Sexy Sadie

 

 

March 22, 1985

 

Sadie, again?

This has a queer tone to me, as if time hasn’t passed since we were an item four years ago.

Perhaps she comes around again because Easter means something and with that day’s approach she needs to return to her roots, probing us to see if we are yet ripe for her calculations.

Good Friday has always been a tough day for me, and I remember during our break up in 1981, wandering through the ruins of my old life in Greenwich Village, searching out my roots there.

I guess we all go back, searching for clues to something we might have missed.

I last wrote to Sadie three months ago, seeking to explain Pauly’s latest condition to her, and how unromantic our lives in this part of the world are and how she shouldn’t long for what we have when we don’t live like this out of choice.

We gather into this pathetic community of friends because we must, driven together by common loneliness none of us are capable of curing on our own. Even Alf has come back – despite the fact that none of us want him.

Sadie has spent years trying to worm her way into our group, seeking to belong, like a splinter that gets under our skin and infect us, never part of what we are, always something that shouldn’t be here.

She is always giving people gifts – like bribes.

Small things like coffee to big things like car insurance. When I first started going out with her, she paid for everything, even convincing her parents that they should donate to my cause to, filling up my small apartment with odds and ends, a table, a lap, a chair, linens even curtains – although the curtains that hang in my windows now were aimed at Pauly when he lived here, not me.

It never stops – she thinking she can buy her way into our group, when we don’t even know who she is. She refuses to let down her barriers so we can see the real her.

This time she’s sent a letter, but it’s not to me. It’s too Pauly. Perhaps it is to tell him that this is his last chance at her.

I have deliberately neglected to tell Sadie about Pauly’s latest infatuation, believing that if I do, Sadie will get hurt.

Pauly doesn’t go for ordinary women even when they are more ordinary that most, painting them into goddesses so he can admire them.

His ego is so vast he dare not settle for anything less. So that a woman like Sadie cannot possibly live up to the woman in his imagination.

This may explain his loneliness and why he needs to belong to this silly group of ours, a group which Sadie needs to belong to, but lacks the basic qualification. She can get anybody she wants to except for Pauly, and Pauly seems to be the only person she wants.

How strange, how painful for someone like me, an ordinary person like me, who still aches for Sadie but dares not admit so in public – my dues for membership in this lonely hearts club.