I said that I was glad to hear it. “I like talking,” I told him wryly.
“And how,” he said. “It’s like it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying. I mean, it’s like listening to the ocean or rain on the roof or something.”
“I think it kind of matters what I’m saying,” I said.
He gave me one of his long looks from half-closed eyes. “Yeah, it does,” he laughed, and he kissed me. “It really matters a lot,” he said, and he pushed me across the bed toward the wall. “You’re something, y’know? You’re just totally unique.” And he kissed me again, and said, “I just love this. You’re the best.”
• • •
When Nick broke up with me, he did it in the cleanest possible way, by telling me that he had realized that he was not very attracted to me. “You’re the best, Harry,” he said. “But you’re a little physically unsure of yourself and—I’ve gotta be frank—you’re not my sexual fantasy.” Nick lived in a world in which desire was so immediate, formed by type and by fantasy, that woe betide anyone who tried to interpose the reality of either flesh or character. Any unimagined scar, any odd formation of the muscles of the groin, could serve to betray the fact of your physical reality. So, too, the joy of a sad person, or the sorrow of a joyous one, could appear like a blemish or a welt in one who ought to have been as pure and smooth as the pupil-less eye of a classical sculpture.
It was a lot worse than when he’d hit me. For a moment I thought that if I showed a vulnerable side again, he might take me back, tell me he’d just been testing me. He had noted early on that my vulnerabilities were staunchly in the realm of the physical, so to pretend that his statement’s honesty made it a kindness, that our relationship really was over because I was not his fantasy, was unduly cruel. That was the thing that took me aback, since Nick was not, whatever his other failings, cruel by nature.
I responded, just for a change, with words. While I was with Nick I was unable to stop talking; it was as though I thought I would disappear if I were silent. I told Nick that part of the pleasure of actual people is that they are not fantasy, and that part of the process of discovering someone is the discovery of his reality, which can, when you fully grasp and hold it, be more deeply eroticized than the dreams that make his hold on you unshakable after two nights in bed. I told Nick that he was too intelligent to have so fixed a notion of type as to be unattracted to anyone who failed to conform to it, that though I did not fit with some model in his mind, I knew that I was not so far divergent from the outer reaches of his erotic sensibility as to be unknowable or unlovable. He had, after all, slept with me for a month with an abundant display of enthusiasm. I told Nick that it was not so hard for me to reach out to other minds and hearts as to reach out to other bodies. I told Nick that the physical is the area in which I unfold slowly, and painfully, and uncertainly, the area in which I need help to be myself, the area in which I can, as though by some law of nature, come into my own only with the passing of the weeks, and with the passing of my own fear. I do not lack imagination or energy, nor am I so far from physical sensitivity that I remain forever stranded on the high ground of my remove. But in the presence of someone else whom I hardly know (for all the variety of my love, how well did I know Nick?), I cannot—I told Nick—be even my own fantasy.
I could not stop remembering things that Nick had said. I recalled how I had once woken up in the middle of the night to find him looking at me, and how he had said, very slowly, in his tone of perpetual interest, “You have such a beautiful face.” Then, too, I recalled the way he had asked once, in the middle of love, with that boyish grin, “Do you like this?” and, before I could answer, had announced with another thrust, “I like this.” I remembered equally well the various times when he had said, “Not there,” or “More gently,” or even “Stop. Stop for a second.” Nick, I said in a voice that was broken, every life is made up of sequences and priorities and hierarchies, and where you place someone in the sequences and priorities and hierarchies of your life can form desire, rather than the other way around. And more. Nick, I said, do you remember about the sublime being the exchange of easier for more difficult pleasures? We were speaking of emotion, but sexually, too, there is such an exchange to be negotiated. I cannot provide you with the easier kind of sexual pleasure at which you arrive when you come across your fantasy in real life. I can suggest on faith that in the physical as much as in the emotional arena, it is sometimes worth the struggle to arrive at the particular pleasure that comes of time and profound openness, at which you cannot arrive when you work from a prototype—that pleasure which comes as the aftermath of fallen boundaries. I told Nick that it was in the sudden and unflinching radiance of feeling with and for each other that we had found each other. I told him I was worth the effort.
