A Stone Boat

by Andrew Solomon

  “She was tiny,” said Freddy. “And completely black, then. She did leave the litter to come over. She picked us out.”

  I patted Molly on the head.

  “Do we have to put her to sleep?” asked Freddy. “I thought you said the vet could do surgery on that paw.”

  “Her whole system is breaking down,” my mother said. “It’s a kindness at this point.” And then she sat down on the floor and rubbed Molly’s coat. “I’m going to miss you,” she said. “I thought you’d outlast me, Molly. I’m going to miss you every day I have left.” She sighed. “Fifteen years. It’s been a good fifteen years, Molly, don’t you think? A good fifteen years.”

  “I’ve got to go back downtown,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got some plans I couldn’t change. Good luck with the vet tomorrow.” I bent down to give Molly a last pat, and she looked up at me with her big brown eyes, hazed over with cataracts. I almost ran out of the apartment.

  • • •

  The world is full of good-looking men, but no others have wedged their way into my soul as Nick did. How to explain him, when my desire has been formed so often by the difficulty of articulating it? He represented my opposite in many ways, though we had in common our gender and abiding curiosity and a certain measure of intelligence. Having found in Bernard and others a dilute version of myself, or an ideal I had but half-achieved, I now sought what I did not have, as, perhaps, men have often sought women. I found in Nick the ease of physical connection, a complete contentment in the fact of being a sexual being, an ability to reach out to the bodily fact of another. If Bernard had been an experiment in domesticity, then Nick, I suppose, was an experiment in physicality. Nick lived for now, and did not tremble at the uncertainty of the future. I have supposed that the pain that came when Nick and I parted is not incommensurate with the pleasure our love might have brought; but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I found Nick because I needed to suffer, and knew that he would be a recipe for disaster. Perhaps his name was just another name for me to give to loss, and my grief for him just another excuse for loneliness. Perhaps the real potential for real joy would have terrified me, sent me running from the room like a crazy cat. At a certain rational level, I saw at once that Nick could not step out of himself enough to be with me, and that it was foolish and self-indulgent to imagine or hope otherwise. Perhaps it is only my own self-indulgence that keeps me from saying that dreams are always dreams, that a dream realized is in the end a dream forsaken, and that my dream of Nick was as cinematic and irrelevant as the ringing of bells at eventide. He never even heard me play the piano.

  I try and try to remember what we actually did with each other and what we said: whereas the man with the skier’s tan and I had had nothing to say to each other, and had done little but eat and drink and learn each other’s bodies, Nick and I not only made love, but also talked through the days and nights, went places, saw things, made friends. In the month that we were together, I did not sleep at all. My mother, to whom I mentioned Nick only in passing, and who carefully showed neither disapprobation nor interest in meeting him, started to ask whether I was all right, because I had grown at once so manic and so worn from the very fact of him. I told her that I had never been better, and in some sense it was true: Nick almost crowded her out of my mind. Nick went with the architecture of my new apartment. He was part of the new life I was going to have in New York. My relationship to Bernard had been like a mineral crystal formed over years and based on obscure formulas so strange that only a few dedicated scientists could chart them; but my relationship to Nick was like an explosion, in which there is no logic of any kind at all. My concerts that month—I had two, both in Boston—were almost mad; I played fast, with technique I had never had before, but my interpretations, I knew, were eccentric to the point of brutality.

  The first night I slept with Nick, we talked until dawn. He presented his past as though this were part of a monologue he had memorized long ago, acquitting himself admirably with tears where tears were required, or with laughter where it was appropriate to laugh. It was as though these were all things he had heard about someone else, and was now duly reporting, as though his own life were something he had observed, and not something he had lived. “And where were you?” I wanted to ask more than once—but perhaps it would have been better to wonder, “And where are you?” since to that question some immediate answer might more reasonably have been expected. He and I were the same age, but he made me feel antique. It was as though he had found, with his detachment, the secret of eternal youth—and though in my mind I was ahead of him at every turn, mistrusting his distance, I, in fact, envied him his innocence, an innocence not of the fruit of experience, but of experience itself, which left him full of restlessness. I gladly conflated his lust for me with his lust for life. I talked to him all night, night after night, and my own confessional monologues were given not so much from an urge to communicate anything (I seemed not to care about myself then), but from a hunger to draw him out, a belief that if you tell difficult things with strong emotion, you can extract their authentic equivalent. I wanted to give him the gift of his own sophistication.

  • • •

  Two weeks into my relationship with Nick, we had dinner with Helen. This had been her idea, and Nick had been very enthusiastic about it—since I had, sometimes, told him stories about Helen while the hours ticked by—and I was going along with it to accommodate the two of them. I thought Helen was trying to place herself within a relationship of which I knew she did not approve, and I thought that when Nick met her, he might see that I was from a world a million miles from the one where we were living. We went to that same restaurant where Helen and I had run into Nick the week of the party. Helen had worn her biggest earrings, with the obvious intention of extracting further comment. She and Nick laughed and talked their way through dinner, while I sat poking at my pasta primavera—the food there was repulsive—and watching Helen knock back the undrinkable wine. After dinner, Nick and I went back to his apartment, where he threw me onto the bed. “So that’s Helen,” he said as he traced the length of my neck with his mouth. “She’s amazing.”

