in the hall of mirrors

Exercises

The Newcastle writers' group meets every other week or so; we try, during lunch time between teaching, meetings, and various demands, to just write for an hour, share it, and recover a little bit of ourselves.

***

October 5, 2006 – write a poem.

Postcard from Newcastle

The blackened rusted red

of these buildings,

dark green of trees,

covering sky soft, fibrous greys,

a page of handmade paper.

***

October 30, 2006 – respond to a picture out of a 1938 book celebrating Elizabeth II's coronation. I chose a picture with this title:

The Children of George V and Queen Mary

They look like the Tsar's children, just before – well, you know.

Actually, a bit sturdier, a bit happier – not quite the fragile solemnity of Anastasia and her bigger brothers and sisters. But what if things had happened differently – what if we were looking on this picture, its relaxed smiles and sturdy tartans, with the nostalgic grief of a post-revolutionary era?...

"When the rebel forces caught up with the royal family at Balmoral, they were enraged by the resistance and losses from the Northumbrian campaign, and thus in no mood for clemency. It is perhaps unfortunate that Scott, rather than Sandringham, was the first of the rebel leaders to reach the castle; as Scott had lost his entire family in the Whitsun Massacre at the height of the riots that followed George's attempted resumption of the throne, soon after the assassination of the second Elizabeth, he had blamed the royal family for all his woes.

Under such circumstances, the murder of the children and their retainers was perhaps to be expected. Although the Central Committee is no longer entirely under the control of the Reichstag, memorials and monuments are still discouraged to this day – despite which, it is said that each October 30, under the vigilant eyes of Party sentinels, wreaths are placed in the field to the west of the entrance of the now-abandoned castle."

***

March 6, 2008 – a response to a casual comment at the end of a session:

The brief version of War and Peace:

"Franklin looked out of the window and said, 'Ah, I see that the war is over. Splendid.'"

***

August 19, 2008 – some haiku written at the end of a session, when I'd run out of steam for the assignment – clearly was thinking a lot of Buddhism that day:

Waking from a dream:

it tells me things that are like

waking from a dream.

This book off the shelf –

page suddenly full of light:

I know what is next.

Fresh gray water shines,

drops across the window panes:

fallen from pure world.

***

November 25, 2008 – write someone else's experience – which in my hands turned into a demented parody of British aristocratic memoirs.

"When I was a little boy, Nanny Jane often said to me, 'Oh Master James, you do say the strangest things!'. I remember her telling me this one sunny day on the south lawn, between the French garden and the maze. 'Why, with your clever ideas and handsome profile, you could surely be a famous actor!' Years later, at a luncheon where my guests included the Duchess of Northumberland, Orson Welles, and Mussolini – I think Gielgud was there too – I regaled them with this amusing anecdote. I could see how deeply impressed they all were – indeed the formerly lively conversation stopped completely, and all had thoughtful expressions, as it was borne on to them what an exceptional artist I might have become. It must have been a bit later, when Welles was casting a movie to be titled Citizen Kane, that he so wanted me to play the great Randolph Hearst; but I had promised my Mimsy a cruise to Malta, and I was forced to say no. It was soon after this that Wells became increasingly subject to depression; I have always regretted failing him in his hour of need.

But back to cheerier times. My father, the handsomest Liberal of his day, brought me and my four sisters up to the highest ethical standard. 'My children,' he would say, as we gathered for our morning meal, 'you must never –' and here he would pause until the servants would return to the kitchen – 'you must always – oh bloody hell, is that gardener out with Daphne again?'. For we could see our mother, the most vivacious beauty of her day, far down the East lawn in the pleached alley, evidently convinced that she could not be seen from the house. Some days she never came to breakfast at all! But fortunately, Deborah, Delilah, Desirée, and Maude knew enough t0 start chattering blithely away at my father, distracting him with various questions, requests and demands. Poor Maude – these habits would stay with her until they got her in such trouble at the Palace, in that fatal argument with the young Charles, which ended so badly for the then Shah of Iran. But I digress...."

***

December 4, 2008 – write about the snow.

I should have brought a map.

I never can remember which street is which around here.

DeKalb, I can see the next is Edison... maybe they're in alphabetical order. Which would mean... oh, five or six blocks.

And oh, here we go, I'm glad it's not further – snow. It looks so....

It's so delicate, falling out of a smooth gray sky. Beautiful.

I always love this. Wonderful to see, and it makes everything so quiet. No sounds, really, except my feet of course.

Even they get quieter....

Did I say Edison? But this is Betancourt –

am I going the wrong way?

I'll retrace a bit...

no, that's silly, I can see my prints, they're in a line.

So they're not in alphabetical....

Huh. Coming down a bit more now. Streetlight as if behind a curtain.

I think... doesn't that on the left look familiar?

Familiar-ish. All right, over just a block, I'll see if there's a sign...

Or someone to ask.

Actually, it's been a while since...

Cars? Certainly no people.

You'd think more people would stay home in this weather. Lights in houses?... no... huh. If I lived around here I'd have a fireplace.

Well, not around here. Looks a bit... well. At least it seems very quiet...

Deep footprints. And snow sticking to my boots... well it's not slushy at least.

Glad of this scarf.

Now there's a building you wouldn't want to live near – talk about gutted....

Well wait: I haven't really been watching street signs but – Vifilsma- – Vifil-smarkt? What kind of a name is that?...

Must be annoying for them, spelling it all the time.

Not really a problem, though, I guess – two houses, and those couldn't be occupied....

I do wonder if I should just turn around.

All right, this is – the sign's just gone. Jeez. Vandalism.

I wonder if – there are still miles of town to go –

Well since I turned right back there – no, wait....

Broken street lamp.

If there were a bit more light from the sky....

Now this is a blizzard.

Okay, headed back – there must be lights –

that way?

no, it's not...

It's just white. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

***

December 10, 2008 – today, in fact. Couldn't engage with assignment, and so wrote a tanka – in the correct form!:

Birds flock around the towers:

stripes of blue-gray, calm above the lawns.

Universities are made to seem peaceful.

Why do these swords always return?

[Later correction: today (December 22), my friend and former teacher Terry from Los Angeles sent out a Christmas tanka, and I was reminded that syllables are an important part of the tanka form. The above doesn't have the correct number of syllables – as many haiku translations don't either; because five- or seven-syllable lines are much more difficult, and thus unfortunately often more strained or affected, in English than they are in Japanese. So, when I said the above was written in 'the correct form', I meant the old rules that the first and second lines should be on contrasting subjects; the third brings them together; and the fourth goes off in an unexpected but not unprepared direction. So, I suppose, I should have said: it's in the correct form – but not the correct prosody....]

The Voyage to Europe

[Fragments for an unfinished novel, 1992-4]

Venice by Gondola

The sophisticated traveler will develop a passion for the dramatic curves of the great black gondolas, which seem to cut into the stone façades of this ancient city. But be ready for the high prices which, when transformed from millions, from billions of lira – lira like masses of insects, swarming, clawing – can be as much as ninety American dollars. A charming smile may help to bring these prices down; such smiles are easy when dealing with the stunningly handsome men who row these long, beautifully shaped boats. But the first-time visitor to Italy must be careful, be careful... Not really an argument, a subtle disagreement expressed through no common language, he didn’t understand, he thought it was a promise but it was just an idea, and not even an idea formulated in my head: my body thought of it, the muscles of my thighs, and it flowered into a smile – my body refuses to recognize its own dangers, to recall its international epidemic status – Stepping onto the gondola itself requires a certain skill, even for the sturdy, well-prepared traveler whose arm is steadied by the powerful fingers, the intensely demanding grip of the gondolier. It is important to sit once one is in the gondola, so as not to tip the boat, not to rock, to fall into the black waters, sinking to the bottom of the canals where gold plates used only once by the great doges of this wealthy merchant city clink and are scratched by the stones, the gray stone that is everywhere. I cannot look into his eyes again, I don’t know how to take back the body’s invitation: how will I ever pay for this trip? The long sweep of the poles as they wave back and forth, creating triangles that diminish and expand with the water’s reflections, are among the glories of this popular tourist attraction. Perhaps a penny beneath my tongue. When passing the great plaza of the cathedral of San Marcos, the attentive traveler will notice

_____

The fever is draining me, visibly reducing my visible presence, distilling my body into something sharper, more detailed. Perhaps gradually revealing that other body, the dark one that lies beneath, the one that is exactly marked with a widely known constellation of symptoms. Since I haven’t done any work for days now, I must watch the projects pile up on my desk, the gradual proliferation of chaotic details delivered to my room by the answering machine, the mail. One project is very late: I must send letters to my various acquaintances and unmet connections, saying, I’m sorry, I’m not there on the continent, I’m not calling you or visiting you because I never arrived, I was sick instead of going to Europe, for the first time, ever. Instead of going to Europe, going to Europe, going to Europe.

