by Paul Lisicky
Elizabeth & Elvis
One night at a reading series in Town, Elizabeth reads from a new piece about Elvis. She speaks the whole narrative by heart, her eyes closed some of the time, her chin lifted at other times as if she is singing the words not just to the people in front of her but to the space above us, higher than the room. Her words are soft but not so soft we can’t hear. Though the direct subject is the beauty of early Elvis’s melancholy, it’s also a piece about living amid so much loss, and how you can’t count on very much if you’re a broken old man at thirty-five.
Mirrorings
At another series, Lucy reads “Mirrorings,” an essay about the liberation of childhood Halloween: to wear a mask is to throw off the shackles of a face. Multiple notes sound in the room. Disfigurement, drag, AIDS, the body in trouble. The room rings like a chord that goes on and on and on.
Shankpainter
Mindy gives us one of her photographs for the cover of Shankpainter, the Work Center’s annual literary magazine, which a few of us are editing. It’s a close-up of a woman’s pubic hair, her fingers pressing into it. It’s not an idealizing photo, or really all that erotic in the conventional sense. But it’s not out to shock either; it says sex when forces in the culture say that sex is death. We think we’ve prepared ourselves for some possible flak—but we couldn’t have predicted the half of it. Some Work Center administrators are not pleased, not pleased at all, especially given that they use the magazine for fundraising and grants. We are clueless Fellows, but to the Work Center’s credit they don’t ask me to change the image. The powers that be still print the issue and slide it into envelopes.
Ha!
Elizabeth and I are sitting in the jury room, around the table with the big writers, meaning those with several national awards. It’s heated, but not unfriendly. Four fiction fellowships out of three hundred–plus applicants: how could the discussion not be heated, especially if people are doing this out of love for the Work Center, and no money? Elizabeth and I represent the two Second-Year Fellows involved every year, and as such it’s hard work but an honor to sit in these seats. And yet we’re all too aware of our position. Together we champion a particular manuscript, longer than usual, about an ongoing environmental emergency, which our fellow jurists dismiss, dislike, for what’s called an overt political agenda. Didactic. Elizabeth and I feel chastened, miffed, but we refuse to give up our belief in the work. During the final meeting, an especially famous writer comes to weigh in after reading the semifinalists, and this time it’s Grace Paley. Around the room we go to talk about the work in front of us. After discussing several applications, Grace gets to the one, looks at Elizabeth and me, pauses. She says, “This is an important story, this writer is writing important things.” She says more, but that’s all we take in. All disagreement comes to a stop in the room. The writer gets his fellowship, and Elizabeth and I do not clap and gloat and do a little jig until we’re outside in the parking lot.
Founders Club
Often Stanley Kunitz and Alan Dugan, the cofounders of the Work Center, show up at Fellows’ events. They sit apart from the group, possibly expecting to be approached, but we’re often shy as if they’re the intimidating older relatives at a family gathering. Why? In truth, they’re funny and eager to hold a conversation, but they must be approached. Elizabeth, for instance, gets along famously with Dugan, and I always end up talking to his wife, Judy Shahn, whose drawings I know from the pages of the New Yorker. But to talk with them upends our sense of collective identity. It’s perhaps easier to think of ourselves as emerging—all of our best work still ahead of us—than it is to be in the club where we already have a body of painting or writing to which we have to be responsible.
If given the choice to be an adult or a child, most humans will choose the latter.
26
Koan
In the beginning of a relationship, sex starts in the kitchen, or maybe in the foyer, within sight of the neighbors if anyone chooses to look in. It might travel anywhere in the house, onto the stairs, into the shower. Sex has an energy all its own; it doesn’t ask, doesn’t reach; it moves like water, and just when you think you’re on top of the wave, you’re underneath it, turning over on your back, coughing and hungry for air. Outside time, outside the possibility of death when death is leaning in on you from the moon, the sky, the wires, the trees.
Then one night—why does it seem like it happens all at once when you know real change always takes its time?—you’re no longer next to the conduit to your shared imagination, but lying alongside your damn sibling. You know him too well now to turn him into your projection screen, and what is a bigger killer of sex than familiarity? He is past and future. He is consequence, the other side of. And though familiarity might work for certain kinds of sex—say, intimate sex, after you’ve read a story to each other, or fought and made up, or shared something particularly intense, a secret—it doesn’t always serve you when you’re up for pure animal release, when you’re an animal and you want another animal, without a context for you. The human version of the lyric bubble that Town can sometimes be.
Maybe all relationships, at whatever stage, come up against this koan, the riddle embedded in attachment—or is it just sex? And you find a way to stay fresh in the relationship, or is it the beginning of the way out, but you can’t see it yet?
Candy
An easy morning, sun coming in through the frozen windowpanes. The two of us are still in bed. I’m reading a passage of a novel in which the word intimacy comes up. I read Noah the passage, a beautiful passage, not actually realizing that reading aloud to another is an act of intimacy until I’m well into the third paragraph. My voice isn’t quite mine. My voice is just an instrument of the narrator’s voice, the writer speaking that narrator, and I’m inside a box in a box in a box.