And when I finished telling him as much of this as I could, I told him I had loved him with a passion in many ways as inexplicable to me as it had been to him. I told him that I knew that this had sometimes been difficult and awkward for him, and I told him I was sorry for that. I said that these strong emotions were beyond my poise to control, and I acknowledged that when they did not seem like gifts, they could seem sad or even ridiculous. I said that my hopes had always been good hopes. And I remembered all those days and nights and afternoons as bit by bit I came to know Nick and to find in the very fact of his existence a joy such as I had seldom known before. I knew that I was losing Nick, and so I told him that in my tired eyes he had shone like the ten thousand lights of the night sky. “Nick,” I said, “I have loved you as though you were my own past, and though that love has by and large left me feeling only more alone—you have seemed sometimes not to notice it, at other times not to like it—it has also, in a few bright moments, filled me with joy.”
I actually said all of that to Nick. At the time I believed that by saying such things I could change the world. I even imagined that I could make someone love me. At that time the words poured out of me like tears. Breaking up with Nick was twice as bad as breaking up with Bernard, though Bernard was real to me and Nick was in many ways a fiction of my own creating. I had set out to find love and had become a collector of pain; in the long nights of that winter I would sit awake classing my sorrows as though they were rare objects destined for museum display, ranking them by scale and by type, marveling at how one had surpassed or been surpassed. I hoped in this way to remove myself from them, to see them as objects external to me; but I discovered that to study your sadness is to know it and to own it, and that to own it is to cease to separate it from yourself. “Here I am!” I wanted to say. “With my bag of sorrows!” But in the end that was as impossible as to say, “Here I am! With my brain and my heart in tow!” as though I might, under other circumstances, have left them at home.
• • •
When Nick had looked at me with his quirky grin, and told me that he wanted us to be best friends always, and when he had left and closed the door, I went uptown and saw my mother. I had not been to see her as much as I ought to have been in the preceding weeks, and when I had been with her, we had tended to argue. My mother and I had been arguing a lot; I was constantly annoyed at her—more so, for some reason, since Molly had been put to sleep. I went uptown that day and saw my mother and I did not feel angry. I could hardly speak. She sat with me for a long time, and then she made English muffins with Swiss cheese, and sat with me some more. “I always love you, Harry,” she said. “It’s not the same, I know. I’m just your mother. But it’s always there.” I looked at her, embarrassed. “Harry, you have my love for the rest of your life,” she said. “I wish I could give you more than that.” And she held out her hands to me, as though to show that this was all that was in them.
I went into my old room, the one from which I had not taken all my childhood things, and slept through the afternoon. Janet had put winter blankets on the bed even though I hadn’t slept there or mentioned sleeping there since autumn. That night,
I had dinner with my parents in the kitchen. I told them that I had not been practicing enough lately, and that I wanted to spend whole days at the piano, completely uninterrupted. My father asked me about the party plans. He was very kind; I remembered, as though I were waking from a dream, what a tremendously kind man he was, although it would be several months before I had the wherewithal to love him again. My mother told me she thought grilled scallops were probably a mistake as passed hors d’œuvre (“Greasy fingers—yuck”), and asked whether I’d arranged about the flowers. I told her that I had, and made a mental note to do it the following morning.
• • •
After dinner I went back to my apartment; but the emptiness of it filled me with horror. I called Helen and asked whether she wanted to get a late-night drink. “Why don’t you come up to my part of town?” she asked. “I’m actually not in the mood for that dingy place on your corner. You must be getting tired of it yourself.” I put on an oxford-cloth shirt and a pair of corduroys and a big Shetland sweater, the kind of clothes I had worn all the years I had been going to school. I left at home the slightly ripped jeans and the leather jacket I had been wearing for a month. I turned off all the lights and took a taxi to Helen’s house. I rolled down the window and felt the wind in my nose. That day, the bracing weather had arrived.
