by Paul Lisicky
A half hour later I’m laughing with the others at the picnic table. The night is sweet, windless. There’s a smell of lawn clippings and wet mulch. It astonishes me that I can turn off the disaster and listen to my friends. Claudia and Nick are discussing bewilderment as an aesthetic, what it might mean to how poems get made. They’re having a hard time of it: how does one talk about the ineffable? In another life I would have used this window to talk about my bewilderment, the news that came to me an hour ago, and my worry would have been the subject of our night. But not tonight. We need this night. We need to pass Nick and Lili’s baby back and forth, not just for the weight of her—feel her between your hands, lighter than a bag of sugar—but for the wonder of looking into another face. Isn’t that why people lean toward babies and dogs, after all? We want to look into a face that isn’t going to judge, dismiss, or hurt us, but one that looks back at us with amusement, a face that makes us wide awake.
Maeve moves from one set of hands to the next. She smiles, reaching toward us with a hand no wider than two of my fingertips together. She squeezes my fingers hard, as if to say, Look! Beware! Maeve is strong!
Across the country Denise tries to be perfectly still as the technician pulls the hood down over her eyes.
Rehearsal
2008 | Finally, some quiet time in which to write you. Darling, I heard your messages and love them so much, but usually when I get them it’s before a procedure, after one or in the middle of something. Sorry I have not spoken with you yet.
Okay. Here is where we’re at presently. Take a breath …
Not only is the non-small-cell cancer in the lung, but it invaded the fluid in the pericardial sac, so while the fluid is gone now, my heart has cancer as do the lymph nodes along the trachea and a few in the neck. We got the uber bad news on Monday that the MRI showed the cancer has metastasized to my brain. There are 17 lesions, mostly in the cortex; two teeny tiny lesions but scarify a shade too close for my comfort near the cerebellum. Long story short—this development altered everything in terms of the order of treatment. We must get to the brain first and everything else after.
Yesterday they called me in to meet the radiology oncologist. I love him. He’s excellent. And today they brought me in for a PET scan and mask-making mold of my face. Very freaky which I will wear when they begin radiation on Monday. They are doing whole brain radiation, five days a week, for three weeks in fractionated doses. I will feel deeply fatigued and will by the ninth day lose all my hair. When radiation is done, then it’s on to chemo which will be more uncomfortable.
Tomorrow I go again, wear the mask, then they map all the markers for radiation. I must lie completely still for one hour.
So today, I came home, made an appt. and had my hair cut short. I figured it would be less painful to part with short wads of hair than to see my long hair fall out. Also I figure it’s a way to embrace a new head rather than resist what I cannot control.
2010 | Six months after Denise’s death, M and I are standing before a four-foot-wide nineteenth-century photograph of a crowd on the beach. We’re in Cape May, at Congress Hall, the old hotel with the forty-foot pillars, where the picture in question hangs in a low-lit hallway. It’s almost impossible to make out any details. Maybe that’s because the photograph itself is showing its age. Some might call the color of the paper sepia, coffee, soil. To me, it is the color of Time, though I don’t want Time to be that color. I don’t want it to cloud or grime or seep into everything. Right now I want it to be clearer, brighter. If it can’t be a color, then it should be the white of the snow around the shrubs outside.
And yet, what is worse than a room where there’s nothing old, where the chairs and paintings have been bought from the same furniture store at the same time? No signs of fading, chipping, loose threads, or paw prints. Or the water stains on this photograph, from which we can’t quite tear ourselves away. There’s a shipwreck, a lighthouse, and two bird sanctuaries down Sunset Boulevard, yet here we are, on a cold January afternoon, sinking into the nineteenth century.
