by Paul Lisicky
2010 | The faces look animated and bright on my walk down Seventh Avenue tonight.
Manhattan can affect your perception, especially when you’re feeling angry, hurt, disappointed, depressed. At those times, the cheerful faces at the outdoor cafés can oppose aloneness. Their laughter can blot you out, rub it in: you are not of our happy ranks. This is the circus of pleasure and play. Where did you go wrong? But every face looks beautiful to me tonight. Maybe because I am tired of being sad, maybe because I’ve been reading a little Walt Whitman, who suddenly makes sense in a whole new way. This listing, this habit of naming what he sees, high and low, monumental and minuscule, raw and cooked—isn’t he in fact inscribing boundaries in language? Isn’t he saying you’re not me, and you’re not me, and finding delight in that? The exquisite loneliness of the poet striding down the sidewalk. How else could intimacy happen if we didn’t carve boundaries between us? It is the great paradox of love, and I am making love begin as I say, bearded young skateboarder zigzagging in and out through cars. I am making love begin as I say, old woman pushing shopping cart outside Duane Reade. These were never figments of the One Holy Self, but real people, moving in time, cherished by someone, hated by someone, morphing, active, irreplaceable.
A prayer:
You who I don’t know how to talk to anymore. You whose body comes to me in a dream only to be gone as soon as I say your face, your mouth, your arms, your breasts, your feet. What happens when you die? The broken light switch in the kitchen, the doorknob glistening in the saucer by the window. How can you get in? This solitude, no match for your solitude, which must want to be sung again in the clear strong throats of the living. You who must want to be useful again, now that the two of us can see the myths we made of ourselves. What use is this skin now that you no longer have it? Would you have lived differently, read other books, loved other men, spent more time in the woods, the mountains, the sea? What happens when you die? Teach me to listen so that I might know what you know now.
2010 | There is a person in my house. In the passenger seat, at my chair at the dining room table. In my refrigerator, on the toilet seat, feet on the bathtub, hands on the sink. On my sofa, where his eyes fix on the TV screen. On my walk past the bookstore, the gallery. Between the rows of spinach and radish that I picked just weeks back, when the sun warmed the back of my neck. The person is a good cook. The person makes the rich food of the poor, delicious and caloric, high in oil, fat, and salt. The person takes the walk I just walked to the bay beach, where he meets the people I would have met, provoking wonder (and confusion, I’m sure) when he’s leaning back into the arms of my Beloved.
Meanwhile, I am back in church, where I am singing the hymns with clear, powerful notes, in spite of the sore throat I’ve been nursing for a week. I sing without the least bit of fear. I sing without any tightness in the lower half of my face. I sing not louder than any of the others but with them, inside them.
And here I thought singing was hard. And here I thought singing was work, asking us to use parts of the body (lungs, throat, tongue, lips) that would so much rather be at rest than pouring out sound. I leave the church, having sung twenty songs and acclamations, and for a little while on my walk down West Sixteenth Street, I can swallow without any discomfort around the roof of my mouth, around the back of my uvula. All of that will change in a little while, but it’s still a way off. I’ll find out, days later, when I go to the doctor, that I have strep throat. I’ve been singing entire songs through strep throat, and it doesn’t even hurt.
A day later S insists on showing the Beloved multiple DVDs of his acting and singing roles. Not just one performance, but a second and a third and a fourth and so on. Every male lead from every musical penned, from Lerner and Loewe through Sondheim. This goes on for an evening. So many performances that the poor Beloved is smothered in need—there is nothing less attractive than need, raw need, a desperate artist—and the Beloved drifts far away from the sofa, out the window, through the woods up to the clouds, and the cold dome of space, as lonely as he’d ever been.
As if this should foretell the end of the story? Well, perhaps. But the story is never linear, and this might only be another beginning.
September 28, 2008
My Darling,
Forgive me and ask M to forgive me, too, because I haven’t written him to thank him yet for that wonderful letter, but it’s been insane here. The pressure to get this tenure packet done under these physical constraints has truly been a challenge. Your cold sounded awful and I’ve got one, too. Not to mention the return of C-diff so now I’m back on medication.