I rang the bell, and Helen came downstairs wearing a blue dress with tiny drawings of African animals on it. She stared at me for a minute. “Harry,” she said. “You look like hell.”
As I stood in the doorway, I felt as bad as I had ever felt, but I also felt as though some part of me that had been sleeping for too many seasons had come to life. “It’s been a rough day,” I said.
“Well, then let’s not go out. Why don’t you come upstairs and I’ll warm some cider or something. I’ve got some leftover orange cake.” And so I followed Helen up to her glowing apartment, to the divine order and the polished furniture and the pleasant kitchen. Helen produced things to eat and to drink, and we sat and talked into the small hours of the morning. I told her a bit about Nick, and she said very little, but I felt that she understood everything that Nick had not understood, and this lulled me into a sense of safety that I had not had in many days. I was relieved to be drinking cider instead of taking Ecstasy, to be in the easy company of Helen again. I hadn’t been to her apartment in a long time. She had a few new plants, and a new dish rack, and she had re-covered (at last) the old chair her brother had given her.
“Oh, Helen,” I said to her at one point. “Don’t you think it’s ever going to get better and easier?”
“No. I don’t think it is,” she said. She looked at me for a minute. “It’s going to get better and harder. It just gets better and harder.”
It grew later and later, and I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to leave at all.
It might have been four o’clock in the morning when Helen went into the kitchen to wash out the pot she’d used to warm the cider. I went to help her, and paused in the doorway. Her hair was falling forward over her face as she rinsed, and her slender hands were turning the pot deftly. She threw back her hair to look at me, and she smiled. And suddenly Helen was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had often wanted to touch Helen, and this time, almost in spite of myself, I walked over to her by the sink and ran a hand through her hair. She looked up at me, more curious than expectant, and it came to me in a flash that Helen was the answer to the questions I had posed to Bernard, and to the skier, and to Nick. I kissed her with an awkwardness made unimportant by our years of friendship.
I took the pot out of Helen’s hands and turned off the water. I led her through to her bedroom; she looked at me with uncertain eyes, and at one point I thought she was going to laugh; but I had never felt more certain of anything in my life. I cannot describe to you how beautiful Helen’s body was; nor can I describe to you how much its beauty, and my own pleasure in that beauty, surprised me. It was as though I were discovering someone entirely new, a Helen that my own and old Helen could hardly have imagined, could hardly have known. Had this other Helen been there the whole time, hidden under the wool or silk or cotton of the seasons? Of course Helen had always been beautiful, but there was suddenly a wholeness to her, lying there, unclothed, in the faint moonlike light of the streetlamps outside her apartment. When I was little, I went once to the Musée Rodin and bought a black-and-white postcard of a marble figure, naked, her head thrown forward; and this postcard made its way into a collage that stayed in our house. Helen, stretched beneath me in the night, reminded me of that Rodin, an image of beauty from the dim reaches of my past. That I could touch her, could claim this beauty after these years of male bodies pressing roughly against me: I was terrified, but I was also ecstatic, and I felt that I could never have enough of looking at and of touching that strange body. And I also felt ignorant, and I was startled by the oddity of a body formed so differently from my own. How could one ever know what sensations one produced in something so foreign? There are fewer kinds of mystery in the love of men for men. I had often indulged the luxury, in bed, of supposing someone else’s body to be my body, and at such moments I would close my eyes as I performed some act that was also being performed on me, and imagine that I had reached a perfect solipsism, that what I did was solely responsible for what I felt. What peculiar bliss it was to take responsibility for sensations I could never know; what confidence there was to be drawn from that endlessly paradoxical territory of the unimaginable.
