A Place at the Table: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  • • •

  It is a rush to get our clothes on, to find our physician’s number—a personal friend, he has come to our home for dinner before—to call and beg for him to see Sebastian right away. As it is Sunday, Dr. Wilson’s offices are closed, but he is a compassionate man and he tells us to come to his apartment. He lives nearby, at Central Park West and 78th. It is November, cold, and we wear long black coats as we rush to see him. The coats you might wear to a funeral. It starts to snow during the walk over, the first snowfall of the year. Each winter Sebastian welcomes the first snow with boyish excitement. But today he makes no comment, just grabs my arm tighter so neither of us will slip. The white flakes land on his black coat, and I think of the lesions that might overtake his body. The first lesion Michael found was on his ankle, noticeable only if he pulled down his sock and showed it to you. Two months later, his body was covered with them.

  Michael was dead within four months; the last month of his life he had stopped making sense, could only speak in gibberish, sometimes had to be tied to the bed to stop him from pulling out the hair on his brows, which he thought were baby snakes, come to eat his brain. This the fate of a renowned painter whose impressionistic “splash” portraits hang in museums. In one of his lucid moments, Michael told us that he wished to paint a self-portrait with all of his lesions, to paint it against the side of a building, to say to New York, to the country, to the president, to the world: This is really happening.

  It is happening. But all around us, life bustles on. As if the deaths of gay men are irrelevant.

  I try to imagine what else Sebastian’s mark might be. Poison ivy, a wart, a rash, something, anything besides Kaposi’s sarcoma. We are monogamous. And I had such little experience before Sebastian. A hand job in a bathhouse, a kiss on a dance floor. I was such a good Baptist boy when I first landed in the city. What I thought was sinning was nothing more than licking a vanilla ice cream cone.

  But think, Bobby. Think. Sebastian has been around so much longer. He and his friends speak of how wild the 70s were, the Wild West of gay sex, of any sex. Back then contracting an STD meant popping an antibiotic or shaving off your pubic hair. Think, Bobby. Of how he speaks of those carefree days before he met you, when his favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon was going to the baths and coming home afterward to listen to the opera.

  And then it occurs to me: If Sebastian has AIDS, do I have it, too?

  • • •

  We enter the lobby of Dr. Wilson’s building, checking in with the doorman, who calls up to make sure we are expected. I wonder how many other panicked men have visited Dr. Wilson at home, have made this inverse house call to find out, as soon as possible, whether or not they have received a death sentence.

  When the elevator stops on the eleventh floor, the color drains from Sebastian’s face and his knees buckle. He grabs my arm.

  “Oh my God, Bobby. Oh my God. I can’t breathe.”

  We stand in the elevator for so long that the door starts to close, but I push the button to keep it open. “Come on, sweetheart, one step at a time. One step at a time. We don’t know yet. Just take one step, good, now another. We’re just going to walk down this hall. That’s all we’re doing right now.”

  He lets me guide him, step by step, down the hall and to the door where Dr. Wilson is waiting.

  “It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. It’s going to be okay,” I murmur, having no idea if I am speaking the truth.

  “Let’s do the examination in the back bedroom,” says Dr. Wilson, leading us through his apartment. “It’s more private.”

  I walk with them to the back room, but at the door Sebastian turns and asks me to wait outside.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to do this alone.”

  Stung, I make my way to the leather sofa in Dr. Wilson’s graciously appointed living room, slide into it. Soon I hear a keening, followed by the low murmurs of Dr. Wilson. I hear Sebastian gasp, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” And I realize why Sebastian left me here: so he does not have to face my dismay at the same time that he faces his own. For a moment I am frozen. As long as I remain here, on the other side of the closed door, I can still live in the time before. To go to Sebastian, to push open the closed door, to offer comfort, is to make it real. Yes, Sebastian is keening, but as long as I stay here, life has not permanently changed.

  I sit paralyzed on the sofa, while in the other room my lover weeps. And then I see a vision of my meemaw wearing her pink velour housecoat that zips up the front, looking just as she did the night I ran to her house after being caught with Pete Arnold. Son, she says, go to him. Go to him now. He needs you. I stand and walk to the closed door. I start to knock, but instead I simply turn the handle, entering the room, crossing to him. Sebastian sits slumped over, shirtless, on the edge of Dr. Wilson’s bed. His eyes are rimmed with red, as if outlined with a crayon. He looks momentarily surprised to see me, and then he looks grateful.

