By then I needed extra pairs of hands. Gideon was gone, Robert so seriously down with it, and now Marco dead. Marco had been a birdwatcher. His place was covered with reproductions of the big Audubon prints. And dozens of bicycles being taken apart and reassembled. If I didn’t know him better, I’d have considered this a chop shop. I later found the list of names of friends, and phone numbers where these bikes should be returned. But there were just gears, loose wheels all over. His mother and sister arrived, articulate warm people—not quite what I expected. In organizing, they found a hundred lists tucked everywhere. Marco had remained so clear and annotated to the end. I recalled his sixteen foreign words for “angel.”
One such item was read aloud at the funeral; his sister handed it directly to me after the service. On a yellow hospital scratchpad from “Billing and Insurance,” set down in script so tiny and pain-contracted it looked like a modern dance troupe of Martha Graham-trained ants, Marco Eisdorfer had written a list of over one hundred WORDS THAT RHYME WITH PAIN:
butane
Bahrain
birdbrain
cane
chilblain
cocaine
Citizen Kane
Dwane
Duane
Dusquene
deplane
And with his wit intact, the suffering surpassed even sounding like anything. He’d got clear to the S’s when death, which respects only itself and is therefore humorless, shushed our boy.
(His mom and sister gave me that list to “use,” and now I partly have, and therefore can rest easier.)
More and more, these deaths recalled my father’s, my father. “He seems to have a fair-sized chip on both his shoulders,” I’d once felt glad to overhear a neighbor say. Why did Dad feel singled out? Born poor, he got sent to work the counter as soon as he could stand and speak; he came of age during America’s worst financial rout; he’d outlived that just in time to be stuck into uniform and sent to mind the store in France. How can you perfectly corrupt one whole generation?—First you take all the money away, then you explain that money is what mattered most; then you ship them off in uniforms to ensure an even greater conformity and, once home, you give the money back. And more. More than those aproned kids could ever have imagined owning. And you’ve perfected a group totally addicted to succeeding, at their own expense, and at their loved ones’.
Now I had my own disaster. It let me know how little my own dad could’ve managed in shaping his. I, assigned a sewer, perfected water acrobatics on its unlovely surface. But like him, you sacrifice form. But you get ashore alive.
And, later, after the next to last of my friends died, after I escaped New York, didn’t I, moping around the hardware store of my new village, show both his affable surface and his overpressurized triggerpoint? People acted kind to me but I saw they felt they couldn’t really count on me, not yet. They whispered around me.
In a shed behind my North Carolina house, I bent over some old windows. Each pane reflected the silhouette, stern, bowed, manly yet thickened toward the tanklike—and it was so much him, I had to rush indoors and sit somewhere and miss him.
Did I earlier say I didn’t, that I only missed missing my father? What a flippant, queenly, overelegant and quite inaccurate revenge on half my being. I recall his three-pointed handkerchief as he headed to the Rainbow Room: “Watch out, New York!” I remember his saying, “Provide, provide, they told us.” I recollect the sight of him, having dragged my mother’s vacuum cleaner out into the garage, him down on all fours purging sand from the Buick’s backseat carpet, and looking so intense and playful squatting there, using the screeching as something to hide in, his face grown childlike, rapt. Doing good, doing good well.
Oh, Dad. I never even “interviewed” you.
Would you, asked, have answered me?
I will go on record. I still don’t exactly know why you were so strict with your young son. Did you fear that my emotions, my drama, would cut me off from seeming serious enough to be, say, anybody’s dad? That’s not true, Pop. I’ve several friends and children.
I sometimes miss you, Sir.
* See Appendix.
* The New York Times, March 18, 1986.
AFTER AFTER
The Company of Spirits
I can never write any sort of story unless it contains one character for whom I feel physical desire.
