by Chris Kenry
“Yes, I see,” she said, arching an eyebrow and examining the end of her cigarette. “In trade.”
After a long, agonizing pause in which she sized me up with her reptilian eyes, she nodded slightly to the lawyer, who then pulled a file from his briefcase, opened it, and took over the conversation.
“Mr. Thompson,” he said, giving me a plastic smile, “whatever the nature of your relationship with the deceased and whatever financial arrangement you may have had with him in the past, he made no provision for you in his will, nor in his life insurance policy.”
At this point he removed a copy of the will, dated 1988, from a manila folder and gave it to me. I had never really given much thought to wills or estates, and certainly never to something as abstract as life insurance! I naturally assumed it would be several years before we needed to consider anything so adult as a will. My family was well off and I had never really known want or need. Every possible form of calamity had been covered by my father or my father’s policy, just like the umbrella in the commercial. If I needed a doctor, I went to one. If I wrecked the car, it went in to be fixed and I drove a rental. When I took a lacrosse stick in the mouth and lost a tooth, I went to the dentist and he made a new one.
With Paul, my life went on as usual; I just had a different provider. His insurance covered domestic partners, so we took advantage of it. I expected it. Took it for granted. When I moved in, he took over my father’s role (as icky as that sounds), and I assumed that if there was something important like a will or life insurance Paul would certainly have seen to it, just as he had seen to my car and medical insurance. But, as I stared down at the paper before me, dated April 11, 1988, long before we had even met, I saw that he had not. His death was sudden and unexpected and had not been prepared for. Certainly it should at least have been discussed, seeing as we were both gay men living in the nineties, and had, between us, attended more funerals than we cared to count. But we had not discussed it, and the potential consequences of that failure to communicate presented themselves to me then. The sun peeked over the horizon in my infantile brain and I began to comprehend the situation. I finished looking over the will, which was all legalese, and looked up. They were both eyeing me with vaguely bored expressions.
“What does this mean?” I asked, my hands suddenly very cold. The lawyer shifted his weight on the sofa and coughed unnecessarily into his hand.
“Essentially what this means,” he said, “is that there was no legal tie between you and the deceased. And my client”—he gestured and smiled at Wendy—“being the next of kin, is entitled to the entire estate.”
He paused and the sun inched a little higher.
“Again, what does this mean?” I asked more urgently, thinking of all my things: the artwork, the venetian glass, the bank-green Chesterfield on which they sat, the pewter gardening tools, the small German kitchen appliances, the copper cookware, the coffee-table books, the little Phillipe Stark lamps, and everything else that I now saw sprouting wings and flying away. It was like an inverse episode of The Price is Right: the show was going backward and all the gifts from the Showcase Showdown were going back behind the curtains. I spun the wheel backward, losing my winnings, and eventually was told by that booming voice of Johnny to go take my seat in the audience with the rest of the nobodies.
The lawyer gave his little cough again, pulling me out of my reverie.
“What this means, Mr. Thompson, is that in the eyes of the law you are entitled to nothing.”
I gasped.
“However,” he went on, “my client, sympathetic to your plight, has graciously selected a few things that you may have.”
“And those are?” I asked hopefully.
He pointed to two boxes, one of which I was sitting on, and a suitcase, positioned conveniently close to the front door.
“We determined which personal effects belonged to you and which belonged to the deceased. Since you were essentially a lodger here, you were given all of the clothing that was determined to be your size and one bike and one pair of Rollerblades, as there were two sets of each in the garage. I think you’ll find that my client has been more than fair.”
The sun was searing me now. I was getting screwed and I really didn’t want to listen to someone tell me that I was getting a good deal. I stood up but was so angry and shocked that it took a while for anything to come out of my mouth. I felt the helplessness of the wrongly accused, the shock of the innocent victim, the stupidity of the cuckold, and when the words finally did come, they were not witty.
“Rollerblades? I don’t want fucking Rollerblades! I get Roller-blades?”
“And a bike,” Wendy added cheerfully.