Paul, this beautiful apartment has become a literal prison; I haven’t been outside for over two weeks because of the stairs.
(I move on October 10. I was under so much stress that I moved my chemo date from Oct. 1 to Oct. 13. I figured it best to begin it in a place where I feel safe, where I can move around, have a washer/dryer, and can walk freely from room to room and NOT use a commode!!)
Anyway, I forgot that this Tuesday I must go to the brain oncologist for what they call an Inspection. I think this is when they determine whether or not the radiation is successful. I do know I have short term memory loss and trouble with numbers and sequencing….
I hate to sound whiny and boring, but life has gotten just a shade unwieldy and I’m trying to remain calm. I think after the 10th? Life will start all over again….
So, I don’t think I’ll be seeing you this week much as I want to. Are you mad? I get so tired that it feels I only have eight hours in a day instead of 24. My stamina is nil.
I will write a civilized email soon. Forgive this but I didn’t want to be out of touch….
I love you deeply.
One day the woman inside the apartment on the first floor hears crying, crying from the second-floor landing. She sits still for a minute. She listens, then cracks her door, just to make sure she hasn’t imagined it. Maybe it’s just a cat, sound from a neighbor’s TV. She walks up the stairs. There Denise is curled against the wall, unable to get up the last flight. Most likely Denise cries harder once she’s been seen like this. Somehow the woman leads-carries-leads her up the stairs. She sits Denise down, she asks her if she wants a drink: coffee, water, a glass of lemonade. She’s so moved by the plight of her neighbor that an idea comes to her on the spot—she’ll trade her apartment for Denise’s sometime in the coming week. She’s always wanted to live at the top, while Denise has always wanted to be near the leaves and water in the garden. The woman, after all, is a life coach, and she couldn’t call herself a life coach if she weren’t willing to make this sacrifice on her neighbor’s behalf. Denise beams at the woman’s offer; maybe she even weeps. How could human beings, so frequently unreliable, be capable of such goodness, such selflessness? The woman leaves after Denise is settled, and that is the last Denise will ever hear from her.
2010 | I don’t leave my therapist’s office without remarking that the process ahead isn’t going to be chronological. J nods with relief as if I’ve said the gold star thing. Though human beings condition one another to want order, peace, and resolution, we also don’t want too much of that, and just when it seems all is comprehensible, the world bewilders us again. But before it bewilders me again, I grieve my old life with M, as I grieve my old life with Denise. I see Denise’s body, her arms, her legs, walking toward me. To take care of me? The life that thought it was a given, the life that thought safety and routine were never up for question. Perhaps they should have always been up for question. Two writers together: what on earth were we thinking? Suddenly I see Denise’s lost body all over again, as I talk to my therapist about making the link between her death and M’s crisis. He was the first to see a possible link between the two crises; the image of Denise’s approach in the daydream reinscribes that. “Smart man,” I tell J.
Two hours after my session, M runs into a friend from way back, someone he’d once hooked up with, and it seems crucial that they meet now, immediately.
We haven’t seen each other for two days. I know they’re not meeting for sex, but still. They are going out for a hamburger together. As to the dinner I’d been imagining with him? I leave the apartment. I walk west to the High Line. I trudge up the staircase, turn south past the fringetree, the smoketree, the quince. I look out to the Hudson, the late sun over Hoboken, Jersey City, the Statue of Liberty. The asters smolder as if they’re about to burst into flame. I sit on the edge of a lounge chair. Okay, I should have asked earlier in the day if he’d wanted to go out for dinner. I just assumed he’d want to do what I wanted to do. But that doesn’t stop the rage from heating up my face. I walk back down the High Line steps. Soon I am walking through the Meatpacking District, crossing the West Side Highway. Past the trees, the river, the benches where lovers sit, leaning into each other. The night is beautiful, hot. Waves pulse against the bulkhead, the air fresh with the smell of the ocean. Water plunges and lifts beneath the open metal grate. Still, it is New York City in July. What the hell am I doing in New York City in July, when I’ve spent every summer of my life near the ocean? The desire for the ocean has always come before anything, and I am hours from where I really want to be.
