Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

  I met Bridey when I was leaving San Francisco, a place where I’d spent far too much time, for New York, where I was intending to spend another as-yet-indeterminate period of time, that would turn out to be three years. I’d abandoned all pretense of a fine arts career some time ago, had drifted into making raku pottery for some of the home goods stores in the area and developed a line I called stormwate, for all of it looked as if the sea had gotten to it first. It was popular. Magazines used it in pictures, and sometimes I made some money. I couldn’t make enough, though, on my own, but didn’t want to expand the business, and began looking for a way to leave. But of course, the only way to leave is to just leave.

  I no longer spent all my time wanting to die, but I was fairly apprehensive about being alive. It wasn’t that my life lacked meaning, but rather that I disliked the meaning it offered to me every morning as I sat at my studio wheel, spinning. My father’s scientific mind had given me a knack for the chemistry of glazes, my mother’s orderly ways and laid-back approach made for a loose style. The housewares were popular and profitable and vanished more or less as they were made. I kept none of them, eating off odds and ends I found in church sales. With the exception of the occasional political demonstration, I lived quietly, and was relatively solitary, avoiding the Castro as well as the Mission, and the bars of SOMA. I was not making great art, but I didn’t want to, either. I wanted to make lots of things that added little beauties everywhere, on a daily basis. This seemed to me better. I’d had enough of great art, I had decided, through music. One afternoon, though, my resolve was stronger than on the others and I made my plans. I gave my notice at my apartment and called friends from school in New York, who said, Well, it’s about time. Penny in particular was impatient.

  I had heard in gossip from these school friends that there was a boy from the crew team who was doing erotic dancing at a strip club in Chicago, at a place called Slick. It was a place that had male dancers a few times a week who all showered in front of the clientele before walking around to collect their tips. I loaded my car with my suitcase, dropped my boxes at Greyhound, and headed off. Checking my mail on the day I left, I discovered a letter from my mother. I decided I would open it later.

  I thought of Bridey fairly often. Who would he be? My friends had tried to describe him to me. He wasn’t out when you were there, they said. He was closeted. He’s beautiful, they said, but sort of arrogant and very crazy. As I wound my way through Reno, and then Omaha, and then Iowa City, I thought of the stories again and again, how he had married and divorced a beautiful and wealthy Boston girl from an old family, how he had been forced to divorce her because he was caught with a boy I did remember, a breathtaking boy he had seduced apparently for the first time at their wedding reception. I had decided well in advance to stop and so I parked under the SLICK sign, locked my car, and went in. I reaped, pushing the door open, I had no idea if he would be the one I thought he was. I’d no way of recognizing him.

  I had my mother’s letter in my back pocket, and set it on the table in front of the stage, where I ordered a Scotch and water and watched as boys made their way in and out. Most of the clientele were older men, some of whom openly stared at me. The bouncers raised their eyebrows but did nothing. And then he came out.

  I remembered him as soon as I saw him. He was beautiful, he was arrogant. I remembered paying him almost no attention. I don’t remember there was time enough to do so, as I was graduating, and occupied by thoughts of my worthless life. He remembered me as well, for what he did was step off the stage to perch on my table and squat down. He wore only a towel that night.

  You’re a bastard for coming here, he said. He looked me right in the eye. No one else has, he said.

  I shrugged. I was trying not to laugh.

  Aren’t you going to open that, he said. He pointed to the letter.

  I might, I said. He had squatted so that my drink lay under his towel, which is to say, under him. To get it, I had to reach there, so I did. I left my hand there. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Who’s it from, he asked.

  My mother, I said. Listen. What exactly are the rules here about touching you?

  He laughed. There aren’t any in the house. I have personal ones though. In order to keep the local peace. He brushed his hair out of his face. A drop of water fell from somewhere underneath the towel and hit the bar, and then another dropped on my wrist. I noticed the thing around his neck was a wet G-string.

  I stood. My arms reached out, as if I were waiting for a baby.

