Late in the Season

by Felice Picano

  Tired as Dan was, he was still a most active sleeper. Where did he get his energy from? Awake all last night, then jetting here in the morning, running around the city, getting to Penn Station, then coming back, having dinner, going into the park, arguing. And still not stopped yet, still moving around.

  Dan’s body always stayed warmer than Jonathan’s when he slept—another sign of his intense vitality. Feverish, Dan was like a big bedwarming pan. During his last bout with the flu, every time Jonathan had brushed up against him by accident, he’d felt seared by the touch.

  Now Dan was on his back again, shifting position twice in his sleep as Jonathan watched. Dan’s head was tilted back, half on, half off the pillow, the sheet covering him had inched down past his midsection. Long, low snores emptied out of him. Even sleeping seemed to be exercise for Dan.

  Gray hairs on his chest: the first Jonathan noticed. One or two among Dan’s pubic hairs. The large, fleshy volume of his thighs and arms, of his calves and torso. Only an inch taller than Jonathan, Dan was slender-looking because his weight was distributed well. When they’d last weighed themselves together, Dan had been more than twenty pounds heavier. Big bones. Lots of muscle and flesh. He was essentially a country boy, from the north fork of Long Island, with his bright chestnut hair and WASP-y facial features. Dan’s hair had glowed red under the sunny sky that first time Jonathan had seen him at the Bethesda Fountain in the park. Since then it had glimmered orange on beaches and under strobe lights, been dyed to auburn on misty afternoons, had become a bronzed helmet during drugged hallucinations.

  Ladies and gentleman, my lover! Or rather, my ex-lover. No, that wasn’t exactly right, was it? You couldn’t take back love once given, could you? So that someone once intensely loved was no longer perceived as having been loved. No, impossible. Love didn’t flash on and off like a light, like lightwaves, only striking one person, one object, and nothing else. Or rather, yes, love did seem to be like that, on the surface; but it acted differently too. As though it were a material, given and received, forever attached to the receiver. You could suddenly hate someone once loved, but that didn’t subtract from having loved before. It meant, instead, the addition of another, opposite energy. Love was both a wave and a material, then. A wavelike material. Didn’t that define something else too?…Of course it did. Sophisticated experiments on the most minute atomic particles had shown them to be both waves and matter at different times. That meant that love was like atomic structures, the very stuff of the universe.

  Then Fiammetta wasn’t merely an idealist. She’d given the memory of her falcon a materiality far exceeding what it had really possessed. And if no bird could compare, it was because Fiammetta already possessed it fully. As Gentile, her suitor, possessed her fully too, loving her.

  As Jonathan possessed Dan, Barry Meade, Amadea and Saul, Artie and Ken and Janet, all his other friends, all the people who adored his music, those who sang it on stage, in cabarets, in shower stalls, those who recorded it, who hummed along with it, who sent him drinks anonymously. Why then, possessing so much, had he needed Stevie too? Losing her, why did he no longer want his fans, his friends, his collaborators, Dan, anymore?

  It was impossible to figure out. He should get some sleep.

  But he couldn’t. As soon as the bed light was shut off again, Dan became restless in his sleep. At first, he mumbled. Then he began speaking disjointedly, short half words blustering out of him, then broken whispers.

  He was having one of his big dreams, a Cecil B. DeMille, as Dan called them. He was dreaming that he was on location, or on-stage, or on a sound set, or in a story conference room. He was reliving, or replaying, or preparing for some work-related encounter: talking to a film actress, trying to persuade a producer or scriptwriter that something had to be changed. He would be animated, suddenly laugh, then be quiet again. He even performed in his sleep, damn him!

  Jonathan sat up and lighted his bed lamp. He’d never get to sleep without a pill with Dan carrying on like this. Jonathan didn’t want to wake up tomorrow with a drug hangover; he didn’t want to feel foggy and vague until his second large mug of coffee. Or did he? It might prove a good way to not deal with Dan.

