When you hung up on me, they were due to leave for Paris the next day.
Two days later the pictures started coming, one after another, in my inbox. I recognized many of the landmarks from having seen pictures of Paris over the years, and I was naturally envious that they were over there, but I was more struck by the ordinariness of it all; not of the landmarks but of everything else around it. Tourists toting cameras were wearing all sorts of clothes: T-shirts, sneakers, and whatnot. A few even wore berets. They didn’t seem to be thinking about style, or adhering to a sense of classic style that pervaded many pictures of Parisians some decades before. Then the cars. They were small and ordinary. No sense of identifiable style. Yet I couldn’t pinpoint precisely why I’d felt so disappointed until I thought of color’s power to transform.
Somehow everything becomes nostalgic when it’s seen in black and white. Paris, even though it’s supposed to be on the forefront of fashion and all, is the epitome of romantic nostalgia. Its landmarks have become shorthand for timelessness. Strip away its colors, and one begins to long for the one who got away. Such is the power of monochrome.
I’ve never taken a picture of you.
Never will I be able to correct my own memory of you against the reality of you on my iPhone’s screen.
Memory is elastic, a rubber band, a roll of plastic wrap.
I will dream of you so much that you become taller, bigger, and broader only to shock me with your true dimensions when I see you again. The picture of you on Bear411 looks like it’s about five years old; your beard had less gray.
It is said that our bodies undergo a full transformation every seven years.
Will I recognize you years from now, and will I still find myself with a dull ache burning that only you can heal? Will I be just like Djuna, who never had another great love after Thelma left her?
You were careful not to give me a memento of our times together. No physical traces of you, and yet my body plays you like a recording as if made yesterday.
Four months after you hung up, Chloë knocked sharply on my door. “We have come to ask you to tell me everything you know about the night . . .”
I rolled my eyes at the tone of her voice. It wasn’t singsong; it was demanding as a mother’s. Tired as I was, I had been sitting in front of my laptop, hoping to score a date online. Well, anything. Even a hookup would’ve been acceptable.
I put on my bathrobe and stepped out into the living room.
“Sit down,” Chloë said in her best schoolteacher voice.
“What? What did I do?”
Chloë sat down next to Veena. “Honey, you want to start?”
“Bill, we’re very, very worried about you.”
“Well, it’s just stuff at work.”
“It’s not work. I can tell. Was it that guy you used to see on weekends?”
I said nothing.
“Come on. You can trust us,” Veena said. “What’s his name?”
“He doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Wait a minute. Let’s guess—he’s a closet case at risk of losing his trust fund if his parents found out about him?”
I chuckled. “No.”
“Number two: he’s a rising politician with a very dark past that he can’t risk exposing because he’s too in love with you and can’t afford to lose you, but that’s not how the movie ends in real life. He dumped you.”
I looked at both of them, and I felt as if my tears were shooting bullets straight out of my eyes.
When they sat next to me with their arms around me, I blubbered out the story of us between swaths of Kleenex under my nose. “How can I explain James to you?”
“That’s the problem with gay guys. It’s all about the look. You want to be seen with the hottest man in the bar so you can jack up your hotness quotient.”
“He didn’t . . .”
“Truly, I’m surprised. Haven’t you learned anything from your Gender Studies degree?”
I explained how he didn’t want me seen near him in public.
“What an asswipe.”
I laughed. Veena had been lobbying everyone to stop using the word “asshole” and start using “asswipe.” Chloë and I couldn’t stop giggling whenever Veena used that word. “It’s more colorful as we all need assholes, or we’d explode from so much shit inside us. Asswipe is a cleaner word.”
God, it felt so good to laugh.
In that moment I realized that in our times together we’ve laughed uncontrollably only when we tickled each other that one time.
Had we been tiptoeing on eggshells around each other the whole time?
The thought saddened me.
It nevertheless felt good to start getting it off my chest. You were no longer a dirty secret.
I contemplated telling all my friends about you, but I wondered if they’d think I was making it all up because I was desperate for attention. No one would believe that a man as hot as you would want me because, after all, you didn’t want to go anywhere in public with me. What did that say about me? Was I that grotesque?
Chloë picked up Nightwood and scanned its pages for a specific quote: “The lesson we learn is always by giving death and a sword to our lover. . . . take action in your heart and be careful whom you love—for a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.”
James, was I good enough for a fuck, but not good enough to be seen with you in public?
Gee, thanks a lot. Even my cock should’ve seen that one coming a mile away.
Down on the escalator I stood with my purchase of underwear in the northern end of the Allston Mall, one of those sad affairs that never attracted a lot of high-end retailers, and up on the escalator coasted the curly-haired stranger I’d seen before. It was already summer, so he wasn’t wearing his green parka. The sides of his head were trimmed, letting the curls on top of his head overflow a bit. He wore white-framed sunglasses and Converse sneakers. I didn’t recognize him at all until he peered above his sunglasses and gave me a tiny smile that annoyed me so. Who the hell did he think he was? I thought of running down the escalator and jumping onto the other escalator so I could pursue him. He was a ghost made flesh; he existed, yet reappeared as if at will. It had been the first time I’d seen him after you hung up on me. Who was he, and what had he done to you? Ghosts are full of answers waiting for the right questions.
