I now felt far readier to say to sloppy acquaintances, “You’ve got your reasons, I’m sure. But my life’s become too short to fritter away in restaurants hanging around for fifty-eight, now -nine, minutes for you to maybe show. Time is freedom and you are abusing mine, plus yours. The corn chowder is fairly good. I started without you. Never let this happen again. I could be doing something useful. Sitting here helped nobody, least of all me—No, I just don’t think I can now. Sorry, friends waiting. I am out of here, you selfish little shit. How dare you do this to me considering how everything stands now. What world are you living in and wasting? Oh, waitress? My total.” They had closed, as a hazard to public health, all the baths where sweet rough sex was nightly had and had. Insomniac, I sometimes did the math; I imagined my one night at St. Mark’s, I imagined how many of those beauties still breathed this dear polluted air. The trucks parked on West Street and left wide open for nocturnal adventure were now either bolted shut or parked on the far Jersey shore where they stayed safe from trade, contaminants.
Management was worried for the trucks!
Gideon finally introduced us to his family from Queens; heavy, dark, polite, and shy, they looked like immigrants. You could tell that he, maybe our circle’s laziest, was their tribe’s only “success.” Their glances his way were worshipful.
We kept seeing Gideon try to paint, in bed, trying to paint very well once more; and improbably recovering much of the old joy—but all while rigged with catheters and IV lines. Partying these last few years, like a minor-key Robert, he had rushed his work and we, ashamed, all knew so.
Now, once more, our darling Gideon was slaving at play as all real artists do. Life and death, one “what if” at a time. Our darling Gideon was once more hurrying to paint slow.
I saw so much I’m trying sparing you. Why? Okay, I won’t then.
A certain citizen who had lived safe and untouched till the month of September, when the weight of the distemper lay more in the city than it had done before, was mighty cheerful, and something too bold … in his talk of how secure he was, how cautious he had been, and how he never had come near any sick body.
Says another citizen, a neighbor of his, to him one day, “Do not be too confident, Mr. —: it is hard to say who is sick and who is well; for we see men alive and well to outward appearance one hour, and dead the next.”—“That is true,” says the first man (for he was not a man presumptuously secure, but had escaped a long while; and men, as I have said, especially in the city, began to be overeasy on that score),—“that is true”, says he. “I do not think myself secure; but I hope I have not been in company with any person that there has been any danger in.” “No!,” says his neighbor. “Were you not at the Bull Head Tavern in Gracechurch Street, with Mr. —, the night before last?”—“Yes,” says the first, “I was; but there was nobody there that we had any reason to think dangerous.” Upon which his neighbor said no more, being unwilling to surprise him.
But this made him more inquisitive, and, as his neighbor appeared backward, he was the more impatient; and in a kind of warmth says he aloud, “Why, is he not dead, is he?” Upon which his neighbor still was silent, but cast up his eyes, and said something to himself; at which the first citizen turned pale, and said no more but this, “Then I am a dead man too!” and went home immediately, and sent for a neighboring apothecary to give him something preventive, for he had not yet found himself ill. But the apothecary, opening his breast, fetched a sign, and said no more but this, “Look up to God.” And the man died in a few hours.
Consolidate Surviving Acquaintances
ow dare I synopsize their suffering? How can I bear not to condense it?
And yet I’m going to hurry now, okay? Okay. Others’ accounts will focus on the changing of the diapers of those once-strapping men you wanted or you had. I reserve the right to keep my hand firm on sweet Fast Forward. You just imagine those other parts. I don’t care to see them twice. This go-round, I opt for dignity, because—alone and clean and so enraged for them—this time through, I can.
I go quick to what I “learned” as Robert taught me. And if that sounds hokey, if you think I’m moralistic and too proud of them and me with them, you are probably the one who kept me waiting one whole hour in a restaurant with others restless in line for our table. Well, almost an hour. If you’re determined to undervalue what we crazyquilted together in our exit mode, please leave, do.