  What is this, he asked.

  I want to pick you up. I mean, carry you. Just for a bit. I reached for my wallet.

  How are you going to do this if you don’t hold out your hands? he asked, and began to swing himself toward me. I reached and he sat himself down in my arms. People stared as I wandered around the room, him laughing. There’ll be trouble, he said.

  Yes, I said. I bet.

  He was warm, he smelled clean, of course, having just showered. He reached out and plucked the letter from the table, and when I set him down again, he handed it back to me.

  Thanks, he said. I’d like to see you again.

  Nothing seemed likely, except that I would have to open the letter, and so I said, You could see more of me now. It’s unfortunately the only way. You could take me home.

  He laughed. You’re like a boy someone lost in a toy store.

  I live well over three hours away, I said.

  All right then. But I have to finish this shift. And saying that, he climbed back up on the bar.

  He told me that his name was Albright Forrester, but that everyone called him Bridey. I sat at the bar and waited through several more drinks as he showered again, and the other men in the bar pushed dollars into the G-string he had put back on and then eyed me, suspicious. He remained cheerful, as if this were the most fun he could have. The money, the fingers, didn’t seem to touch him, as if his skin wasn’t really skin but a field of energy with color and texture. If you had to do a job like this, his skin was the right skin.

  Later, in his apartment, I told him. I’m not from around here.

  I know, he said. I saw the address on the letter. Which way are you going?

  To New York, I said.

  Oh the fear, he said. You’ll have to leave now. He punched a pillow, puffing it flat, and rolled over into it.

  I sat a moment.

  Well, he said. I mean, a boy’s got a heart to protect. Go on.

  I, I said. I could. Visit.

  Mmm. That’ll be fun. What, like you are a sailor at sea or something.

  Something, I said. Something.

  It turned out he had always wanted to go to New York. I can’t let you drive on your own, he said later, as he packed his suitcase. You could have an accident. My sister’s words about love came to me then: When it’s right, she said, you don’t have to have a committee meeting about it. Later, when we’d been in New York for a few weeks, Bridey said, I had no idea there was so much to see in New York. I’d better stay on a while yet. It turned out that New York required several years of seeing. And when I told him about Maine the first time, he said, You’re always dragging me around. But I see the best of the world with you.

  With me? I said.

  In you, he said, and stuck his finger in my ear.

  3

  FROM THE LETTER my mother sent me, opened, finally, after my arrival in New York, read to me by Bridey:

  Darling:

  I ran into Freddy Moran’s mother recently, and she was, well, she wasn’t herself and looked as if she hadn’t been in some time. You see, Freddy’s been HIV-positive for a few years now, and recently his health took a turn for the worse. And now she’s been frantic, caring for him. She doesn’t feel up to the job, now that she’s buried her husband, to now bury her son. It doesn’t look real good.

  Your father’s been good enough to help get him into a drug trial at Maine Medical’s research wing, and we’re all praying for his go
od health. I know you two haven’t spoken much, but I wanted to let you know.

  I don’t answer this letter. When my mother and I speak next, I don’t ask after him. And the new drugs work for a while. Freddy lasts the three years that will pass until I see him next.

  4

  SPECK DIES ON an early-summer day when he is, uncharacteristically, in his garden, in Maine. He hated his garden, I remembered. He had a gardener who cared for it and he had told him, when he hired him, Just do enough stuff so that these neighbors of mine don’t complain.

  The news of his death reaches me in Provincetown, in a summer share I’d taken with Penny and Bridey. A stroke took him, very quickly, and he felt nothing, the letter I receive from his current assistant tells me. There will be a ceremony in a few days’ time. My mail being forwarded to me, the ceremony, I can see, is tomorrow. I had just written to him, telling him of how I was spending the summer. You shouldn’t be leaving New York then, he had written back, just a few weeks earlier. People like you, the city belongs to you.

