I had a double life in the city. At the top of the stairs sat my mother, making lots of demands. It was her last chance to make them, and it was my last chance to answer them. I took great pleasure in the easiness and familiarity of this. I would call my mother four or five times in the course of a morning. I would get up and work for a few hours, and then I would without thinking much of it cancel my various appointments and go up to my parents’ apartment to sit with her. We would toast English muffins and eat them for lunch in the kitchen, or we would take short walks; the weather in New York was strangely mild for the time of year, and sometimes, since my mother tired easily, we would have Robert drive us just as far as Madison Avenue, so that we could stroll the few blocks she could stand, and look at the shops, and hypothesize about the shoppers. Sometimes I would play the piano, the old piano on which I had learned to play. My mother would come to listen, and she and I would talk about music. When my mother was very tired, we would sometimes watch TV together. Janet would bring us tea, and we would compare notes about the news. We talked about whether the dog was turning very gray, about whether Freddy would find a new girlfriend, about why certain of my father’s business associates were not going to last. Or we would talk about the big things: our relationship to each other, her marriage to my father, the prospect of her death. We talked about my party; when my mother was most fragile or most depressed, I could draw her out by asking what she thought of a tablecloth fabric, or of putting the musicians in the same room as the buffet, or of having the salmon on skewers. These were the subjects on which she had an easy expertise that predated her illness, and they recalled the time before it, when we had had few greater concerns. I wished and dreamed and imagined that this time might last forever.
But when I was not uptown with my mother, I was at the bottom of the flight of stairs, looking for any and every kind of love. I went off deep into that search, as startled by the strength of my own new emotions as if I were standing at the brink of sexual identity. I went out with new people, masses of new people, part of a New York whose existence I had not dared to imagine during my childhood. They were all the friends of friends of friends; I have heard that New York can be a lonely city, but it seemed then that there was an infinity of humankind waiting to meet me, that there was no reason not to have a thousand new friends every week. After all my time within the clean barriers of London society, I had been set free in a world in which nothing was clear. In this context, I pressed myself into new, alien confidence with men who were tougher than I was or than Bernard had ever been, and I pretended to myself and to them that what we had in common was greater than what stood between us. In the months of my deferred adolescence, I threw myself into perpetual loss as a way of feeling perpetual love, and hardly noticed how I was myself dwindling into the sum of my losses, as difficult to know or to love as the spaces between the stars.
I was afraid of this new and brutally male circle, but Helen laughed off my fear. “You might find someone who’s perfect for right now,” she said. “Remember, not everyone provides everything. Not everyone is a supermarket. Some people are just butcher shops or vegetable stands or twenty-four-hour convenience stores, and those places can sometimes give you a few things that you really need.”
I must have looked unconvinced.
“You know, there are a lot of ways to find a perfect ten,” she said. “You can find a perfect ten, or you can find four and four and two, or you can find seven and three, or six and four. You have good friends. If what you’re looking for is adventure or romance—that’s OK, lamb chop.”
• • •
So I came to Nick, saw him often at parties, and eventually—it seemed a matter of chance—agreed to meet him, with some others, for a drink. I did not like Nick very much at that time; nor do I recall being particularly attracted to him. It could have been someone else with whom I made this plan to go out, but Nick was the one who mentioned drinks and the name of a bar, and I, game for anything that month, agreed at once. The place where we met had that singular combination of expensive lighting fixtures and deliberate shabbiness that I had come to associate with sexual freedom in New York, and it was full of young men who, apparently unacquainted with the February weather outside, were dressed as though cloth were too precious to be squandered on such insignificant extremities as arms and legs. The multitude of leather jackets seemed to be breathing animal smells at each other; their attar mixed with the smells of the men, and with the old wood of the floor, and the effect was surprisingly fresh, and reminded me of the wooden barns filled with livestock that I had visited as a child, some summers, in New England.
Nick had taken over a table in the corner (there were a few tables) and three other friends were there. Nick was drinking a martini, which had been served in a V-shaped glass. “I’ll get you a drink,” he said, and I asked for a martini, too, because I wanted to touch such a glass, and could not bring myself to reach out for Nick’s. I have always had a good head for liquor, but I have never much liked drinking. That night, with Nick and the others, I quietly drank six months’ worth of alcohol. I can remember ordering the first martini, and I can remember deciding to have a second one, because I was tense, and I remember ordering a third one because it seemed unsociable not to, since everyone was having another round. What I cannot remember is how the third one led to the others, when three seemed so sensible a final limit. So far as I can remember, I did not decide to go ahead and get drunk. So far as I can guess, I did not decide to relinquish control.
We were in that bar for a long time, until at some point the other friends left, and Nick and I were on our own. “Whaddya want to do?” he said to me. “You’re a little drunk, y’know.” His voice went suddenly double bass. “This place is getting too tired,” he said, weighing down the last word to make it more urgent.