As I stood beside their beds and opened greeting cards and held inscriptions down so they could see, I no longer felt merely brotherly toward them, nor “sisterly,” as when we camped it up on the street and risked having beer bottles thrown from passing cars.
Now, friends, weak, strengthened all in me that was most Fatherly. How proud I was to find I could. A whole new verb tense, “To Dad.” It’d, all along, been latent. A closet case. I’d always, secretly, wanted kids. Not just Connecticut statistics, but real, needy, honest, children all my own.
Soon, I was finding my dad’s own temper; it was also mine. Mine had been a closet case of rage. I’d never really needed it before. Except, perhaps, in resisting him.
Anger charbroiled to the surface during this, My Own Catastrophe. I saw how it had worked during his Depression, then his War (with its eighty thousand soothing lethal Chesterfields). Hard events “cured” Dad’s fury up of him and into view where his wife and sons tripped over its tentacles biweekly. Now his Hartley yelled. See Hartley rant. Note Hartley kick stuff. Try not laughing when Hart breaks his big toe, kicking. Literally. Against the baseboard. Having watched my money-crazed absentee dad get so much wrong, I wanted a continuous audition now—at Fatherhood. For his sake, too!
I was yelling, demanding, not for me of course, but for my boy waiting at home, for his medicine please, if you, the pharmacist, could stop selling friggin’ cherry Chapstick long enough to help my friend through his PAIN, much appreciated. Thank you. No prob.
I know the efficient way to tell this—combine characters. From the thirty-odd dead-letter files of friendship, I should create a single narrative address, “Occupant.” I might then trace his single typifying history, his ascent, then his cliff-wall Roadrunner’s drop to the canyon floor—I should combine Gideon with Robert—with Ansel, the abstractionist-photographer-construction worker, with…. Someone wise said of the Holocaust, “Six million Jews did not die. One Jew at a time died. But, six million of them. Singly.”
Dead soldiers in a war get tallied as one daily impersonal digit; and this disease unified, then flattened individual difference among my address book’s most determined, memorable individualists. 2 dead, becomes 15, becomes …
Heaven’s password will be, I stake my life on this: “Hello.”
I’d be dishonest to claim that my friends stayed—throughout their crashes—citadels of charm and thoughtfulness and breeding. Oooh, dear me, no. I could tell such tales. When tired enough these days, I occasionally let myself remember them at their worsts. It cuts through cheap, fudged sentiment so fast. I forever toy with the notion of intentional forgetting. But it’s one of many things I’m not good at.
Even Robert, after I’d forgiven him his recklessness with Bama. Even poor Robert had to beckon me closer to his hospital bed. I hesitate, even now, to “tell on him.” But then, part of remembering a person whole is just such a jagged, various completion. Besides, by now, you’re probably so sick of hearing the exact color of his pale eyelashes, or of his pistol whipping’s bow-shaped scar. Ill as he was, might not even my true love be entitled to a little cruelty, if he made it brief?
The crown prince waved me nearer. Compared to his Federal fourposter, this hospital bed looked so low to the ground, it seemed beneath him—so gleaming, hi-tech, and essentially demeaning. Robbie beckoned me over with the spindle finger, a single Hollywood Halloween crook of it. He, however in and out of his head lately, had something to say, something he’d meant, he insisted now, to tell me for the longest darn time.
“It’s about … your
writing, Hartley. Lately, for a lot of us, it has gotten very hard to foll … ow, duck. Not always, but people, when you’re not around, do say so. It’s jumpy, undercuts itself. Needs more time to bake. Oh, you’ll get better. Think of the years you have ahead. But maybe try and put more straight lines into it maybe? Good, though. Comic, they like. Still, nobody wants to read much more of the Southern stuff—choir practice and magnolias. No question that you have the ‘chops.’ And yet, you are way funnier in person. You talk better than you often get it down, but maybe that’s true of … our lives. We’ve each always offered each other the most charm, hunh, Hart? We mostly got our very best, hunh, Hart? Ahead, there’ll come a subject big and dark enough for you to chew on, hon. An all-week sucker. People are not very good. People never stay real happy very long. I don’t know how you missed out on that. It’s a first rule, really. Your weakness is this hero worship. Gets in the way of your characters’ seeming real. You’ve still got your thank-you-note expectations, lad. Some people want to be famous, some just wanna get fucked regular; your fault is, if you have one, you deepdown hope to be—don’t get mad—thanked. You wanna get thanked. I wanna get fucked. She wants to get famous. Literature? It never says thank you, Hartley. Good books they just eat and go home. But … main thing is, babe—you keep at it, hear?”
