Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  … years, even in the exquisite beauty of Sicily, right among the old Greek paganism that still lives there, had not shattered the essential Christianity on which my character was established. Australia was a sort of dream or trance, like being under a spell, the self remaining unchanged … Tahiti, in a mere glimpse, repelled me: and so did California, after a stay of a mere few weeks. There seemed a strange brutality in the spirit of the western coast, and I felt: O, let me get away.

  But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend.1

  He was the same age as Roger when he died, forty-four, and no more chose this site for himself than Roger had his at Forest Lawn. Yet one couldn’t help but anthropomorphize the moment, as if Lawrence were crouched in the chapel’s doorway, pointing into the distance—like the dead in Our Town, gossiping among themselves as they study the daily rounds of the villagers below. Somehow I was drinking in this vista with DHL at my side, or through him or for him. A strange connectedness at certain graves, as if however briefly one became the ghost of the dead.

  We went back to the chapel the next day, by which time I managed the visit without tears. But there was something else going on now, a sudden compulsion to get back to Forest Lawn and our place—as if this whole visit were a kind of betrayal, sleeping in somebody else’s bed before the funeral meats were cold. Abruptly Star and I left, and I stopped at the first payphone to change my reservation, bringing me back to L.A. that night, which was New Year’s Eve.

  I raced over to Forest Lawn next morning, full-crazy by now, terrified that Roger’s grave might have vanished, or else that it had lost the magic closeness it engendered—the nearest I could get to him now except in dreams. Though still laden with Christmas, the cemetery was practically deserted, everyone staying home today to watch football. I dropped to my knees at 3275, announcing that I was home again. Whimpering rather than crying, I buried a Zuni ring I’d picked up on the plaza in Santa Fe, buried it over his heart.

  And then I began to keen, rocking back and forth on my haunches. I realized I was trying to match the sound of Roger’s moaning when I arrived in his room at UCLA the day he died. A sound I barely understood at the time, a lament of terrible urgent sorrow, calling out but without any words. The cryptococcus had swelled his brain in the night and stolen his center of speech. “Why is he doing that?” I asked the nurse, but she couldn’t say. I asked for a shot to calm his agitation, then realized he could answer me by blinking his eyes when I asked him questions. I called his sister and held the phone to his ear as she talked, and he blinked and blinked.

  Now ten weeks later, a stillborn year before me, I finally understand that the bleating sound on that last day was Roger calling my name. Through the pounding in his head, the blindness and the paralysis, all his bodily functions out of control, he had somehow heard me come in. Had waited. And once I understood that, I went mad. My moaning rose to a siren pitch, and I clawed at the grass that covered him. Possessed with a fury to dig the six feet down and tear open the lid and clasp him to me, whatever was left. I don’t even know what stopped me—exhaustion, I guess, the utter meaninglessness of anything anymore.

  Grief is madness—ask anyone who’s been there. They will tell you it abates with time, but that’s a lie. What drowns you in the first year is a force of solitude and helplessness exactly equal in intensity to the love you had for the one who’s gone. Equally passionate, equally intimate. The spaces between the stabs of pain grow longer after a while, but they’re empty spaces. The cliches of condolence get you back to the office, back to your taxes and the dinner table—and for everyone else’s sake, you collaborate. The road of least resistance is paved with the gravel of well-meaning friends, rather like the gravel that cremation leaves.

  Most of my friends would have said I was doing quite well as we passed the first anniversary. I finished the draft of Borrowed Time and set off with Craig for Italy, spending the first night in Rome, just off the Piazza Navona where Roger and I had spent the last night of our trip in ’83. I had no plans to visit Keats’s grave, having given over the sum of my graveyard vigil to 3275. But the jet lag woke me wired at dawn, and Craig was a slower riser even than I. Our train to Florence wasn’t leaving till eleven.

  I scribbled a note and left on foot, my map of the city blown to shreds by the wind off the Tiber. No taxis in sight, but maybe I just needed to get there on my own. I had no idea what the hours were, and got sidetracked in my confusion by a military cemetery across the way, immaculate and precise as a full-dress drill. A wizened gardener put me right with a lot of gesticulating, and at last I found the crooked side street and the door in the weed-chinked wall.