  When he returned to the bedroom with a glass of water to wash the sleeping pill down, he saw that Dan had assumed a peculiar position. His knees were drawn up toward his chest, his arms across his face. The sheets were pushed completely off. He was very agitated, still talking in his sleep, but oddly, gutturally, the words difficult to make out. His lips moved, his head thrashed on the pillow from side to side.

  Jonathan had seen Dan happy, passionate, even angry in his sleep, but he’d never seen him frightened. Dan seemed very fearful now. He flinched, as though struck. He pulled away, as though avoiding being punched in the chest or face. Fascinated, Jonathan put the glass of water on the side table and kneeled on the mattress watching him more closely.

  Dan flinched again, his arms protecting his face, as though warding off blows. He whimpered, then drew back to receive another invisible blow, his face contorted with anger and terror. The attack seemed to worsen, the bed began to shake with Dan’s contortions. It seemed as though Dan were being beaten up as he slept. Jonathan had never witnessed anything like it before.

  Watching, Jonathan went from fascination, to feeling satisfaction, even to feeling vengeful; but that soon altered to helplessness in the face of some terrible, invisible thing that swooped past him to strike at Dan as he slept. As the bizarre attack seemed to become more intense, Jonathan began to feel afraid himself, as though a battle were being fought in which he counted but in which he was unable to contend. He’d awakened Dan from dreams before, sometimes he’d suffered from them. But this was different, so chilling that it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck, as though some ghost, some horror was counting on his very indifference. Watching Dan, Jonathan was suddenly ravaged to the heart.

  As suddenly, he realized he faced a choice. He could wake Dan up from his nightmare, or he could get out of bed, close the bedroom door, take the pill, and sleep undisturbed on the sofa in his studio. Both choices were insignificant actions. But each held far-reaching consequences, each would determine the rest of his life. If he left Dan now that meant he was leaving him forever—it meant it in a way his earlier words to Dan hadn’t meant it, meant it even though Dan would probably never know how it happened, here as he slept and had a nightmare. Was that what Jonathan wanted?

  He got off the bed, looking away from Dan. He could still hear his movements, his stifled cries of fear. But he couldn’t face him. Not for a minute or so. He had to think.

  Outside the bedroom window, Central Park stretched in a darkness made only dimmer by the punctuation of tiny streetlights within its black masses of trees. Across the park, on the East Side, building lights were few; the skyline formed a continuous ebony silhouette against the humid gray sky. It was three fifteen. Hadn’t Scott Fitzgerald written of the desolation of three o’clock in the morning? Hadn’t Gerard Manley Hopkins written of the torture of sudden emptiness at such an hour, “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist—slack though they may be—these last strands of man / In me…” What was Jonathan to do?

  Words. Hollow words. Where was the music, the halting, tragic, unending dirge that ought to accompany them? What was he to do?

  If he left now, he left forever, gave himself forever to solitude, to despair. There might be Stevie, other Stevies, other Steves, even. Never another Daniel. But if he awakened Dan, it would begin all over again, continue, this shadow of a life he’d only just recognized tonight, this unendurable life. What was he to do?

  Behind him, Dan whimpered on. Help Dan? Help himself?

  “Help me decide,” he cried inwardly, though to whom he didn’t know. “Help me. Please help me!”

  He was suddenly aware of quiet behind him. He turned, realized his hands were clenched over his face, let them down, and saw Dan, awake, half up on his elbow
s, staring at him. Dan’s face glittered with perspiration, his long hair was matted with sweat. He breathed deeply, irregularly. He looked at Jonathan with a glazed expression, as though still half dreaming.

  “You were having a nightmare,” Jonathan said. He could barely get the words out; they broke on his tongue, spilled out, dribbling out of his lips.

  Dan seemed to awaken fully. He still stared at Jonathan, who felt the need to explain.