  He’d helped me get work after I arrived in New York as an artist’s assistant to a wealthy sculptor and landscape designer. We’d seen each other a few times. His book, the one I’d helped him on, had been published years before: A Letter to the Digger: A History of Edinburgh During the Plague, by Edward Speck. I had it on my shelf, and sometimes people would pick it up, and ask, Why do you have this? I like history, I’d tell them, and then we’d move on from there.

  The day I get the letter, Bridey and Penny are at the beach together, having left to go early and run. Thick as thieves, is the expression. My oldest friend and my best one, together. Who knew what they might come back with? Some days they returned with a new friend, usually for Penny. Bridey and I had been faithful, another expression. I like to think of it as attentive. We were and are attentive. We occupy all of each other’s attention. And sometimes, to make me laugh, he allows some man to flirt his way home with him. I need to keep in practice, he says, after they go home. In case I get dumped. In the second-floor apartment we’d taken, I wait for these two to return and then I tell them, how it is I have to go to Maine tonight. I call my parents and tell them to expect me, and I drive out the next day in our rented car.

  Speck’s final assistant is a graduate student, a much more professional young man than I was when I worked for him, and he greets me at the funeral home with real pleasure. He’s dressed like a true Speck student: gray herringbone tweed coat, with patches on the elbows. A black turtleneck, black jeans, brown oxford shoes. I go in, uncertain of what to expect until I see, at the front, on a pedestal, an urn. I go back out for a moment. Already? I ask.

  He left instructions he was to be burned immediately. The student shrugs his tweed shoulders. He abhorred the idea of his body lying around without him in it.

  And . . . speakers, I ask.

  No, he says. I go back inside.

  In the attendees I see that we are all former assistants, most likely. The moderately sized room is full of men and young men of descending orders of age. A familiar reserve, the articulate quiet I learned from Speck, makes the room familiar, and then of course we resemble each other: dark haired, pale, clean-cut but rumpled from reading and bad lighting. Some balding, many with hair that seems to be rising to Speck’s example. Bachelors all. Looking at his urn we look at our future. We smile at each other some and trickle out after paying our respects to this last quiet with Speck. No one asks if there are any heirs, as we all know there aren’t.

  At home, I have a quiet dinner with my mother and father. At the end of it my mother tells me, Freddy’s not doing well.

  Why not him too, I tell myself.

  Do you want to go see him? I’m sure he’d appreciate it. She picks up all our plates and goes to the kitchen. I recognize a pattern for the first time, of how my mother asks me a question and my father waits for the answer.

  Yes, I say. My father smiles reassurance. And I call down to tell Bridey and Penny that I’ll be a little later than I thought. Tomorrow, I say.

  We’re using up all the sun, he says. You’d better hurry back.

  Penny says something in the background I can’t hear and I ask about it. She said, Bridey says, You’re never leaving Maine. But she has a plan you’ll hear when you get back.

  Thick as thieves, I tell myself as I hang up the phone. They’re stealing me.

  Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it’s the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it’s what adults have, when they forget what it’s like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can’t remember what that feels like.

  I have to know how Freddy’s doing. I could call, but instead I go over to Mrs. Moran’s new house. After her husband’s death, my mother tells me, she moved. A quick trip through Portland’s rain-stained houses, all of them a wrong color for happiness up in this part of town, the part between the stores and the sea. The Eastern Promenade, Munjoy Hill. There’s a cemetery here where kids come in and kick the stones down regularly. Because they probably hate the dead for being free from the sights around them.

  Her house is near the sea. In a sense all of Portland is near the sea. Red-brick buildings, mostly, in a crest over the land on the rise of hill here, a gentle brick murmur to the slope of the whole town no matter where you are, the slope from where the glacier came through. Don’t think this means Portland isn’t beautiful; it’s why its beautiful. In any case. She stands taking in her mail as I arrive. I barely recognize her. And she doesn’t recognize me.

  Fee, she says, when I reintroduce myself. Shocking, how you’ve changed. She takes me inside her dark clean house.