  I sit beside him on the bed, and he leans the full weight of his body against me.

  “Oh, Bobby,” he says. “When you were little were you scared of the monster under the bed?”

  “Yes,” I say, though in truth my kid fear had been that when I flushed the toilet a witch would rise from the bowl, grab me around the waist, and pull me down into the sewer with her. For a while, until Mama caught me, I peed in the sink to avoid having to flush.

  “Well, the monster is real and he has come to get me.”

  12

  Communion

  (New York City, Winter 1988)

  Sebastian’s death shows itself on Dahlia’s face. Whereas before she looked remarkably young for her age and was sometimes even mistaken for Sebastian’s sister, the word “crone” now comes to mind whenever I observe the heavy black circles under her weary eyes, the set of three parallel indentations on her forehead, the shallow stream of lines running off from the sad red river of her mouth. Yet, while her son’s death aged her, it also gave her the melancholic beauty of a survivor. The beauty that comes from waking up every day resolved to meet the worst that life has to offer with compassion and grace: bringing fresh flowers to the apartment, massaging her dying son’s feet with peppermint lotion from The Body Shop, singing lullabies to him from his nursery days, her voice pure and clear, like the ringing of a crystal goblet as a wet finger is run round its lip. There was one song she sang again and again, at Sebastian’s insistence, even though it was haunting and sad. “Um umm, I’d like to linger here, um umm, a little longer here, um umm, a little longer here with you.”

  Whereas Sebastian’s father, Mel, turned away. Mel turned away from his dying son, visited only twice during Sebastian’s final months, called only a handful of times. Ate and ate and ate, gaining ten, then twenty, then thirty pounds, his petulant refusal to engage in his son’s death reflected in his swollen face, which kept expanding, until it was as wide and useless as a Mylar balloon, until he was a balloon man with hapless eyes, a man who could not face what life delivered and so allowed himself to drift away from all that mattered. What more can I say of Mel? To rail against him is to complain of the cold in February, to wish a dip in the ocean didn’t leave salt in your hair, to be startled when a two-year-old wants a sugar cookie before eating his broccoli.

  He is of little substance. He is little more than a knot and stale air.

  • • •

  As for me, I remain at the Belthorp. It is what Sebastian would have wanted, though not for sentimental reasons, but so that he could retain some sort of hold on his rent-controlled apartment, even after death. Yes, I have become a living punchline to a tired old joke about New York real estate. And Lord knows I need the cheap rent. But that is not why I stay. I stay because at the Belthorp I can remain with Sebastian. I sleep on sheets he picked out; I use his brand of laundry detergent, his brand of dryer sheets, his brand of toothpaste. When the bathroom sink backs up and I pull out the drain, I still find pieces of his hair stuck in it. Not willing to throw them awa
y, I store them in a Ziploc baggie, placing it on a high shelf in the back of the closet, where Sebastian kept his collection of porn videos, which I sometimes watch in an attempt at communion, wanting to link into his specific fantasies and desires so I may be with him again.

  Funny: Those videos used to embarrass me; they were low-budget and hard-core. The fact that Sebastian enjoyed them—relished them—revealed something about him I felt was unpleasant, unsavory. Had I been given the choice to wipe out that proclivity, along with a few of his more abrasive personality traits, I would have. (He drove me crazy by arguing the other side, any side, just for the hell of it, just to be a provocateur, once going so far as to defend Lacy Lovehart by saying her Save Our Sons campaign was well within her First Amendment rights. To which I answered, “Baby, that might be, but I just need you on my side with this one.”) But now that he is gone I miss his edges, his extremes, the more difficult parts of his personality. Those edges made him Sebastian. It occurs to me that I loved Sebastian the way my father preached you should love your spouse: warts and all.