  “I didn’t know whether to go or to stay and wake you. For the first time in my life, Dan, I didn’t know what to do!”

  He kneeled on the bed.

  “I had no idea, Dan. None!”

  “Shh,” Dan said, and Jonathan realized he had been shouting. He must have shouted before, calling for help. Had his calls before been vocalized? Had they awakened Dan?

  “You were having this nightmare, see,” Jonathan repeated, “You were being attacked or something.”

  “It’s over. Don’t worry about it,” Dan said, his voice calm.

  “It was horrible, Dan. I couldn’t stand watching you like that. But I didn’t know what to do.”

  Daniel held out his arms. Jonathan looked at them blankly.

  “It was horrible,” Jonathan repeated in a hoarse whisper. “I was so frightened.”

  Dan leaned forward, put his arms around Jonathan, and drew him to his breast. Jonathan could feel the heat from Dan’s arms around him, Dan’s sweat-beaded skin cooling, slightly clammy. His own body trembled. Their hearts thudded.

  For an instant, he pictured himself like that butterfly on the beach at Sea Mist, its beautifully colored wings held tight in the grip of a dead sandcrab. The image revolted him. He shuddered at it, tried to get it out of his mind, and almost pulled away from Dan.

  Dan hushed him again, held him close again.

  After a long time, Dan said, “That dream was a grade-B horror show. Written by Poe, directed by Hitchcock. Maybe when I’m done with the BBC I should look for a thriller project.” He went on in that vein for another minute, throwing out ideas, books that had never been made into films that might fill the bill; he almost decided on one. “Incidentally,” Dan concluded, “thanks for waking me up.”

  Jonathan wanted to say that he hadn’t, that what really happened was… He didn’t say it. Dan didn’t seem to want to hear it, anyway. Their bodies fit together, as they always had, and their hearts had slowed down to normal and beat with a strong, regular, identical beat. Nothing else mattered. In his worst moment of despair, without being aware of it, Jonathan had made his choice; his despair had made the choice for him. He let himself be held.

  Afterword

  Only recently, a friend reminded me of what I said upon the publication of Late in the Season in 1981, “It was sort of a bargain book for me: You know, write four novels, get one free?”

  I was trying to explain how quickly and easily this novel arrived, fully formed as it were, and how quickly and easily it was written: a mere twenty-five days for the first handwritten draft, another five weeks for a revised typed draft. Compare this to a year or more of work for all of my other novels.

  According to the little ledger, wherein I’ve listed my works and their publication since 1971, Late in the Season was immediately preceded by the second of my Window Elegies poems and by three short stories, “Teddy the Hook,” “Spinning,” and “A Stroke,” all of which were quickly published, the first two in Blueboy magazine, the third in a literary quarterly no longer extant. The stories later appeared in my popular 1983 collection, Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love. For the next year, following the completion of the novel, I wrote only poems, essays, and book reviews. Obviously, the novel satisfied me for a while.

  That Late in the Season came so easily is due to three factors. First, I knew the book’s Fire Island Pines background and so didn’t have to research it, as I’d had to for the previous two, much longer, more detailed books, The Mesmerist and The Lure. I’d lived at the Pines as a summer resident for the past five years and knew the place as well as anyone in terms of its flora, fauna, and seasonal change. Given how small it was, even if you included nearby Cherry Grove and Water Island, geographically and, in terms of population, it was nothing more really than a small town: easily comprehended and equally easy to render.

  It was this ambience of an American small town with a twist that I was trying to convey in the book. As well as the idea of a “summer place,” a partly stable, partly transient community intrinsically different from other resorts around the world.

  A second factor was that I felt strongly impelled by the very autobiographical story of the novel; impelled to write it out in the hope that I might somehow understand why the romance had gone so totally awry, despite all of my conscious efforts.