•••

[Fontainebleau/Paris]

I was scheduled to give a lecture at the Château Fontainebleau, the summer music school just outside of Paris. Bart arranged it as a special favor; I was going to stay in his suite for the night – hoping that low rumors wouldn’t follow me, as Bart is known for his predatory instincts – and then I would spend a few days in the exquisitely gray city. A friend supplied the addresses of city dwellers I might be able to stay with; their replies to my letters were subtly haughty, precisely but obliquely cutting with the fine edge of Parisian discourtesy: please tell us exactly what sort of establishments you would be interested in, or: we prefer visitors who can properly appreciate opera and ballet, or even: please send us a recent photograph.

But to walk alert, electric in the City of Lights, to stand under one of the great glass shopping arcades left over from the Third Republic, or to weave along the walls of a discotheque, marvelling at the subtly varied collection of cool, bored faces with high cheekbones and pouting lips. To hear the dense, poetic resonance of the language’s sounds, that must be the best of all: listening alertly in a land where a simple request for directions sounds like one of Rimbaud’s prose poems. Pretend that, on some quiet back street, it’s possible to find the little girl lying dead behind the rose bushes, to touch her white forehead, then suddenly withdraw: and then it would all come clear, everything would be understood.

The truth is, I need to see Paris, especially because I can’t imagine it: these clouds of surreal images, the long chains of alexandrines, just don’t fit with the abstract chill of these photographs, where city buildings like huge granite symmetries mercilessly dominate the flowering trees, the filigreed iron fences of cafés. At one time, I wanted to visit Paris with someone else: David, perhaps, if we could have squeezed a few last romantic sensations from the drying gourd of our past. More recently I wanted Peter to take me: I would make him hold my arm with his great, blond hand, forcing him to act as though we’re in love, since, of course, love must happen to any couple that travels to Paris. No, I can’t see Paris, and I can’t see us there.

It’s easier to envision the château, the riches of the land more neatly contained for the pleasure of a single very rich personage. The great blue fountains and the vast gardens intricately carved like chessboards for alien cultures: triangles folded into hexagons into webs of great circles. And the Hall of Mirrors: haughty echoes of overblown gold fixtures reflected how many times? like an endless stasis experienced all at once. It must be a remarkable –

No, wait, I’ve made a mistake: that’s Versailles, there’s not a hall of mirrors at – so then what is at Fontainebleau? There must be a listing in the red Michelin book, the one with the beautiful leather covers.

No, nothing.

The other guides don’t mention it. A slightly dizzy panic hits me: is the name misspelled, is the château in Belgium instead? I thought I would get to go to Paris, I thought it was all set up and all I had to do was pack. No, no, wait, I will say this much: I refuse to die before seeing Paris. I absolutely and categorically refuse.

•••

[Fever/Heat]

It’s not the heat. It’s something else. It’s a lot of other things, and then the heat comes down on top of them, melting their edges together, welding them all. When I keep the room closed up the heat doesn’t really get in –

No, that’s not true. The heat starts here, it comes from me and goes into the thermometer, it comes from me and drenches the sheets, gives my body the ability, or the command, to lie without moving, calmly arranged as flesh modelled over the sweaty sheets, the dimensionalization of flat wetness up into the air. It all comes from me and flows down me like slow waterfalls. I’m generating the heat, I’m causing this wave of baking weather.

Actually, no: my condition is causing it, my diagnosis. But then it’s also true that those who manage my condition, who make the diagnoses – really, the man who replaced my last doctor, he’s a famous researcher, so big and classically handsome and also remarkably insensitive – they say, or he says, he and the tests say, they don’t know what I’ve got at the moment although the general context, the viral condition that prefigures all my body’s actions is probably author and creator of this fever, but the fever itself is nameless. It also has another characteristic of being nameless –

Give it up. Floating here among the damp white clouds of sheets, I can think whatever I want. Panic and irritation are attenuated, is that what I mean? that is certainly the right word, they are not lessened but they are strung out, vastly lengthened, so that in going from one stage of each emotion to the next there is a long, slow leap, as in a film where someone jumps the great gap between two crumbling, yellow cliffs, and the camera suddenly slows: you get to watch time happen. You can see what’s coming because the next stage comes into view so slowly, so clearly articulated – the thoughts cross gracefully over: now I am moving from a quiet irritation sharpened with long-term fears into a subtler, slower phase of grief, grief which has little to do with anything happening here or now since it is really a mere side effect of the past, it’s about someone else’s illness. Later, staring deep into the ceiling, I will slowly leap from that old grief into pure sleepless presence, the kind of state that is most easily recognized when it is over –

No, I won’t either: I suddenly hear the mail falling with a great scraping and clattering into the slot next to the front door. Stimulus and response: I can think about the probable bills, or I can choose to worry about projects unbegun. The mail may include yet another of the endless letters from Europe asking where am I, or giving instructions, not knowing I can’t use them, and dates and places...

Yes, when I finally get up I will write back to all of them, although that may not be for a few more weeks. I can design the letter in my head: I’ll say I have been ill, but then say that it wasn’t serious, yet in such a way that no one will quite believe that. And perhaps for some of the haughtier business connections I should make some other excuse. I should say when I’m rescheduling the trip, but as I don’t have any idea when that could be –

I must be charming, amusing so that they will still put up with me when I do arrive, when I need places to stay and to go; I’ll start with something about how I’m doing, how the days are here, even the weather, I’ll say: It’s not the heat. It’s a lot of other things, and the heat comes down on top of them, melting their edges together...

•••

[Avignon/Doctor]

[The itinerary is difficult to settle. Aside from the obvious cities – Paris, Amsterdam – and the personal favorites of my imagination – cool, bright Copenhagen, or the stone mysteries of Venice – I also want to visit Avignon, which has a particular resonance for me... I think that for most people it must be merely a part of the relaxed beauty of southern France, something not too expensive but near the Côte d’Azur; and of course, everybody has to remember the bridge...]

The clinic is so quiet today, I suspect I’m the only patient. My doctor is in a good mood and wants to hear what I’m doing, so of course I begin to talk about Europe, babbling away while he plays with his disposable needles and plastic bottles. He’s enthusiastic, but becomes more so when I mention that I want to go to Avignon. He laughs and digs into his wallet, pulling out a handful of photographs. As he sorts through them, I can peer across his arm: there are various groupings that look like they might be families – so then he’s not gay? Unless maybe he is, but there are other family members from –

He finds the one that he’s searching for and holds it up, his bushy mustache quivering with suppressed laughter. I control my recurrent, and unfortunately inappropriate, desire to give him a hug, and look at the photo: it’s of him standing on a broad stone pier, part of a larger structure, his hands waving and one foot in the air – best of all, utter glee on his round, cheerful face. “What’s that supposed to be?” He shuffles the photos back together: “That’s the bridge.” I still don’t get it. “At Avignon!” I start to laugh, remembering the children’s song instinctively before I can translate the words in my head to explain what he’s doing in the photo. His blustering laughter follows mine...

After he listens to my chest, his large, gentle hand on my shoulder, he goes out of the room, telling me to wait. He leaves the pile of photographs on the desk; I go through them and pick out the one taken on the bridge at Avignon: he is really such a thoroughly pleasant-looking man, so affectionate, I’d love to spend more time with him. I want to put my arm around his shoulders, talk animatedly – I didn’t get to tell him why I want to go to Avignon, what my own Avignon looks like. The Palace of the Popes dominates the landscape, a vast stone building, acres dedicated to the grandeur of the ambiguous popes, the ones who weren’t approved by Rome; [the French tourist board still does son et lumiére things on the vast walls after dark, red spotlights cutting across the black shadows of the towers.] Perhaps that’s how I choose my favorite places, my favorite times: not in the search for great or noble art, and certainly not looking for junky monuments like the Eiffel Tower; but instead searching out the knots in history, the places where pleasure and fear were sharpest, the junctures where disaster loomed, and sometimes fell.

