Close your eyes and try to sleep, close your eyes and try to dream. We belong to the night, we belong to each other. We belong, we belong, we belong together.

Charlie and I met in Santa Monica at the mouth of an old fire road, which wound round a massive mountain to an overlook for a Technicolor view of mountains, sky, and sea. I had called Charlie up that morning and asked him to take a walk in nature with me. It felt good to have a no-pressure outing with a nice guy.

All the same, I chewed three pieces of wintergreen gum. Poor hygiene is just poor manners.

Charlie arrived dressed liked a trendy forest ranger in olive khakis with a vintage Boy Scout shirt with a patch that said 420, mirrored police officer sunglasses, and clunky mustard-colored lace-up boots. I was brave enough to pour myself into a pair of jean shorts and a long-sleeved ribbed purple cotton T-shirt, even though my legs were wintry white and unshaven. I figured I needed to be utterly myself right away; that way I'd find out quick who stuck around.

"This is white sage," he said as we made our way to the first of several plateaus, and then told me its Latin name along with the names of about sixteen other neighboring green items. Of course, he knew about plants. It turned out Charlie had his own little herb garden. Mint and chocolate geranium were his favorites. I was so nervous about my breath and memorizing the plants and their corresponding names that at no time did I notice the ingrown hair on my leg the size of a small dog until we began to dig into our ascent. I panicked. Decided to hug the area closest to the fall so that he wouldn't see the red inflamed boil side of my leg; but Charlie was wily and crisscrossed back and forth in front of me to point out some type of succulent ground cover and tiny yellow wildflowers. "This is mustard!" He pulled the yellow blossoms off the slender green stalk for me to taste. Mustard, I thought. I had to laugh inwardly because of Spoonie's and my codeword for trouble...

"This is licorice and this one is yucca." I stayed low, unable to concentrate on a thing Charlie said because I was sweating so much and straining to hide the bump.

I touched IT compulsively now, with every other step. I was all bump and minimal forward motion.

"Are you OK?" he asked suddenly.

"What? Why?"

"Because you're walking kind of funny."

"Oh?" I said, a deer in the headlights.

"You're walking like this." He demonstrated it for me. "Like you have poopie trou or something," he said, grinning. I dropped to the ground and pulled my shirt over my bent knees, buried my face in my hands. "Dude, did I say something wrong?"

"No," I said to my navel, "it's just that you're so honest and I don't know you and... and..."

He crouched beside me, put a hand on my back. "Just say it."

I pointed to my leg, ran my hand over the fabric that hid it. "Bump!"

"Where?" He pulled at the end of my shirt trying to get a look.

"NOOOOOOOO!"

"Let me look at it." He bent down on all fours and leaned forward. Without lifting my face, I raised the shirt and revealed the lump. "Eeuwwww! It's huge! Can I pop it?"

"NOOOOOO!" I screamed again. I pulled my shirt back down and began to rock myself back and forth. "Go away!" I peered at him over my left kneecap. He was smiling devilishly.

"Let me pop it, can I?" His intentions seemed so pure, I let him lift up my shirt once more. Upon closer examination, he decided it wasn't ripe for picking and found some wild lavender, plucked a sprig, crushed the blossom and the stem, and applied it like a salve instead. Then we collected eucalyptus leaves and he told me to boil them with some gauze and apply it like a poultice. I had never heard the word poultice used in real life before, certainly not by a handsome, heterosexual twenty-six-year-old man.

The following Tuesday I asked Charlie if he wanted to hit the museum for the Cubist show that was still running. My dad's stuff had been up for weeks at LACMA and I kept promising myself I'd go. Charlie was dressed like a Salvador Dali painting complete with pocket watch. Before we piled into his giant dented blue flatbed truck with the sticky starter, he climbed my tree. My tree! The one the feng shui people told me prevented me from ever getting a man, that tree. Charlie climbed it. Climbed it. Climbed IT. I was so shocked I dropped my purse.

Strolling through the great halls and seeing the look of awe on Charlie's face as we stopped to examine a piece of my father's called If all else fails choose D, none of the above, a painting of pure sky, made me recall one of the only things I did like about seeing my father's work on display. I liked it best when the pieces belonged to us, before they had to pack their bags and travel to a gallery overseas: in our living room above the fireplace or propped up against a hall closet or blocking the door to a guest bathroom.

We paused at another from his book called Barely Mammal -- a Ku Klux Klan guy holding a gun to the head of a black Raggedy Andy doll, and then another, a favorite called Gargoyle, which is just a building gargoyle looking after some pigeons with a fountain and a roller-skating street scene in the distance.

