He said you had a terrible problem that you wished no one should ever have. For a minute there I thought he’d meant your disability.
“Bill, didn’t you hear what I said?”
“What?”
“That’s why he broke up with you.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not quite following you.”
“He broke up with you because he was in love with you.”
“What?”
“I know, I know. This sounds weird, but hear me out. He’s totally incapable of using love and sex in the same sentence. The minute he falls in love with someone is the minute he loses sexual interest in him. Just like that.”
Whoa, I thought. “Really? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“It happens a lot more than you think. Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much sex.” He leaned closer to me. “My friend’s wrong about me. I’m not obsessed with James. He knows that I’ve been dating a lot of guys these days, but he likes to needle me about James, the ‘hottest man alive.’ It’s just annoying, but you know.”
“He doesn’t sound like much of a friend then.”
“No, he’s not, but he’s proven himself useful now and then. Like now. He brought me to bingo when I wasn’t in the mood to go out.” He held out his hand and smiled. “Tonight I’ve made a new friend.”
For the rest of the evening, we didn’t talk about you at all. We talked about books and movies and music and theater. Oh, he’s really a delightfully funny and smart guy. He works in marketing for the largest corporation in the city. You know the one I’m talking about. No wonder you’d broken up with him, and with so many others.
Including me. You did love me.
As I twist and turn, thinking of you, wondering how could I have been so oblivious, the foggy-eyed fool that I am, in my sleep toward dawn, I am cloaked with light, the same light as fireflies casting off the dust of day’s sleep. I have no feet, yet I have no need of prosthetics. I am made of air, yet not of the dead and forgotten. Ahead are the weary streets of Paris, not of the 1920s, but right now, in the twenty-first century lit by LED bulbs and murmurs triangulated between cell phones constantly moving like blips on the radar screen, lined with tiny gas-efficient cars parked and still more moving along like cattle corralled toward their slaughter. This is not the Paris of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless or even Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie; this is the Paris of any other city in the world yet fortunately blessed with one jaw-dropping landmark after another. The night is blue-pearled with crescents of gold cascading across the older cobblestones not yet paved over. The striped awnings are painted with words in French that I don’t know. I overhear snatches of conversation in French, Dutch, Korean, Polish, Japanese, German, and English between lovers and strangers looking at the glimmers of the Seine. It is frighteningly easy to travel anywhere in Paris; you just have to let your heart go and be there. Close your eyes and listen below you to the thousands and thousands of skeletons, the bones rearranged for ghoulish effect snaking along in the catacombs under the thick skin of the city. They whisper, sing; most of all they welcome you. They never get enough sparkling company, made more witty with the right amount of alcohol and cigarettes, showing up at the party. Right here, right now is Paris, not thousands of miles away, but right here in the cup of my hands holding the blood and tears of my heart. I can see my face in its mirror, and behind me are the clichéd lights of the Eiffel Tower. It’s what tourists were trained to look for when they come here, and it’s become shorthand for what Paris should be as no one has the time to understand anything more than what’s there in the movies, but it’s not the Paris I want to know and live in. The Paris I want to know has nothing to do with you, not that foreign language of you, for the Paris I had lived and breathed for too long, from Djuna from so long ago, has become a mausoleum, an art exhibit left in tatters after critics savaged all of it with their oil-hungry daggers. Djuna of the Storm King Mountain, who knew how far she’d travel from the days, ached for those happy years she spent with Thelma, and they took place, right there, on 173 Boulevard Saint-Germain and, later, 9 rue Saint-Romain, both on the Left Bank. She twisted and turned long enough to turn her hurt into spite, recasting horrors into objets d’art, the kind that would surely line the walls of the Louvre, a museum not of painted images but of words brutally sculpted as the Rodins. Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud and Jacques Prévert and Jean Cocteau aren’t the only gods of the page. The 1920s are dead like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso and Man Ray, and it’s time that I seek a different kind of romance, the kind that will fill me with wist and wonder when I look back twenty, thirty years from now, with the kind of man who will look me in the eye and see the twinkle of stars, the same that Vincent van Gogh once daubed across the canvas stretched wide enough to embrace his startling visions and then some.
