by Paul Lisicky
LATER
Also by Paul Lisicky
Lawnboy
Famous Builder
The Burning House
Unbuilt Projects
The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship
LATER
MY LIFE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
PAUL LISICKY
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2020 by Paul Lisicky
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
This is a memoir. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Certain quotations have been reconstructed to the best of the author’s ability.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-016-1
Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-115-1
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2020
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933480
Cover design: Kapo Ng
Cover art: Sam Chung @ A-Men Project (dog illustration)
Phase4Studios / Shutterstock (photograph)
For Polly Burnell and Elizabeth McCracken
The sand is the great enemy here…. The sand drifts like snow, and sometimes the lower story of a house is concealed by it, though it is kept off by a wall…. There was a school-house, just under the hill on which we sat, filled with sand up to the tops of the desks, and of course the master and scholars had fled.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1865
*
The very houses are subject to change and move about as though not anchored to the land. In most places when a man builds a house he builds it and there it stands, practically unchanged…. This is not true in Provincetown. Houses there do not remain upon their foundations. Formerly, every summer one saw houses cumbrously moving down the front street.
MARY HEATON VORSE, Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle, 1942
*
This wasn’t the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the eternally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you—we are more water than dust. It is our origin and destination.
DENIS JOHNSON, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991
*
In Provincetown I was overwhelmed with this sky thing. It became a new character in my life and made me want to write poems. Then I realized there were skies everywhere, so that whole period of time I kind of made every poem I wrote touch the sky.
EILEEN MYLES, 1999
*
What happens to people out here on the Lower Cape, a mid-ocean sandspit, what happens even to intelligent and educated people, that they take to plying skies like cows in Chagall? From solid citizens they sublimed to limbless metaphysicians. Their minds grew lucent as gels. Or they slipped from supersaturation to superstition without passing through crystal.
ANNIE DILLARD, The Maytrees, 2007
*
Paul had begun to work out the taxonomy of Provincetown (should he say “P-town?”—he wasn’t sure): performers seemed to occupy a stratum between tourists and townies—weekender tourist, all-season tourist, short-season worker, long-season worker, year-rounder worker, queer townie, fisherman townie—but which one he wasn’t sure.
ANDREA LAWLOR, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, 2017
LATER
1991–1994
1
Dream House
We’re out on the driveway, my mother and I, leaning against my little red car. September 30. It’s the first morning in months when it’s possible to stand outside and not be wrecked by the heat. Fourteen hundred miles to go, twenty-one hours; a stop in Beaufort, South Carolina; another in White Marsh, Maryland. We’d known this day was coming since May 1, when the writing coordinator phoned to tell me I’d been offered the fellowship: a seven-month residency in Provincetown. We’ve had plenty of time to take in the good news, but the day of my departure still seems to come out of nowhere. It is bad timing, but isn’t it always? The good news flattens us, as if we’ve both come down with the flu, passed it between us, on the coolest, driest morning since April.
My mother looks back at the house: the tile roof, the arched window, the date palm sprawling over the tight, pineapple-shaped trunk. The lawn glistens. Sprinkler heads relax after hissing out water. She is probably telling herself it’s the house she’d always wanted, the house she’d invoked in a subversive challenge to my father: When you see me lying in the casket, do you want to say: I never bought her that house? So he bought the house, and to punish her, holds on to the New Jersey house, lives there alone amid a slop of bills, newspapers, and out-of-date engineering books, and comes down for a ten-day stretch only every six weeks.
She rubs her hands, arthritis twisting her forefinger, which she occasionally shows me just so she has a witness. I’ve been back only eight months since grad school, but it’s also been a lifetime, as if I’d never left home and known what it is to have an adult life. She won’t let me know how much she loves me, won’t say how much she’s going to miss having someone to talk to, but instead channels those feelings into lists, asking me if I’ve packed a razor, toothbrush, deodorant, contact lens solution, contact lens case, comb, dental floss, Q-tips, Band-Aids, blunt-tipped scissors: all the items so easy to pick up at a chain. She is driving me nuts, knows she is, but can’t stop. Terrified of silence, she’s lost her famous ability to laugh and listen. Not so long ago, on a trip to Morrison’s Cafeteria, she talked incessantly for the full twenty-minute drive. I blew up and told her it was wrong to keep a running monologue, selfish not to leave any space for my response. Her face went red, as if I’d seen right into her liver and heart. She knew what I saw: someone who had lost her friends, someone who told them her secrets, and thus she withdrew, or they from her, as if direct talk about, say, her dead twin brother or her gay son named after him were too much for anybody to take.
