagine he eventually elicited, just before the lift and lilt of its sweet finale.
Giovanni.
I play his name over my tongue and lips and teeth. I could chant this mantra to bring me home. Giovanni, I could repeat and breathe, my Molly Bloom’s “yes.” James Joyce and Henry Miller were oh-so-explicit about women wanting to be fucked, but oh-so-wrong about which lovers we talk about 20 years later. Not the quick fucks, never the too-tipsy-to-fully-remember guys, not the ones whose need slammed us against the wall or table or floor, and certainly never the ones we fucked because it was easier to acquiesce than explain why we didn’t want to. Size matters; of course we talk about that, too. But 20 years later, we shudder and release to the memory of ample generosity, the willingness to give more and do more and be more. We can’t recall the name of the guy with the largest dick; we don’t want to conjure the face of the one whose greedy desire overwhelmed us.
No, the one that remains in our minds, the one we return to in our fantasies, the one we imagine leaving our husbands and our children for, that one we remember for almost everything other than the fucking. The one who knew his way around a woman’s body, but never made us jealous of the women before us. The one who was eager to learn our particular body, which he made seem the most desirous he’d ever seen, touched, tasted. The one who made our usual sense of failings – our soft bellies or our too-big asses or our too-small tits – evaporate under his gaze, his hands, his light and feathery fingers, his lips and tongue and teeth. The one who spent an eternity in our homeland, the one who softened and moistened us, kneaded us until we could smell our own yeasty need, the one who opened and entered us so wholly (and holy), the one who gave until we were completed and satisfied, rather than those who took until we were emptied and depleted.
We savor the limited hours with our Giovanni’s. We protect those memories, store them in a secret place with our most cherished trinkets and baubles. We will tell our closest girlfriends, all these years later, about his patience, the way he lingered on spots we hadn’t previously thought of as sexual, the way he spoke our name, the way he slowly stroked our hair, the way he listened to our sighs, the quickening of our breath, the unhurried way he adored our folds, our heat, the way he waited, and waited, and waited, his willingness to look us in the eye while drawing us in and out and under and over, over and over.
This one, the cherished lover, lives on forever. He waited for us.
And so, my next Giovanni, or Dmitri, or Liam, or Antonio, I wait for you.
Yes, I say, yes I will, yes.