Suddenly I'm five, and seven, and thirteen, sitting in my parents' kitchen late at night watching my father heat up a bowl of chili straight from the can. We make color jokes. It's one of my favorite things to do, to have quiet time alone with him like this. While he waits for the lugubrious brown stew to boil, we call out horrifying color combinations and laugh and laugh. I say something like "Apple green and orange plus brown." And he says something like "That's nothing. Beige, mildew, and Washington, D.C." or "Turquoise, leather, and tofu." If I try to argue leather isn't a color he tickles me. Sometimes if we are driving, Spoonie and my mother play, too. Car interiors have us peeing in our pants. Strip mall color schemes send us over the moon. The very idea of fabric stores flattens us.

When Charlie and I get to a piece from my father's Cubist period, our feet become cement. The piece is called From Russia with Glove. The image is the Statue of Liberty, barefoot in Central Park, wearing a crown of thorns made of splayed Barbie doll legs and an oven mitt. Charlie and I can do nothing except look at each other and know instinctively just how sad it is. The loss of a true humanitarian absurdist.

There was nothing to say.

Then I had an epiphany about Cubism. I had always despised Cubist art, but now I understood that it wanted us all to comprehend the full scope of things, to be able to see and know everything from wherever you stood. To see the back of the head of those you love and the inside of their heart at the same time as you look them directly in the eye. Inwardly, I thanked Charlie.

When I got home I decided to spruce the place up a little, so I picked wildflowers from all my neighbors' yards and hillsides. Daffodils in an old tea tin in my kitchen window near the sink, iris in a jelly jar by my bed, and a single white camellia in a mint-green-and-white chipped finger bowl by my father's easel.

The next day I was still feeling so inspired from our museum visit that I called Charlie and asked him if he wanted to paint pottery. In the clean little terra cotta-tiled shop on Main Street I was suddenly nervous. I felt the pressure of my father's artistic legacy, and picked out an inconspicuous unfinished soap dish, but Charlie wouldn't have it. He picked out a large white unfinished salad bowl, because he wanted something large he could paint with me. My courage surfaced: I wondered if it would stay at his place or mine or if we should just move in together to avoid an argument.

I let Charlie choose the colors. A girl in a navy apron squirted the paint onto a single square of glazed white tile, orange and ice blue and magenta, dark green and brown, pink and plum. I looked around the room. It was hard not to notice things differently with Charlie around. For example, the relationship between things in pairs: the edge of the table we sat at and the corner of his chair, the bottom of the clock and the door frame overhead, the way the viny plants in the window leaned in toward each other.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Charlie.

"Uh!" I said blushing, twirling my paintbrush in the water, watching it turn a milky blue, "um, things in pairs actually." Charlie jolted straight up in his seat, turned his side of the bowl around for me to see: a big fat PEAR next to a bunch of dancing bananas with top hats and faces, and a scruffy-looking creature with four legs and antlers that looked like it started out as a dog and then turned into a goat, maybe.

"OK, I know that's a pear, and those are dancing bananas, but what the hell is that?"

He contorted his body to my side of the table to examine it again and then sat up triumphantly. "It's a goatbear!" We erupted into peals of laughter. "What did you make?" He sat straight-spined in his seat now. His whole face softened. "Wow!"

I lightly smacked his arm. "Shut up!"

"I'm serious. It's really nice. Really... feminine." I crinkled my nose up. "You're like a real artist. I love the colors."

"Nah." I pulled a face.

"Really." He looked sad now. "Don't close off. See?" He turned the bowl back around for me to see. I looked at what I had done, trying to see it through Charlie's eyes: intertwining vines and roses and two birds and two dancing fairy ladies and some snakes with mosaic multicolored backs.

"Not SO bad," I said, brushing my hair behind my ear. Affectionately he conked me on the head.

Later that night we ended up in a carpeted piano bar at some divey hotel in West Hollywood. Charlie knew that no one was ever there, so we sat and played the piano even though I can't. We ended up singing all the Pat Benatar songs we knew at the top of our lungs to the dead drunk amusement of a few lingering lonelyhearts and some random staffers. Soon the man with the industrial strength vacuum cleaner and the too shiny skin was using the end of his nozzle as a microphone for a duet with Charlie. "Hell Is for Children" never sounded so good.

"Does he have a girlfriend?" Sadie said when I called her from my cozy bed. I had Tulie curled up beside me and I watched her dream with her eyes open.

"I don't know," I said softly, stroking Tulie's pink belly.

"Did he try to kiss you?"

"No."

"Ooh, that's a bad sign."

"Sadie..."