I cannot be her husband. She must know I can’t accompany her to Home Depot forever, pour shock into the hot tub, fertilize bougainvillea by the downspout. But does she say she can take care of herself on her own? That would be expecting too much. She puts her arms around me so I will feel the consequence in my body, the consequence of her losing once again. And I hug her back even harder in my attempt to do the impossible: push dark feelings out of her and leave light in their place.
Maybe she thinks, Why should he get all the freedom I don’t have? Go to grad school, come back home, go off for a fellowship. Why should his happiness spring from, depend upon, my disappointment? What kind of logic is that?
Do you think I’m going to die, Mom? Is that why you’re sad?
I want to say it, but don’t. It would be cruel to go down those roads.
I suppose her heart wouldn’t be so broken i
f I were headed to Arizona rather than Provincetown. Over the years our family has twice visited Provincetown, and we know what draws people there; we’ve walked among the queer people on the street, heard them laughing, carousing, seen the signals passed between them. She is afraid of my living among my kind, especially now that so many young men are dying of AIDS. She is expecting me to die of AIDS.
My mother. If I were studying my mother in a story, if I could step back from all my hot feelings, I could admit she still saw all the parts of me I’ve obliterated. The boy too anxious to eat his tiny sandwich on pumpernickel, the boy cowering before his teenage babysitter after she’d taken off his clothes. My mother must know I can be strong. And if she cannot help trying to beat some of that strength out of me, it’s probably not just to keep me close, though that’s part of it. She wants me to know that I can’t lose my vigilance. She knows how easy it is to slip from one category to the next: health to illness, blind routine to misery. One minute she was a teenage girl working her finger into a hole in the floor, and the next minute, miles away, her father lifted his shotgun to his head and clicked.
I start the car, my eyes floody, burning. Tears drip off my chin, onto my shirt and shorts. It’s quite possible she won’t be all right. She isn’t going to kill herself, I know that much. She isn’t going to drink herself into a stupor. Nothing as extreme as all that, or even as rebellious. Her own killing will be softer. She doesn’t believe in spectacular gestures, doesn’t believe she deserves them. She does what people do all the time. Not making new friends, not allowing herself to be known, eating too much ice cream, no exercise, watching daytime talk shows that don’t even capture her attention. Life as pure endurance instead of the hard, hard work of finding interests that refresh and nourish her.
She’s been on another kind of suicide, but no one ever uses that word because it is continuous, cuts too close to home.
Who doesn’t want to try to kill herself, at least once in her life, in a bad patch? You wouldn’t be a human being if you didn’t go there.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too,” I say. “Very much. And I think it’s time we tell each other a joke.”
“Joke?” she says, managing the impossible, tearing up while laughing.
“We’re getting a little too serious, the both of us. Don’t you think?”
And that stops her. The old pretty mother, the warm, dark-haired mother of the deep-red lipstick, flashes before me and goes. Who is this other mother in her place?
“I’m not as bad as I seem right now. I’m just exhausted. You must know that, don’t you?”
“We’ll be just fine.”
“You promise?” She grimaces now. “You could sound a little more enthusiastic.”
“I’ll call you after I get to the motel.”
“Don’t forget, now!” she cries. As if I would ever forget.
I drive through pines and palmetto scrub, past lit signs taller than skyscrapers, a pink building in the shape of a huge sombrero, a dreamy wide river lined with moss-hung trees, the kind of river about which my father would say: I’d like to buy property there.
The kind of river you might choose to drown in if you found yourself in that frame of mind.
At a later point, I’ll see my mother’s rage as her strength. This refusal to regulate her sadness, this no to taming the inner animal of hurt. She must know this rage eats her alive, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to soothe it, pet it, loosen its collar, and give it all the biscuits it needs. I deserved better, barks the glorious animal. I should have gotten more. And it runs around and around in circles looking for a way out of the fence, and it never gives up.
But I’m in no place to see that right now: I am all blind spots. I’m trying to be selfish, even though it feels like my left half is gradually being torn away. To steady myself, I conjure up a scene in which we’re both undergoing surgery. Painkillers only when required.
2
Utopian
If you’re lucky in your life, a place, or two, will be offered to you. That place won’t be where you were born or grew up. It will be at some distance, and it will never be yours—you’ll always be a visitor or guest. The trees will smell like rain. They might stay green all year, or their leaves might start browning in July as cool weather comes soon to these parts. Animals will be nearby, some of them in those trees, or right out in the open yard. The air will taste of ocean, negative ions churned up by the surf, or be so hazy your eyes will tear up and burn on sunny days—and you’ll be fine with that.