How often do we get to see this many people at once, fixed? I think people are beautiful when they’re together like this, even though I know I’m not seeing them as individuals. From here I can’t see their resentments. I can’t see them wounding the people they care about or jockeying for position against one another. This is a production. It’s likely the hotel had put up a sign by the front desk: GET YOUR PICTURE TAKEN BY THE PIER AT NOON! The people on the beach seem to know they are part of a larger scheme (advertisement?), so it’s no surprise they do what they can to resist it. One stands with a foot in the surf, looking toward shore. One hands another a baseball or a piece of fruit. Another drapes his arms over the shoulders of two muscular men, as if to claim them as brothers. Off in the distance there’s a lifeboat—or maybe that’s just the dark head of a swimmer—the lifeguard inside trying to protect bathers from going out too far. These people must have money. Their casual indifference suggests they don’t need any more attention than they’re getting. There is no lack in them. But it must be work to pretend it’s a casual occasion. And in that way they have no idea how fragile they look.
I wonder if they know they might be rehearsing for their deaths. Probably they were asked to hold still. Thirty seconds, thirty minutes. Maybe a whole afternoon went by when they could have been moving around in their good clothes, getting ready to go out for fried chicken or oysters. Very likely it wasn’t a single shot. Keeping still is harder work than digging a ditch. Why would they even put up with this, on a sunny day in summer, if they didn’t want someone 122 years later to do exactly what we’re doing: standing in a hall on a wintry day, asking who might that have been? If their souls could see what we’re doing, wherever they are, whatever they are, would they be saying, Watch me? Pick me?
I glance over at M. His eyes are as clear as they’ve ever been. Is he imagining W, his late partner, into that crowd? I imagine he is, blue eyes following W out into the waves as if W has lost all semblance of human form and become a marine creature. W has been gone for sixteen years, but M’s attachment to that fact does not shift or diminish. Death shadows his face. It draws him away from me. I have willed myself not to feel apart from M when he goes to this place. I have learned not to think: replacement—I am not his great love. The love coming at me is the love intended for the lost. I’m swimming in it. I’m trying to ride the wave of it. And yet I have been chosen. I have enjoyed being chosen, picked out from the crowd.
I place my hand on the small of his back just as a hotel bartender hurries through the hall, smelling of fireplace.
Maybe now that Denise is gone, I’ll have a better sense of what it is to be M. Maybe that will make us closer.
Imitation Jane Bowles
1983 | “Paul?”
I sit up in my desk chair as if I’ve been shocked awake. I’m in my little office on campus, where I’ve been reading and marking up five-page process analysis essays. This particular essay—thirty-eight of fifty—details the steps involved in blow-drying your hair, and though the writer thinks the sound of her voice is funny, it isn’t funny at all. I’ve been circling on the second paragraph for the past twenty minutes. I’m not so far off from drooling, with one eye crossed.
Denise waves some papers in the air. Her earrings quiver. Her face gleams as if she’s just coming down from teaching a wonderful class. She is a second-year teaching assistant at Rutgers; I’m just starting out. Unlike me, she’s able to hold the attention of an entire group of freshmen. They listen to her, rapt, as she tells funny stories about the comma splice and fused sentence, while I must work very hard to control my stage fright in order not to throw up all over some girl in the front row.
“Let us make love like a couple of crazy angels,” she says. And breaks out in a deep laugh as if that line were the funniest line ever written.
The line is from the story in her hands. The story in her hands is mine, one she’d asked to see last week.
; She says the line loud enough for everyone in the English department to hear. Dr. S, the Shakespeare professor, with the natty blazer and the lockjawed vowels, hears it; Phyllis, the department secretary, part my aunt Vicki, part Chita Rivera, hears it, too. They go on typing whatever it is they’re typing, but there’s no way they’re not leaning in, listening, because these halls are small, and let’s face it, we all need distraction from the wonders of process analysis.
