The Soap Dish

The Story of a Love Lost

When we moved my mother and stepfather out of their house and into their new home last year, my brother, sister, and I unpacked their things.

I did not expect to see the porcelain bathtub — a stolen soap dish from the Plaza Hotel where I stayed one weekend many, many years before. Now, my stepfather uses it as a coin dish. I quickly set it down on his dresser.

I wanted it back, but at 91, my stepfather needed some continuity — he and my mother had just moved into a house that was sure to be their last. And the tub? It was, after all, merely a souvenir from a weekend in New York. But it is also the only thing that remains from a relationship that ended long ago — a lopsided, if not one-sided, love.

I went home that night thinking all about the fucking soap dish, and the more I thought about it, the more upset I became at the prospect of this “love” being one-sided, but it was, and why this became so clear to me that night, I am not sure.

This story is a small part of a vast part of my life that I never talk about. It is a tale where there is no real place to dive in. It is jumping into the shallow end, the area where necks break.

I rarely write about this part of my life. It is a part I surrendered, felt shame towards, lied about, and eventually accepted — being gay and being in love with another man. It was not easy for me.

My first love happened during a time when men like me could not love men from certain families. It was the advent of AIDS killing thousands when love between men was a “choice” at best or perversion more often. The Albanian zeitgeist did not offer much of an alternative.

It was long before “don’t ask, don’t tell.” And not for nothing, DADT, when it rolled out, seemed progressive to me. Before this tacit nod of quasi-acceptance, being gay was wrong, and I ate this message for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. From the 4th grade, when I knew I was gay, through college and into my twenties — I was told the affection I felt towards men was wicked. I loved in an iniquitous way.

And then, one day on the street, I was introduced to a guy who, for whatever inexplicable reason, would one day make this taboo fall away, not forever, but for a time.

I did not talk to or see him again for a year after that introduction on the street.

The first time I was alone with him, we walked down an empty fairway under a starry sky. All the while, I wondered if this man would like a guy like me. He is so out of my league, I thought. I slept with him that night, but it would be another two years before we had a relationship.

Who knows what brings two people together? Effort and timing.

I never felt reluctant around him; our affection seemed to come all at once. But the closer we got, the closer our other lives came into play.

Family and friends.

People talked.

We did not break up because of money issues, jealousy, cheating, or lack of attraction. We broke up because I moved away, and this fragile relationship could not survive any distance.

I went home to visit him after two months. He told me he did not want to see me again. He had started to see someone else, a woman. It was an overwhelming blow to my self-esteem that went unnoticed because it lingered in the shadows of the pain and fear associated with the prospect of never seeing him again.

I moved back to Albany a year later and saw him many times, but we never said more than hello.

Strange to be so connected to a person and then have that connection severed like a limb — and even after all these years, there are times I have phantom pains associated with his amputation.

These aching apparitions come in the early morning when I wake up after the occasional dream or some other rare reminder of him, like the soap dish.

How is it that something like love and tenderness dries up for some seemingly overnight? It can be, and over the years, I grew to accept that he merely did not reciprocate the same level of affection I had for him, and this realization left me in a dizzying spin at times. I certainly get unrequited love, but unequal love? For all these years, he has been a magnet that sat next to my emotional compass, but I never really wanted to know if I was just a pit stop for him.

What changed? I think it has something to do with my aging parents; moving them out of their home somehow made me age. In the gloom of my ending 40s, it is clear to me that I want a more authentic life as I grow older. In large part, this is the counterbalance to living a life that was not authentic when I was a young adult. And maybe, too, it is part of trying to make peace with a past before the past is all that remains.

So I reached out to him and asked him to lunch. I gave no false pretext. I told him I needed to see him and frame what had happened so many years ago that left me unmoored and adrift.

We had lunch.

Afterward, as I rode the train home, staring out across the vast expanse of the Hudson River, all I felt was his absence renewed.

I wrote to him and shared my find of the soap dish and how good it was to see him. I was okay with him liking me less than I loved him. I stopped thinking of our past as shared by lovers; instead, I left it alone in the most remote part of my heart as something without a name. I sent the email as the train went north and the Hudson narrowed.

I wish I had not mentioned the soap dish the following day in my email. Who the fuck cares about a soap dish, I thought? But in my defense, I have no context in which to be friends with him; we just had one gear with each other.

He wrote me back.

“I still have the Plaza Hotel bathtub from our stay there. It has been a constant fixture in every apartment and house I have occupied since our stay in the room on the floor that they had not officially opened after renovations. I remember showing up without reservations, wearing paint-splattered clothes, and invoking my parents’ names as frequent guests to persuade them to find us a room. I think we had gone to a restaurant whose French name translated into English as “The Wood Box.” It is still open. La Boîte En Bois.”

I had forgotten that he had taken one as well.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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