The twenty-first century, the known world no longer as vast and infinite, is right here, and I intend to live fully in the now. No matter where I am, I will create my own Paris. I will startle, for not to startle means a lifetime closer to death. I am a magician’s cape filled with tricks, and I will captivate everyone I meet until you realize what a sleight of hand my heart was when you put your hand in your pocket only to find it empty. I am night, and my answers are full of day.
While you play again the game of love with someone else, the rest of us lonely men at the Eagle will eye you with hunger. We will nurse our drinks and make mindless chatter with each other not realizing how many of us have had a secret history with you. We will never talk about how much we wanted you, and we know it’s not proper to wonder out loud about your prosthetic foot. We will one day form a brotherhood of men you didn’t want to fuck after feeling those noodly strings tugging at your heart. We will compare notes on you, and before long, everyone else will know upfront the risks of loving you. Those of us still undeterred will feel the promise of hope because we imagine that if you’re missing a foot, we will stand a chance with you. After all, we are physically complete even if we are not as dazzlingly gorgeous as you. We pray that you will want us to complete you, make you whole. That of course is utter bullshit, but that’s why some people will gravitate toward people like you. They don’t feel themselves complete, therefore they seek out others who are clearly broken.
Like I was.
I am far more complete than I’d ever realized, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I have two feet. My soul inside me had felt like a ghost, and therefore I had to behave like one. I was ephemeral as a puff from your cigar, easily gone like ashes brushed off your fingers after a draw.
Others, unsuspecting, will come forth from the shadows to you. We will watch them try what we’d failed to achieve with you, and whisper among ourselves how much we’d tried, hoped. We don’t need to say much. If we can’t be part of the bear community, I suspect that we’d be content with knowing we weren’t alone in loving you. You like to sit and model. Sometimes you will unbutton your shirt, or take it off. If you’ve got the fur, you might as well flaunt it. We’d be something like the First Ex-Wives Club, except that you’ve never proposed to any of us; Gordy has joked that we should call ourselves the Sutton-Dumped Club. Those of us whose hearts you’ve broken will observe others, not yet knowing your history, melting in your presence. A few of them may feel cheeky enough to approach you with a hello.
It’s a game that you play only to lose. You must like it that way because why else do you keep playing it?
Do you want to know what else Gordy’s told me about you? He eventually met others who were involved with you over the years, so he pieced together what he thinks is your story.
Your father was a major alcoholic who’d managed to hold down his job as schoolteacher right up until the day he retired. You left home as soon as you could, and you never came back. You had five brothers and sisters, and you’d changed your name once your daughter came of age so your ex-wife couldn’t track you down. That would explain why Annie would’ve appeared out of nowhere after so many y
ears. Not sure if I believe this part. Sutton is not an ethnic name like so many others—Finns, Swedes, Norwegians—up north where you grew up.
Your mother couldn’t deal with the emotional travail of raising six kids and the strain of keeping your father at bay. You saw him hit her repeatedly when she insisted that he hit her instead of the kids. She spent her days recovering from the bruises, and she needed to be left alone. She couldn’t bear to be touched by anyone.
No wonder you didn’t keep beer in the fridge, and no wonder you didn’t want me to cuddle you all night long.
Gordy believes you’d learned from your parents that love invited only emotional and physical pain, so you couldn’t bear the potential hurt of love. What then now? Should I punch you on the jaw because that was all you’d learned of love? Should I demand that you never be touched because you were only worthy as a punching bag? Should I denigrate you and call you all sorts of names so you’d know how much I loved you? What is love to you?
