A Stone Boat

by Andrew Solomon

  Helen and I went to find me an apartment, largely at my mother’s suggestion. “If you’re living here with your father and me when I die,” she said, “you’ll have a hard time moving out. You’ve been living on your own for a long time. With you in this apartment full-time—we’ll end up arguing. Remember what you promised: no fights.” In fact, neither she nor my father wanted me to move out, but I think she knew that there was a great deal in my life that she would not care to see, and that it was easier, better, for me to be at some distance. And I think she knew that the illness that held her prisoner could hold the rest of us, and she did not want—at least for the moment—to trap me inside it, where she and my father were.

  Helen kept saying that Jason had managed to locate the Golden Fleece with less high drama than I brought to finding an apartment. I suppose that I did fuss about where I was going and how I would live. I had decided to keep, at least for the time being, my house in London, and so I wanted to find someplace where I could be while I really decided about the US. I wanted it to feel completely different from London. Agents showed me places with scratched marble fireplaces and crumbling moldings and I was absolutely belligerent. “It’s got to be someplace very New York,” I said to Helen.

  “This is very New York,” she said. “You’re in New York. It’s all very New York.” I told her that one apartment was too close to my parents, another too far away. I said I didn’t feel comfortable with postmodernism. “You know what?” she said at one point. “This is a very uncomfortable period in your life. All the apartments we look at are going to seem very uncomfortable. Just find one you can make the best of.” My mother was too weak to come along on all these treks, and I was glad to have Helen’s company. She would ask the agents all the tough-minded questions about whether the air-conditioning really worked and what the neighbors were like and why the elevator inspection certificate had expired. After we’d looked at places, I would take Helen out for drinks and I would rant about Bernard. “Let’s talk hard sense,” said Helen. “You never thought Bernard was the true love of your life. So you always knew you were going to have to break up sooner or later. So now you’ve done it and that’s over with, and you can begin looking again, and maybe find someone who’s really right for you. This is New York. The world’s your oyster.”

  Helen and I finally found an apartment for me. It was a loft downtown, full of quirky architectural details and dramatic vistas. It had windows the size of front doors, and no doors at all, and it was big enough for the piano. It was not to my taste, nor was it to my mother’s taste, and I don’t think Helen liked it much, either; but it was at least a far cry from anything in London. I moved my things in, with Helen’s help, and the place gleamed with the supernal cleanliness of Helen’s own apartment. I took very little from my parents’ house, because I did not want to destroy the eternal space that I had occupied since childhood. I moved out of my parents’ apartment on a Wednesday, and when I had put the last bag into the elevator, my mother looked at me and I thought for a second that she was going to cry. But in fact, she laughed instead, and as the elevator door closed, I realized that I was the one who was sick with the sense of loss.

  Everyone agreed that my new space downtown was spectacular, and I spoke of starting a new life, my new New York life. My mother came down the day after I’d moved in and brought me salt “so that life will have flavor to it,” flour “for growth and health,” sugar “for the great sweetness of life,” and marmalade “because I know you like it.”

  • • •

  My father had ceased to love me when my mother became ill. I cannot blame him for that; one man can manage only so much love, and my father had turned all his immense powers of affection toward my mother. Still, it was a disappointment, and I felt it to the core of my being. In fact, I thought that my father, who had always been able to deal with any situation, should have been able to make my mother well; and I think that he, too, thought that. He kept applying himself to her health, believing that enough money and enough willpower and enough intelligence and enough love could solve all the problems of the world.

  He and I had lunch often, because Freddy and I were the only people with whom he could discuss my mother’s terrible plan. He kept reworking the details, with me, then with Freddy, then with me again, then with Freddy again.

  “I have a booklet,” he told me, “with instructions in it. It’s a booklet for people who want to end their own lives. It says when to take the pills and so on. I’ve been studying it.”

  I said that I had not realized that these matters required much technical expertise.

  “You have to do it right,” said my father. “For legal and medical reasons. So it works.”