  Open, even so early, and utterly deserted. It seemed at first a typical urban burial-ground, no vacancy and no breathing space, crammed with the marble monuments of another age. But there was a sign nailed to a tree that said KEATS AND SEVERN, with an arrow pointing past the caretaker’s office. Beyond that point the tenement crowdedness opened out onto a pristine lawn, only a handful of graves, someone having made a shrewd Protestant decision to stop any further burial here, for Keats’s sake perhaps. An acre of green bordered on one side by the Cestius pyramid—erected 16 B.C. The Christian in the shadow of the pagan, my sort of place.

  I took the pebbled path around to Keats and Severn, already crying, sobbing hysterically—well, histrionically, then—and fell to my knees in the patch of ivy that fronted the graves. I hadn’t cried so much since the madness of New Year’s Day. I cried for all those who’d died too young, none of their promises kept, whose tombstones bore no name. These days everyone I knew seemed writ in water. Severn lay beside him, the painter having lived into his eighty-fifth year, yet still remembered most for those fevered days and nights nearly sixty years before.

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  JOSEPH SEVERN

  DEVOTED FRIEND AND DEATH-BED COMPANION

  OF

  JOHN KEATS

  WHOM HE LIVED TO SEE NUMBERED AMONG

  THE IMMORTAL POETS OF ENGLAND

  When I was sufficiently composed again I took my leave. I’d had the place to myself for about a half hour, unless my blubbering presence had simply scared off all the bachelor schoolteachers come to pay their own homage. And by the time I’d wandered back to Piazza Navona, gusts of smog swirling about me from the pitch of morning traffic, I was more recovered from a lot of things than I understood at the time. Craig was all packed and frantic lest we miss the train. I gave him the barest outline of my visit to the Protestant Cemetery, content to keep the histrionics to myself.

  And when I returned to L.A. ten days later, my vigils at 3275 grew more and more intermittent. Not a conscious thing, or indeed a happy turn of events. I’d finally shifted ground, and knew at last that Roger wasn’t there in Forest Lawn at all. Or anywhere else. It would mostly now be a journey for the sake of memory, the marking of his birthday or his deathday or the anniversary of our meeting. A special cortege if his parents or sister were in town, but that was only once a year. I suppose I came to rely on the mail instead, letters from readers of Borrowed Time to whom Roger was vividly alive, more alive than to me.

  I met Stephen. Everyone said I’d moved on. After the October action in Washington, and Stephen’s arrest at the FDA, we gave ourselves a few days’ downtime in the Shenandoah Valley. We picnicked in the ruins of a brick plantation house, and later stumbled onto a Confederate graveyard. Buried where they’d fallen, it seemed, tombstones marking the end of soldiers who were only seventeen, some as young as fourteen. And may the gods forgive me, I’d passed once more into the realm of the picturesque. For this was as pretty a place as the old New England family plots fenced by iron staves, where I used to maunder away the afternoons of my adolescence.

  Two months later, over New Year’s on Kauai, we fulfilled a pledge to Adam Savage, Stephen’s former roommate, who wanted his ashes scattered on a very specific beach
. The northeast coast of the island, a dirt road winding down along the bank of a stream that was fed by a mountain rainforest—from deep in the interior where the rain never stopped. The stream debouched at Aliomanu Bay, an unmarked palmy strand where the sand was like powdered sugar. Picture-perfect.

  We opened the box of ashes, difficult to scatter in the gusting breeze that white-capped the breakers. As Stephen poured the crushed bone into the maelstrom just where the fresh water met the salt, I intoned Edna Millay’s “Dirge Without Music,” trumpeting it into the wind. All in all an impressive ceremony, to us anyway, till we were confronted by a pair of natives carrying six-packs. “What’re you guys dumping in that water?” one of them demanded, his anger barely suppressed. He had a hundred pounds on me.

  “It’s just a ritual,” I replied pleasantly.

  “Bullshit,” his partner growled.

