Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center; there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.
And in grief, as in love, we’re porous, permeable. There is something contagious about this openness. Other people sense it and respond to us differently, since our unguardedness seems to invite them in.
I went back to Boston for a day, a few weeks after Wally died. The reasons for this trip weren’t entirely clear to me when I decided to go. I knew I wanted to walk around the old neighborhood, where we first lived together, and I thought perhaps I’d take some pictures.
In grief and in love—so allied, perhaps, as to be severe gradations of one state?—the places and things associated with the beloved take on a shine, a numinosity which radiates out all the energy, the depth of emotion and meaning with which they have been invested.
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t been back often, since the years in the early eighties when we lived together and apart in a neighborhood of brownstones and brick rowhouses, iron fences, and lampposts and April’s splendid flowering trees. After we moved to the suburbs south of Boston together we’d gone into the city constantly, for real life; after we moved to Vermont we’d come back often for a badly needed dose of urbanity, acceptance, and style. But in those days it wasn’t as if we were returning for our past; our visits had more to do with the present, with dipping into the city we could enjoy now, then hurrying home, glad we didn’t live there anymore, in the speed and abrasion of it.
Our trips back to the city, the last few years, had been trips to the hospital, for appointments with the doctor who was supposed to be more knowledgeable than anyone in Provincetown; the medical care in Boston had a reputation for being cutting-edge, and all the technical arsenal of the industry—MRIs, CAT scans, electronic and nuclear wonders—were located in the city’s cluster of hospitals. These regular visits were maddening, in their blandness and lack of news or insight or even good human commiseration. Each time was the same: we reported symptoms, the doctor wrote them down, said something equivocal. We’d combine these unsatisfying episodes with some shopping, with dinner and a walk. But it seemed, quickly, too tiring to do anything but drive into the hospital parking garage, get to the appointment, and get home again so Wally could go back to his couch, or, later, to bed. And then there were months we no longer bothered to go, since the travel seemed a needless undertaking, an investment of energy Wally didn’t have, pain and aggravation caused for no good reason. We’d see our local doctor, and he could talk to the high-powered experts on the phone.
So it had been a long time since I had walked through the original neighborhood of our union. Perhaps, before Wally died, it wouldn’t have been possible to return in quite this way. Coming to the end of a novel pushes our attention back to the earliest chapters. We think back through where our characters have been, reexamine their experience in order to see its shape. As a life continues, we can’t know what turns and surprises its narrative will take; we can’t know what we’ll be able to see in the new lights the future will provide.
Death requires a new negotiation with memory. Because the story of Wally’s life came to a conclusion, at least those parts of the story in which he would take an active role, the experiences of our past needed to be re-seen, re-viewed. Not exactly for his story to be finished, but in service of the way his life would continue in me, braided with the story of mine. Which is going on, at this moment, on the Red Line, intermingling with the unreadable narratives of my fellow travelers passing through neighborhoods of dull-colored three-deckers into the city center. This is the train, I remember en route, Wally used to take home from work, when we were first together and he worked doing displays for a department store in Quincy, on the South Shore. And then I know where I’m going first, to the Charles Street Station, which is where I used to come to meet him, sometimes, in our first months together.
After the deep tunnels of downtown, the train rumbles up into daylight as it approaches the river, the elevated track passing a strange, narrow brownstone apartment I used to love to daydream about whenever I passed it. What it would be like to live there, days and nights threaded by trains? I think Wally told me he’d looked at an apartment once in that skinny Victorian tower, and considered taking it until—luckily—the train came thundering along just outside the windows, a scheduled thunder to drive any resident mad. Then the doors open on the platform and I’m out and onto the concrete footbridge, and there are the metal stairs down to Charles, the handsome and gentrified street along the foot of Beacon Hill. Suddenly I am feeling Wally’s body descending them, maybe a bit weary after the long day, the crowded train ride home, but glad to see me anyway. I’m in him, a dozen years ago, and I am in myself, on an almost forgotten day when I am leaning against the fence by the sidewalk, dressed up to meet him in—what? overalls, I think, and a scarf and a black umbrella, something a bit too self-conscious, done-up to meet my new lover as he comes home. And I’m in my body, not my twenty-eight-year-old body but my forty-year-old self, watching us both. Fluidity doesn’t seem quite the right word for what time does; if experience were a film, it would be one that doubles back on itself, looping, superimposing, one moment coming to stand beside another, layered over it, though they’re years apart.