The Palace, a glittering, arrogant, impossible place: teetering on the brink of Hell, the playground of schismatics and their flatterers. [That part of France had been wealthy two centuries earlier, a flowering of complex poetry in Provençal, a language that is no longer written; they say women ran businesses, proud, well-educated women; but all of that was wiped out in the civil crusades... So the people of the countryside must have had a dim recollection of wealth and power, they must have been so excited to see it return, even if in such a local fashion. Vast wealth poured through the Palace and the town for much of the fourteenth century, money and plague germs, and the subtly profound poisons of cultural collapse. The hedonism, the enjoyment of complex passions, you can hear it in the bizarre music of the time.... It must have felt so strange, waiting from month to month over – how many years? – for the news from Rome, or from the battlefield: has it been decided, are we under a Pope or an anti-pope? Heaven or hell, instant answers for everyone, at least when they would finally arrive.] I want to walk those corridors, blasted by centuries into bare stone, and try to discern in the long curves and sudden angles of the buildings that subtler art of sensuality on the brink, cryptic laughter while death lies in the next room...

The doctor comes back into the room to tell me my new T-cell count, and to explain why it doesn’t really mean anything, and why I shouldn’t worry. I’m still holding the photo; as he is turned toward the sink, washing his hands – and what did he do, was touching me anything, that he has to wash his hands? – I slip the photo into my backpack, almost without thinking. On the way out, I ignore my backpack, not opening it for anything, no one will see what I took, I won’t open it until I get home, shut the door, pull the shades.

•••

Dear William:

Thanks for your cards. I particularly like the one you sent from Florence, but it didn’t say on the back where the statue was. I don’t know what Hercules might have done with Cacus (and who was he anyway?) but they look awfully friendly... well, you’re right, it’s a beautiful statue, very erotic. You’re lucky to get to see it up close, so don’t complain about the crowds.

I don’t know when, or if, this will reach you – depending on the Italian mail system is probably a mistake, and I know you’re off to Prague on Monday. Probably this will fall into a drawer at the hotel, you’ll never come back and they’ll ignore it, the edges drying out and fading until some old woman peers at it and tosses it into the trash... imagine: my letter thrown into a can of Italian trash, shiny chocolate wrappers with the ingredients listed in the Tuscan dialect, worn-out shoes in fine, thin leather, all covered with lots of marble dust.

Yes, I’m very sorry I didn’t get to go, too. The whole money thing just got too complicated, I was trying to turn out a script every week and I’ve never done that before. When I was handed the Wagner project, it was like hitting a stone wall – or like hitting the side of a stone castle, one of those Bavarian things of Ludwig’s. I totally freaked on the third night, went for a walk at four a.m. up north of me, past Santa Monica into the nice-ish houses in that part of West Holly and thought about Wagner and What He Means to Me. Didn’t really think about it, it was more of a slow-motion fit, I remembered the time when I was a Wagnerite, a perfect or real one; I was sixteen I think, I bought the entire Ring cycle – you may remember, if you cared at all in the mid-70s, that Solti recording, it was the first complete one I think. I played it with my best friend (who collected snakes and spiders, but was kind of cute), and we talked about everything. Well actually: not about feelings, or about sex in any way – but, I know it was a very intense and very confused/ing time.

Sorry, what am I dithering about? No more rambling. The doctor says I’m fine really, this fever is nothing in particular. Actually, he has no idea what it might be, but he seems to think that’s good – they’ve tested for everything (some very messy blood tests by tired phlebotomists – see there and I spelled it right too).

I haven’t checked your mail, and I assume Putz is okay in the kennel. If I get dressed and out of the house this week, I’ll make sure they’re doing everything as promised. If you don’t get this letter, you’re probably wondering what’s up. Of course, you can’t expect to just leave a beloved pet behind for six weeks and not run into any sorts of problems – actually, I’m not too wild about my kennel. But it seems as though some people, so many people I know, get to go to Europe so easily, as though they would go to Club Med, they come back and tell me all about the food and the bathrooms and fuss about it all. I don’t mean you would do that, of course, I just mean this is rather strange for me.

I’m going to take some aspirin now. Make sure you take lots of pictures and send me some more postcards – and if you don’t get this, I’ll try to remember and tell you everything when you come back – if I remember – if any of it matters at all – or if any of it seems at all interesting to you, after you’ve been in Europe for six weeks!

Hope you’re enjoying yourself,
P.

•••

[Library/books]

Considering their endless complaints about space (and money, and patrons), it seems odd that the library would have this vast lobby, a nearly empty foyer fashioned in cliches of chrome and glass. I shouldn’t have worn these boots, they squeak no matter what I do. Crossing that vast marble floor, or perhaps it’s just granite: marble is for the really wealthy, or for classic European buildings erected before the rise of the bourgeoisie... the squeaking is particularly annoying because it’s not a matter of the boots being too new – they must be a decade old, Frye boots bought at the end of the seventies, at the very end of the time when they were stylish. By an effort of will I ignore the sharp, regularly spaced noises I am producing and steer towards the reference desk, which is barricaded behind rather intensely innocuous electronic pillars. Behind the desk, a large, blonde woman with a pleasantly round face is watching, or perhaps listening to, my progress...

I ask her if it might be possible to look through the section on travel, countries, languages and such. Certainly, she says, do you have a particular country in mind? I guess that Europe would sound too vague, so I say: well, how about – Finland? I must have sounded too jovial or odd, somehow, she looks at me with suspicion, as though wondering if I’m making fun of her. Before I can speak, reassure her of the seriousness of my desire to examine anything on Finland that she might have available, she turns away towards her computer screen. Waiting, I settle into a dark green fabric chair and look around at quiet people arranged around formica tables, happily separated from each other by rows of identically bound reference works. When she turns back to me, it is to give me a present: a flimsy printout, a list of titles and call numbers under the heading: Finland. She turns briskly back to her terminal, avoiding any further or unnecessary contact.

The elevator ride is short and flattened in affect: beige and dirty chrome form the complete universe and all its details. When the doors trundle open at the fifth floor, though, the sensuality, the richness of the space flowers outwards: entering the green-blue depths, I step out between shelves filled with books, books filled with such rich, far-off tongues: umlauts and accent aigules glittering in gold on leather spines, or neatly sans serif on contemporary paperbacks... I cannot resist, I slowly, gently reach out to touch a large book with a title in some impossible pseudo-Cyrillic language, and caress its spine...

•••

[Fever/cold]

On a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle. On one side write ‘feed a,’ then drop down a space and write ‘starve a.’ On the other side of the line write, similarly, ‘cold’ and ‘fever.’

I can never remember the correct matching of these terms, the original form of the sort of proverb one snatches for in the twisting, endless depths of an illness that has gone on too long. The great armature of medicine lies outside this experience, metallic and huge, but ineffective in helping one to try to cross from moment to moment, the space between the realization that the pain is eased when you turn onto your left side with your legs scissored slightly apart, and the return of that pain in a modified but no more acceptable form a second, a few seconds, later. The length of seconds is called into question, also.

The day is so remarkably, if dimly, beautiful – the cab driver who took me home from the clinic yesterday, chatting, happily driving while leaning half out of his window, said: hey, it’s really gorgeous. I had that slightly painful sensation of missing out again, of being trapped in the dim grey wrappings of illness while the real world is having great fun just outside, just down the street. But no, lying in bed, not having to do anything, I can see it quietly now, there are such beautiful trees and ivy outside my bedroom windows, and the mild wind keeps it all in that stirred, more vivid state: nature presented in its more organic, more chaotic, form, which is always so comforting because human control is shown to be both impossible and unecessary.

Starve a cold, feed a fever. Now one of the problems of managing this distinction is that, as is not often enough pointed out, when you have a cold, you have a fever. So which were those old wives talking about? There are fevers without colds, of course. The fevers of various infections, like the one blazing sharply across that strange triangle over my left hip – why should that triangle be so clearly articulated, doesn’t that suggest something very specific must be wrong? – or the many others, earaches when I was a child, even certain respiratory infections that are nevertheless clearly not colds. So we can deduce that the class of illnesses named colds, identified however they are – I suppose congestion, coughing, etc. – are set apart from all other fevers, which are then distinguished from such colds under the general name of ‘fevers.’