Over the weeks that followed, I told my housemates more about you in bits and pieces. It was sometimes hard to find the right words, and I’d always regarded myself as pretty articulate!
I felt like a ghost reporter when I recounted our times together. I left out the sexual details, of course, but I gave them the facts.
Veena hugged me now and then. “It’s great that you’re telling us so much.”
Chloë was the one who’d said it best. “Losing Craig nearly killed you, and finding James brought you back from the dead. You can’t let him kill you now.”
Hearing it framed that way made a lot of things clear, but I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted answers. I even asked Veena if I could use her phone to call you; not to talk with you, but to see whether you’d blocked my number. For a long time the telephone company said your number did not exist.
My heart beat louder than the ringing from your end.
You picked up. “Hello?”
I gave the phone back to Veena. “Sorry,” she said. “Wrong number.”
“Fuck. He’s blocked me.”
“Drop him. It’s all about him. He’s broken.”
“Broken?”
“Yes, he’s broken,” Chloë said. “Forget about him.”
“I don’t understand. Broken?” I looked at her and Veena. “You talking about his foot?”
“No. His heart’s been shattered into a million pieces, and he can’t collect them all into his hands. He can’t glue it all back together. Too hard, too painful. He’s never going to heal. If what you say is true—that he’s like the hottest stud around—he’ll
never have a shortage of guys who’ll want to take care of him. That way he can stay broken and not do the heavy work on himself. As Djuna would say—” Veena reached for Nightwood and scanned the pages near the end. “I’m looking for this part where she says— oh! There it is: ‘And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her “escape” again.’ Bill, I’m so, so sorry, but he really is broken.”
I’d never thought that way about you.
Broken.
What a strange way to rethink you.
Almost insulting, even, when you consider how people had treated you differently because they saw your body as incomplete.
But broken?
I’d spent all this time believing that I was the damaged one. That you might be more broken than I am had never occurred to me.
I dreamed of being pushed along through a crowd screaming and hurling insults at me in a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what my crime was, only that I was full of stomach cramps. I couldn’t stand to my full height without feeling the urge to keel over. It was probably botulism. I could not breathe normally, what with my swollen face, and my naked feet, which weren’t toughened against razor pebbles, felt spikes of pain with each step. The rough-hewn rope scratched like knives around my neck; I was a starved dog being led to his execution. When I finally looked up, I saw that we were in a huge town square. Vultures waited expectantly in barren trees above the crowd; they appeared to be licking their beaks. Up ahead was the wooden platform. I couldn’t wait to climb the steps for at least there wouldn’t be such sharp teeth nipping at my feet. I felt myself zoning out until I bumped against the first step. Everything around me turned into a blur of noise and light and shadow. I pushed up on the steps, and as I did so, I felt slivers of wood poking at my bleeding feet. I wanted to scream out from the pain, but I was too parched to talk. Nonetheless I forced myself to lift one foot after another up the ten steps. I was not a suicidal person, but this I wanted: death.
A tall shadow crossed my face, and I tried to peer at it, shielding my eyes from the sun. He was tall and broad-shouldered like you, and his furry chest was scarred and tattooed with pagan icons. He had a gray burlap bag with holes cut out for his eyes over his head, and he had a huge ax in his hand. The ax swung ever so slightly, as if in anticipation of my raw neck. I called out your name, a whimper. He took the rope from my caretaker, and he pulled me sharply to let me know who was boss. There before me was a stump. I could see through many layers of old and dried blood the onion slice of years it had grown before it was chopped down. He pushed me down to my knees, which really hurt. He twisted my head to the side as the crowd’s screams and insults turned louder and louder until I saw nothing but out of the corner of my eye the white bounce of light off his ax swinging high before severing my head. But the ax had been heavier than he’d expected, so it was a struggle to swing it upward; as he did so, the bag-mask fell off his head. It was me! The crime of you was so unforgivable that I had become my own executioner.
When Djuna first arrived in Paris, she didn’t like the City of Light; she almost hated it for a few weeks. The French language and culture confused her, and everything else was strange, foreign. But when she began to meet other English-speaking expatriates all of the artistic bent, she felt more and more at home until she met Thelma Wood, a silverpoint artist. Ah, the lights of circus, the arcs of trapeze artist, the spectacles of white horses trotting in unison, the smell of sawdust and popcorn! Ah, Thelma! The very mistress of night herself had illuminated the darkness of day with gas-lit kisses. By then Djuna had been living in Paris for not even a year, and it wasn’t long before the two women moved in together. They spent days and nights together at home and abroad, eventually amassing tender souvenirs that became a list, easily the most forlorn and the saddest, in Nightwood: “circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old merry-go-round, Venetian chandeliers bought from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from Munich, cherubim from Vienna . . .” Each object, by its very mention, became invested with memory, fraught with emotion, until its power faded with the sun of years passing by. Why each object listed was important didn’t matter; the very mention alone implied stories that only these two women would ever know. Each souvenir was chosen, born out of their own mythology. Djuna too surrendered these objects, but she clipped them all for the scrapbook of Nightwood.