“?-ha,” I said. “Yeah, I thought maybe I would. Gracias, I guess.” My hands felt suddenly unbusy. “Guess I’ll have to work on all that. Suuure will. —But listen, after the talking just now … you thirsty, darl?”
He nodded. You cannot make a scene. You cannot have that be the last thing Robert remembers saying, regrets saying.
Most Classical and Romantic Composers lived long enough to complete their Ninth Symphonies, even their Tenths. He got half of one.
I now lower the clear glass straw into the clear water and watch him struggle, choke, to bring it to himself.
“Good,” says a dadlike voice. “You were thirsty, weren’t you?” The voice sounds like a pederast kiddie-show host, like God the Father Almighty, like healthy healthy Hartley cheering Robert who is so sick that he says things he doesn’t really mean.
Shortly after my ideal one scolded me for immaturity and professional ineptitude, this (water, drugs, treats, Ensure food supplement, turning the patient in bed, the doughnut foam pillows needed to shield inevitable bedsores) started being what I did with days.
Hard to explain: First I was doing it because it had to be done. My friends could not afford paid attendants. Then I did it because I was one fragment of our Circle still left upright. Next, I told myself I did it because I could do it, do it as well as most and better than some. Then, old hand at rigging Hickman Catheters that pump nutrition into beloved boys’ chests’ centers, I got almost too good at it. Compassion can become a form of legal ego.
Next phase, I lived these rites and cheerings merely as a journalist: I planned to someday “use” it, as a feeder source for fiction. Of course I’d first have to antique it, improve it into something far more shapely, and shortly. To use it someday, in the disguise of a novel, I’d probably need to roll back the period, make myself better looking, make them less gallingly articulate. Placing the struggle in a prettier age that might retroactively give meaning to my chores as all these gifted lives were ending everywhere around us.
Nothing helps cheer a brilliant thirty-four-year-old dying so unjustly. Not your wit, not your will, not the best that medicine could offer us then.
You just keep him warm and comfy and supported, and wait. You give up any plan or hope that gets in the way of anticipating what fluid or solid or joke your dear needs next. I’d somehow stopped writing. I kept tutoring. But I gave up sperm-doning for fear I’d shoot my present sadness into some new life form. Jinxing junior. Finally, tired past gray and on toward clarity (once everyone but me and The Bama had finally come down with it), I tired till I hit an ersatz wisdom, the cult of Only Now.
I gave up the eventuality of ever having a writing life again, even AFTER. AFTER, too, was a prop I quit leaning on. By then, this was a job, looking after was simply what I did, and then it stopped being a duty or a job and it was just a Tuesday and the things that needed fetching, washing. On the back of my apartment door, I’d thumbtacked a list marked “Do Today.” It had just three categories:
Must. Should. Might.
Must was a column I never quite got out of. I admired the waiting rectitude of Should. But, oh daydreaming ran mostly toward ethereal and sky-blue Might!
Finally, after fantasies of all those books I’d write dissolved, after the pride in a squeamishness overcome fell away, this was all that any of us managed. Caretaking could only take care of itself. There was a whole pack of us, mongrels, defrocked priests, unwed, with time to spare because we made time, with secret missionary temperaments. The tendency to want to think well of others—certain evidence not withstanding; this tireless try at, if not happiness, then not constant screaming either. The will to do the best ourselves. For ourselves. So, if we lived, we could live with ourselves. Even alone.