We went to another bar, and then to another, and then to another. The cold air outside woke me up part way, but I had by then lost some part of myself or my mind. Someplace we went, where everyone was dancing, Nick bought drugs from a very fat man with a moth-eaten fur hat, and told me to take them. Without considering the matter, I took whatever Nick handed me, whatever came along to make my heart beat faster and my eyes move slower. It seemed to me that I woke from one dreamlike state and passed into another. I was at a gathering of the male young and beautiful, of men who spent the better part of their waking hours improving and polishing their bodies. I saw the most beautiful men I had ever seen, pressing close against each other. The very number of these men overwhelmed and for a moment rather saddened me; how could I, I wondered at that moment, have passed so much of my life in cities populated with such trunks and torsos, and not have plunged myself into the experience of them?
“Where are we?” I asked Nick.
“You’ve never been here before?” he said, as though we were at a grocery store, and I amazed at the canned tomatoes.
It was hot, the heat of so many bodies working themselves up to greater heat by constant motion, and Nick and I danced, with each other, then with others nearby, then with others less near, sliding along on the strength of other men’s eyes. I sensed all around me the wild affirmation of crowds of people looking on, taking as much pleasure in my pleasure as I was taking in theirs. Partly I discovered an impulse of exhibitionism, but there was also a more simple relief in this enormous mutuality, the very real pleasure of feeling that I was as much a part of the fantasies of the other men in that room as they were of mine. You could not keep on all your clothes that night in that place, and so you began by taking off your shirt; and you went rolling through the mass of men, getting to a place on the floor where you wanted to dance and then shifting as the music and the other dancers shifted. I had in the past held on to the subtleties of Schubert and Rachmaninoff, but here repetitive sound held us in its grip, and I thought that this was the original reason for music. Everyone’s bodies swirled into everyone else’s bodies, and soon it became impossibl
e to tell whose sweat was pouring down your body, or to count the number of men whose arms and chests and faces had rubbed the length of your own arms and chest and face. Perhaps the drugs made me want to touch everyone (though I might well have wanted that anyway), and everyone wanted also to touch me, and though it was in one way very erotic, in another way it transcended eros, the way that cold water transcends its slaking of your thirst on a hot day.
Male appetite usually builds to a pitch and then is satisfied, but this was just a slow and constant building and touching and rubbing, a never-ending progress from limb to limb and person to person in which the stimulation of your entire body seemed almost to dull the senses, in which your curiosity for other bodies was satisfied before it was formed, only to give way to more bodies, more entire satisfaction, more of the pleasure of the shapes of muscles and planes of the chest or buttocks that you could only half-associate with the unlit faces above them. If you wanted, you could drift from dancing to a rhythmic rubbing and pulsing that was still part of the music, and then, almost without noticing the stages of the development, on to sex itself, a sex validated and confused by the people around you, and by the people dancing below you. Late into the night, I let all my clothes go, and half in time to the music, whose ruthless beat was fixed in all of us by that time, half in time to my own pulse and the pulse of the strangers around me, I gave myself naked into the naked arms of a Hispanic construction worker and those of a seventeen-year-old go-go dancer, and I felt lucky to be pressed between them.
But still time did not give. All my senses were so strung out by then that I was simply lost in the event and the bodies around me, almost unaware of the cheering of the other men—it seemed like thousands—whom I would half-discover when I occasionally opened my eyes, men cheering me and one another and everyone else there, because as they were incorporated into my experience, I, too, became a part of their experience. I slipped then into other arms, felt other men above me, around me, within me, beside me; I occupied their bodies and they mine as though the physical boundaries of human flesh had fallen away. Pleasure ripped through me over and over again, until I found myself shaking and unable to stop. In a moment of clarity, I realized that music and my education had simply disappeared, taking with them kindness and whatever other daily virtues I had clung to with such pride. I was surrounded by people who lived in digital-clock time, where you cannot see what the moment before looked like, and you have no hint of what the next moment will look like, where you can see only the minute you’re living. I had been, always, analogue as a grandfather clock.
In a final exhaustion, after this elation, I felt my body give out, entirely spent. I looked for Nick and saw him standing at the edge of the floor, grinning. He helped me to gather my clothes (my thick black belt, which I had loved, was lost, probably stolen; later, I’d buy a new one), and I got dressed. My body was sore, so that my shirt and my jeans hurt. When I was ready, Nick and I walked to the door. Outside, it was eleven o’clock in the morning. Ordinary people in daylight clothes rushed back and forth to their offices and to shops. Suddenly ashamed of my night-smeared body, of my drunkenness, of all of it, I hailed a cab. I was abruptly rigid with fear of my own experience. “Sleep tight,” said Nick, as he closed the door for me. Then he pulled it open again. “You’re a sweet boy,” he said, slammed the door, and somehow I made it home.