Then Gordy told me a story about you that shocked me. Some guy named Charlie, who was a struggling potter, gave you a box of cheap cigars for your birthday. You insisted he return it for better quality cigars, which he couldn’t afford. Charlie felt like crap because he’d let you down. If this story is indeed true, you should be ashamed of yourself for not appreciating the intent of his gesture. Doesn’t matter if the gift wasn’t up to your standards. Someone took the time to think of you long enough to get you something, even though he was quite broke. You say thank you, and just smoke it! Don’t be so selfish, okay?
Gordy told me another story from someone else named David. You were quite the hiker before the accident. This I hadn’t fully realized about you, but I should’ve known from the way you were able to scale that hill near your house. It wasn’t just your height or the way you walked; you were made for slope and altitude. David, the guy you were seeing at the time, had been thin all his life so he’d never felt the need to work out. He had such high metabolism that he could eat anything and not gain a pound. One week you and David went out west to somewhere in Idaho. David did warn you that even though he had some camping experience growing up, he didn’t have much hiking experience, but he was game to try. You moved so quickly up the mountain that every time you paused, you were seething from impatience at what you’d perceived as David’s slowness. You didn’t have trouble breathing at the higher altitudes, but he wasn’t used to it. You lashed out at him because he was keeping you behind in your goal of covering a certain distance each day. David was shocked. He’d thought that the two of you would share a week of communing with nature, but you didn’t seem to care about accommodating him. David turned around and went down. He left you standing there, and you were quite incensed by the time you two returned to the parking lot. David said absolutely nothing, wouldn’t say anything to your face, demanded to use the telephone in the ranger’s office to change his plane ticket while the park ranger gave you a what-the-hell-is-going-on look, went outside and found a ride back to town with two day-trippers returning from the mountains, taxied to the airport back home. He was sorry at first to learn of your accident, but he later became happy when he realized that maybe your disability would teach you to be more patient with others.
Gordy told me many more stories from men you’d discarded. I was truly astonished. I had no idea that you’d become an anthology of selfishness. The problem with physical beauty is that people in awe of it will excuse a lot of ill behavior. Thanks to you, I’ve become grateful that I was never so beautiful I’d forget how to treat others with kindness and compassion.
Love—if that was loosely what we had—had to be on your terms only. That’s not love. That’s possession. When you felt you couldn’t control the relationship, you had to end it. No wonder we lasted only six months.
I hadn’t seen that one coming, but it seems so obvious now.
Of course, you didn’t want me to meet any of your friends or be seen in public with me or meet my housemates, because if that happened, you’d lose control over our relationship. You just can’t discard people for no reason at all. Just not right.
Not long after I met Gordy, we went to see a play called Plum da Faeries at the Punkhead. It was an outrageous take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, except that they were all Mafioso fairies who liked to cross-dress while drinking one martini after another one long night in a penthouse. It was funny!
When we joined the audience filing out of the theater, I noticed Matt sitting in his wheelchair by the entrance. I hadn’t made the connection between him and the director’s name—Matthew J. Madden—in the program notes until that moment.
“Excuse me,” I said to Gordy.
The crowd had thinned enough that he could see me coming. I was afraid that he’d roll away, but he didn’t. He gazed at me as if he had nothing to hide, and he was right. I had been hiding too much.
“Hi, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your play, it was funny as all get out, I’m so fucking sorry for being such an asshole weeks ago, I still have your number taped to the wall above my desk, I was a jerk, I should’ve—”
“Stop.” He held up his hand. “It’s okay.”
“You scared me because you were so strong.”
“Right. Crips are supposed to be weak.”
I slowly shook my head. “Well, I felt like anything I said or did would make you make me feel like crap, when I was trying my damn best to understand you. I hate the feeling that my best is never going to be good enough for you. Ever.”
“No, that’s not true,” he whispered. “You know that’s not true.”
“Then stop knocking me down all the time. I’m not every able-bodied person who’s given you the middle finger, so just stop taking it out on me, okay? I fucked up, okay, and I’m sorry. Okay?” I glanced back at Gordy. “I gotta go.”
“Are you going to call me?”
“Maybe.” I couldn’t look into his eyes. “I don’t know.”