“Mr. Thompson, please!” the lawyer protested. “You’re getting more than you’re entit—”
“Please yourself!” I shouted. “These aren’t just things; these are my things.”
I tried to cry, thinking that might help my case, but the tears wouldn’t come so I just stood there looking constipated. Again there was a long silence in which the lawyer and I exchanged nasty glances, our jaws clenched, while Wendy sat, calmly sucking on her cigarette. She exhaled noisily, as if thoroughly bored and annoyed, and then rose from the sofa and walked to the stairs. When she was halfway up she turned, as if she’d just remembered something.
“Oh, Mr. Thompson,” she said. “There is one more thing you’ll be getting.”
“And what’s that?” I asked, my tone sarcastic, wondering what she could possibly concede. Again she formed her lips into a bloody O and said quite simply, “Out.”
She then turned and skipped like a schoolgirl up the remaining stairs, flicking her ashes on the carpet as she went.
The lawyer escorted me out with my boxes and the Rollerblades, which I violently hurled into the bed of the truck I’d borrowed. I’d anticipated making several trips, but that was it—two boxes, a suitcase, a pair of Rollerblades, and a bike. Obviously she had not given me all of my clothes, since my socks alone would have filled the suitcase, but at that point it felt useless to argue, and I was feeling a little ashamed that I had shown myself to be more upset about losing the twelve-speed Waring blender than about losing Paul. I drove slowly down the driveway, past the rows of lilac bushes I’d planted last fall, now in full bloom. When I was far down the driveway, out of sight of the house, I reached out and ripped a large branch from one of the bushes. It was an unsatisfying gesture.
I drove around aimlessly for a while, not knowing where to go or what to do. I felt I’d come unexpectedly to the end of a book. I turned the page eagerly to see what would happen next but there was no more type, only blank sheets of paper. Paul was gone, and for the first time since his death I felt a tinge of worry as I realized that he would not be coming back. Until then, I’d sort of believed that he was just away on a business trip and would be back soon to sort out all the lunacy that had transpired in his absence. I had watched much too much daytime TV as a child and far too many episodes of The X-Files as an adult, so as I drove I indulged myself in the imagining of several different conspiracy theories:
I believed that he would somehow come back from the accident, and it would all have been a bad dream. It hadn’t really been his body in the morgue, but that of another dressed like him. An impostor! The real Paul had been kidnapped and was being held in some underground hovel by strangely silent criminals who were not asking for ransom.
Or he really had been injured and, suffering from amnesia, was being nursed back to health in a mountain convent by kindly nuns who would patiently help him regain his memory and take back his life.
Or the whole accident had been staged as part of the Witness Protection Program and Paul would return with a new face and identity, like when an actor got fired or quit a soap opera and a new one was hired to take his place. I would accept this new Paul without question.
Whatever the scenario, I thought, he would return. He’d come and get the house and belongings back from his evil, withered siste
r in a big dramatic showdown worthy of a nighttime soap opera like Dynasty or Falcon Crest, and we’d live happily ever after.
Of course I knew that this was ridiculous and absurd. No one in a soap opera ever lives happily ever after, and I had, without a doubt, identified his all too real dead body in the morgue. But maybe my theories were not all that ridiculous. His whole death had been absurd, and when a death occurs suddenly, like Paul’s, it is incomprehensible in its simplicity and the shock does take some time to wear off. As I drove around that day it was definitely wearing off. I felt sad, yes, but more than that I was disappointed. Like at the end of a good night at a dance bar when they suddenly turn up the lights and start herding everyone toward the exit.