"He's either gay or he has a girlfriend."

"Maybe he's just being respectful?"

"You see each other all the time and talk 500 times a day and have all this synchronicity and he hasn't tried to jump you? Something's fishy in Denmark."

"Or maybe he's a grown-up, Sadie, and what's the rush if it's forever?" I said, biting dry skin off from around my index finger. "It's like he lives his life like in The Book! Every day he shows me something else! Every day he has a passion for some new thing!"

"He has a girlfriend."

"Sadie!"

"Where's the rose connection? If he's the one, where's the rose? Huh?"

I twisted my hair around my index finger. "Maybe she got it all wrong. Maybe that's all superstitious nonsense."

"Just do me a favor and go out with this guy I met in my spinning class. You might like him."

"What guy?"

"He's a math teacher. He's from ROSEville."

"Sadie, my plate is full."

"Well, at least add a side dish for Godsakes, at least find out if he has a girlfriend before you go all gaga on me."

"Goodnight, Mom."

"Goodnight, Mission: Impossible to deal with."

On Wednesday night I asked Charlie if he felt like dancing. He suggested that I meet him at The Temple, a dance studio tucked deep in the Valley. Sun Valley far. Ikea far. At a warehouse with a little parking area surrounded by barbed wire. He told me to look for a single red light -- that's how I could tell the difference late at night between the dance studio I was looking for and the sheet metal supply house, the wax supply house, the paint warehouses, the marble supply house, and the terra cotta pot and garden outlet.

I was ill-prepared for the calming beauty assault of the large room with wood floors and high airplane hangarish ceilings. A ballet barre ran the length of the room, and in the corner, a bench had been decorated like an altar and lay littered with fragrant magnolias and a row of ligzhted white candles. Industrial music with African and Brazilian samples blared. Barefooted, people of every size, shape, and color had their eyes closed and were just dancing wildly. It looked like a scene out of the Woodstock movie, like one of my dad's sittings, only holy.

"Just let your body move the way it wants to. This is like the opposite of yoga. Just totally free your mind. Over there on the altar you can offer up your intention. Tonight I am going to dance the purity of connection along with a little don't-make-me-pay-my-Visa-late-charge on the side." Following Charlie's lead, I slipped off my shoes. He smelled like sandalwood.

He grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the floor. At first I was shy about letting Charlie see the way the music moved me, but when he started hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean, I felt a little more free. After an hour of swaying and jumping and bumping and weaving in and out of sweaty backs and damp pits and fingers outstretched like sea anemone feelers, I was fearless. It actually felt good to be in my own skin. To be myself completely opposite Charlie, who was also himself, and not lose me. I felt a radiance in my belly, like we were all walking around with little potbelly stoves full of light, beaming it back and forth at one another. Everyone was just a light being on a path, dancing through life.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand for the realization. Maybe this is what Jasper meant in his letter. I looked over at Charlie. His eyes were closed. He was giving himself a long luxurious hug.

Later, over cheap Mexican food in Glendale, I broke down and told Charlie about Jasper and Jym, mainly to get things off my chest, but secretly to initiate a dialogue about our possible future together without scaring him off by talking about myself. I figured he'd just naturally bring up his whole relationship deal if I broke the ice.

When I got to the part about how I didn't understand why all the people I have ever loved never loved me back, including my dad, and that I had never actually seen a relationship that actually worked, it started to sound like a story about a girl I knew once. Charlie must have felt this, too, because in the middle of building his guacamole fortress like that scene in Close Encounters, he looked at me and said point blank, "Dude, you didn't do anything wrong. No one did. Relationships are all about flow and finding someone who makes you feel good because they are just flowing right alongside of you doing their own thing. A lot of it just comes down to plain old timing and luck..." Even though he said the word "dude," my chest tightened and vibrated like a paper drum, like a revelation was about to blast on through.

Charlie leaned in closer, smelling of onion salsa, dried sweat, and denim, and popped a tortilla drenched in guacamole in my mouth. The candles on the table in clay pots made his face light up like a sun. "When something's right, it's just... right. Dude, you're totally great, so don't even sweat it." I felt so seen, I ached.

"I feel so lucky to have met you."

"Me, too," he said, taking my hand. I looked up at him. Tears of joy were in my eyes. He handed me a hankie from his jacket pocket, embroidered with tiny hand-stitched roses. I could not help but laugh. Of course you carry real old-fashioned handkerchiefs with roses on them you miracle.

On my drive home, alone, speeding along Mulholland under a canopy of stars, I thought, Let me get this straight, men can do nice things for you? Men can show up when they say they are going to and do their own laundry and drive and let you express your feelings and hug you when you cry and give you good advice? Is this some kind of a gag?