It was a night of folly, the fulfillment of an unremarkable set of fantasies that would probably pall if they were too often fulfilled. But I had got so into the habit of living for the long term, of not running off with people I might not love forever; there was something glorious about living for the moment, the more glorious because I had until then controlled my life so well that I had forgotten that that was ever even an option. And the publicness of it became a real part of its pleasure. I had had my days of anonymous encounters in public parks, and those, too, I suppose, were of the moment; but they were always cloaked in some shame, in secrecy, in everyone’s knowledge that it might be necessary to hide or to run, in the understanding that what could be done quickly should not be dragged out over time. I cannot even remember the faces of my construction worker or my go-go dancer in any real detail, nor of the other men whose bodies I merged with my own; I remember the fact of them and the sensation of them, but their selves I never knew and have now lost entirely. I am sure I am even more lost to them.
• • •
Nick and I did not become lovers until ten days later. I cannot write of Nick without some terrible pinching at the middle of me: in the month that we spent together I traveled a range I have never known elsewhere. I can remember his feckless smile, and his crazy laugh, and his powerful body; I can remember the reflections of the world in the big gold hoop he wore in his left ear. Like a sunflower, Nick was always facing the light. I can remember his self-assured swagger, the way he would reach out when we were in my apartment and open my jeans as casually as if they were his jeans, on him. I can remember the weight of him on top of me when he threw me onto my bed, and the easy way that he had of pinning back my arms. I had never given myself altogether to Bernard, and I had never even told my full name to the blond skier I met that night in London, but I abandoned myself entirely to Nick, so that there was nothing left that was my own. I can see now that it was a way to deal with the prospect of my mother’s death, falling deeply, deeply in love, with all the mad passionate conviction of my own exhaustion. I tumbled headlong into an ardor as immediate and incontrovertible as it was preposterous.
• • •
The day before I started seeing Nick, I had dinner with Helen. I had suggested we eat at one of the new spots I had found downtown, and when we got there Helen looked almost like a period illustration: the delicacy of her features seemed to clash with the style of the restaurant. She ordered a glass of white wine—as always—and told me that it was undrinkable, and insisted that I try it. “It’s not a white wine sort of place, Helen,” I said irritably. Helen and I made desultory conversation, but some of our usual comfortable intimacy seemed to be lost, and by the time we stood up to go, I was feeling bored, and restless.
As we walked toward the door, a voice called out, “Hey! God, I don’t believe it! Harry!” It was Nick, wearing jeans and somewhat less than two-thirds of a T-shirt. “Hey, Harry,” he said, and kissed me. I could feel myself blushing a deep red, as I had never blushed when I saw Bernard. I stepped back gingerly.
“This is Helen,” I said. “Helen, this is Nick.”
“Hiya, Helen,” said Nick. “Great earrings.” Helen reached up to touch her earrings, perhaps to remember which earrings she was wearing.
“Great earring,” she said, eyeing his hoop. It annoyed me that Nick couldn’t hear the irony in her tone. We exchanged a minute’s pleasantries, and then Helen and I made our excuses and beat a hasty retreat.
On the street she said, “Did you sleep with him?” I was hit by the vulgarity of the question. Helen was never vulgar, and though she knew almost everything about me, she knew it without resorting to direct questions.
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I went out with him the other night, but that’s all.”
Helen looked at me with an expression of frank mistrust. “He’s certainly very good-looking,” she said. “Almost too good-looking. Archetypal,” she said, drawing out the word on the end of her tongue.
“Archetypally what?” I asked.
“Just archetypal,” said Helen, who was good at being difficult when it suited her.
• • •
The next day my mother called to tell me that the dog had gone to the vet. “She’s not doing very well,” said my mother. “I think we’re going to have to put her to sleep.”
I did not want to discuss with my mother the ramifications of putting the dog to sleep. “Poor Molly,” I said.
“Freddy’s going to come down from school,” my mother went on. “He wanted to see her a last time. I think h
e’ll be here tonight. If you want to come by for a little while, I think that would be nice.”
I rearranged my plans with Nick very grudgingly. He hardly noticed, since his life didn’t really include plans. He said dinner at nine would be fine. I imagine dinner at three in the morning would also have been fine.
When I reached my parents’ apartment, they were sitting in their bedroom with Freddy. Molly was lying on the rug in front of the fireplace. When she heard my footsteps, she hauled herself to her feet and came over to greet me. The vet had removed something from her paw, and she had on a bandage, and she trundled toward me with a lopsided, rolling walk. I looked around in a daze. My mind was with Nick. Through the air came the sad sound of my mother’s voice. “I loved that dog,” she said. “It’s fifteen years since we went up to the breeder’s and you boys picked her out among all the puppies.” She turned to my brother. “Do you remember?” she asked. “She nudged away from the rest of the litter, and you picked her up, and you held her in your hand, Freddy, and she squirmed around, and you said, ‘This is the one.’”
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