An hour later I am back inside the apartment. It’s humid and stuffy inside, the air conditioner is off. M is on the sofa. Hi, he says. And I know my face is the color of heart attack, my peasant ancestors rising up in me. I ask for his hand and tell him how angry I am, how hard it is to say how angry I am. The two of us must look like monsters to each other, our faces clenched into unexpected shapes. This is not the way we’ve ever known each other, but it is the way we must behave if we’re to accommodate conflict, not simply be the couple that looks happy from outside. The anger is as thick as musk in the air. My thoughts are out of sequence, or is this what it feels like to run sixty miles per hour into the side of a mountain? We are quiet for some minutes. The argument is not resolved. Tonight I don’t think it will ever be resolved. I am in a complex position: To say I am jealous is to be possessive, to lack trust. To stay silent is to grow hurt in myself.
And when I stay silent, I am tested by M.
If there were any more freedom in this house, there wouldn’t be a house.
I sit down with my laptop. I open the inbox, and ten sample covers of my novel come in from Kapo, my book designer. I click the icon. “Look,” I say, and M glances over my shoulder, puts his glasses on. I start scrolling. As if no argument had ever transpired in that room, we sit side by side on the sofa, knee pressed into knee, and begin to talk about the sequence of twelve burning houses. For a while, we are back to our old sweet ways.
It Is Hard Work to Be Dead
2008 | Can it really be two months since I’ve last seen Denise? Her moving, my cold, her cold, C. diff, radiation, chemo, her move to a one-floor apartment—so many things standing in the way of us, even though we’ve talked a lot on the phone and sent messages to each other. I don’t want any of my fear to show on my face. I know she will look different; she has been through so much since my last visit-will she even be the Denise I know? I try to relax the muscles in my face as I walk up the steps to the new building. I speak my name, as calmly as I can, to the doorman behind the desk.
And there she is at her door. She is looking hard at my face to see how she might look, and I am watching myself, trying to let her know that, no, I’m not shocked that she’s thinner. I’m not shocked that she’s blond. Denise, of all people, blond. Not that she chose blond, but blond’s the color of the soft hair that’s come in after chemo. Her hair is like the down on a chick, so impossibly new that you might not even want to bring her out into the world. If she could have foreseen this transformation from an earlier point in her life, maybe she’d have enjoyed that trip to Wisconsin more. There she swore that everyone looked at her as if she were trouble. So dark, so Sicilian—they stood back a few feet from her, as if certain she’d put a curse on their families, or worse.
I stop thinking about her hair. If there’s anything that shocks me, it’s the apartment itself, which is certainly a good apartment, facing west toward the Schuylkill, with large windows opening to the western sky and the playing fields of the University of Pennsylvania. But it doesn’t look like an apartment that she’d put together. All of her things are here, her chests, her paintings, but it doesn’t have— what? Her love, her sense of making a work of art out of her home. The rooms feel temporary, with none of the full range of her personality, as if a group of well-meaning people had approximated her personality for her and she was too tired and compromised to care. The apartment’s a way station, and that is a notion I find hard to bear. But she distracts me from any of that, and within minutes, we’re sitting on her sofa, looking out to the sky, watching a September thunderstorm flashing, pretending that we’re much more scared than we actually are.
2010 | It’s not the biggest shock to find out that M is getting a dog. After all, we’ve talked of getting a dog for six years, ever since we lost Arden. Arden had many functions in our lives. Uncle, child, brother, friend—all these things and more, and maybe we were honoring his absence by traveling, by doing all the things we couldn’t do when he was sick. It was freeing to move again, without thinking of him being left behind, resting his head on his paws on some concrete kennel floor. But if you’re a person who has loved a dog, you can’t live so long without sharing your bed with another creature. You miss the routines (feeding, walking); you miss meeting the people you wouldn’t talk to without a dog. You don’t know how much you’re giving up simply by keeping yourselves alone.