Then I had a conversation with the moon. When I was little, on the long drive back from picking up my father from his old studio, I would lie in the backseat while my mother drove him home along this very same road. As we wound along, I would alternate between watching my exhausted father's profile while he reclined in the front passenger seat and making sure the moon was still following us. Sometimes it seemed the moon was leading the way, ducking behind great dark pines every now and then, but mostly it seemed like it was making sure we got home safe. Now I'm checking to see if the moon's watching over Charlie tonight. Leaning my head out the window, I was sure her benevolent face was saying yes.

At that moment, Angelyne pulled up beside me in her pink Corvette. She looked spun sugar-fragile, tired. I thought, Underneath all that hair and makeup and baby doll sexuality is someone just like me, someone who wants love, someone who wants to know who she is and what she does so she can say, "I existed in this moment of time!" and leave her mark on the world for everyone to behold. I wondered what love she had lost, and hoped she had found someone who truly saw her beauty like I saw hers. Like Charlie saw mine. When the light turned green she sped past like a pink human comet. Don't we all want the same things?

When I got home, in my journal I wrote:

Thank you God. As a result of knowing Charlie Mate these are the things I will not miss about being in a relationship with Jasper Husch and Jym Court:

1. That panicky feeling that I couldn't be myself.

2. That jealous feeling whenever we were apart.

3. That anxious feeling when they didn't call.

4. That frustrated feeling when we talked things through and neither one of us felt anything had been resolved.

5. That lonely feeling when they don't hold me enough or for long enough.

6. That painful feeling when we'd have sex and they'd just grind away and only he'd orgasm and I'd feel empty inside and physically uncomfortable if not in actual pain.

7. That angry feeling when they didn't care enough to see a couples counselor to work through things even though they said they loved me.

8. That less-than feeling when they'd hang out with losers and treat them like they were so much more interesting than me.

Under this, in crayon, I colored a rainbow with pinks and blues and lavenders and reds and then covered over all of it with black crayon, like you do when you're a kid. Then, with the end of a paper clip, I drew a little self-portrait: a girl in a dress of moons and hearts, under a canopy of stars.

As I climbed into bed, inwardly I prayed, If it's not too much to ask, could you make Charlie love me forever and send me a little job so that I don't have to take money from my mother anymore or at least a sign as to my real purpose, just so I know you're real? Thanks.

The rest of the month went like this:

Thursday: Picnic in Griffith Park. Drink virgin sangrias, take pictures with real camera and read poetry aloud in the sun: Rumi, Hafiz, Mary Oliver... Discuss importance of classical music. So swoony when I go, accidentally leave wallet in Charlie's truck.

Come home to three annoying messages from my mother, saying she misses me and when can I come help her clean out the office and to remind me she is thinking about selling our childhood home or at least remodel the kitchen (again) and to say the real estate person is coming on Friday so again could I please please please come help her clean out "the office."

Friday: Meet Charlie at Starbucks for wallet and surprise pix. Sit in car and talk for hours. Smell and covet jean jacket he accidentally leaves in back of car. Drive home holding it to face. Get home and post photo of us looking like the Twin Stars on bulletin board above computer I never use.

Saturday: Go on voice-over audition for BBQ sauce wearing lucky jean jacket. Meet at Starbucks to return jacket. Receive gift of old T-shirts and patches Charlie thought I might like.

Spend rest of rainy afternoon alone, whimsically darning socks and jeans with homemade patches and embroidery thread. Have massive crush on Self. Listen to only Bach (Glenn Gould on piano, Heinrich Schiff on cello). Avoid picking up phone when my mother calls again about today being the perfect day to clean out office.

Later, go to Largo with Charlie to see Spoonie open for Repeat Offenders and Squeezeboxx.

Monday: Receive annoying phone call on car phone from my mother about making time to talk to annoying journalist for Vanity Fair piece on her to run in conjunction with my father's birthday and retrospective in Frankfurt in the middle of drive to beach with Charlie for guitar sing-along and lesson on how to build fire in sand.

Tuesday: Talk about luck and flow, book commercial for BBQ sauce called Luv'n'Fun. Call Charlie. Make a plan to go to Big Bear to see snow to celebrate. Make perfect cup of Earl Grey tea with half&half and two sugars. Thank God up and down, mostly for getting out of cleaning out office with mother. For first time ever, feel like things are turning around for the better. Think all suffering was meant to lead me to bliss as result of Charlie.

Know beyond a shadow of doubt consummation of Charlie's love for me is only matter of time.