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Introduction to Collected Stories
Naming of Parts
It is here, to be observed, that after the funerals became so many that people could not toll the bell, mourn or weep, or wear black for one another, as they did before, no, nor so much as make coffins for those that died, so, after a while, the fury of the infection appeared to be so increased, that, in short, they shut up no houses at all…. All the remedies had been used till then were found fruitless, and that the plague spread itself with an irresistible fury; so that, as the fire the succeeding year spread itself and burnt with such violence that the citizens in despair gave over their endeavors to extinguish it, so in the plague it came at last to such violence, that the people sat still looking at one another, and seemed quite abandoned to despair. Whole streets seemed to be desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their inhabitants: doors were left open, windows stood shattering with the wind in empty houses, for want of people to shut them. People began to give up themselves to their fears, and to think that all regulations and methods were in vain, and that there was nothing to be hoped for but a universal desolation. And it was even in the height of this general despair that it pleased God to stay his hand, and to slack the fury of the contagion in such a manner as was even surprising, like its beginning, and demonstrated it to be his own particular hand.
still use the one book for recording my friends’ whereabouts. I’m averse to a Rolodex or computer screens for my own pal-tracking function. Books somehow appeal to me. Blame my love of the antique. I must now purchase new address ledgers at those serious office supply shops that rest between the solemnity of medicinal suppliers and the useful good cheer of hardcore hardware stores.
“I am merely Society’s secretary,” Balzac’s fake modesty proclaims. But all address bookkeepers become novelists of sorts, charting entrances, chronicling exits. Divorces register; incoming newborns warrant the listing of full names. Wars and epidemics only heighten the hindsight drama of the role-call. This is the DNA “material” of life and, incidentally, of narrative art.
Those years I spent attending, nursing, celebrating, thirty-some waning boys, my straight friends spent having, nursing, teaching one baby. It’s a lovely baby, mind you, and my godchild. It has golden curls and is, of course, a genius. The parents’ engendering and then “changing” said baby seems laudable to all. My own loved ones were not brought into the world by me, but only, in my company, let out of it.
I know that my obit will read, “Leaves no immediate survivors.” And I know my friends who’re parents will be squired into their afterlife with the ennobling proclamation, “Leaves a son, Gaines, a student at New Haven …”
And yet, I feel I’ve earned a family, too. It’s just not a family of survivors.
Now I understand another peculiar fact of physics: It is possible to sit before Love—even the love of someone dead—to sit before it as you would before a brand-new sunlamp, and to become, over time, quite tanned by it.
You can be bronzed toward health by the love of your missing. I still feel irradiated daily by the playful wit, even by the stubborn petulance, of absent friends.
—So, I’ve decided: I will keep them in the book. But they will be spelled in capitals all their own. The living, any possible new ones, will get only lowercase. The living friends will have their jumbled data entered and then changed in pencil. But inked, changeless now, my darlings are rendered bold, right where they left off, all caps, all stars, and honored there forever.
Please, though, tell me. Tell me that I managed to love t
hem enough.
When they started getting sick, I feared I wouldn’t do enough for them. When so many were down with it, I feared I’d done too much. Now they’re dead; I’m shamed by all the chances missed.
I am just figuring out how to do it right next time around.
You hear of something called Survivor’s Guilt. That’s less than half the story. With it comes Survivor’s Pride, Survivor’s Glee, Survivor’s Fear of Having Survived in Name Only. Add to that, a Survivor’s obnoxious tendency to work every topic back around to a Survivor’s survival. You can, if you’re lucky, tell yourself you’re living for them, so they can better live via you.
I hear there’s hope now. These new medical regimes can sometimes keep the sickness beaten to one place. The procedures are expensive; the sickness is still dreadful, but it’s becoming something you can mostly live with. Pray.
And yet, a pro at this by now, I feel somewhat teased by the protease inhibitors. They just make the struggles of my loved ones feel even more early early. Friends seem stuck even farther offshore that long night when our beautiful boat went down. Till then, we sure did think that we were something.
This, my ledger record, is a huge debt only partly repaid.
Only now am I just starting to begin to know them, whole.
“Hello”—as I begin my second life.
With them.
Friend?