No, that doesn’t seem quite right to me, either.

There seem to be so many zones to be concerned about: a vast series of different spaces, problems, solutions, things to be done, all intersecting in a highly randomized space, one generated by various desires and promises, but a space whose coordinates cannot be resolved under a single system. To start simply: my feet are cold. They are, at the moment, the only part of me that is cold, in thick cotton socks, under the soft farm-made blanket given to me a few months ago; if I could get up, of course, I would add the wool afghan over my legs, and that might solve the problem. But the rest of me is, at the moment, rather comfortable; if I don’t move, nothing very painful happens. A pleasant stasis holds me, allowing me to really listen to the leaves on the shutters...

‘Feed a fever:’ you know, that really must be wrong, the proverb would never put the two assonant words on one side of the equation, the whole proverb would collapse, overbalanced. Loud buzzing, varying rapidly in volumes and approximate pitch, plows across the room, cutting through the sounds of the breeze and leaves: I believe that must be my third fly in two days. One of them left, miraculously, by itself; one I batted out of the air in a rage, while I was tired and barely able to stand at the bathroom sink, then stared in astonishment: without my glasses and hardly able to lift a glass, I had nevertheless managed to knock the damned thing to the ground. I grabbed a tissue and smashed at that fly, this is the second one we’re still on, noticing and trying not to notice the small blob of yellow gunk that came out of it as I dropped the whole mess in the trash. Although similar gunks are unpleasantly familiar from the past few days, after the strange products of coughing flung into the sink, after the rows of various specimens at the doctor’s.

The tiring, distancing part of all of the different zones is not, of course, the spatial one mentioned above: the calm awareness and adjustment around what parts of the body are comfortable, what parts are not, is merely a problem in extremely local management – although, okay, I admit, Monday night and the two nights before, at the peak of all this week’s fevers and aches, the problems seemed terrifying in the intensity and unsolvability – but now, during the day, it’s not all that hard. And the spatial understanding of the things I need to do, mostly, gratifyingly enough, in the other room, nearly out of sight – yes, those are worrisome, but only if I focus on them; it is clear that I’m not capable of doing anything about them today, and making the big decisions, telling the landlord, surviving the ensuing explosions, those are all things I can’t do today anyway.

But the temporal zones, the divisions in time, are much more frightening: not easily delineated end to end, they form great but fuzzy rectangles containing chunks of my life. I cannot manage any of them from this bed, of course not, but, how can I explain this? The panic comes from knowing how many zones there are, and seeing how unpredictable the universe’s general support for them is. It’s sort of like, the network of relationships around getting out of bed, clutching across my chest with both arms to hold it together in one piece against the storm of coughs, moving a few yards to the bathroom, choosing the aspirin or antihistamine or Tylenol and performing the correct operations with them – those are complex but visible relationships, and I can tell when I am finished, when I can turn back towards the bed, or when something goes wrong, when the thermometer is broken on the tile floor. But my bigger promises, the things I must present soon that aren’t even written, the things I’ve promised to write that aren’t started – and will I have to move everything into storage, where am I going to live? I don’t know what to do with all of those.

If we agree that ‘feed a fever’ must be wrong, then it must be ‘feed a cold, starve a fever.’ But the particular network of aches of shifting temperatures that has me glued to the bed is the flu, plus that other annoying, painful infection; does the flu count as a cold or fever? I can’t put it together – the distance between what I’m trying to figure out now and its roots is too great, I can’t hold the whole thing in my buzzing head – it’s like doing sums in your head but there are too many of them, you can’t remember if you rounded up or made a mistake, and the whole thing falls apart. Speaking of buzzing, that fly – did we say this was the third fly? yes – has left. All on its own. Leaving behind the lovely, shimmering system of green leaves, trees, the wind pulling them apart and pushing them together, and the quiet spiders who have lived in the space between the shutters and the windows since long before I ever rented this place. They make me a mere day-tripper, a renter, they won’t even notice when I’m gone. The ease, the pleasure, that is right around the corner, if only I can get there, get to it: of lying here and not worrying, because there is nothing at all that I can do about anything, at this moment: the freedom of giving up, the relaxation of hands that are tightly bound...

•••

[Dream/de Falla]

Carefully handling the LP – how quickly we lose our habitual skills, when they become outdated – I drop (no, place) the needle onto the beginning of the record: de Falla’s Nights in the Castles of Spain, the tangled, eerie impressionistic pictures of deserted castle gardens, midnight towers. But it’s disconcerting when the record begins with some sort of announcer’s voice, interrupted by bursts of applause, bravos, even catcalls: And now, in the celeberated recording series produced with money donated by Mrs. Dorothy Empfandingskeit, we present de Falla’s Nights in the Castles of Spain in the original version for two pianos and percussion. To my irritated disbelief, he keeps chattering as the pianos begin, but the music seems very strange and intense, tightly wound ornaments and repeated notes overdetermining a simple tune: I read the score with its dense tangle of small notes over this thing descending from D to A, but that sounds wrong, it sounds like a fifth, it should read E to A – and after about eight bars...

I awake, the room hot and confusing, air held in place, holding me down. The heating system must have gone on, with a vengence, I’m still feeling very strange, sick and confused, confused about being sick. Fever maybe, headache for certain, now what the heck was that thing, that dream of Nights in the Castles of Spain? That should be ‘gardens,’ besides Nights in the Gardens of Spain is for what, piano and orchestra, or maybe piano and chamber orchestra, there’s no two-piano version. Percussion – was that a Hammond organ joining the pianos on that melody, grotesque, Weill-ian? I have to transcribe this somehow, D’s next to each other and practically overlapping, tiny mordents – but the computer music program is too foreign, it’s been several months since I brought it up, I can’t remember how to use it; and it’s not made for this tangled, immediate density anyway, it’s only happy with clear melodies notated clearly. When I finally give up, I’ve got some tune sketched out, and space for two pianos and percussion – I can’t remember what this tune is, it’s some sort of standard schlocky Franco-Spainiana, and it’s definitely not de Falla...

•••

[I had, of course, various ideas to work through the plot, the body of the novel – and various frustrations with those ideas. But, at least for now, this is a two-part draft of the ending.]

[Dream ending/Venice]

I come back every day to the pensione, looking for a letter: he should have joined me here by now. He is evidently delayed; the days pass pleasantly, but I am still impatient. For some reason, I seem to be having difficulty remembering the color of his hair: the picture in my head shimmers, and I can’t remember if it is blond, a goldish color, or a sort of red-brown: and does he have a beard or not? I got so tired, so fragile, like some British Victorian type with neuralgia, before coming here, I probably just need to rest. But the people are friendly, their dark eyes become merry in response to my blundering questions. Outside my hotel, I can look deep into the canal – and perhaps it’s the weather, or some optical illusion, but the water seems clearer than it did at first, a deep blue with glints far away. And the water seems slightly lower, as though Venice is slowly, gently, rising out of the sea, moving towards the sun, drying out just a tiny bit, to save itself for future centuries. Botticelli might have drawn a great seashell to hold... no, it could never be large enough.

This morning, at the little stone church next to my pensione, there were two young artists, or perhaps more accurately restorers, working on the wall frescoes: a minor Last Judgment from the sixteenth century. The girl is always serious, her vast brown eyes and mussed hair contained in an austere but gentle expression of concentration; but the boy laughs and gestures, he speaks to her in rapid-fire sentences which must be jokes, to which she responds with a brief, absent smile. While I was standing, watching, he turned away from repainting a brown tangle of muscular bodies, caught my eye, and, winking, grinned: I looked at the painting to calm my heartbeat, amused in spite of myself, and could see that the blessed spirits already shone with more gold, and the damned ones had a certain passion, a life they didn’t have before: as though they mattered more, as though they meant something important. Even the edges of the plaster seemed less dilapidated, less old. I tried to say something about how fine they looked: “Che bella, che...” but then I stuck there, and I wasn’t quite sure of the gender anyway, so I simply gestured towards the wall. He suddenly looked serious and proud, and he burst into a long, tangled paragraph of Venetian dialect. I really must work on my Italian more; I’ll spend evenings reading the phrasebook, although it might not help much with Venetian. When I left the church, it seemed as though parts of the wooden door frame had been replaced, and so well that it was as though they’d never been missing: everything looks newer, a little sharper...