  The booklet was only about thirty pages long. “How much time have you spent studying that?” I asked. It looked dog-eared.

  “I just want to make sure that I really know what we’re doing,” my father said. “You and Freddy should probably read this as well, so we can make a final plan.”

  I told him I had no intention of reading it. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, and I’ll play along with your plan, but I’m not getting any more involved than that.”

  My father seemed not to hear me. “I never imagined that I could find myself in such a situation,” he said. “It’s intolerable. It’s unthinkable.”

  I remembered that I had promised my mother that I would take care of him. I decided I should save such energies as I might have for the task until after she was dead. Unfairly, I began to hate my father. After so many years of confidence, he was lapsing into need, and all I did in the face of it was to hate him. I hated Bernard and I hated my father. This made it easier to love my mother.

  Helen told me I was really hating myself. When she said that, I hated her.

  I couldn’t tell my father how I was growing to dislike him, and so I took it all out on Bernard, whom I was free to loathe from the core of my being, from the center of my heart. I was afraid of my mother’s death and miserable that Bernard had been able to leave me, but I was really most afraid of being left in a world in which I loved no one and nothing. That October, I began to imagine my own death. I imagined it as though it were a form of vengeance.

  • • •

  The third chemotherapy seemed to be working just then, but we had been through two success stories already, and we knew better than to feel too happy. More than I hated Bernard or my father, I began to hate time. I’ve never stopped. Time is still my enemy. I once said to my mother that I wished that I had a fast-forward button on my life, that I could skip over the darkest hours, and my mother shook her head and said, “You’d just fast-forward your life away.”

  Only later did I realize how much more complex my wish had been. I want a fast-forward button, and I want a rewind button and, perhaps most of all, I want a pause button, since I can see no evil in asking the fair moments to stay. I want these buttons for myself and for other people. It is a basic principle of traffic that if all the cars on the highway are moving at the speed limit, they cannot hit one another; only when one of them slows down or speeds up will an accident occur. We all know that our entire solar system is hurtling at some unimaginable speed across the galaxy, but since we’re all moving at that speed, it feels as though we aren’t moving at all. What is the point of time if it happens at the same rate to everyone? I want to be able to move and readjust and change in my relationship to other people and the world. I want to have some experiences over and over again until, like songs heard too frequently, they become tired and uninteresting. I want to skate through some kinds of pain and most kinds of indifference. I want to be born over and over and over, as though I were the world itself in all its changes.

  VII

  THREE LOVES

  I will tell you about my last trip to London, the trip to collect my belongings, the January trip. I will tell you about a happiness so brief it did not have time to be fragile. I
t was in the dull period after the New Year, when the gray sky over London stayed close to the ground, as though to hold in the cold. I had come back to London to get away from the persistent misery of New York, and to sleep long nights, one after another. Each day I called home and spoke to my mother, and each day her voice, pale and thin and taut as the top notes of a piccolo, echoed off some satellite and across to me. I had come because in New York I was up too close to what was happening. And I had come to get the odds and ends, sweaters and books and sheaves of music, that had been left behind when I’d set off for New York that early October day.

  I slept for days when I got back to London, slept as though I were practicing for hibernation. My sleep followed the law of inertia: when I was asleep I tended to remain asleep, and when I was awake, I tended to remain awake. When I rose, the anemic light by which it was possible to trace the passage of the sun behind the unbroken gray was already disappearing. I would go far enough to buy myself mineral water and drinkable yogurt and chilled soups: the things I could consume without a kitchen and without cutlery and without any china but the bathroom cup that sometimes held my toothbrushes. It was too much effort to boil water. Then in the twilight I would practice, on until well after dark. I buried myself in music I knew well, but I did not learn anything new. And so days merged, with the regularly paced interruption of friends coming to inquire after my state of mind and my mother’s health.