You have already written your brilliant, funny, and immortal autobiography. It will prove, in the end, your finest and most complicated work.
It is your address book.
Just after my father’s, then Gideon’s, then Marco’s funerals, I went a bit awry and fell over into a swerving sort of sewering grief. Looking back, I think my dad’s death cost me far more than I knew then. I was so fixed on the injustice of my young friends going down to it. I almost took Natural Causes for granted.
You can only postpone the self-pity for so long. And when it jumps you all at once, it hits you like the beast in the jungle. Jugular, it goes for.
With them dead, I found that basically I did not care to caretake myself. You cannot simply reach down now, tickle yourself and expect to laugh. Takes two, though three are even better. You can only bear to lose so many in a row. You keep turning for help to your next-to-last one down, keep expecting he might help you with this loss most recent. Missingness cannot support you. Soon, that steady whistle is the wind tunnel you live in. Soon—you can barely sit up on your futon—(and why do futons suddenly seem so passé? Why live in a city where everybody sleeps on the same sort of furniture in the self-same trendy season?).
Then I truly could not get up off my outmoded mattress. I lost those marginal unwanted fifteen pounds and then dropped thirty-five and people began avoiding me. But it was not That. At least, not That, directly.
Only Angie hung right in there, with awful jokes and flowers almost too perfect. “Just no white lilies, ever,” I begged her. She laughed her best bad witch imitation.
She was the only one who kept on teasing me alive. “You have work to do. Potential, remember? That’s where we all came in.”
In the literature of sailing there’s the term “becalmed.” To us, these days so driven by speed’s imperatives, it can sound desirable. It was actually a sailor’s nightmare—to be left floating on a sailing ship far far from even sight or thought of land, with only windpower to push you, and then no breeze for weeks. I felt like that. All dressed up and no place to blow, anchored yet only in some void. My sails aloft, waiting for the only locomotion something so passive could count on … a push, a jump.
In those months before I fled New York, I still passed Ossorio’s. But crossed to the street’s other side, fear of who would not be visible there at “our” table, one reclaimed for the general good, dominoes now played there by the dapper older Cuban gents.
Then, if I can chronicle another change, and I am trying trying—several things lifted, a breeze had pushed me somewhat forward. As happens at the breakup of a depression so complete, I was moving before I quite noticed.
One thing that helped—an accidental stillness. How to survive? Do not remarry at once. Don’t rush out and find “new friends.” Some folks will foolishly buy a pet shop puppy the day they back over their beloved old beagle snoozing deaf in the sun-warmed drive.
“Give it a rest, Hartley.” So folks said to me, touching my silvered temples and strained face as if these were geological formations that deserved their own postcard. I wondered what “it” meant. I’ve begun to know.
With assistance from the lady real estate agent who helped Mother find her place one village away, I came upon the very house I had long pictured. My expertise at packing others quickly came in handy. I learned to unpack, myself, so slowly.
When I leave this house here, I’ll be crated out (by others).
Living in this little town, owner of two birdbaths regularly filled and used by multitudes for free, I do not go out more than two consecutive evenings. I linger with my missing ones. I have bought a porch rocker apiece, as the portraits of Marco, Gideon, and Robert, and six more of my missing. By the time I lured Angie down here to see my new-old place, she walked around the L-shaped porch and, poking a chair, announced, “Your rogue’s gallery. A circle, the old familiars, hunh?” Placing her hand on the back of each rocker in turn, pushing it to see if it wobbled somewhat in character, she named every boy, a chair at a time.
She scared me, smiling. Got them all. “Perfect Double Jeopardy score,” I told her but felt half undone. I settled on Gideon.
She next played musical friends. “Marco sits most comfortably, but Robert’s throne’s the prettiest by far, just not built for the long run, is it. Showboat.”
As someone always lucky in his friends, I’d daily rush to our table for company, today’s gossip political and sexual, consumed like more caffeine. (I all but got a headache if I missed two days’ good trash and bustle.)
