Bill

In those first few moments I have to confront my name. The moderator introduces me to her as “William” and she has eyes the color of blue ice and I can’t remember the last time I cared about my name, though for some years, as a young man, I did. But now I care once again. I shake her hand, and her eyes seem restless upon me, but we are turning to our places and we sit behind our name placards. Two other scholars of the Cultural Ephemera Association separate us at the table, and before us are blank legal pads, an untouched pitcher of ice water and four glasses, a few dozen sleepy-eyed scholars in Naugahyde hotel chairs. Everyone went drinking last night, deconstructing the texts and designs of the pulpboard beer coasters, by the end laughing crazily over obscenities only they could see. I sat apart. She was not with us. I did not know she existed. No. I knew her name. I’d read a paper or two of hers about Cadbury chocolate cards as artifacts of British colonialism. But I did not fully understand how she existed in a body until her extraordinary eyes were told to see me as “William.” What are my choices? My mother called me Willy from the start and I carried it through grade school. In London or Liverpool a willy is a penis. Will? A confrontation with the ephemera of a life left after you’re bound for worms and dust. Bill, of course. It’s what I settled on long ago. A bird’s beak. A demand for money. But I accepted that it was me. Not William, because that name has always felt too formal, passionless, disenfranchised from a body. I accepted Bill with the wish to keep some informality about myself, hoping that it registered as personal warmth, though I am William to her from the start, and when I meet her I am indeed William, having lived in my body and my senses as all of us do but in some deep way never having lived in my body at all, never having truly touched anyone. On the morning I meet her I am William.

 

 

 

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