I lift my head to catch the look on his face, which I expect to be calm, in satisfaction.
“It’s funny you have such a problem with intimacy.”
I’m so confused by the outlandishness of the statement, the offhandedness with which it’s uttered, I practically laugh aloud. Well, not aloud. It wouldn’t be like me to do anything so mean. I turn my head aside, look down, as if to enact the designation. And that fills me with a rage that I can’t help but turn inward, against myself. I don’t want to be known to myself as someone filled with rage. Sorrowful—hurt—those would be better designations. But why am I participating in this pigeonholing? No one wants to be told he’s one thing when he’s already so many things, thick with contradictions.
“I don’t understand,” I say, my voice not terribly steady.
But he doesn’t reply to that. He picks up a pillow from the floor and appears to move on to the tasks of the day. Rooms need to be cleaned, he has early check-ins coming before noon.
I try to mask the feeling from my face, but I know he must see it, feel it—I’m quieter than I would be otherwise. Is he asking for a fight? Have those very words been said to him before, in past relationships, and now he’s turning them on me, to see what it feels like to wield them? It wouldn’t feel like a big deal if it were said with kindness, with the possibility of hope and change. But there’s accusation here, as if I were the one who were withholding sex. To me intimacy is sex, I can’t disentangle one from the other. And if that’s the case, I’d like intimacy all the time, first thing in the morning, just before brushing my teeth, and in the middle of the night.
I want to eat intimacy the way I want to eat candy!
It would be different if he’d said “we,” right? A welcoming, an invitation. I can’t see beyond my idea of aggression to grasp his statement as a key. I picture it on the floor of the bricked, circular cellar beneath this eighteenth-century house. It doesn’t even occur to me to pick it up. I can’t even see it as a way upstairs.
Talk to Me
There are examples of my type everywhere, in every city and college town, in every coffee shop and gym. He’s always been around, across tim
e. He has an extraordinary feature about him, a big beard, big ears. Whatever it is, he’s an extraordinary animal. He stuns my attention, stills my wandering eye. I can’t even read the novel in my hands without looking up every few minutes, if only to reassure myself he’s as beautiful as I thought he was. It would be helpful if he had a nonexistent chin, or a stain on his shirt—everyone else in the room has no shine compared to him. I know he wasn’t always this person. Possibly he was once pushed up against the lockers, knocked around. But the real point here? The guy won’t look at me for even a second. All I really want is for him to see me, appraise me, dismiss me, look away—that would be just fine. But his demeanor, his attitude—he has no need of me. He’s completely satisfied in his skin. He doesn’t need to look outside himself for more. If I wanted to be cruel, I could think of him as incurious, a little dim, too controlled, self-disciplined: what horrible things are hiding in all that self-discipline? But that doesn’t stop the animal in me from wanting more. From him? Ah, not even from him. This is just my fantasy of unworthiness, which I resurrect from time to time, to feel my limits, to feel alive. Sometimes it’s important to sit with the thing that will never be given to us.
Subversive
The archetype is familiar: expressive younger man with a wild streak and a moneyed, alarmingly calm, slightly cold older man. I suspect Noah’s ideal fits the designation of the latter, and Noah? Aside from the obvious stability, what could be in it for him? Maybe the wild one needs an opposite (an obstacle?) in order to cultivate his identity, his sense of self. Without the obstacle, how can he be subversive, maintain that role? What would he be? Would it feel like not getting a foothold in muck after the tide recedes?
It occurs to me one morning that I’ve been expected to play the stable part, even though I don’t have money, even though I’m not alarmingly calm or cold, even though we’re two years apart, even though I have plenty of a wild streak left, and want to protect it as much as he does his. How has this happened to us, to me? Maybe this is why Noah encourages me to keep a full beard when I complain it ages me. Or why he says he likes a small belly on a man when he’s so devoted to keeping lean and fit, even shredded. In this equation the two of us can’t be lean and fit, and what does that leave me? Here on out as a padded old man? Or the chance to rest, to live a little less, or a lot, because someone else is doing all the living for me. Someone else I’m expected to shake my head at in awe and affectionate exasperation to indicate I’m blessed. A little like the opening credit montage of The Flying Nun, in which the wise Sister Jacqueline shakes her head at Sister Bertrille and her high jinks—a comparison that would make Noah crack up if I ever mentioned it to him.
On some days I wonder whether a husband is always a variable integer for Noah. By that I mean his personality is far less significant than the role he’s expected to perform. Maybe when Noah’s walking down the street with me, he’s actually walking with Henry, or anyone else who preceded me. Should that bother me? Maybe it doesn’t as much as it should. I thought the point of growing up was to find your agency, to make choices and deal with the consequences of those choices, and the world I’ve put myself in is removed from all that. I’ve been captured by some category. Its arms are holding me too close. In lesser moments I think I might as well be that man with the jowls of a beagle crossing the street to get ice cream.