  Stephen was done with the pouring, the last bits blown across the rippling current. We backed away to the car, smiling and nodding. They glared us out of there but made no move to attack. I understood the beach was theirs, no matter who held the deed. But I also knew in my own bones that they’d kill us for the trespass if they knew we’d dumped AIDS in the water. I thought back to them two years later, when my father told me a hospice had been denied a site in one of the Boston suburbs, because the townsfolk feared the runoff of rain from the roof would taint the groundwater with AIDS. This was before the fundamentalists began to picket AIDS funerals in the Midwest, mocking and spitting on the mourners.

  My mother died the next winter, after what seemed a lifetime of struggling with emphysema. (“I know what it’s like,” she used to wheeze, “to have people treat you like your illness is all your own fault.”) I flew into Boston in a blizzard, and was fishtailed the twenty miles north to Andover by an intrepid Sikh cabdriver. The funeral next morning, blue sky and a blinding snowscape, began with a service at Christ Episcopal. They opened the coffin one last time in the vestibule, so my father and brother and I could have a final something. I grazed her hand with my fingers, flinching from the icy cold, the waxen flesh. My father kissed her lips.

  We buried her in the churchyard, in the snow behind the chancel—the gravediggers having huddled and decided the ground wasn’t too frozen for the backhoe. My parents had acquired the plot the previous summer, proudly taking me there on my last visit home, so they could “show off the property.” It was at the crest of a knoll, which fell in gentle terraces lush with the humid green of June, overlooking a hundred years of slate and granite markers in no particular ranks, faithful parishioners having settled in for the duration. Across on the next rise, separated by a country lane, was the Congregational graveyard, neighborly but a bit more trim, less shaggy than the Episcopal. You’d never believe you were fifty yards from the center of town.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” declared my mother excitedly. “Daddy’ll be able to come down and visit me and read his paper.”

  Beside the grave my father has set a small stone bench for just that purpose. For six months after she died, I felt nothing. I’d tell my friends, “As soon as I have a feeling, I’ll let you know.” Not that the numbness wasn’t a feeling, but it gave no access back to her.

  It was sometime in early summer that I was driving with Stephen and his mother, riding in the back so they could talk. At one point he turned to her and asked, “Mom, do you need a place to visit?” We all knew what kind of place he meant. Dolores shook her head slowly: “No, it’s not important to me.”

  I leaned forward and put in my two cents. “I need it,” I said. And slick as a Bible salesman I made a pitch for Forest Lawn, the hill they called Revelation. We’d have to check to see if they allowed ashes to be buried up there, instead of in the safe-deposit boxes of the Columbarium. Otherwise the matter was settled, both of them leaving it up to me.

  But it wasn’t a detail we ever followed up on, the business of ashes in the ground. He got sick so unexpectedly on Labor Day, none of us really believing he was on his way out. Within ten days he was sealed in a mask, his lungs fed by a noisy oxygen push. He beckoned for paper and pen and scribbled these notes:

  19/13/90

  Cremated by After-Care (if possible) and if poss. buried (in the ground) close to you.

  Would’ve wanted to convert to Living Trust but it seems a little late now, doesn’t it?

  Oh yes, later and later every hour. And the déjà vu a week later, riding five miles an hour at Forest Lawn with our Comfort Counselor, then abandoning the car for the steep walk up Revelation hill. Dolores and Ted, Stephen’s father, paccompanied me, along with his sister Susan and Victor, our staunchest friend. I’d already determined to buy the highest plot of all, maybe fifteen feet above Roger, because our row was already filled. The family was pleased with the prospect and let me make the arrangements. There was in fact no problem about burying an urn of ashes in the ground.

  “We usually sell these plots in pairs,” purred the Counselor, thinking to make some room for me.

  “Oh no, I’m going down there with Roger,” I declared, pointing toward my own spot.

  There was a beat of the purest confusion, as the Counselor tried to grapple with the meaning here. Slowly he began to put it together that I was widowed twice, a notion that clearly struck him as rather indelicate. Like that daft moment in The Importance of Being Earnest, when Jack’s revelation that he’s orphaned meets with the arch disapproval of Lady Bracknell:

  To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

  And then Dolores stepped into the breach, turning to Victor to inquire, very no-nonsense: “Well, do you have a place?”

