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You are awkward, bordered not by crystal and brocade curtains and artillery, but by guileless, graceless space. There is so much of it here, oceans of it, you are still nervous as you light your cigarette, glance furtively backwards at Jersey, wave the smoke away - and there’s you are at fifteen, secreting away your dad’s whiskey, choking on the virgin burn of it. Lewis, when they still called you Lewis, thinner but with the same aching face, developing a taste for the finer things in life, burning cigarette holes into the backs of the velvet sofas you disappeared behind...

It’s nice, you say. Oh yes, nice, the house. Rotten to it’s foundations and sharp with odour, but nice. Reminds me of that P.O.W. camp we liberated near Frankfurt.

Lew?

Yeah, Dick.

Shut up.

And you are eighteen, you snap jokes with reckless abandon, wander the house with your itching fingertips stuffed hard into your pockets, not quite knowing exactly where you want to end up, when your mother is out and your father has disappeared you dig your heel into the smooth hardwood floors and your mouth is filled with the furtive, thrilling taste of curse words.

And there’s you at nineteen, the women who visit are starting to call you Lew and they have stopped ruffling your hair and started eating you with their eyes, piece by piece, you smoke more and eat less and start reading Hemingway, Donne, and spy novels late at night, flashlight under the covers, still just a boy.

Stop looking at me like that, you say, and suddenly we are no longer standing together in Lancaster country, I am crouched over you, fingers catching and holding and waiting for you to stop looking at me so I can stop looking at you, realizing that the smooth skin that stretches from temple to temple is unbroken and solid and warm and you are impossibly, impossibly, impossibly...

We live in layers, every moment is a flashback.

Like what?

Like that. You smoke nervously, puffing away, breathing through your cigarette. The way you hold it - nestled in the crook of your fingers - makes you look like you’re trying not to laugh every time you take a drag.

This is you at twenty, another product of old money and cunning mothers and clever fathers, another dark eyed son sent away to Yale, to Harvard, to Oxford; you study economics, business, ancient Grecian mythology, every night there is a different girl in your dorm because you have discovered how to be slick and charming and, well hell, why not?

This is you at twenty one, you’ve failed economics, are failing business, reading Fitzgerald with more and more hunger each and every day - your father keeps calling but has less and less to say to you as the term drags on and you begin adding a soft, slow heaviness to your frame, no longer a boy. The war breaks out in Europe, and you barely even notice.

You kick at the door frame of the house and the whole thing rocks on it’s hinges - perhaps I deserve that look you give me, half a grin, one eyebrow set on a high angle. Son of a gun. I say this, and you laugh.

Son of a bitch, Dick, you say. Just say it. Son of a bitch.

Alright then. Son of a bitch.

Well, jeez. A smile cracks across your mouth, and you are laughing through your cigarette. Well jeez, I’ll be.

Nixon. You have spent your life as a man surrounded. You once read the bible cover to cover and declared yourself an atheist. You stole your dads cigars, made friends with the hired help and obstinately, beautifully, cracked dirty jokes when your mother had Ike and Mamie Eisenhower over for dinner. You were accepted at Eton, studied at Yale, were scooped out of a horrific downward spiral by a horrific war. You smirked your way through training, drank you way across Europe. You never fired a single round of ammo throughout every battle, every conflict, every moment of those two years that stood as lifetimes all on their own. You smoke, you drink, you cuss, you fight. And yet, you have never sat up all night just to watch the sun rise.

And you expect me not to look at you like that.

This is you at twenty three. I am twenty four. You are rounded at the edges, hands still soft and fleshy where they have not yet learned how to hold the clean lines of a rifle. I am just beginning to burn, cursing red hair and fair skin and Georgia with it’s sticky summers and hard, clean sunshine. We pass, my hand jars your hip, sorry, we say this to one another at the same time. Keep walking.