The days all so pleasant, drifting, but at night I can’t get away from these tiresome dreams: beds, plastic tubes, and the feeling that I can hardly breathe. Sometimes, just before I open my eyes, my bed seems wet, soaked with greenish canal water, and then I really wake up and it’s not true. [Nightmares left over from those miserable days when I was so sick, before it all went away and I came here...] Tomorrow I’ll cross to the Giudecca; that should be fun, although it would be more fun if I weren’t alone... I hope he gets here soon; I keep thinking of all the things I want to show him. But I suppose I can wait, with the days so gloriously warm, the cool nights listening to the lapping water, distant calls echoing from boat to boat...

•••

[When the narrator has actually reached Europe, things start to go wrong: his friend vanishes, then reappears to announce he’s going back to America; the money starts to run low, and he still hasn’t seen Paris. And he starts to have fevers, high fevers that won’t go away; with a railpass and a credit card, he gets on a train to Paris, only to wake up ill with the train empty, stopped in a northern French city. Going in and out of coherent states, he decides to continue to the west coast of Ireland, the last land in Europe before the sea... but the dreams drift and confuse, visions of Paris give way to his original dreams of Venice, overlaid with the illusion of having actually made it to Ireland, all interspersed with brief flashes of realization of where he really is – wherever that is.]

night blazing hot, the crawl of sweat across my chest soaking into cotton, I half-turn, bang against the bars again, vast sharp sun pouring down on my chest, my feet in shadow, freezing. pains like a wave, I fall to my knees beside the canal barely able to breathe, holding on and not moving, roaring in my head, in my ears. it passes slowly, I relax and look up into the blazing air at fluorescent bars of light, feel the pulling plastic binding my wrist... hitchhike west from Dublin, ride, walk through deep green fields all the way across to Galway, take a ferry to the last island, the island of Connemara. look west: heather beaten down, ridge of rock, then deep frozen waters, blackblue to the horizon, walking, half-falling across long grass, down the hill, the end of all the land, broad waves whiten on impact – no, another, ach, ripping across the chest, grab ribs, hold together, tape twisting off my arm – rigid – holding, holding, can’t – rushing footsteps – and it crashes on the rocks, to bits, hold my head trembling, face half in sand... long long breath... and out... sharp light through lids, pale blue fluoresces, try to squeeze tighter – yes, okay. now. back to – gondolas, soft stone: but the light strange, so bleak – everybody is here, like they just ran out, by the lagoon, what are we waiting for? – look up, out to the ocean past Giudecca, a tall blueness, higher than, gradually seeing: it’s a wave, huge wave, we are all watching as it moves towards us, stately but so rapidly, thunder, blazing deep blue – can’t remember where, the color of his – all watch, open-mouthed, frozen, roaring wave now above us tilts – and forward – I reach out and grab his hand to steady our

[Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kiel, Irvine, 6/16/92-11/27/94]

Augusts

[Los Angeles, 1991]

My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to establish the month’s meaning, its varied characteristics and echoes – aside from the obvious ones such as vacations and unbearable heat. My quiet, gentle father, with his rooms of shelves of memories on film, of papers in disarray.

Two years ago I slept through the month of August. That sounds like an exaggeration, and perhaps it is one. Basically, for some weeks of the month and well into September, I rarely left my bed, and even more rarely left the house. The mechanism seemed quite simple: I just didn’t care what happened to me. I spent the entire time barely holding down an overwhelming guilty panic, which had many facets: would I be evicted, would the piano rental people come and take back their shabby upright? Would my friends besiege the door and not let me sleep, and would everyone stand in a row, horrified, pointing at my wasteful lethargy, this disgraceful depression?

I actually did panic enough to do something about it: I went to the university’s psychiatric clinic to ask for anti-depressants. But it took several weeks to get an appointment, and by then my tendency to sleep was fading – not gone, but distinctly lessened. And the idea of the pills themselves was making me as nervous as anything else. So I argued against myself with the kindly psychiatrist, and we finally agreed that I could survive this one without drugs.

Characteristic of that time was the obsessive fear of systems collapsing, of walls falling in a heap of plaster and dust. If I didn’t take better care of my skin, my psoriasis – which already covered most of my body and, most of the time, disfigured my face – would become even worse, and I would have no days remaining on which I could pass for normal or healthy. The tangle of unpaid bills, the disastrous pile of mail: my income would collapse just ahead of my credit. Selling everything, getting in the car and going far away – these seemed like distinct possibilities. If the web of people and actions that held me in place was slowly disintegrating, its strands cut by unreturned messages and the dead weight of my trussed-up body, then perhaps I could step away from it entirely. Somehow I would magically get rid of ten thousand books and the computer, and the battered furniture, the shabby bed I slept in; walk away from everything, carrying just some cash and the car keys, my eyes heavy with sweet, forgetful sleep.

No, I couldn’t see it either. Walk away from my library? Unthinkable. And, of course, how long would it take for me to construct any sort of new life anywhere? I have never had a talent for making money or for making a home for myself. For me, the mere fact that I was living in a place that was beginning to look like a home was cause for celebration, and for careful movements, making me hoard the present against a probably worse future.

For anyone in academia, August has the awful, dead quality of the Sundays of my childhood. Reading the Sunday funnies as the dreaded afternoon slogs on, everything is depressing and tiresome and the sunlight through the trees a fake, mocking the emptiness of the day. Your vacation time is up and your freedom and happiness are ending. And of course you haven’t done the work you promised, you’re not ready to start all over again. You’ve wasted this time, and it will never come back. Perhaps bitterest was the realization that the free time hadn’t been very free, that you’d made no special trips, hadn’t had fun, hadn’t hopelessly debauched yourself, or perhaps sat on a hill somewhere watching things grow. No work, no play – the proverb seems intended to reflect some progressive present, but it’s so much worse when it’s all in the past, and unchangeable.

Somehow I got through that month in bed, really five weeks or so, August leaking vaguely into September. It even seemed rather wonderful in retrospect: I discovered I could drop everything for a month and still survive. Nothing was repossessed, although the bill collectors took a certain amount of convincing; no one freaked out, although people wanted explanations of where the hell I’d been. I didn’t lose everything, I didn’t go anywhere. I could pick it all up where I left off, though perhaps a bit more selectively. I’d been dangerously irresponsible, but the results weren’t too different from those that came from being energetic, being good.

That was a psychic watershed. I’d given up, and found that I could change my mind. My therapist said I discovered that I could survive alone, that my desire for some father-figure to save me fizzled, as always, and I was thrown back on myself...

Throughout the past month of July, the flashes of heat seem to be echoed by glints of coldness inside of me. I don’t like opening the mail. There are several bills that have become quite seriously overdue, and I dislike the cheerful, greedy voices on my answering machine. I don’t always respond to my calls this past few weeks.

My father’s birthday is in two days. Today I slept all day, putting my head under the pillow when the answering machine whined. I’m sitting on the sofa, looking out into the darkened street. My car keys are in my hand, my books in rows behind me. I wonder if I’ll make it to September.

[Los Angeles, 7/31-11/2/91]

Looking for a Place

[1991]

This is the third apartment I’ve seen today; it doesn’t look too bad, the rent is only mildly outrageous. The paper with the landlord’s number is damp and crumpled in my hand, and the backs of my thighs are so tired; it’s clear that I’ll have to give up on my Los Angeles hamstrings – chiefly made from working out with the brake and accelerator pedals – to work on the powerful legs, those fine San Francisco butts, made by the high, cool hills. But it’s like coming home, the air is clear and people are friendly, and I can almost imagine that Reid is still alive and will call me tonight. He lived just over the hill, I remember that, and the bus that goes to his old apartment leaves from the next corner, I can see it from the doorway.

I like the tree that stands near the front window, thick and green, with light leaves; perhaps it is birch or ash. The room I grew up in – my own room in my parents’ house – was on the second floor, I looked straight out into a mass of Virginia green, great oaks and chestnuts, and it was like living in a treehouse. There was a peace and completeness about that world, at least as long as I was facing away from the door, looking out the window into green. I always wanted to fly out into it, to be held up by the leaves, by the fragments of light that held them apart.