  After a moment’s left-footed dancing among us, we decided Victor would go beside Stephen. So we informed the Counselor that after all we would take the two-fer deal, which he duly recorded in his book of deeds, however questionable the arrangement seemed to him.

  The funeral was three days later, with the burial after the service. I carried the porcelain urn, too small, it seemed, to hold all of him, for I was a connoisseur of ashes by now. Wondering if the remainder had been left in the oven, since the mortuary hadn’t really liked us providing our own non-regulation urn, brought by Susan’s Marine husband from his posting in Japan.

  Numb again, number than even my mother had left me. The thing that sparked the tears was hearing from my friend Dan, who’d stood behind the scenes at the funeral to cue the music. Near him in the doorway lounged a pair of cemetery employees—polyester suits, not diggers—having a smoke. And trading fag jokes and AIDS jokes. Dan hissed at them to be quiet.

  I reported them, of course, and of course they denied it. The Boss Comfort Counselor assured me over the phone that Forest Lawn had been the first to accept the dead of AIDS. In fact, she added smoothly, Forest Lawn was proud of having regular consciousness-raising sessions for all their employees, where the demonization of “all non-Christians” was rigorously discouraged. I thought I was going to puke if I didn’t get off the phone fast.

  I visited every day for a month, bringing with me a folder of pictures of Stephen—running through them like flash cards for a foreign tongue, except here they were wordless. My last jolt of rage had been spent ordering the bronze, on which I proposed to engrave:

  STEPHEN F. KOLZAK

  MY GUERRILLA, MY LOVE

  1953–1990

  DIED OF HOMOPHOBIA

  DIED A HERO

  BELOVED SON AND BROTHER

  REAL ISN’T HOW YOU ARE MADE

  YOU BECOME

  It seemed the least I could give him by way of defiance, since he’d made it clear often enough that he wanted his body dumped on the White House lawn. The family protested as tactfully as it could. I excised died of homophobia and said I would have it on my grave instead. We retained the final quotation from The Velveteen Rabbit.

  After a week or two I could cry a little, pricked by the weird juxtaposition of paying respects to Roger first, t
hen the final climb to Stephen. Yet by the time Victor and I took off for Europe—a month to the day after burying Stevie—the pain had frozen over again. I’d hoped I might get through the grief weeping in cathedrals, but they pretty much left me cold. I even took Victor to the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, but Keats’s grave had become just another story by then. More exalted than Forest Lawn, to be sure, where the Counselor had puffed with pride in the neighborhood, pointing out how close we were to Rick Nelson.

  I think I’ve been to Revelation just three times in the last two years, in every case as an escort for one or the other family. The conversations on the hill are mostly suffused with memories—the good ones. In this the parents are wiser than I, who watch my body change and dwindle and seem able to recall only the suffering of the men I loved. These memories pursue me everywhere—on the radiation table, in the tunnel of an MRI, half my life in waiting rooms. I don’t know where the certainty went, the solidity of the ground beneath me during the first year’s visits to Roger. No matter what happened I’d end up here, the compass point of my journey’s end. Surcease from the pain at last. Now that seems like another pretty story, no real comfort.

  Last October Winston and I went to Paris, a city he’d never seen before. It was his idea to take the Metro out to Pere-Lachaise, the permanent address for so many stellar Parisians. Mostly decrepit, not kept up, chockablock with phone-booth chapels whose stained-glass windows were kitsch to the max. Parisians being the least Catholic of Catholics, but with a sentimental streak a mile wide when it came to burying the dead.

  They had just sandblasted Oscar Wilde, so the great Egyptian monument by Jacob Epstein—a Deco angel rampant, hovering in stone—was clean of all graffiti. No evidence of violence except the angel’s privates, hacked away in the twenties and never replaced. Then Gertrude Stein, an unadorned slab with just her name and dates, very bourgeois. “But where’s Alice?” I wondered aloud, thinking I’d misremembered their lying together. Then we walked around behind the slab through the unkempt ivy and found Alice’s name in smaller letters, as if she’d averted her face from the spotlight one last time.