  At night I study Sebastian’s art: the Chuck Close print, the Rosenquist lithograph. I listen to the long-playing jazz albums on his record player, try on the African masks hanging on the wall. I wanted to mark Hanukkah by lighting candles in the brass menorah he kept on the mantelpiece in the living room, but early in December Dahlia asked if she might have it and I willingly handed it over. Dahlia also wanted the photo albums of Sebastian as a child. It pained me to part with them, but I told her to, of course, take whatever she needs.

  Though I often see Gus at the café and I occasionally have dinner with Mike, my old friend from the residence hotel, who, like me, is perplexed by his HIV-negative status, the only person I allow to come to the Belthorp is Dahlia. She stops by every few weeks for a cup of tea and a little something sweet to eat. When we are together we do not speak of Sebastian’s death. We do not speak of our choking grief or our gaping yearning. Instead we speak as if Sebastian is still alive but simply not around, as if he were traveling, like Holly Golightly, whose calling card read just that in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We act as if Sebastian has taken a trip to a distant but knowable place—Paris, perhaps, or somewhere even farther, Sydney or Hong Kong.

  It would make sense to assume that Dahlia has become a mother figure for me and I her replacement son. But ours is not a relationship of transference. I remember hearing Mr. Morgan, my RA leader from so long ago, speak with fierce loyalty about a friend he made while fighting in Vietnam. Side by side, they survived the war, then both returned to the States to resume normal lives among people who had no idea what they had been through. I imagine my feelings toward Dahlia are similar to those Mr. Morgan had for his friend. We walked through something unfathomable together. We came out on the other side, changed, only to find that much of the world remained the same, callous and indifferent.

  While I see Dahlia every few weeks, I rarely speak to my own parents. They do not even know that Sebastian is gone. I never told them much about Sebastian when he was alive, saying, simply, that I was moving in with a friend to a very nice apartment. They did not ask many questions. They remain hesitant to know any but the most general details of my life. Were I to tell them who Sebastian really was to me and that he is now gone, died of AIDS, I fear they might say that Sebastian’s death was fitting punishment for a decadent lifestyle. I have no capability to handle such condemnation. If faced with it I imagine I might fly down to Georgia, arrive at their door, and show them the meaning of Old Testament vengeance.

  I am sane enough to recognize that I have gone a little crazy.

  • • •

  I never venture to bars or clubs. God forbid I meet a man, bring him home. Even though I have been spared (for now at least), I cannot separate sex from death, no Larry Kramer dramatics needed to convince me of that. I know some gay men who are still fucking their way to oblivion, just to escape the constant pressure AIDS exerts on our lives as we do the hospital-to-memorial-service shuffle, again and again. But losing myself in suicidal sex is not the way through. Instead, I become a hermit, a monk, a ghost. Wryly, I think of myself as the phantom of the Belthorp, an apparition haunting my six-room flat. I cook only at the restaurant, never at home, but instead stock the freezer with Stouffer’s frozen entrées: macaroni and cheese, spinach soufflé, lasagna. I watch television religiously but live for Thursday night comedies, for The Cosby Show and A Different World, relishing the escape into the loving antics of an intact family, followed by the adventures of happy undergraduates coming into their own. I drink too much red wine on too many nights, grow accustomed to a low-grade hangover for much of the next day. I cling to ritual, to coffee made in the stovetop espresso pot each morning, to my jog through Riverside Park, to showing up at Café Andres each night ready to methodically prepare the meals ordered, no longer itching to transform southern classics into haute cuisine, happy now to stick to the standbys demanded of me: my cheddar biscuits, my crawfish spread on toast points, my fried flounder, my potpie. And always the banana pudding made with pound cake instead of vanilla wafers.

  The dazzling young chef is no longer dazzling and certainly no longer feels young. At twenty-eight, I am exhausted. At twenty-eight, I have lost everyone I have ever deeply loved.

  • • •

  Early Sunday, mid-December, one of those New York winter mornings that make you consider moving back south after all. When you are exposed to such biting, pervasive cold, the South’s mean prejudices seem superficial, nothing a dry martini and a good sense of humor can’t conquer. Certainly I am not the same freezing boy I was my first winter in the city—I know now to wear long underwear, thick socks, a down coat that falls past my knees. Still, on this morning I underestimate the weather and walk all the way to Zabar’s for a bag of coffee beans and some half-and-half. I stop at the café on the way out, order a cup of coffee to go, along with a still warm ham and cheese croissant, which I eat quickly, ravenously, finishing by the time I walk out of the store.