  The end of that relationship caused me great anguish. And, coming as it had at exactly the same time as the extraordinary popular and critical (one might say “cultural”) success of my novel The Lure, had caused a strange psychic rift to open in me: a conflict between what I believed life was capable of bringing me and what I was experiencing. I sensed some screwy equation between artistic success and failed love that I kept praying was not or would not become a life pattern. I remember one afternoon when, within a five-minute span, I received incredibly good career news and the worst possible news about my love affair. I desperately needed to heal that inner rift before it turned into severe depression, schizophrenia, whatever. As I’d done for over a decade, I once more turned to writing as a tool for self-healing, for self-redefinition.

  A few words about this romance. Like the one in the novel, it was a triangle, and, like the young woman in the novel, I was the third party intruding into a gay marriage. Yes, I was Stevie—not Jonathan. Unlike Stevie, I wasn’t aware a marriage existed until I was in very deep. But like her, once I was aware of it, I came to believe it was not a strong relationship and would not survive work on my part to end it. Like Stevie, once I’d made that clear to the young man I loved and he expressed a wish to continue the marriage anyway, I sacrificed myself and split, hating myself for taking the high road. Unlike Jonathan and Daniel’s marriage, the real one didn’t last once I was gone.

  A third factor for the book being relatively fast and easy to write was that I’d grown tired of the post-Flaubert, tightly written, point-of-view novel, which, in their own way, my first four novels all had been. Now I wanted to experiment.

  Late in the Season turned out to break the mold less than I’d hoped. Instead, like the next two non-gay-themed novels, House of Cards and To the Seventh Power, it was a further exploration of how to tell a story from multiple points of view. Evidently I hadn’t worked all of that area quite yet.

  On the other hand, this novel was experimental for me another way: It successfully got me past the concept of the “perfect” novel. Instead of writing a book that had to be laid out like a diagram, each hour and place and action and emotion graphed to within an inch of its life, Late in the Season was written almost impromptu, as though I were doing prose-poems. Feeling, mood, and atmosphere dominated action and plot. If one can (invidiously) compare writing to painting, The Lure was a large mural (or series of murals) while Late in the Season was a watercolor (or series of aquarelles). Where my other novels depended upon fully modeled characters and totally detailed settings, this was more a sketchbook, where the “white” space—what was not narrated, or said—was as crucial as what was.

  I would have to construct a new form, a hybrid of fiction and the memoir, or as one publisher put it, “a memoir in the form of a novel,” to fully break away from those stylistic precursors who’d influenced me. Especially the great Henry James, who has been the cause of much of the best and worst writing of our time. Because as it turned out, how to restructure wasn’t the problem I had to solve to go on and develop as a writer, but rather how to retexture. By the time I came to write Ambidextrous, it was clear I had to not only stress my own voice and style, I also had to design a new way to narrate that would be no
one’s but mine, one capable of the color, scenic power, emotional depth, drama, philosophizing, and character drawing of the masters.

  The following volumes, Men Who Loved Me and A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay (also about Fire Island) continued to develop this new texturing. Even my novel Like People in History uses it, while pretending to be first-person point of view—a slyness that has elicited the most hilariously irrelevant, boneheaded reviews a book of mine has ever received.

  In that sense, Late in the Season is a transitional work, on the way from one fully formed style—even period—to another. Because of that, because of how easy it was to write, and because of its ability even today to revivify for me the emotional situation and period of time in which it was written, it will probably always remain a favorite.

  About the Author

  Felice Picano is the author of twenty-three published books, including novels, novellas, short story collections, poetry, memoirs, and other nonfiction. His work has been translated into thirteen languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Slovenian. He has been nominated for or received over a dozen literary awards in several literary forms and genres. In the U.S., Picano is considered a founder of modern gay literature; internationally, as a noted American postmodernist. Writing about him can be found in several references including Contemporary Authors, The Cambridge History of American Literature, and Wikipedia.com. His third play was revived in Palm Spring for a sold-out run in 2008.