It was the third time I'd picked up Susan from the airport after a trip to Indiana, where her friend Chad lived. This time was for Chad's funeral. It wasn't unexpected; he'd been HIV positive for over twelve years, and Susan had just been out to see him and say good-byes only three weeks earlier. Still, she and Chad's other friends took it hard. As before, she traveled with Karen and Richard, who had also gone for the other two trips. When all else fails, they are all comfortable turning to heavy drinking and smoking as a coping mechanism, so they allow each other to indulge in calming vice without disquieting guilt.

I'd been hearing snippets though my short conversations with Susan, who reported that things were satisfactory but emotionally grueling. Chad's parents arranged a Catholic Mass, which most of his friends feared would be a stuffy and impersonal affair. Instead, the church allowed people to get up and say a few words about Chad, and quite a few did so. Susan talked about him and read some snippets from letters he had sent over the years. I'd read them before she left, and they really were a scream. There was, to be sure, already a hint of the dementia which took greater hold of him in later years, but it was so muted that it only made the prose more humorously lucid and loopy.

I plucked some daffodils from the front yard and took them along to the airport. It was a bedraggled bouquet -- I probably looked like a third grader bringing an offering for his teacher -- but under the circumstances it seemed warranted. As I had guessed, all of them were exhausted. The few emotional circuits that hadn't spontaneously burned out in the strain of the funeral had been systematically eliminated through excessive drinking and smoking.

Susan and I took Karen to the train station to head back to New York. Both of them were woozy and prone to start crying without warning. Both wondered out loud how they possibly had any tears left to cry. When not upset, they laughed a lot, as the living will often do.

As Karen was getting on the train, she hugged Susan for a long time and then turned to me. She put her hands on either side of my face and leaned in as if to kiss me on the lips. I had a moment of panic. At other times, I've caught myself getting ready to plant a smooch on a woman who is not Susan (i.e. my mother) just because they said or did something that was similar to my partner. The realization of what I'd almost done in those instants was quite breathtaking -- like standing on the Metro platform as the train comes and discovering that there is a small but real part of yourself that is compelling you to jump. I thought that Karen had made an accidental-kissing error, momentarily forgetting who I was, and I turned my head to the side to receive her kiss on my cheek.

Much of the time that Susan was away I had spent not sleeping and instead working on more or less useless personal projects, so we were both in bad shape by evening. Seeking some kind of diversion, we went to see Analyze This. I might not have been quite so compelled to go see the movie under normal circumstances, but it was playing at the Uptown -- by far the greatest theater in Washington DC. It's one of the old, classic movie houses, with a full balcony, where I once watched Vertigo while sitting in the nausea-inducing foremost row. You could rip the film out of the projector and spend an hour making shadow-puppets on the gigantic screen there, and I would probably be willing to sit through it. The movie was not a profound journey into the human heart, but not everything should be. It made us laugh out loud a few times, and that was all we asked of it.

Afterwards we headed across the street to an Irish pub, where a guitarist was singing unmemorable tunes to a packed bar. I ordered a cider, despite my recent theory that it frequently sends me off into a deep sleep. (Sure enough, I remained awake for an almost laughably short time when we later stumbled into the house. I dislike it when my body shuts down like that without my permission. Controlling your own wakefulness should be some kind of unalienable human right, like the freedom to determine whether or not you will have sex with a given individual. Both are pleasurable drives, but you are denied control of them, they can be oppressive.)

Sitting at the bar, I confessed my confusion when Karen went to kiss me earlier in the day. Susan said she thought Karen was going for the lips as a genuine sign of affection. Karen is a lovely woman, and under more prurient circumstances I would be pleased to smooch her, but the idea of the affectionate kiss will take some getting used to. I didn't grow up in a very kissy family. Kissing was for more lusty pursuits. In fact, I've probably had sex with nearly as many people as I've sincerely kissed. That tends to imply that my standards for either kissing or screwing may be a bit extreme.