Speculative
Years from now I’ll live in a place that thinks it’s Provincetown when it isn’t Provincetown. Yes, queer people and straight people will live side by side here, but there is no Provincetown when there isn’t life in the yards and streets. In the pretend Provincetown, the citizens will stroll inside, pretend they hear a pot boiling over on the stove if they see someone walking down the sidewalk. They’ll do anything, short of blinding themselves, rather than risk awkwardness, uncertainty. A spontaneous conversation? Backs will tense, not because these people are inherently cold, just that they know that human personality is disruptive and threatens the order they value more than they know. There will be a park, but it will be scraped clean with ballfields, more per square foot than any other place in the world—activity must replace spontaneity. There will be no halls of interaction, no bars, no coffeehouses, just churches. Instead there will be a farmers’ market on Sunday to which people come after church to say hello and laugh, still under the spell of services or masses, and all their appeals to togetherness, which is where the divine lives. But the divine can be dangerous too—anyone who’s held their hands over a fire knows that (the burn where your fingers meet your palms). Anyone who’s felt it in the body of somebody else. The divine insists you stay awake because it can leave at any second.
I don’t want to be superior to anyone for being afraid. We already have a culture built on that.
Boat
We’re naked under the covers, the two of us, making the most we can of the lousy light. We’re reading again: Noah from Elizabeth’s first collection of stories, me from Joy Williams’s Breaking and Entering. Our heads are filled with others’ voices but we might as well be speaking those voices to each other. Noah latches his leg over mine and we drag closer. After a while Noah reaches up and tilts the lampshade to the right to see if he can get some better light. This could be enough. This could be the best any relationship gives any two people, and I don’t know why I want to ruin it by asking for more. Will we always want more? His eyes look a little dazed, even dead. I can tell he’s reading the same playful, nuanced sentence again and again, trying to get a hold on it and he can’t, and soon enough he closes the book on the hardwood, turns on his side, and says, “Good night, honey.” And I say, “Good night, honey.” The room is absurdly still, not even a sound from outside, no wind or shutter banging or stones crunching under tires. I stare at the back of his head for a while. The clipped dark hair, so brown it’s close to black, a gray hair here and there. A pink blemish, at the top of his neck, possibly a razor nick. It’s a wonder I’m even here, sharing a warm bed with another human when I could be as alone as the hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein before he met his monster. The dead hover over and about us—maybe they are watching us through holes we can’t see, maybe they’re inside the light bulb, warming its thin glass. Can you hear them humming in unison? I hold that thought in my head for a while. I carry it along inside a little boat as I go under.
Prayer
Night up against the day, walk us into the next. Don’t hold our stupidities against us. Forget them as you would the wind unless you think we need to be reminded of them. Don’t let us forget the dead, and don’t let us idealize them out of their humanness. Remind us of all the ways we’re strong. Teach us to be useful, Night. Anoint our irreverence, our humor. Don’t let us gloat when we’re outspoken. Praise our anger and help us hold it inside our love. If this is the end, Night, calm and carry and lamp us forward. Fold each year of us into your nest so that time may not destroy us.
27
Parade
Noah holds out the chocolate cone to the girl, the vanilla cone to her brother. He seems perfectly at ease with serving soft ice cream to so many summer tourists, and he’d have to be to take this job. Binky’s is right in the center of Town, across from John’s Footlong, the Chamber of Commerce, a square freighted with park benches and gargantuan lobster traps in aesthetic formation. He works late hours, and after the place closes down for the night, he must stay another hour to swab out the machines. My ritual involves waiting for him, meeting him each night as he finishes up. We like these times. They give us simple peace at a time when simple peace is not to be found. Maybe this kind of thing is the best part of being with someone, but as the pleasure of it is modest, so self-effacing, we don’t give it the credit it deserves, the way we do to a night of good sex or a happy vacation.
Carnival is the third week of August, and the centerpiece is a parade every year. It happens during the afternoon, though it used to happen at night, which Town stopped after the spell of darkness made things a bit raunchy and lo
uche. Not to mention a particular incident in which activists in Town spontaneously kissed unsuspecting straight men on the mouth. It goes without saying that the men (and their wives and girlfriends) were convinced they’d been given HIV, even though everyone knew better by that point. I can almost picture them spitting the kisses out of their mouths, the screams and the cries. Human lives.
Did I mention the Buttlickers Unite signs? That too.
So it’s all rather PG-13 these days, as family friendly as gay can be in the summer of 1993, during the hour of a plague. Noah will represent Binky’s. He dressed up as Mrs. Binky the year before, which involved wearing a red-and-black checkered skirt, long black wig, black sunglasses, black high heels. Also a two-and-a-half-foot-tall vanilla ice cream cone balanced on his head. He will repeat the role this year, but he needs a Mr. Binky—will I do it? I’ve never refused an opportunity to be onstage, even if I am wary of the stage—at least before I go on. The plan is for the two of us to wear the cones on our heads. In addition to the cone, I’ll wear a wig—a blond curly wig—and a white T-shirt, white painter’s overalls, white Converse high-tops—I’m intended to be the man.
Which, let’s face it, means boring.