I have no such mementos from our days and nights together; just memory, the most fragile of all gifts tendered between one human to another. The room of you is empty, but my bed is covered with musty trunks plastered with stickers of the countries I’d traveled with you. It is ready to collapse; there is too much weight. Memory, though light as air at first, turns heavy when not allowed to travel, gets lost. If worthwhile, it will come back; if not, perhaps it was not meant to be, already an insignificant detail not worthy of recall. What we do remember, of what we can when we are able to do so, says so much of what we’d valued back then. If that being the case, each orgasm we shared together is what had been important to me. Maybe trying to top our previous orgasm was so important that we found ourselves floundering in trying to braid the invisible yarns floating outward from our hearts to each other. We had so little experience in loving, truly loving, that when we had a chance, we flubbed it, not realizing what we’d just done until it was all over but the silence, the great silence that always shouts in our ears when we at last catch the sight of each other’s shadow fading into the sunset. By then it will be too late to photograph what we’d seen in each other, and people younger than us will wonder what was such a big deal. Without scrapbooks of memory we are nothing.
AS WINDS BITTER AND CALM FLEE
If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
—Adrienne Rich
Oh, what of the night that makes us see the very things we are afraid of in broad daylight? What in the sinister detail keeps scratching at the edges of our eardrums that keep us from falling completely into the kind of sleep reserved for newborns? What of the gritty gravel spewed all over the smooth pavement so no rain can slip and slide wheels aside? What of the electrons blinking in blobs on the TV screen, leaking out windows where lonely men and women prowl the streets, never seeing each other as they pass? What of the wet cold that coats the grass blades like daggers, impaling the naked body of your dreams? What of the searing sip of scotch coursing down your throat, filling you aswirl with fire at a world gone mad? What of the distant eyes blinking blocks away before the car coasts closer to a stop, too late past the stripes of the pedestrian crossing? What of the crickets playing their locust song, needling the fireflies into staccato lightning until they too expire?
Oh oh oh, what of the night?
Answer me with the searchlight of your heart.
Tonight I’m feeling great. James, I haven’t felt this great in a long time.
I think you’ll be extremely upset to learn what happened tonight at the VFW Hall. I knew you wouldn’t be there as it was a midweek night. My friends Ted and Steve wanted me to come play Drag Bingo with them, so why not play a dumb game for a change, right?
Well, guess who happened to sit next to me at the table?
A goateed guy with glasses. Thick curly hair. Rather slender. A confirmed Anglophile. Do you remember anyone like him? Quite a mysterious character.
No?
Let me refresh your memory: you called him a “nut” some months ago when I got into your truck one Friday evening.
Does that help?
All right: his name is Gordy Benjamin.
I’m sure you’re rolling your eyes already.
I bet you’ll think he has serious mental health issues.
Let’s just say what he said about you was most enlightening. Most enlightening!
He had come in with a friend of his, and they happened to sit at our table. I introduced my
self to them since—might as well, right? I did recognize him from before, so I didn’t want to seem rude.
The game was fun with Lady Squirrelbutt calling out the numbers. I didn’t really care at all whether I won, and I didn’t win at all. It was all for some charity.
I learned that Gordy was single.
I thought, Hm. Not exactly my type, but you know what? I’ll give him a whirl. After all, Craig wasn’t really my type, but we clicked anyway.
That’s what I always have to remind myself when I meet someone new. Give him a chance, like I gave Craig a chance, you know?
I asked Gordy how long ago was his relationship.
He said, “It ended last year.”
His friend said, “He’s still obsessed with James Sutton. Can you please help snap him out of it?”
I sat there slack-jawed.
Gordy gave me the queerest look. “I knew it!”
I whispered to him. “I’m tired of this game. Let’s go outside for some air.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m dying for a smoke.”
Outside by the parking lot he offered me a cigarette, but I passed.
He really illuminated a lot of things. Truly.
Don’t roll your eyes at me now.
You wanna know what he told me?
He said you were looking for a relationship when you met him at the Eagle thirteen years ago. You had lost your foot five years before.
He said your longest relationship had been six months.
He said you told him you always ended the relationship before the other guy did, so you wouldn’t get hurt. “‘Preemptive strike,’” he quoted you.
You should’ve seen the look on my face.
I thought Gordy was lying about you. I couldn’t believe that you could be loquacious. What had happened to you between your time with Gordy and your time with me?
But that’s not what interested me about Gordy.
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