But now I was past forty-seven. That age in itself makes it easier to sit alone here for almost fifteen minutes. My sex drive—once the Indy 500 every weekday—has recanted to mere spirited Sunday drives. I remembered my grandfolks’ weekly puttering tour of all land they owned, no rush, it’d be there.
If I could not spend time with my Robert, Ansel, Gideon, Marco—and if Angie was off traveling more and more lately—it might as well be me here. I would be interesting, at least, for having known those mythic others. This whole house had cost what one ghetto studio-apartment would. Now, suddenly absolved from nursing duty, I was free to relearn writing. But what to write about, but them?
I cannot bear, by now, to explain myself to strangers. Spelling out afresh my number of sibs, how many parents dead or living, my childhood ballroom dancing lessons while wearing those little white chimpanzee gloves— the very prospect of my issuing charm toward some “date” (i.e., a total stranger!) makes me feel ill and worried, fake.
By now, such an inventory of my life history must include my friends! It’d take my whole remaining life to tell it, tell that, tell them all.
And who, new to my address book, would willingly learn so endless a yarn? Prom themes of Dead Iowa Boys. No one should indulge me.
So I would sit now. In portrait rockers of my dead. I would now learn to sit.
On the big porch of an old house in a little town, there’s a semi-tubby man rocking, not reading a paper, not writing a letter, not doing his taxes, not doing nothing but setting there, listening to birdsong, and that is me now.
Am I lucky, or what?
And if I did not change the pandemic,
Q: How did it change me?
Answer:
B.C. —I did not know anything.
A.D. —Then I sorta did know I hadn’t, known.
And post A.D.?—Now I fully know I knew almost enough. If Doing ranks among the crudest yet more honorable forms of Knowing. I pretty much did. Know.
Of Robert’s ending all I’ll say is that he understood we were in the room, that we�
��d drawn up close around his bed. Don’t ask me how I know he knew. How do any of us know anything about the rest of us? Trust me, there are signs too subtle to leave even one overt smudgy stain. He knew it was I who held that bone rake previously considered the music-writing hand of an artist formerly known as Robert. He knew that Alabama had been forced to leave for her Berlin show. Those two had already said their goodbyes (just in case). I did and didn’t want to be there to see the terms, the scale of it, but I suspected.
He knew I had just emptied his apartment of the kiddy porn and bigboy love stakes, coast clear now for his folks, so they could sleep in that most hospitable and proactive of fruit-topped beds. Before I phoned them there to grab a taxi and come fairly quickly please, I tried to tell him a tale, to make the subway mishap into a comic story for him: of a blue shopping bag that split on a uptown local. He was past speech since his last direct orders, “broom closet.” But I could see a ghost of an eighth of a smile still ham-mocked somewhere in him. I knew that it—a joke about some vice of his made overly public and therefore comic—had reached our boy last thing. Amen.
Robert’s was a genial, a stammering halt. He waited, dutiful, for his parents to rush in, without wanting to seem to rush. “I’ve called them, honey,” I had said. He waited till they wrestled their coats off, then half collected themselves. I could see they had been napping or more (the magic bed’s romantic effect?) and that the Gustafsons were flustered on account.
You watched him take in the room as does some swimmer waiting for the signal, the contestant strong and flexed in starter position at pool’s edge, eyes still busy, playful, fixed just above water level on those loved ones waving, eyes busy and glad to be working a last time before true work begins, work mostly underneath.
Then it was that starting pistol, the determined if slowed movement as through water. His mother got on his right side, his father prayed aloud (eyes lifted) with such sweet faith, on his left. I wedged in at the feet. Surrounded, he knew he was. His eyes opened wide a last time, and he took in the room and I wondered if he looked for Angie and I fought feeling jealous of that, even now! He saw me at the foot of the bed and I, silly, waved, but it was all right because he gave the slightest nod and tried to lift the hand to his mouth for, I knew, a last blown kiss, so social, then put his head back on the pillow and began the ending of it in earnest.
Plays Well With Others Page 39