  The precision of modern medicine is among its many punishments. You still have the nasty surprises of chance symptoms and unusual side effects, but you also have the knowledge that certain events will occur on certain dates; if the surgery is on such a day, the chemotherapy will begin on such a day, and you will have the first indication of its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) on such a day. And so I spent my first week back in London with the image of a certain Thursday always ahead of me, as the next day for bad news. The news always came on Thursdays at about five o’clock New York time, and even now, years later, I have a sense of uneasy suspense attached to Thursday afternoons. It was like being a prisoner attending the electric chair and awaiting a pardon, counting the minutes in dread and intermittent hope, and feeling, by the time Thursday rolled around, that it was better to have bad news than to go on waiting in this agony of suspense.

  Time grinds and polishes your expectations; the news we received would, through the murky hopeful lens of a year before, have been bad. But through the refined clarity of pain, it was good, good news for the first time since October, news of stability if not of improvement. Some part of some treatment (the fourth? the fifth?) seemed to be having some effect that might be sustained for some length of time. On that Thursday, a day that could have held the news of my mother’s almost certain death, we had what I was determined to receive as good news. And armed with that, I began my holiday. I did not make new plans to travel: that, too, was part of the holiday. For me, there was no greater vacation than the calm of staying in a familiar place. Another test result was expected three weeks later; I said to my mother, and to my father, and to Freddy, that if we all managed three weeks of feeling light and easy and unconcerned, we could build up our depleted energy for the renewal of the battle. “And if the battle need never be renewed,” I insisted, “we will not have wasted this time by being happy.”

  Sparkling that Thursday night, I chanced to pause on a corner to let the traffic pass, and on the opposite corner chanced to stand a broad man with unkempt blond hair and a skier’s tan. I caught his eye, and he caught my eye, and I stood quite still as the traffic waned; and after a moment he crossed the road, and spoke to me in imperfect English with an indeterminate accent that seemed to live at the back of his throat. I broke with old rules, and with new rules, and I walked with him to his car, and drove with him to his home and slept with him in his bed. By the time we arrived at his door, I knew that we shared only a world of mutual surface; but I was fascinated by his face and his body and his movements, and by the gilded edge between eroticism and romance.

  Our liaison lasted only a week. He told me that he was soon to go to Geneva; I knew that by the time he returned I would be in New York. I was never able to ask him whether he made it a habit to pick up young men on the busy streets, and he never asked me whether I was in the habit of behaving in this way; it would have spoiled that week to inquire too closely into the other weeks like it that might or might not have gone before. Once or twice our conversation drifted toward politics, and I was stunned at how little we agreed on, but I didn’t mind it. He was, I was later to learn, a man of considerable influence in his country; perhaps I should have tried to steer him toward my notion of enlightenment, but to do so was then beyond my means. I was happy to speak instead of the weather, or about skiing, or to tell anecdotes of my childhood, or to hear from him about his childhood, which seemed to have unfolded in a land full of garden courtyards and fountains splashing under a crescent moon and the distant sound of children singing. I admired the Renaissance pictures on the walls, the eighteenth-century furniture, the flowers that someone came and changed every day. He had a piano, and I played for him, sometimes before love, sometimes after; he had a sensualist’s enthusiasm for music, as though it were another physical stimulus. Our nights together held pleasures I had never dreamed before, and though my skin and body emerged damaged by the extravagances of desire, I was lost in such rapture that these ravages were only souvenirs, marks to remind me, between our meetings, of the pleasures that had gone before and the pleasures that would follow.