I felt that I did not want ever to leave Helen, then. I had always slept naked beside naked lovers, and I was startled that Helen put on a long pink nightgown. I loved the way the silk moved around, revealing by chance this or that part of her, but I disliked the sense that it was closing me out. I wanted never to let go of her. That feeling did not leave me. Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, I would lie in the dark with my hand across one of her breasts, astonished by its inviolate shape; but what I loved most was the entire delicate mass of her, the thin, supple limbs, the fineness of her torso, the softness of her breath. Being naked in front of a woman was vastly different from being naked in front of a man. It was like being five times as naked, as different anew as the nakedness of the bedroom is from the nakedness of the locker room, as different as the whole truth is from the truth. The smoothness of the sexual act itself astonished me, the absence of pain, the fluidity of it. I felt none of the manic pleasure I had known with Nick, but I felt a joy that seemed to touch every inch of me, a high bliss, unnervingly quiet. Had I spoken to Nick about balance? With Helen, I found a balance that incorporated what we had in common and our differences. It was a balance—it seemed abundantly clear to me at that time—that I could never have achieved with Nick.
I suppose that I would not have ventured toward Helen if I had been fully happy with men. During the first week she and I were together, the image of Bernard at the toy store in London came back to haunt me more than once. That feeling in the toy store, of being marginal, of being excluded, had propelled me toward Helen. My mother talking about children and telling me that I could do anything had made me try to prove to myself that we have choices in all things. What I could not have known or imagined then was the pleasure that I was to find with Helen. I see now that I had been drawn to her since we were in high school. It could well have been otherwise, I suppose: I could have led Helen from the kitchen and met with disaster. It could have been humiliating, or strange, or awkward, or fearful. When the moment came, it surprised and delighted me to find that I loved her as much with my body as with my mind, that desire formulated largely as an act of will had become so startlingly genuine and irrefutable.
I had always subscribed to the much-vaunted theory that everyone is bisexual, and that circumstance turns us toward one gender or the other. I had thought then that if one could triumph over circumstance, the difference between sex with a man and sex with a woman would be like the difference between sex with a short person a
nd sex with a tall person. But for me, the two experiences proved so different that the use of one word to refer to them both seemed hilarious. The Eskimos cannot be more puzzled by the huge generality of the English word “snow” than I was by the generality of the word “sex.” To feel that one kind of sexuality should exclude the other saddened me, for I cannot pretend that I did not still long in some ways for Nick; even as I lay with Helen, images of men ran through my mind. It was not like choosing between apples and oranges so much as like choosing between the mountains and the sea, whose beauty is clearest in their contrast. That you cannot be monogamous and encompass both genders—this is one of life’s gross cruelties. With men, I had felt something urgent and terrible that built up and then broke, suddenly and entirely, and then was over. With Helen, I felt something constant and slow and continuous, something that grew by slow degrees, that seemed to wane only to return again more strongly. Perhaps it was more profound; it may also be the case that there was less of me in it.
It was as though I had been practicing all my life to love Helen. If my mother had not developed cancer, I might have gone on practicing and practicing and never got to the thing itself, to the fact that I loved Helen with more of myself than I had known I had. But I don’t think so. It would certainly have taken longer, but I think I would sooner or later have realized that Helen was, at the very least, a shadow of the love I had been seeking all of my life. I learned so much in the course of loving my mother and being loved by her; and though Helen was a different matter entirely, the quality of that love between my mother and me was relevant to my relations with Helen as it had never been relevant to what I had with Bernard. My mother showed me how love is the business of life. She made a singular and perfect world out of her love for my father, and his love for her, and her love for me became a part of that. My mother showed me a love made of bricks, rather than of straw or sticks, a love powerful and inviolable enough to withstand every one of the disasters of which any life is made. My mother showed me how to live in love. But Bernard was the one who showed me how to live outside love, how to move through it and around it; he put windows into that strong house of bricks. It was with Bernard that I learned that what you touch does not automatically become your own; it was from Bernard that I learned the nature of love’s strange and wondrous equalities.
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