Would I date a disabled man again? You bet your ass I would, but not if he felt unable to mix love and sex in the same sentence. I deserve someone who is fluently bilingual in love and sex. Just not you.
I looked at Matt’s number on the wall above my dresser. What the hell. I picked up my phone and dialed. “Hey?”
“Who’s this?”
“Bill Badamore. This is Matt, right?”
“Oh, yeah.” A brief pause. “I thought you’d never call.”
“I’ve decided that giving you the silent treatment wasn’t fair to you.”
He laughed. “Oh, it’s okay, bud. How are you doing?”
We met again, and this time we had burgers and fries at Beefy Guys. We had a great time. I think he’d figured that he should lay off on disability politics and hang loose with me. I didn’t think I’d feel so relaxed with him, but I did.
Did I end up having sex with him? No. Did I want to? You betcha. He’s solid. His thick arms and toughened fingers remind me of this important fact. Just like yours did.
I admit to worrying about the logistics of sex with someone who can’t stand on his knees like you can, but you know what? Try I must, but I’m not going to worry about it. All I hope is that he’ll invite me up to his place, and soon.
There in the distance, as the cobblestones gleamed in the streetlamps of Paris, I espy two slender women with tight-fitting hats and dark capes swinging just so above their clackety heels. I know instantly who they are.
Djuna and her beloved Thelma.
I gaze upon Thelma’s face. She was the face of love itself. No wonder she had been the love of Djuna’s life; not just her, but a few others, too.
Thelma smiles, almost a coquette, and huddles closer to her.
Djuna smiles demurely as she takes out a silver-encrusted lighter from inside her cape and flicks it to light her brown cigarette. A different aroma, a different smoke tickles in the insides of my nose. I want to sneeze, but I don’t. She has come from a time different from mine.
&n
bsp; She is night itself. She has come to inject me with the narcotic of night. Thelma gleams confidently as day. She’s not the candle of confusion that burned lives through the pages of Nightwood.
Djuna pulls out a cigar from inside my jacket. I am surprised that it was there.
She tears off one end of the cigar and holds it up to me.
I lean forward to accept it in my mouth.
“May I?” she asks.
I nod assent.
She lights my cigar. Thelma weaves her arm into Djuna’s, and they fade into black.
Meanwhile my head mushrooms inside with memories, a haze of smoke and sweetness. I am awash in dreams thick as molasses. Yes, I would write the story of us. I’d change your name and your disability. Our story would be a roman à clef like Nightwood. Let the world play the guessing game of who’s who in its pages. I too would become highfalutin with my writing: if I belly-flopped at verse, I shall soar in my prose. Each sentence would be rethought with the muscles of language turning me into a new contortionist of the tongue. I will work out with the weight of words so well that I can lift a thousand pounds with my pinkie finger, toss it up like a baton, and file my nails while I await its lofty return. I wouldn’t be afraid of waxing poetic with descriptions of how we met and being nonlinear with the plot. I would take risks whenever I could, just to see if I could fly. I am both owl and mouse. Above all I would strive for art and be the artist I was long afraid to become. I’d make Djuna proud of me. Or maybe not, as she’s ether now. I wouldn’t dare imitate Djuna—no one could. It took her forty-four years to master the language of night before she felt strong enough to turn on the light bulb in the operating room of night. But I would honor her spirit, the very night of fog that had made her name. I have been a soul talking to myself in the heart of night, and it’s time that someone else listen. I would write of the shadow that was you, and it would be so well-written everyone would believe that my fiction is truth. I am an art historian. I will document the provenance of you, the greatest masterpiece I have ever had the pleasure of studying. My book would become the lecture no one cares to attend until they see you in the flesh and fill with wonder. That face. That chest. That cock. That missing foot. You will turn each man who shares your bed into a detective, and they shall consult for clues. We men may share the same anatomy, and yet we find novelty in the variations in our bodies. That is the difference between us and the ghosts that haunt our lives. We both are different and living, and the ghosts are all one and the same. Let them all float away.
Flannelwood Page 17