Denise pulls up a chair beside me. If only I could be present enough to take in that gaze, to stop sensing obligation in it, my life would change in an instant. I’d no longer be a lowly graduate student, but be like her, a writer whose first novel is poised to make a splash. I’m still mired in my past, a past that says, she likes this story more than it deserves to be liked. Yes, I’ve worked on every word, chosen every description with the greatest care, but the story still sounds like imitation Jane Bowles—which is exactly what it is. Yes, the characters might have some life in them, but the best of them fall out of the story, never to be heard from again. Things happen without foreshadowing. I’m pretending to mock and shatter narrative, to make fun of story convention, but the truth is that I have no control over what the hell I’m doing. I should tell her the story is meant to be nothing more than a cartoon. And as far as the seriousness that’s expected of literature? I don’t yet know how to be serious. The only thing I know how to be is silly, to make people laugh, which is why I’ve written a story about a fifty-five-year-old spinster who meets a thug on the street who fucks her silly until she wakes up parched, cross-eyed, and wigless, with her head at the foot of the bed.
Denise sits so close, I can feel the heat off her. There’s a scent about her, the faintest perfume, a little cigarette, black coffee—sex? She must be surprised that I don’t lean back into her. She’s probably used to people pushing back into her, as if they’re playing games with their bodies. I’m all packed up inside myself like a house that hasn’t been opened in years. And when she does touch me to underscore a point, I tense. I wonder if she feels me springing shut. When anyone touches me, it feels like it’s an electric shock, and I won’t find my body again.
Her voice shifts, her shoulders draw back, her voice gets quieter, more neutral. She’s reached into a different room in herself. She’s restrained now, teacherly. She is drawing from the place that makes her students listen. “Now here she wouldn’t say that,” she says, pointing to some dialogue on page three. She’s not talking about me, or herself, but she’s talking about writing now. She herself is part of writing now, as I am part of writing; she’s teaching me how to detach, to respect the story’s wishes as distinct from my own. She is teaching me not to be bewildered, defensive.
But soon enough she’s back to laughing about the things she likes about the story. Control, though necessary to our project, is only bearable for so long. We’re back to silliness and the real reason I wrote the story: to make somebody laugh. We’re laughing harder; I’m letting go of my wariness, and we’re probably on our way to flooding the English department with disruption and delight, all the feelings that aren’t usually expressed here. Phyllis shifts in her rolling chair; Dr. S clears his throat with a gruff, exaggerated sound that expects us to make use of its command to shut up. His throat clearing suggests that we’re not worthy of the task at hand—we don’t know the least of it when it comes to the discipline required of literary study. If only he knew that control was already written in our blood. People like us—Catholic school kids, children of social aspirants, grandchildren of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—have already been spanked and shushed into submission. The real work-though we’re not able to see it yet—requires us to throw off those old coats of obedience. The coats have been on us so long we don’t even know we’re wearing them. We’ve been tricked into thinking they’re light and beautiful when there’s only lead in their threads.
Or perhaps Dr. S is just jealous he isn’t one of us right now. It must be irresistible, if a little lonely, to be so close to the sound of two people fast becoming friends.
A World Out There
1946 | Roberta Joan Anderson looks out the window of her house at the train tracks in Alberta. Snow on snow, the layers so deep, no one can even say how much has fallen by January. The snow doesn’t go anywhere; her parents don’t go anywhere. Sometimes the snow doesn’t let them leave the house, and if they do leave for a concert or a movie, it requires wrapping themselves in multiple scarves and layers and gloves. Why would her father, just back from the war, want to go anywhere? Former flight sergeant: he has seen enough brutality, enough of the world. It is definitely before Roberta has polio. It is definitely before she starts smoking, at eleven. It is definitely before she’s known as the singer Joni Mitchell, or given up a baby girl, Kelly Dale, for adoption. She looks and looks out the window, as if by sheer looking she can transform the landscape. The train that she waits for every night—she hears it first, an ominous but satisfying rumbling; then a sweep of light, lunar blue, as if the moon has turned up its wattage—roars by with the transformative power of an explosion. It cuts through the snow like a knife. It says Canada is just a place to be passed through, and for that moment there isn’t just a bed and a window frame, but a world out there. And the world inside—her father with his trumpet and his Harry James records, her mother with her school prep and mops—recedes. The train says that the world they’re in is not as big as she thought; these lives are as weightless as the flakes her friend shakes into her goldfish tank.