  That first night had the dangerous thrill of anonymity clinging to it. Much later, I learned that he and I knew many people in common—that we might, indeed, have met at a drinks party—but I was glad not to find that out during our week together. Did he kill Bernard for me, finally, once and for all? I never got to know him, and I never knew whether those nights carried for him such a burden of significance as they did for me. We never argued and never made up. I never asked anything of him but that he lie beside me and burn with desire, and he never asked more of me than that I look deep and straight into his dark blue eyes. But I felt with him what I had never known with Bernard: during that week I felt no desire at all for anyone else. I felt no anger. Bernard and I used to lie tossing separately and then drifting into sound and ordinary sleep. This man and I would hold one another all night, and when I was sure he was asleep he would suddenly stroke my hair or touch my leg or grasp me to him; and all night long we would linger uncertainly between sleep and wakefulness. Whereas in good photos Bernard can look like a model, this body had the more generous curves of too much pleasure. I would cling to that greater weight, as though bulk were an anchor to happiness. Sometimes, when he had curled around me, I would find that I was becoming unbearably cramped, or desperately hot, and I would take a steely pleasure in lying motionless for hours, until the cramping or heat had become the most hellish of tortures; it was the joy of knowing that through such wild efforts he was sleeping undisturbed behind me. Sometimes, I would find myself longing to climb out of that bed and stretch, or go to the bathroom; but I would restrain myself all night for the pleasure of remaining in unbroken contact with that noble body and those fond hands. Lying among my restraints in this way, I would feel my own happiness, the first happiness I had felt in almost a year, and I would cup my hands around it so that it would not be blown away. I knew I could hold that happiness for only a week, but in that week, I made up for months of indescribable agony. With the same restraint that kept me locked in a semi-fetal curl all night, I kept myself all day from talking about my depression or my mother; and when, one night, toward the end, I spoke about my mother, it was a Paris story I told, about the bar at the Ritz Hotel. When he had to go to Geneva, we held each other in an unrelenting embrace. No one discussed driving to the airport. We made no plans to speak on the phone. We didn’t even get each other’s full names. We said goodbye in his bed, on those pure linen sheets, rumpled with our desire, and then I let him go, and felt th
at I had something to hold on to for whatever was to come.

  Four days later, I found out (some intermediate test) that the therapy was not really helping my mother as much as had been hoped. I packed all my sheet music, and went back to New York.

  • • •

  My relationship to Bernard had been part of my appearance of a happy life and it had, in fact, made me happy. I found that I had begun, once I slept with someone else, to forget what it was like. I mean it literally; I couldn’t remember what my two years with Bernard entailed, what we did day to day, how we made plans. I couldn’t hold on to any of it, the way you find that you cannot remember a dream. I could still occasionally muster a deep, vengeful, passionate hatred for Bernard; I could still imagine taking the keys to his flat and going in and putting rat poison in his coffee, but I couldn’t remember why. I called him and we had lunch the day I was leaving, which I thought would remind me; I expected to love him again, or to hate him, but in fact, I was only a bit bored.

  • • •

  Moving to New York was like falling down an endless flight of stairs, gathering a momentum that blurred the pain of each new alarming contact with sharp angles and hard surfaces. It was like skiing down a sheet of bumpy ice, so fast that I simply sailed from panic to panic. If it was like dying in slow motion, in every other sense it was an event of desperate speed; and it was only when I wanted to calm myself that I thought how much slower all this was than the deaths of some young men through disease or disaster. Mostly, really, moving to New York was like falling down an endless flight of stairs, a flight of boys (thump) and the void of my mother’s approaching death (thump, thump, thump); and serious work (thump) and physical discomfort (thump) and the exhaustion of my father (thump, thump); and more boys (thump), and parties (thump) and cold days and homeless people and all the sordidness of the rest of the world which, in London, somehow remained so much more hidden. I used to remember how Pooh Bear had come to hear a story of an evening, bumping his way down the stairs in Christopher Robin’s hand, bump, bump, bump, and then, after the story, going up, bump, bump, bump, and then to bed. And some days I liked to imagine that there was someone pulling me down the stairs, someone who later on might pull me back up to a safe room in the almost-darkness where I could lie in the bliss of silence. Sometimes I tried to imagine that the boys and the void and the cold were all just part of the story someone was telling, and that soon it would all be light and air in the Hundred Acre Wood, and that I might dance forever in the last rays of sunshine of a golden afternoon. Moving to New York was like falling down an endless flight of stairs—but surely you set off on such a course from the love at the top of the stairs, and tumbled only as far as the love at the bottom? Yes: on good days, I would think (thump) that that was it—a bumpy ride from love to love. And then I lost myself only in wishing there had been some landings to make the intermediate days livable.