  “Amazing,” I sighed back, as I felt my clothes sliding off again. They came off so often that month that I sometimes wondered why I bothered to put them on at all.

  “No, she’s completely amazing.” Nick sat up and looked at me. “She’s like someone out of a movie or a book or something. I mean her mind just goes on and on. I’m not sure how much I could take of her, but she’s completely amazing.”

  “Helen’s great,” I said.

  “She’s fucking gorgeous, too. She got a boyfriend?”

  I explained about Helen’s breaking up with the man in films eighteen months earlier, and said that she had been single since then.

  “Totally crazy,” said Nick. “Totally crazy, the straight world.”

  • • •

  Helen and I talked on the phone the next day. “How’s the CD going?” she asked, as she always did. “Are we going to get to hear it soon?”

  “I’ve got to call London later,” I said. “To check about some things. Basically, it’s all on schedule.”

  “And the party?”

  “I’ve just arranged about the flowers,” I said. I made a mental note to arrange about the flowers.

  “So now I’ve met the love of your life,” she said.

  “Don’t be snide, please.”

  “He’s very charming,” said Helen. But it was two weeks later, when Nick and I broke up, that she said in a tone of sudden passion, “Harry, I don’t know how you could. I don’t understand it. He wasn’t a person, Harry. He was like someone who was imitating a person. He was like someone who had seen a lot of people and who wanted to be a person but who didn’t really know how to go about it. He had an idea of what people do, and so he did those things. When people would laugh, he laughed. When people could be loved for being
sexy, he was sexy. When people asked questions, he would ask questions. But it was absolutely eerie how blank he was behind that. It was as though he hoped to be mistaken for a person, as though he were impersonating a person. And when he talked about you, it was as though he were trying to impersonate a lover, and not as though he had any love at all.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “He was a little bit afraid of intimacy. Like a lot of people.”

  “Afraid of intimacy?” said Helen. “It was more like the whole idea had never crossed his mind.”

  But that was two weeks later. In the meantime, I believed that Nick was as profound as the earth, and that he needed only my excavating skills to locate his tremendous character.

  • • •

  Three days before we broke up, Nick and I went out and we took drugs (we always took drugs) and in the small hours of the morning, he hit me across the face. He had never shown any violence before, and I was too surprised to say anything. Then he hit me again, hard, and I bellowed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Nick began to laugh. “So, Harry,” he said. “You’re vulnerable after all. You’re a normal vulnerable guy just like the rest of us.” And he kissed me then. “Sorry I hurt you,” he said, and his voice sounded like a caress. “I just had to make sure.”

  I looked at his big frame and his strong muscles and his face that was always creased with laughter or desire, and I looked at my own thin limbs and thought how much of the year I had spent at the brink of tears. I was the most vulnerable person in New York. But in my family, we learned long ago not to make a habit of wearing something so fragile as our own vulnerability on our sleeves. Nick had apparently not learned that those of us who carry our vulnerability wrapped in all the protections of insight and social polish have a vulnerability unequal to the changes of weather that anything worn on one’s sleeve must be hardened to endure. He could not tell that it was the hidden and not the manifest vulnerability that bruises most readily and recovers most slowly.

  I now see that the only thing that Nick and I really had in common was that we were both changing. During the month that we were together, I tried to tell him so much. I said to him that balance seems like the most boring thing in the world, and the absence of balance, a rainbow miracle of seduction. On the day I said that, we were lying side by side in my bed, beneath a downy duvet, on cotton sheets that had been ironed that morning, and that seemed to be yielding their smoothness to us. Nick’s dark skin glowed against the whiteness. It was late at night, incredibly late, and I had curled myself up around Nick, my right ear just over his heart, my legs clutched around one of his powerful legs. I, too, I said, hate the middle path, the road more taken. But balance is not always so tedious. Try to see (I begged Nick to see) the metaphor of balance as being not one of scales and blind justice, where tiny grains of sand are added to one or the other of two dull golden dishes until they hang, neither of them higher or lower, in dull, ideal symmetry, but rather one of surfing, where imbalance leaves you floundering first on the far side, then on the near side, of waves so tall and so glorious that from their heights you might see the magnificent extent of the sea entire. Balance allows you to slide up instead of down: it is the only authentic extreme that there is. Oh, Nick, I said, you have within you the discipline to stand at the center of a piece of fiberglass and control the power of the ocean itself with the shifting of your weight and the turning of your ankles.