The landlord opens the door, and he has some trouble with the key. I’m going to live here now, and give up on all my other cities; the people I love in Los Angeles will finally be left behind, just like those in the cities of the east and the north. Sometimes it seems as though everyone moves away, and no one ever moves towards. I’ll never live in New York again, that’s a little sad, but also a relief. I remember Sid’s tiny, bizarre Village loft; I know now that his cheery notes were love letters, but I didn’t pay enough attention, I was too young and I didn’t know. And he’s dead of cancer, and I never told him how I felt. And there were so many others there, the fastest city I’ve ever lived in, the most painful. Holding men during long nights, trying to rub the city out of their tense shoulders, but I never could quite do it. I remind myself: the disorientation, the loss of not living in New York, of being away from the light and sound of the violent center of culture, it must be less than the pain of living there.

And Los Angeles, I’m sorry to lose the sun and heat, but I can’t stay there anymore. The decision is made, I tell myself firmly, but silently, trying to look interested in the cabinets that the landlord has been showing me. He coughs, a hacking cough, and I move away, trying not to show revulsion or my instinct to protect my fragile immune system. He is certainly different from the landlord of my first San Francisco apartment, who came out, tanned, sweating and covered with paint chips, to show me the living room, then the bedroom, and I brushed paint chips out of his chest hair while we made love. He later gave me a teapot, something chic of Milanese metal, as a housewarming gift; perhaps it was intended to keep me from blabbing to his lover. I wonder if he’s still around anywhere.

The living room has that bright peace typical of empty rooms in sunlight, with no furniture cluttering it, couches and tables that speak of living and of time. The floor is hardwood, and there is some damage in the corner; I make a show of examining it, although I have no idea how to fix the marred spot, and I know I’ll just put something over it. I always liked hardwood best, another legacy from my parents’ home. The Los Angeles apartment, the bedrooms and the living room, all with the old wood that was so kind to feet, that made me feel as though I was touching the earth. Mornings when I would lie on the living room couch, reading, wearing the gray cotton robe, and maybe Patrick would drop by during his run. It was later that he packed up and moved to Houston, or perhaps Dallas, I never heard from him again. I go into the bedroom, and the door creaks as I open it.

The closets have doors with pine moldings, small echoes of Ron’s house, the wood A-frame full of light and air, and when we were lying in his vast waterbed in the morning sun he said he loved me. But I couldn’t stay there, he was handsome, affectionate, I can’t understand why I couldn’t bear to see my reflection in those adoring blue eyes. Last year I wrote to a national association of graphic artists, and I asked them: Where is he? He’s not in the phone book anymore. Tell me he’s still alive, tell me he’s moved somewhere where I can’t find him, please find him for me.

Back out into the living room, and I go across to the small door that leads into the kitchen. An empty space where the refrigerator should be, that is annoying. I don’t want to bring the refrigerator from Los Angeles, the broken thermostat has been freezing vegetables and mustard for seven years. The relief of leaving the Los Angeles apartment, which is so worn out for me now, full of crowded and exhausting feelings, although no one else can see it in the sunlight across the living room floor. Actually it was almost like the apartment in Washington, so long ago now, from the time that I was fleeing from my parents into the city. At first Randy and I shared his bed, but I wandered too much and moved too fast. When I saw him at Christmas, he looked so athletic, so grand, as always. He and his lover are both utterly healthy, and I’m glad; I wouldn’t want to worry about them. But I can’t understand why he looked at me with a faint, distant suspicion, as though he wondered what I really thought, whether I ever cared about him at all.

The kitchen has shelves all along one wall, like the kitchen in Steve’s apartment. I would have been so happy to live there, I dreamt about it for several years. I would visit him in the large, open living room, and occasionally see the dark, small bedroom, which looked so warmly comfortable, like the lair of a big, clean animal. I wanted to spend time in that room, in the large, loosely made bed that smelled faintly of his skin, his arms; but by then my life were already falling apart, the skies were darker and my flesh was visibly ruined. Mornings when I looked particularly bad, I would walk alone, cushioned in a silent, unending rage. The polarity of me and other men had changed, it was no longer that they were asking me and I was forgetting to answer. I was the one asking for attention now, and I didn’t want to listen for oblique, embarrassed refusals.

The bedroom is all right, a little small. It has none of the charm of my last San Francisco apartment, an efficiency in the Castro, hardwood floors supporting rows of bookshelves, and the garden, which was kept up by the man from the third floor who wore his leather vest while digging around the plants. Right outside my glass window, there it was: a tiny green sanctuary with a high wall, like a monastery garden. On festival days, when the Castro a hundred yards away was packed with handsome bodies, you could only hear a faint roar, like a seashell, and I would think: out there, he’s out there somewhere, all you have to do is go look. And then I would go look, and my resolve would collapse, and I would be lonely, walking past people as though they were great, silent buildings, and I were lost in an unknown city.

I check my list to remind myself of what to watch for: plumbing, electric heating, is it on the ground floor? But the real questions, the ones I won’t ask the landlord, are: can I put a table with books and medicines in easy reach, can I get to the phone and window from the bed? Which means of course: could I be sick here, could I die here? As opposed to going home to the room in the trees, where I would be with my parents, so well taken care of, but so far from all the other people I love. Every place I go has more empty spaces than full ones, there is no city that isn’t drenched with the loss of those who don’t live there, or who don’t live anywhere anymore.

I go back into the living room. The landlord is standing by the door, peering at the heater, which is hammering strangely and sounds broken. I gaze away from him at the walls, seeing in the cracks faces and rooms, the air of many places, people who have passed by and have vanished. I pivot slowly on my left heel, and I feel my face making a bright smile that’s just for him. “It’s perfect,” I say, “I’ll take it.”

[Los Angeles, 5/3-7/91]

The City

Stepping along the steel edges of intersections, people in precisely cut suits walk quickly through the icy air past elongated glass windows protecting neat arrays of crystal, ebony-handled carving sets, and thin, pale diamonds. The edges of all these things extend out in a net of lines infinitely narrow, infinitely sharp, a labyrinth of slashing blades. The people walk carefully but as rapidly as possible, watching for traps, concealed mechanisms. They move past each other without looking, but occasionally they misread subliminal signals, forget obliquely worded instructions, make missteps, fall from an edge that they meant to follow as far as the eye can see; then they are brought, however accidentally, face to face, turning towards each other sharp lips or livid cheeks, the rage of a fat man in gray, the malice of a woman with long red hair.

The air turns colder, a shrill wind cuts past the closed windows of buildings. Guns are sold and locks are tested, and the gray of the sky seems to become heavier, denser. Newspapers with large headlines and photographs of executions blow through the streets, past boarded storefronts and their bolted doors. Heavy men with hidden weapons stand alert in open squares, young men and women wearing zippered black clean their knives at the entrances of parks, and every alley rings with running footsteps.

A little man in a raincoat, followed by a number of birds, carries a crumpled paper bag to a bridge over the fast lane of a freeway. He casts crumbs over the edge in handfuls, watching intently for the intermittent explosions of blood and feathers.

[Los Angeles, 1/19/91-9/30/92]
[Picture: Elizabeth Barton, Night City]

LA '89

He pulls back the brake, turning his head. Pressure of the gear shift. Bare arm and vinyl. Warm, bright air, a slight glare. Can’t see. Growl of the engine. He backs towards the red Porsche...

Hand on the brake, he pulls. Up. Feet on the clutch and brake, his head turns, he feels the breeze on the sweat of his forehead. A cough. Yanking back, turning, he sees...

Grabbing the brake, pulling. Foul exhaust laced with jasmine. Head turning, eyes away from the glare, a pull in the neck muscles, pain, feet lifting from the clutch as...

Hand still on the brake, window, sour air, noise of the street behind, slight headache, pulling, neck turning, too fast, gasp...

Reaching for the brake, turning, look, red Porsche, fast: how far, turning head back, arm, tired, pulling...

Hand on the parking brake, grip, smooth, upward, look, jasmine, exhaust, glare, pulling...

Letting go of the brake...

[Los Angeles, 11/8/89]

Signs

[Los Angeles, 1992]

The session chair is standing, the first paper is over, and through a long wave of applause intended for someone else I move through a labyrinth of aisles towards the stage. I’m wearing khakis, emblematic of the Eastern aristocracy, the conservative controllers who went to school with me; shoes beige and just too light to seem quite serious. The chair is introducing me, pausing, trying to remember exactly who I am: he looks at me for confirmation, clues, but I pause, silent and confused, before I start to speak: “I was at the –” He remembers suddenly, cuts me off, and shifts smoothly into a lecturer’s drone, handing out my credentials in the standard order. They are mostly correct. I nod to the audience, settling our relationship into a stable and predictable one, but then ruin it: I pull up a large black leather upholstered piano bench and sit, straight and, hopefully, dignified; but of course the other speakers all stood. Well, last night was very tiring, I really need to sit down.