This place will give you things denied you in your place of growing up. Company when you’re in need of it, solitude when you’re exhausted by careful, polite conversation without jokes. It will make you feel smarter than you are. It will make you younger, sturdier, more flexible in your joints and muscles. People treat each other better here, all of them, at all levels, and maybe there aren’t even any levels, all the old ways we use to divide and rank one another. The lives of animals are important, too, not for human use but for themselves, in themselves, complex societies that care about their communities and want to stay alive as much as we do.
You love this place like a person you can’t stop making love to—you dream about this person when they’re right in front of you. You move through its streets and paths aroused and alert. You can’t get that mischievous smile off your face. You want to put your hands on it, that place, that whole place. You have a secret, and isn’t it lucky that everyone else on the street shares that secret with you?
Wanting
In pictures from that time it looks like my body and brain aren’t speaking to each other. Certain parts ignore the other parts. And the ribs, lats, obliques, the shallow channel above the tailbone—they don’t believe they matter. I expect clothes to do all the work of identity, as does practically everybody. In the era of AIDS, clothes are enormous. They function as armor, or drag. They bestow power, but also swallow up whoever pulls them over their heads. Maybe the greatest taboo involves drawing attention to the body, as so many are losing theirs, waking up to find their wrists thinner, chests marked with spots and scale. And yet my longing to stand out—through a pattern or a color—is so strong I can’t help but get it wrong. Pent-up desire makes me a little nuts. It makes me porous, warps my perception. Weird words come out when I don’t expect them to. Desire flushes me with shame, the kind of shame I want to rub out of my skin until it relaxes.
The real me is not here but in the future.
And yet I’ve done everything possible to prolong childhood and delay adulthood—or to make sure that that future doesn’t happen. I’ve gone from grad school to grad school, slept with three guys before I was twenty-eight. And that’s all about HIV? The fear of? Too simple.
“I didn’t hold you enough when you were a baby,” said my mother the evening before I left. We sat at the kitchen table, shucking corn into a brown shopping bag. Immediately she looked like she wanted to take it back, even though her face also said she was giving me a gift, an act of tenderness she tried to pass on but couldn’t. For a second I felt it pour through me (everything is explained), but then the room felt warm, too warm. She’d given me power over her by letting out a deeper secret: She was afraid of me. Even when I was a ten-pound baby, my mother was afraid of me.
Camera
Years back, I memorized all the Fellows’ names, but the names mean less to me now than the group photo in the old brochure. It’s a scrappy bunch. Peacoats and scruff and chapped hands and muddy boots. They stand outside a shambly cedar-shake building officially known as the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, some on steps, some on the landing. Each person looks on-the-way-to-important but not self-important: they’re too confident and wry and full of possible humor. They don’t look burdened by their pasts, maybe because they’re making work out of those burdens. They’re bound by something ineffable, the gut sense that they’re transforming their lives, involved in a task that matters. And they
have company while they’re doing it.
They’re a version of a family, too, though I doubt they even knew this about themselves until the photographer lifted the camera.
Legs press against legs, arms toss over shoulders.
And now I will be in the picture.
Circus
The car climbs the hill, and at the top, wild space opens up ahead. And there it is, rising out of the water like a question, an illusion across marsh and platinum lake. The Pilgrim Monument, a twenty-five-story replica of a tower in Siena. The curved coast of the harbor, shining. The spray of boxy white cottages along the beachfront. Fishing boats, sailboats, boats of all types pinned to the surface like thumbtacks. Up Route 6 I’ve been driving in deepest New England, charming and astringent. Or through a version of my childhood woods, thick with pitch pines. And from here it’s a tree-shorn city, stranger because I haven’t driven toward a city in hours, not since Fall River. Who would ever tell that it’s all of three blocks wide, three miles long? A long, reclining anaconda of a place.
And maybe that’s why every attempt to lay it out comes up short. Every representation stretches out into failure. The temptation is to paint it gold and deep green, because that’s what it stirs up in me: safety, connection, expression. But Provincetown is neither warm nor cold, and it’s never in-between. A simultaneity of masks, a place constantly shifting like the light and the dunes. What should I expect of a town built on dunes?
I make the left turn onto Conwell Street. I pull into the parking lot between two buildings, one long and relaxed, the other stubby. A barn with a blue circular plaque on the shingles. No one’s around but for a young woman with hunched shoulders carrying pots and pans from her car to a doorway. I loiter in the car for a minute, head down, moistening my dry lips. Why is my pulse racing? Maybe she’ll go away.