One day on the subway, I stood reading how Reinhold Niebuhr, asked to define Sainthood, answered, “The spouses of saints.”
I laughed aloud. People moved away at once. It’d gotten rarer, laughing aloud when alone. I so welcomed the sound, I barely noticed the fear it always stirred in fellow New York strangers. Happy=crazy.
Angie and I worked split-shift. She lunged at saving our friends in just the way she labored at the play of making art. Her toughness, I aspired to. It out-butched and outclassed us all. That she might be around to catch me when I fell, that kept me standing.
Finally, our Robert and Gideon and Marco were not just those we loved but what we did. Not as a rehearsal for some Walt Whitman story ahead, Walter nursing fallen pretty boys, becoming indispensable and then learning from it all.
Partly, my friends’ quiet bravery pushed me, teaching me, beyond my own peevishness, my own inherited hotheadedness, my cheery bogus “goals,” my early selfish self.
One day, filing through the piles of insurance forms that now littered a desk where I once wrote dog stories, my hand hit something cold. It was glass in a picture frame. Increase Hartley, his somber face had once seemed comically forlorn during my smiley youth. I now recalled Mosby’s praise, the Colonel’s concern about blankets and bacon for his “boys.” They called him “Saint Hen” and the name was truly affectionate. I remembered my own early snobbery at having a kinsman praised solely as a good provider, not as Terror of the Yankees. I had known so little two years back. “They taught us to provide, provide, son,” Dad had told me that last day.
Now, resemblance meeting resemblance, I pulled the oval frame against my lips. Glass now felt all grimed with New York’s dust-grease. I kissed the great grandfatherly image, pulled it off a ways to study. My mouth pursed, I touched the lip. Blood. I’d cut myself on him, too. Then I coughed back a sob, put my head down amid Blue Cross-Blue Shield forms and knowing I might might might cry. Did. Oh, but a good cry, at the right time, is like shitting when you really really need to. A good cry is so good.
Regrets, second thoughts, career frustrations?—you could either deal with those, or this.
This, of course, meant:
Them. Meant: Mine. My Boys.
I received the usual blue envelope from my mom. (The exact color of that thank-you-note supply she’d sent with me to New York.) Mother explained that, without Dad, many of their favorite Florida couples could no longer ask her over; not even the Albertsons! “On group things, I can see their cars leaving without me as I now seem to throw their numbers off!”
Therefore, she was considering, shock of shocks, moving back to North Carolina. She had begun asking my brothers, the two who lived there, how crowded this might make them feel. Then she added, in her schoolgirl handwriting,
“I have been picturing buying an old fixer-upper type of home. Two stories. A back garden, private. Is this too trite of me? Big repairs would drive Dick crazy
. But I personally like the idea of improving such a place. I want lots of rooms for you all to come visit whenever. And listen, you. Should you or any of your friends ever need to come down and get better from anything at all, or stay as long as you like forever, you know that I have had a lot of experience in this line. Nothing would make me happier. I am buying the house in order to get ready to entertain in a manner I would like to grow accustomed to giving away! Best to Angie. Nuf said, I remain, with love, Mother.”
On one of Robert’s last two good days, he barked, needing me to come closer. I dreaded hearing his next assault on my, what, what next? My remaining looks? But I could see my friend had been fretting, sad at having put a hex on my work, and last thing before I left that evening. I would lie if I told you I hadn’t felt it, to the quick. (Not that all he said was inaccurate, and not that, in replaying it a thousand times, I have not really tried to learn from it. Because I swear I have.)
Returning from the corner newsstand, I’d just bustled back into room 282, my face burning rosy from that stinging cold wind off the East River.
I was wearing something tweed and something silk and both were colorful. Saint Robert the Gaunt appeared oddly like Quixote now; he beckoned me nearer. “Today, m’Hartley, you look fabulous. Health itself. A Dutch still life. So pink a fine boy. You always were a table full of such good things, ready.”
“What you’re really saying, Robert, is—your Hick Hartley here is getting just a li’l bit fat.”
Plays Well With Others Page 36