  It is shocking to step outside again. The frigid air numbs all exposed flesh, my cheeks, my nose, the lobes of my ears. I slurp at my paper cup of coffee, trying to keep warm, but it is nearly impossible to walk and drink at the same time and I keep dribbling down the front of my coat. It makes me think of the Airplane!-inspired quip Sebastian and I used to trade when either of us would spill: “I think you might have a drinking problem.”

  One more spill and I decide I’ve had enough. I look for a trash can, spying one on the sidewalk ahead. I throw my cup away, pausing for a moment to listen to the melodic sounds emanating from the stone church to my right. A sign framed in Plexiglas proclaims this diminutive fortress to be Our Lady of Sorrows.

  I have been to too many churches over the years, wearing the same black suit to attend funeral after funeral of gay men, mostly young. I am so tired of memorial services. So weary of the eulogies and the dirges. Which is why I should turn away from Our Lady of Sorrows. And yet I inch closer toward the church, the choir’s plaintive hymns matching my own raw grief, its collective voice a swath of densely woven fabric, ripped from the bolt, the edges ragged, unraveling. The door is closed but not locked. I push my way in, look around the empty vestibule, at the stone fountain by the door, at the garish red carpeting, bright as fresh blood. I do not know much about Catholicism, but I know the water in the fountain is supposed to be holy. I dip my finger in it, press a drop against my forehead, figuring what could it hurt? There is a poster board, displayed on a long wooden table, showing photos of a youth mission trip to Guatemala, brown and white kids linking arms and mugging for the camera. I think of my days as a Royal Ambassador, how I wanted to befriend Anjan, the orphan we sponsored in India.

  Life runs in circles, I suppose. I was lonely then; I am lonely now.

  I keep walking, through the swinging doors that lead into the sanctuary. The choir, taking their seats in the stalls in the nave, consists of only four people, a much smaller group than I imag
ined, given how powerfully their voices carry. There are not many in the pews, maybe twenty-five people, a few black, mostly white. Almost all have gray hair. One woman turns to glance at me as I make my way down the aisle, but everyone else keeps their eyes facing front, toward the preacher—priest—who is beginning a sermon.

  The first thing I notice about the priest is that he is hooked to oxygen, clear tubes running into his nose. His voice is kind and lilting, marked by the effeminate cadence of certain gay men. I wonder if he is HIV positive, if that is the reason for the oxygen. But I notice no lesions, no wasting of the cheeks, no other signs of disintegration. Maybe he is just old. What a blessing in the middle of the AIDS epidemic: to be a gay man who simply grows old.

  There is another priest behind him, a broad-shouldered black man with closely shorn hair, his body thick and substantial, his massive chest pushed out in front of him like a football player. I slide into a pew, taking note of the kneeler in front. Kneelers are not the Baptist way.

  The priest on oxygen speaks of comfort, of how it is the job of Christians to offer comfort to the suffering world. “Mother comforted us when we were little, but she’s not always around to do that now,” he says. “So it is up to us to provide comfort and nurturance to each other.”

  Well, that’s the damn truth, I think. I sigh deeply, then inhale, incense filling my nostrils, that exotic musky smell of the Catholic Church.

  The remainder of the homily is brief, kind, and unarousing. No one claps their hands in agreement, or murmurs amen, or follows along in their Bibles like Mama used to do, her painted fingernail trailing below the verse. Everything is very staid, very orderly. It is nice, actually. To the priest’s point: comforting. Like the rituals I have grown to depend on, the morning espresso, the long runs through the park, watching sitcoms on network television. We kneel at certain points, recite the Nicene Creed—which I, unlike the other congregants, do not know by heart. A collection is taken. I slip a five-dollar bill into the straw basket that floats in front of me, attached to a long wooden pole, wielded by an usher who stands at the end of the aisle. We say the Lord’s Prayer. And then it is time for communion, something we only took occasionally at Clairmont Avenue Baptist, and with grape juice instead of wine.