esme

I went to a barbeque Sunday night on the roof of my ex's Alphabet City apartment building. I could make any number of wry comments about the gathering including but not limited to the fact that the only non-queers in attendence were a Los Angelian Mormon and my dear friend J, but instead I will limit my pith to recounting the following moment, whose oddness and potential signifigance did not strike me until hours later:
I was chatting with this adorable peanut of a kid named R when I noticed he had a small tattoo of a fish on his inner forearm. I commented on it, then declared to anyone who might be listening in that if I ever get a tattoo it will be of a goldfish. K, a young-at-twenty Barnard dyke, asked why, and I told her "Well, it's a long story. It kind of has to do with J.D. Salinger." At this point she nodded in complete agreement. "Oh, yeah," she said. "Seymour." I smiled and frowned simultaneously, but four beers to the wind I didn't react to this confession like I might have under other circumstances. "I had a goldfish named Seymour," she went on. "He died. Jumped right out of the bowl."
Here's the thing: any normal person, or even any quirky Salingerian, should not be expected to make that leap. The Seymour of the stories was not a goldfish, he was a poet and a Sick Man. True, his first appearance was in a story that involved the fantastic bananafish; true also that, as I discovered just a few days ago in rereading The Catcher in the Rye (which, I still maintain, is by far his most tedious and irritating book-published work), Holden's brother D.B. wrote a story called "The Secret Goldfish." But Seymour, to me, is so much more than any of that. I wrote him into a post-modern fiction piece when I was freshman; I garnered wide acclaim across the tiny campus and even through my senior year, upon giving my name to unnown professors and horribly literate alumna, a smile would spread across their face and they would say "Oh, yeah...the goldfish story." Sophomore year I memorialized him in oils; the painting now hangs in my breakfast nook. Seymour was, Seymour is, in conclusion, more than any old geek-girl's pet's name. He is an icon, an inside joke that only I really understand. So what am I supposed to think about my encounter with this Barnard girl? About the fact that as soon as I said the words "Salinger" and "goldfish" she knew. She knew before I'd even said anything that it wasn't Holden or Zooey or Esme. Why couldn't her fish have een called Holden or Zooey or Esme? Not to mention the fact that her Seymour's death was much more romantic than mine (I wasn't even there for it--he passed away over Spring Break when my friend L decided to be nice and clean his bowl while I was away. I wasn't even there for it, though I maintain, for the sake of romance, that he actually died of loneliness). Perhaps I should stop being so cynical and wonder instead if she might be my soulmate. It might not be that bad--a PoliSci girl from Barnard. A native of the urban midwest, like myself. So she's not old enough to drink, but just barely. And she was wearing a cute skirt. The thing is, though, I'd just end up worrying, wondering the whole time we were together whether it was possible that Seymour loves her more than he loves me.