No tie, I should have worn a tie, and I shouldn’t have this pinstriped blue business shirt open at the throat: not, definitely not, two buttons open, that’s far too much, I discreetly button up the second while shuffling papers, looking as though I’m aimlessly fooling with the shirt front. The shirt itself is conservative, a bid for a Connecticut WASP kind of credibility. I begin introducing my paper, talking about what I’m going to say, preluding everything: the subtly planned hook of the beginning, my dedication to a dead man, and I say the dread word AIDS without flinching or emphasis. The word ‘gay’ is frankly stated in this clearly heterosexual environment, they are academically, liberally calm, but on some of the quieter ones, the men with the correct ties or women with their hair in a bun, there is a momentary look of panic: did they think they were safe from sex, protected from the body in the academy, did they think that the university would keep all this away from them? I love that panic: shocking the bourgeoisie, an old habit from my avant-garde days. I should unbutton that second button again, I always had a strong neck, a square collarbone – no, I’m droning into the main part of the paper, I can’t unbutton it, that would be too obvious. I do wish I’d worn a tie, I’d feel solid, sure, in control, taking advantage of male privilege to coast through this paper. On the other hand, there are the marks on my neck, where the doctor burned off a number of small disfiguring bumps two days ago: they don’t look good, scattered small blistering scabs. It’s like being marked, but people don’t know that they’re from a damaged immune system: those little bumps mark us unless we take out after them, attack as soon as we are attacked.

Moving smoothly into a long abstract patch, will they understand any of this? and if I go too fast they won’t have a chance, I unfold a complex matrix of arguments, stepping carefully and quickly around a rather flimsy link in the chain, I hope no one noticed. Shifting forward on the stool, the comforting, damp softness of the black, soft leather. It helps me to keep going, which is difficult given the fog still hanging in my head, that rich dinner last night: you can tell from my pale face that there were three wines, a sweet aperitif wine followed by a dry white over the first course and then a deep, sharp red, then ending with the rather disappointing champagne that I’d brought.

Moving into my conclusions, tying it all up: making one last mention of AIDS, of people who’ve died. If you only knew, my scholarly audience, my own deep ties to those deaths: the loved men, the dissolving general hopes, the prefiguration of my own death: although I’m still in pretty good shape, there’s nothing to worry about in the next year or two. I like to think.

Ah. Conclusions, and not a moment too soon: I’ve been stumbling too much in the last two pages, my vocal cords fighting through the gunk of this morning after. End. Applause, their eyes distinctly warm, the supposed objectivity of academics up against the pleasure of an interesting paper. Because it certainly is interesting, I know that much. There is a question, easy to handle, I dispose of it neatly. Another one, more broadly stated and positioned, and I start to have trouble: what am I talking about? Am I answering the question he’s asking? I look up at my questioner and pause, trying to sort out my position, my arguments. His eyes are warmly sympathetic, even more than I’d expect, of course we all know what it’s like to be up here in the hot spot. I become aware that some are looking sympathetic, others are looking down or aside. I stop again –

And then the ground opens before me. I suddenly see what they are thinking, see it with perfect clarity. This isn’t sympathy around a difficult question, the genteel encouragement of senior colleagues: it’s my pale face, the scabs on my neck, I’m sitting holding onto the bench and talking through phlegm, I mentioned AIDS as a hint, as a warning, and they’ve guessed much too much. They know, they all know my story, but they’ve gotten it wrong: seeing the signs of my fragility, my illness, they think I’m making some supreme effort, fighting through death in order to – oh my God. Blinking at them, mumbling an excuse and pulling papers together, leaving the stage clumsily, too hastily amid the growing kindly applause. Thank you, thank you. So kind, so supportive of what they think must be just about my last, I can’t hold on to all of this, I wanted understanding, sympathy, but not this, they must stop clapping, they shouldn’t smile in that melancholy way, gentle eyes boring into me, I’m trembling as I sit, they’ll see it and misunderstand, I’m choking, strangling, can’t stand them all so kind because I’m still alive –

[Los Angeles, 3/7-4/1/92]

The Long Weekend

[San Francisco & Los Angeles, 1991]

I
Saturday

What was he like – you mean before, don’t you? Wait, move, my arm’s going to sleep. Oh, it’s not so bad for a foldout couch. Hey, it’s free, right?

Okay, it was sort of – no, it’s fine, they always shut their bedroom door. Okay, first. Up until the Halloween party, that was the last time I saw him healthy. I really didn’t know him long, I guess.

Let’s see. He was blond like you, furry, same quality there, but the skin and hair a little more delicate, slightly more golden. An inch taller than either of us, I think, but his shoulders weren’t as broad as yours.

Now, stop it. Because it tickles, that’s why. Well, if you don’t want to hear. Okay, move your arm over. Better.

I suppose he was more of a golden boy than you, a bit more delicate, more beautiful. He was beautiful, really, even in the hospital, when he was all –

No, handsome, but never as solid as you. Not as much of a man, really. Though only by a little bit. Not as grounded.

You know what I mean, it’s like you’re in more solid contact with the ground. You walk like you’ve been in the Navy. You’re sexier, I’ll give you that, and you smell good. To me, anyway. Ow, hey, hey, stop. If you don’t stop I’ll take your clothes out and sell them on the street. Ha. Okay.

So, he was a bartender – No, at a nice bar, really a pretty ritzy place. So this big, blond bartender gave me an incredible smile, and he kept it up and I couldn’t even think straight, he gave me his phone number and, of course, I practically fell off the stool getting out one of my cards. And he says, how about breakfast?

No, he didn’t mean that. Well, I wasn’t going to hang around ‘til three in the morning. Although, if he’d – Anyway, next morning I was running late. Oh, stop, I am not always late. Okay, so, he shows up and I’m in the shower, but since I left the front door unlocked–

Well, I didn’t want to make him wait outside. Hey, come on. So, about two hours later – look, do you want to hear this or not? Two hours later, we got dressed and out the door, went to breakfast, and he starts talking about reading Nabokov in Russian. Oh, a novelist, modern, very tricky, subtle, sort of like – anyway. But it was so –

No, I know you can’t read novels in Russian. You’ve never read any Nabokov anyway, I bet. No, don’t be ridiculous, I don’t care. Well, don’t look like that. You don’t think I only want to fuck with readers of the New York Review of Books, do you? Don’t be silly. No, look, I’ve been hanging around intellectual types all my life and, believe me, it’s no better than anything else.

Look, I’ve seen you cook, and you make the leather things, the – it’s like you’re directly in contact with everything you do. And how you were with the kids at the store, and your dogs, and all your plants. I mean, you’re so good with them, sensitive to them, in touch with what’s living. That’s an incredible talent, and do you know how amazing it is for me? It’s like it gives me a chance to really live. I mean normally, I’m miles away from everything around me, even – oh, of course. Well, yes, I assumed that would go without saying. I’ll admit that I really like that. Anyway, it’s not like I cared about discussing Nabokov with him, it was just a nice surprise, as an idea I mean.

I don’t like the tone of that. Hey, I think of you, and it’s like... Yes, I do. You’re here, and you’re so – I shouldn’t say it, it’ll give you a swelled head. Okay, you’re such a solid – no, I know, I don’t mean that, let me finish – you’re so real, holding on to you is like, the most real thing I’ve ever done. And you know you’re handsome, I’ve seen the photos, I’m not going to go over all that.

Well you wouldn’t have pictures of you in those costumes if you had much doubt, would you? Black cowboy hat, vest, boots, period. Huh. I mean. No, they’re great photographs, but I’m not going to worry about convincing you that you look good.

Well, I know you look good to me.

Prove it? Just wait. If I can get one arm free, I’ll prove it. And no more tickling.

*****

II
Sunday

No, I had a good time, I’m just a little tired.

Well, these boots are just, and then it got so crowded.

I guess so. Yeah, the men looked good. Okay, pretty good. Huh, I just wasn’t looking at them, that’s all.