2
ITALIAN NOSTALGIA
In my life I have found nostalgia to be a very dangerous thing. Unlike hindsight, which shows you your folly in a painful, morning-after clarity, nostalgia is a pretty store window into the past, smeared with Vaseline, all dreamy-looking. If hindsight is 20/20, then nostalgia is a look back through rose-colored glasses. Rose colored glasses that filter out all those pesky rays of truth, showing you happy times, usually much happier than they actually were, that are gone forever. Sure, you’ll be happy again in the future; you may even be happy in the present, but nostalgia takes you by the hand, leads you into the past, and shows you a happiness you’ll never quite have again—because you never really had it in the first place. To most people nostalgia is sweet. To me it is bitter and masochistic, but most of all, completely useless. Nevertheless, here’s a hefty dose of it:
Paul and I met, as most gay men meet, at a bar. We didn’t really meet there, but it was the first time we noticed each other. I was still in college, home for the summer, working for a landscaping company during the day and going out nearly every night with Andre. We had the bars on a tight schedule back then, according to which one was likely to be the most crowded on a given night. Mondays we went to the Compound, Tuesdays to Charlie’s, Wednesdays and Saturdays to the Metro, etc.... On Sunday afternoons there was always a crowd at a bar called Soc’s and, like faithful little lemmings, we were there every Sunday. Its unabbreviated name was Club Socrates, as in a place to corrupt the youth of Denver. Get it? If not, don’t worry, neither did anyone else, which is why they shortened it to Soc’s and made it into a sports bar. The bar itself was small but it had a huge patio and dance floor outside, so most of their business came during the summer. In fact, I don’t know of anyone who went there in the winter, but everyone who was anyone in the gay community went there on Sunday afternoons in the summer.
On this particular Sunday in August, Andre and I were there, of course, drinking and dancing and being our fabulous selves, boldly eyeing guys we thought were good-looking. Paul was one of these guys. He was funny to look at because he was so short and was with a group of friends who were all very tall, and I remember that I kept losing sight of him when his friends would crowd around.
“Who’s the midget?” I asked Andre. He spun around excitedly, clearly hoping to see an actual midget, and followed my gaze over to Paul.
“Oh, that one,” he said, his voice revealing his disappointment. “Girl, that’s Paul Oswald. English, I think. He’s some big-deal architect, or as big a deal as an architect can be in this town. Big fish in a little pond. He did that new building for Channel Eight—that one with all the columns that looks like it was left over from the Ben Hur set.”
“He’s not bad-looking,” I said, staring at him. Andre winced and gave an expression most people reserve for entering Porta Pottis on a hot day.
“That little limey?” he cried. “You don’t want him! He’s one of those weird fags who didn’t come out of the closet until he was, like, thirty-five, and from the look of him, that was not yesterday.”
I watched Paul as he gazed up at his tall friends like a child who’d wandered into his parents’ cocktail party, and then, finally, he caught me looking. We held eye contact for a moment and smiled at each other, but then his view was blocked by a wall of bodies, and Andre, hearing the opening bars of a Madonna song, impatiently dragged me through the crowd and onto the dance floor.
That was it. We didn’t see each other again that night, nor even that summer. It wasn’t until late autumn that we actually met. I had returned to school in Boulder, and was taking a class on classical Roman architecture. It was an interesting class made boring by an uninspired professor who hated the subject he was teaching, so I strolled into the classroom one Wednesday afternoon expecting the monotonous worst, as usual, only to find Paul sitting at the front of the class waiting to give a guest lecture on the Pantheon. He looked familiar but I couldn’t really place him until he took his place behind the podium and nearly disappeared behind it. Aside from being short, he was handsome. He had a beautiful mop of dirty blond hair that was always attractively unkempt, and a long, elegant nose. His chin was pronounced, and he wore round tortoiseshell-framed glasses. He looked classically beautiful in a studied, Ralph Lauren way. Or, if I am less nostalgic and charitable, in a false, pretentious way. He gave a wonderful lecture in his crisp, concise English accent, growing more and more animated with each slide he clicked onto the screen. He really was brilliant when talking about architecture, and it was clear from his enthusiasm that he had found a career he really loved. I think that was partly what I found so intriguing about him.