But a golden retriever? I keep quiet as he tells me about the breeder on the phone. Hadn’t I once said that I wanted a blond French bulldog? A German shepherd, a pit bull, an English bull, a boxer, a beagle: any breed but a golden retriever, all goof and wiggle. A golden retriever, the kind of dog who rolls in the slop, runs toward you, wiping the slop on your best jeans, expecting you to find him endearing. I want a dog with spine. I want a dog with gravitas, a dog with a little shadow in his face and walk, eager for boundaries and conditions and agreements, if not for you, then for himself. Any creature, canine or human, deserves the joys of accomplishment.
And yet there’s no turning back for M. In spite of my anger about S (I still refuse to go out to the Springs house, which I think of as my lost house, the closet still full of my shirts, my study still packed with school books, teaching papers, bank statements), I don’t discourage him, especially as he’s as nervous as he is excited about the appointment to come. Life with a dog. A walk in the morning, a walk in the afternoon, filling food bowls, thinking about a dog, missing a dog, the kind of looking and listening any human could use, especially those of us who think of ourselves as too busy, with no time for anything more.
What must it be like to take that ride he’s on? Trees going by, brake lights ahead, burning. The stomach burning, or maybe empty, as who could eat on the verge of changing your life, another life? Then to park, to walk into the breeder’s. To see the puppy in the playpen, back warmed by the white fur on his brother’s stomach, and the face tilted up to see you for the first time—that first who are you? cock of the head that literally grounds you to yourself.
I am dog. Who are you?
Smell of sawdust in the air. Biscuit, flour, corn muffin, a little ammonia in the mix. Pee? The smell of puppy.
Why am I not standing in that room with him?
I press my head hard, harder into my hand. The solutions to our problems seem even further away now. They’re out on some island and the boat has left without us.
2008 | I can’t tell whether Denise’s health situation is better, or whether it’s in some holding pattern. Maybe we’re just pretending it’s in a holding pattern. It’s definitely easier to live that way than the other, which says that death is inevitable, so it’s time to start getting one’s books in order. Denise is having no such thing, and maybe that’s why she seems to be the model cancer patient. Maybe that’s why she’s taking higher doses of chemo
and radiation than was thought possible for someone of her age and weight. I can believe she’s going to go on and on, as I am not seeing her every day. The story of I’ll-be-around-longer-than-you-think requires physical separation, and imaginative faith from both parties. And maybe that’s why a month or two after her death, Denise’s ex sends me a folder of photographs from her final months, without any words attached. Just a folder in my inbox. The Denise in these photographs is not pretty or composed, even though she could be those things during those months, her hair short and blond: half Annie Lennox, half professor of women’s literature. You can see pain in her face, tension hardening her mouth. You can see her trying to feel better when family fills the kitchen, though she feels anything but. I can’t help but feel a stab of helplessness. Denise wouldn’t want me to see her this way. But maybe there’s value in getting to see what it was like for those who were there for her, by her side, night in and night out. Denise looks around as if to say, who are these helpers in my house? And why are their coats and bags on my bureau, my table? My apartment, the apartment I once called my own.
2010 | I check my computer to see that my mail program has updated itself. Somehow syncing it to my phone has disrupted everything, and six years of emails disappear between five o’clock and six, without any warning. Not only the addresses but the messages themselves, messages I’ve been unknowingly using as a kind of journal, whenever I needed to see what I was thinking on, say, Christmas Eve 2004. Inside the lost mailbox is much of my correspondence with Denise. As troubling as losing it sounds, I’m in the frame of mind where I’m not shattered—though I am curious about not feeling shattered. How many times have I read her letters, heard her voice on the page, so certain of its persistence, its ability to keep on? Maybe Denise’s messages, maybe the messages of any of the people now dead, are best consigned to the ether. Probably I am thinking there will be a way to get all those emails back, an adjustment of a server setting, a reconfiguration of a password. But I must think about what I’d do if I couldn’t get them back. Would I be okay enough to go on without her written voice, no chance to read them some July, ten years from now, on her birthday? Sure, I might think I’m okay with it tonight, when I’m sitting in the chair by the open window with a glass of red wine in hand. None of the old fears of loss stirring up panic. But maybe it won’t be okay ten years from now when someone asks me who she was to me, and I’ve just turned her into some myth, so many versions away from the person I knew.