Thirteen years after those winter nights, Denise stares out the bedroom window of a split-level on a cul-de-sac called Catalina Court, in Somerdale, New Jersey. She can’t take her eyes off the backyard at the house beside hers. Mad Dog is on a tear and nothing in this world is safe. Mad Dog is the name she’s given the woman next door, the mother who’s always fretting, always lashing out at her kids, whose infractions are nothing more than the usual kid kind: talking too loudly, stepping on new grass, leaving handprints on the foyer walls. Today Mad Dog has put her oldest son in a dress and has ordered him to march around in circles while she watches from the back step. The boy marches around the perimeter of the backyard with a calm, neutral face. The boy will not cry. The boy will not let his mother get what she wants. In an hour he’ll get this over with, and he’ll sit down and do his math homework, and maybe she’ll even reach into the freezer and give him a cherry Popsicle, his favorite. She won’t even mind if the red drips down his fingers onto his sleeve, where it will stain the fabric for good.
Does Mad Dog know that a girl is watching her through the second-floor window frame? If so, would she make Denise come down to watch with her? Or would she put her in boy’s clothes? Denise does not feel any urge to call Joey, her brother. She knows if she does, he’ll start laughing, and she’ll probably start laughing with him. Maybe later they’d even bring up the story within earshot of Bobby. Maybe they’d even imitate his march in front of him: a boy putting on a girl’s hat—the teasing kids will do! Soon enough Bobby would be the laughingstock of the cul-de-sac, that paved bulb of a street where the neighborhood kids play kickball and tag. Denise wants to keep him her secret, she wants to live inside his pocket, where it’s warm and sweaty and a little sad. She steps round and round the backyard of her own imagination, engraving a shape that won’t ever let her rest.
2009 | No one is walking the halls of the bathhouse tonight. The floors are clean, the ceiling is clean. My sheets, towel, and pillowcases are clean, which should lift my spirit, but I can only think about Denise, with whom I’ve spent the better part of the day. She’s in her last hours. It’s early Friday night. Anyone who would be here is already off to Rehoboth Beach, Fire Island, New Hope, or Asbury Park, any of the gay weekend resorts within driving distance of Philadelphia. But I couldn’t bear the intensity anymore, all those faces turned toward Denise, waiting for her to go. She wouldn’t let go.
My stare is vacant, deliberately vacant. I am performing it. I am perfec
ting it. Music thumps the speakers, music that’s working too hard to express transformation and joy. That is okay. I’m too stunned to feel, anyway. My mind is still inside that hospice room, the Joni songs, the nimbus of warmth and confusion surrounding that bed. Maybe that’s why I’m here. I thought I’d wanted to touch someone. I thought I’d wanted to escape myself, but maybe I want just the opposite: a cool dark space, tight walls, low ceiling, where I can be attuned to the sound of my breathing again.
Denise would understand. She’d have asked me all about it, would want to know the details, eyes wide open and in awe. She’d have said “why couldn’t I be a gay man?” with mock exasperation. But she’d have meant it, too, without any of the self-delight or condescension of people who often say such things.
A skinny young guy with burning eyes hurries down the hall. He backs up, stops at the door of my little room, with an affable, devilish smile. He seems interested. I might be interested, too, but he keeps on walking. Not with the aura of rejection, but because it’s better to keep moving than to stake your claims on any one person. I think it’s incredible that such places stay open, what with Grindr or Scruff or any of the other smartphone apps. Why keep them open? There has to be some better reason than simply to extend the last hours of an old tradition, which barely exists anymore.
Then another man, thicker, more muscular, appears at the door. My response is instantaneous, animal. My spine goes straighter. The other face is hard, squarish, a smart head shorn to the scalp. All bone and plane and brow. Salt-and-pepper whiskers. A salt-and-pepper pelt on chest and shoulders. In his eyes, certainty, solidity, gravitas. On the street, in a different neighborhood, he might be thought to be a construction worker who spends more time than usual shaping and trimming his beard. But in here I know better.