  Freddy’s my only one, she says, as I sit down. And she flips open a scrapbook. Pictures from the choir, the robes, the rope belts. All that smooth hair gleaming on head after head. Freddy Moran, the book says on the front. And she shows me the clippings of Peter’s and Zach’s obits.

  I’d last seen Freddy in a restaurant in the Old Port. I was home from California, visiting, out to lunch with my mother, who sat, radiantly blond and happy to see her son again, across from me. It was a two-story seafood place, red carpets sanguine in the stained afternoon sunlight that tugged the gauzy sheers in the windows. Captains’ mirrors on the walls distorted us all into faraway and tiny shapes. I watched them for a while, thinking, those are the real mirrors.

  He moved through my center of vision like a shadow, like a floater bouncing through the fluid of my eye. The room went black like a wick blown by the wind, returning quickly. It was him, I thought. He had turned into an elegantly attractive, clean-cut young man. His gait gave him away, his walk a little faster than the rest of him, as if his legs were always dragging him forward.

  To my mother, I said only, as I rose, I have to go say hi to someone. She gave me a crooked smile and consented.

  I found him in the downstairs, seated at the bar, a dark, wooden affair. He took me in as I entered, in a way I recognized. He was checking me out. Hi, Freddy, I said, and his eyes opened large, as if they needed more room.

  Aphias, he said. Jesus.

  As I stood in front of him, I realized I didn’t know what it was I would say to him. I was so happy to see him, I had followed the feeling, and not arranged for anything to say. For it remained that we really had nothing to say to each other. Up until that instant, when language there was gathered, like condensation forming on a window, inside us both.

  It’s been so long, I said. I don’t know where to start.

  You look great, he said. I heard you were in California.

  I’m visiting, I said. It’s been great out there. For me.

  We were a study in contrasts. I’d adopted a shabby mode of old-man-style clothing in high school and never really gotten far from it. That morning I wore a black T-shirt, a pair of
old suit trousers made from charcoal wool, and cordovan leather shoes, on the worn side. I knew I looked sallow from smoking too much. Freddy glowed, rosy-cheeked, smooth-faced, he smelled clean from where I stood, and was dressed in a red polo shirt and khaki pants, brand-new running shoes on his feet. He looked protected, from germs, depressions, extremes of poverty and misfortune. None of this was true, though. Just a marvelous show. Marvelous even as mine was drab.

  It was good to see you, he said to me. Uncertain as he said it.

  I went back to my table, the world altered. The lunch, flavorless, my mother soundless: I couldn’t hear her. I’d look up periodically and see her mouth moving, and I knew she was saying things, but I couldn’t hear any of it. All I could think of was what a terrible person I was. How I needed something terrible to happen to me. And years later, looking at the pictures of this in my head, moving in time, resolving one into the next, I can see how it never occurred to me that the reason Big Eric had gone to prison was because he was found, by the law, to be guilty of the crimes. Not me. I was not the one in jail. I wasn’t guilty. Was it enough, that the law said it?

  Not then.

  He’d been wandering the streets in his coats, no pants. In his apartment, his clothes were found, all of them soiled. He was wearing only the coat because it was his only clean thing to wear—he hadn’t lost all of his mind. His mother came and burned the clothes, packed up his things and tried to clean the apartment. He’d scraped all the plaster off the walls and painted it blue, she tells me before I leave her house. It looked as though someone had exploded in there. She shuts the book and goes into the other room.

  When he gets out of the hospital, she says, returning with a mug of coffee for me, he’ll be coming back here.

  In his bed at the hospital, he’s a tiny map to himself. A reduction. The dementia is now the least of it. I recalled a friend telling me how either his meds or his virus caused his face to hollow as it went for the fat under his skin. Freddy’s face has hollowed, and the bed rises a little in a way that is meant to be his body. I stand in the doorway, unsure of how to go into the room. This is the content of our first visit.