  Nick’s arm was heavy around me, and as I spoke he held my head down, pressing it into his chest. From time to time he would grunt an acknowledgment of something I was saying; mostly, though, he would respond to sentences by pulling me in tighter, by letting me go, by running his free hand through my hair, or by reaching down to hold the small of my back. I kept talking; the sensation of Nick was no longer sufficient to quell my need for words. Love itself is, I told him, perhaps more than anything else, that state of delight in which each single moment becomes globed and complete, so that thought may linger beside it and within it; it takes place in the silence, in the moment’s pause, in the expanse of yourself—and these are matters of balance.

  And as I said this, Nick pulled me on top of him, and then he rolled over, so that I was beneath him. While I went on speaking, his mouth closed over one of my shoulders, and then it began its slow meander south. I felt that my whole body was disappearing into his mouth, that there was nothing left of me but my voice, the sound one short of music that I made for myself. I tried to move or to shift my weight, but he held me too strongly for that, and after a minute of helpless struggle, I gave up. He seemed to know better places for my limbs than I knew; he twisted my arms behind me and pulled apart my legs and pushed back my head as though he were getting rid of everything unnecessary about me.

  I told Nick what Helen used to say to me (it was a quote from someone)—that the sublime is a matter of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures. Helen and I once thought the truth was hidden in such aphorisms; but our attachment to that one outlasted many that had come before and quite a few that came afterward. Sometimes it seems foolish to give up easier for more difficult pleasures: there is so much pleasure to easy pleasures, pleasure that is only squandered when we give up what is easy for something so deeply buried we are more than lucky if we ever find it at all. It seems foolish to give up easy pleasures, and sometimes it is foolish. But I don’t think, in the end, that volition is at issue in this. We have to look forward to the surprising, difficult pleasures that come upon us when we least expect them, the strange rewards abruptly bestowed for opting against easy ways of living.

  When he turned me over, then, so that my chest was down, my face was almost buried in the pillow. He pulled my head back by the hair, gently but firmly. “So I can hear you,” he said, and did not let go.

  “Nick,” I said. “You cannot turn in the easier pleasures for the more difficult ones as though you were exchanging appliances at a department store, submitting the cheaper model with some cash and being given the fresh and better one to take home. You must give up those easy pleasures, and only sometime later do you begin to achieve the more difficult ones. In between, there is a period as empty and void as despair: but it is not despair. Despair is a time without reason or redemption, and this time of void is so pregnant with reason” (I felt that Nick must know this even when he did not feel it) “that it is a time when you need only the infinite courage of patience” (not, perhaps, Nick’s rave favorite virtue). “Nick,” I said, “if you fill that void with drugs and novel affairs and the poetics of an unfelt pride, with those successes of the mind and body that lie to the west of joy, you will lose not the emptiness, but the reason.”

  And still I went on talking, as his muscles contracted in a tempo as irrefutable as plainsong, rhythms I had that month learned by heart, that I held on to as though they were my rhythms also. I contracted beneath him. I said: “I have tried to create a life of relentless beauty, and have seen that by putting yourself in a position in which no one can betray you, you lose more of the world than you gain. The true nature of fulfillment, I told him, is to do with giving up each thing you strive for and achieve in the hope that there is something better and finer to strive for next: building the self, not undercutting it, giving things up, not giving up on things. The painful process of longing is all there is in life, the longing from one experience to the next, from one pleasure to the next, from one kind of loss to the next. Nick,” I said, “you are full of such longing; you scream longing from every surface. The longing from pleasure to pleasure, by way of voids often more sustained than the pleasures themselves, is not sad; in its own way, this is a credo of the utmost optimism. It describes a life without stasis, complacence, or stagnation. If you truly accept this, you will contain the voids, relieve the anger, mitigate the sadness, triumph over fear and panic, and become not a pale shadow of your dramatic self, but the self of which you are now a shadow.”

  By the
n, he had finished with me. He lay on his back again. I lay beside him: his arm was around me, but now it seemed to be holding me away, rather than pulling me to him. My body was covered with bruises, and if I moved I felt new ones. I did not know where each of them had come from, nor did I care; they made me feel that Nick had infiltrated my whole body and that his imprint was a part of me forever. Still, I had not finished with him. In the heat of my emotion I told Nick, “Perhaps I am wrong in some or all of what I have said. But I believe that I see you with great clarity and great accuracy, and I want you to understand that this makes me love you not less, but more. I was drawn to you not by naïve fixation, but, I think, by seeing you as you are, and I liked you only the more for that, because you are someone not only of careless joys and fresh, enchanting enthusiasm, but also of great substance and nearly infinite depth, strange and rare and many-splendored as this abruptly clear February night itself.”

  But by the time I had said all that, the night was pretty much over, and Nick was asleep. He was not what I imagined him to be, nor was he what Helen perceived him to be. After we broke up, I saw that it didn’t matter that he’d fallen asleep before the end of my monologue, because of course I had been talking to myself all along.

  • • •

  The next morning Nick said, “God, it’s the best just listening to you talk. I completely love that.”