After the lecture, as I was waiting in line in the cafeteria of the student union, I noticed him sitting at one of the tables wearily listening to the drone of the usual architecture professor. I watched them shake hands as the professor pointed to his watch and got up, leaving Paul sitting alone. I quickly paid for my coffee and wound my way to his table before one of the other students had the chance to jump in.
“Was he boring you as much as he bores us?” I asked, gesturing at the departing professor.
“I suppose he is a bit dry,” he said shyly.
“You’re too kind,” I said, and moved into the seat recently vacated by the professor. “He’s the only one who could take something Italian and make it as exciting as oatmeal.” He laughed and I flashed him a smile.
“I’ve, uh, seen you before, I think,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, last summer,” I said, and hesitated, remembering his latent sexuality. “We never really met, but I think it was at a bar called Socrates.”
He smiled. “Yes, of course,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I remember. You’re Andre’s friend, and no, you’re right, we never did meet. Let’s rectify that.” He extended his hand and I took it in mine.
And so it began. We talked for hours that day about the Pantheon and Rome, and before we parted he invited me to go to dinner the next night. The next night led to the next weekend, which we spent together, going through the Art Museum, and eating out, and having sex a ridiculous number of times a day. That weekend led to the other evenings together and then to the following weekend and then the following Monday and Tuesday night, and before long I was coming down to Denver or he came up to Boulder nearly every night. I spent so much time with him or traveling to him that I’m afraid I didn’t do very well in school, but it was my last year, and my class load was light, so I didn’t really worry. Neither did my parents, who were so enamored with Paul when they met him, and what they saw as his positive influence on me, that they overlooked my mediocre final grades. In fact, I’m afraid they liked him more than they liked me, but then that was probably because of his accent and his small stature. It sounds stupid, but the two combined were a very charismatic mix.
For graduation, Paul took me to Italy for three weeks, and the nostalgia I have about that trip is the most bittersweet and persists even to this day. We flew to Milan in the first week of June, and from the moment we touched the ground it was as if everything—the weather, the scenery, the architecture, the food, our accommodations, the little navy blue convertible we drove—had all conspired together to make the trip magic. Or maybe it was just
that we were so in love. Or so I thought. Madly, blindly, wildly in love. The kind of love eighty percent of all pop lyrics are about. The kind of love movies and fiction teach us to expect. The kind of love that burns brightly for a few months, a year or two at most, and then fizzles out like some grand firework, leaving only memories.
In the mornings we’d have breakfast and then go quickly to see the architecture in whatever city we happened to be in. It’s difficult to convey the significance of this, but it was something we had both studied and were both passionate about. Seeing together the structures and artwork that we loved and respected cemented another bond between us. Paul was far more knowledgeable than I, so I learned something everyplace we went. His specialty was Italian Gothic, but he was knowledgeable about any movement or time period and was as comfortable talking about painting and sculpture as he was about architecture. I remember, in Florence, walking through the Uffizi Gallery together looking at all the Botticellis and Raphaels and Titians, and being amazed by all Paul knew about them, about the techniques used, and the histories of their subject matter, little anecdotes about the artists. Each day was filled with revelation, and my respect for him was raised to nearly impossible heights. He, I think, was thrilled to have found in me a receptive companion, someone who would listen to all he said and ask relatively intelligent questions.
Every afternoon we spent making love in our hotel room, the sun casting slanted rays on our naked bodies through the shutters. We would rise just as it was setting. Then we’d shower and dress and go out and join the evening crowds of well-dressed people strolling the streets. We’d stop and have a leisurely drink or two and a few cigarettes on some piazza or gran via, watching the people as they passed by, and then wander some more until we found a place to eat. And eat we did! Food and wine and desserts, the memory of which I still cherish (nostalgically, of course). We’d stuff ourselves and drink far too much, and then after dinner we’d walk some more, aimlessly, leaning into each other and slowly losing ourselves in the labyrinth of streets, becoming so lost that we’d have to hail a taxi to take us back to our hotel. Once there, we would make love again, or try to anyway, usually falling asleep in some degree of undress, clinging to each other like two spent swimmers....