Here, help me with – thanks. Damned boots.

Okay, it starts at eight so, we can lie down for maybe an hour. No, just on top of the comforter, it’s fine.

No, not sleepy.

So. Tell me about Brian.

Oh, everything, I guess. How long were you together, anyway?

God, I can hardly even imagine that. No, I think it’s wonderful, you must have really loved him. And the house and everything.

But what was he like?

Oh, just anything.

God, you are kidding.

No, that’s good. I mean, you loved each other anyway. Besides, it means you can put up with me, right?

I mean, you know what I mean. When I get cranky.

Oh, did I? Sorry, like I said, I was tired. I’m sorry. No, we did stay five hours, I thought you’d had enough too.

So, then, did he do the living room that way?

No, I think it looks great, it’s just – it’s not how I think of you, that’s all.

The entire house? How long did that take?

That’s great, that he could still do that.

So then he must have died right after. A whole year?

Oh.

What did – what did you, do with him? You know. What did you both, like to do? Together?

Sorry, I didn’t want to be pushy, I just wondered.

You know, I want us to take the coast route back instead of the desert. Yeah, it’s long, but it’s so beautiful. I took it alone last time, it was amazing, the fog, the trees and everything, green the way Ireland must be. And the ocean past the cliffs, it’s... I was thinking how nice it would be to share it.

We can both drive, it wouldn’t be so bad.

We can decide tomorrow. I already know my vote is for the coast, though.

Actually, the best part, it’s neat that he’d tease you about always leaving your glasses behind. Well, you don’t like to admit you wear them. No, uh-uh, I’ve seen you hide them in your pocket. Oh, come on, it’s sort of cute. Yeah, this big, brawny man with glasses. Ahh, c’mon.

You know, it feels like – nah, I shouldn’t; well... I like being with you so much. No, it’s like I want to wake up with you, every day, and, I want to remind you not to forget your glasses, and laugh with you about it...

No, I’m not trying to go too fast.

I know. I didn’t mean anything.

Hey, we need to get up and get dressed for the party, it started an hour ago.

*****

III
Monday

One or the other, doesn’t matter to me.

No, it’s not open for breakfast. Never is.

Let’s just go in here, it’s fine.

Eggs and hash browns. Yes, that’s fine. Whatever. A bran muffin.

I’m not looking serious, I’m looking unhappy.

Frustrated. Um hm.

I didn’t sleep. Not much.

I understand that it’s difficult for you, and I’m willing to give you all the time in the world.

No, it’s not that, don’t be ridiculous.

All right.

You should have gone home with that guy from Atlanta.

Oh come on, I saw you. That was the fastest your head moved all weekend.

No, I’m sorry, really, I don’t want to sound like that. But it was clear that, if you – if you can’t deal with everything since Brian, then it’s...

I mean if you can’t deal with sex. With someone living.

... I’m sorry.

It just – it seemed like you could deal with sex when it came to that child from Atlanta.

I think you should have done it. Maybe it would have been a good thing, I wouldn’t have minded.

No, I’m not saying anything about what you, I don’t have any – claim on you, I don’t have any right to say anything about whatever you want to do. And I wouldn’t take it anyway, I don’t want to push you into anything, that would be like, I couldn’t do that. I only want to –

I’m calm. I just need to explain, and I don’t like living in some fool’s –

Because I thought you wanted me.

No – no, go ahead, take the plate, I’m done. No, I don’t think? – nothing else for us. Thank you.

Oh, you don’t need to do that. Look, all right, I’ll leave the tip.

I think we should go home through the desert.

I know.

It’s shorter, and I have a lot to do when I get back and so do you.

No, I wouldn’t suggest it if I minded.

It’s late. We’d better go.

Hey –

you forgot your glasses –

[San Francisco, Los Angeles, 9/8/91-4/19/92]

L.A. Story

[The first sentence of the worst gay novel ever written.]

As the bus station locker slammed shut with a clang, I reflected blissfully on having escaped from the bitter, windswept plains of Montana and on Muffy’s predictably overjoyed reaction which I could virtually see (although of course she was not present at the time, being, as I then thought, cleverly hidden in the darkly handsome Raoul’s huge Bel Air mansion but actually unbeknownst to me trapped in an unused bomb shelter in Tarzana with six bikers) and happily considered my future in this city of angels, where the casual boulevard pickup of the hot new boy in town could lead to a fabulous life in a dazzling glass and stucco mansion in the hills and a career as an important film star or maybe director (not to mention getting to meet handsome, tanned body builders instead of the sheep to whom I had become accustomed, although I would never stop being grateful to my little friends) when I suddenly realized with a sharp pang in my lower abdomen, a couple of inches to the left of that remarkable organ with which I hoped to impress the rich and famous in this glitziest of cities, that the key was locked inside.

[1/21/91]

Writing a Story for You

[Los Angeles, 1991. For me this story is always paired with Valentine's Day (below), because I started writing them the same night, in that laundromat – but it is about a different man, a different time, a different city.]

You’re dead, but you wanted to write stories. You were just about to get published, just about to start making it. So I’m writing a story for you, I started it in the laundromat, I went next door to buy a legal pad and a felt-tip pen and scribbled in front of the dryers. It won’t be the story you would have written, I’ll never know what that was, your mother took all your books and papers back to Florida, she wouldn’t give me any of them, they’ll moulder in an attic somewhere.

When I get home, it’s after midnight, I type the scribbled pages into the computer, changing as I go along. When we met, that part’s easy, you were behind the bar, I was so confused by your smile, but happy, I didn’t know what to say. Page two. You never had a computer, the best ones were after your time, but you would have liked this one a lot. I got it the year after you died. Page four. The next morning, our breakfast date, you showed up early and caught me coming out of the shower, you kissed me, wet as I was, and it was two hours before we got to breakfast. Page seven. I want to show you how the printer works, show you how pretty the pages look when they’re done, how easy it all is. Your story will look very professional.

I begin to format the document, putting page numbers in the header, styles in the lead paragraph. What sort of styles would you have used? What would your voice have said, your slightly rough, resonant voice? That first morning, you told me about your favorite novels in Russian, and I thought, you look like the handsomest lifeguard on the beach. I’m writing this story for you, not for me, not for publication, not for people saying, Goodness, this is fascinating. It’s for you. I can print out this draft now, but it needs work. I’m trying to say something about your arms, the golden hairs and the broad gestures, I don’t know quite how to put it. I want this to be well written because you would have wanted it that way.

As though I would put any name on it but mine. Who am I fooling? Certainly not me, I know better. I can’t wait for people to tell me how good it is, how good I am. And I couldn’t possibly be fooling you, but I suppose you’ll forgive me, you always would. In the hospital, you were disfigured, bloated and in pain, but I couldn’t stop looking at you, you were so beautiful to me. Are you watching? Over my shoulder, seeing if I got it right. Seeing if I make myself look better, if I skip over the times when I stayed away, when I couldn’t deal with your sickness, my fear. I wonder if anyone will ask me about your name in the epigraph. Who was that? Oh, a friend of mine, somebody who died.

Editing, a red pen with the printed pages. But I’m beginning to feel so strange, uncomfortable, almost afraid – what will you do when you see what I’ve made of you, what I’ve done to everything? The story is beginning to feel horrible, it’s as though I’m draining energy from you, taking it from your poor dead body. I wanted to bring you back to life, but that can’t be done, not any more. Who told me I have the right to write a story about you? The story is for you, it’s your story. It’s not for me. I’m not writing this to show off, to make people impressed. It’s for you. But it’s rotting, turning into fodder for a new anthology, garbage for some monthly magazine, I haven’t said anything right, it’s not right, not right at all.

I go back to the computer, push some keys.
REALLY ERASE THIS DOCUMENT?
Yes.

As the computer buzzes, I tear the pages in shreds, quickly, before I can think about it, and put the shreds in the trash can. I’m not quite crying, really more sniveling, and my stomach is hurting again, it always does these days. I can’t write the story without you, you shouldn’t have left me here, alone and scared, I can’t even see your face any more, and all that’s left of your voice is the words I used to describe it. I take all the trash cans, dump them into a plastic bag, and drag it out across the wet concrete, my white socks soaked and muddy, and I fling the bag away from me as though it burns, it burns.

[Los Angeles, 2/15-8/19/91]