A dozen years dispensed with, at least for a little while, I am on the Charles Street we knew. Here Romano’s bakery, where we’d go for coffee and napoleons, layered confections done up like presents in creamy glazes and pipings. Here the realtors with their windows full of photographs of expensive apartments, the upscale grocery with its windows full of perfect food, the florists’ and antique dealers’ windows: promises, everywhere, of the dream of occupying, the hope of home.
I am strangely, buoyantly happy, though there is a ragged edge to it, like the torn spring clouds of late March or early April; it is the sort of joy that might become tears at any moment. It seems to be contagious; people are oddly friendly, emotionally available in a way that doesn’t usually characterize this—or any?—city. At the corner of Charles and Beacon, the Public Garden opens out, wide and inviting in the grand scale of its accomplished trees, severe in its colors (the day’s a dozen shades of gray) but greening, the faint haloes of the outer branches a haze of bud. Here is the pond where the swan boats will soon be doubled beneath the arching footbridge; here the angel on the corner (did she always face in this direction? memory reorients her) whose motto enjoins: Cast thy bread on the waters…
And I know what the joy is.
It wasn’t that I’d ever stopped loving him. But the years had shifted things, as years must, adjusting the focus. Twelve years is time for a river to try a variety of positions, to adjust itself and settle and adjust again, defining the channel in which it flows. After an initial year and a half of fireworks and jealousy and consuming passion—far too volatile to sustain—our union modulated, happily, into something more durable, the beginning of a long, comfortable time of partnership. That is the movement, I guess, from being “in love” to living in love, which is quite another thing. Still with its intensities, its pleasures and depths, but marked also by trust and elasticity, the kind of relaxation which allows a couple to be both profoundly engaged with one another and turned outward, involved in the life that surrounds them.
In the years before Wally’s death, our life together came to center around his illness, and whatever questions or issues might have arisen between us, whatever evolutions might have occurred in the normal course of a relationship, were simply covered over or set aside, obscured by the reality of a more pressing condition. That, I think, is one of the real tragedies of illness; you cannot know the life you might have had. Epidemic forces us to multiply this loss a thousandfold, a hundred thousandfold: had AIDS not appeared among us, what lives, what works would we have had?
After Wally died I realized there was a new quality in my feeling for him, something that didn’t have anything to do with taking care of him. It was, in fact, not something new, but the reemergence of an original feeling, from years before: I was falling in love with him again.
I am taking a walk with my lover, in the place that was ours, which is imbued with that early intensity, where dramas of passion and sexual obsession were played out, dramas of doubt in ourselves and in one another, dramas of jealousy. It’s ironic, since he spent the last nine months of his life in bed or in a wheelchair, that now we can walk together, now that he’s dead. Beacon Street, Berkeley, what Robert Lowell called “hardly passionate Marlborough Street” and my friend Lynda would later revise to “harshly passionate Marlborough Street.” No other landscape, in the history of neighborhoods in which we lived, can hold quite the resonance that this one does, perhaps because no other is quite so far away, and no other’s yet become so emblematic and so completely interiorized, the city surface transformed into the surface of dream. There is a wonderful little poem of Cavafy’s, “In the Same Space,” as heartbreakingly plain and direct a poem about memory as I can imagine:
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.
Cavafy’s Alexandrian neighborhood is remade within the perceiver through the transfiguring power of long inhabitation. But that which we leave behind is transfigured in us, too; my city’s a location of memory and desire, and I can plot in this neighborhood points of rapture and longing and wonder. Here a corner where a particular magnolia, in flower, tattooed the sidewalk, and us, with the shadows of its blooms, the street lamp glowing through them tinting our passage beneath to a warm flesh tone. Here the portico of a church—little private space—we’d duck inside to kiss, happy transgression. Here the marquee of the old theater—since then become a big house-wares shop, and now a fancy bookstore—where we emerged one winter night into an enormous snowstorm, which completely buried us both in big wet flakes while we fought all the way home. What we were arguing about? I have no idea, but I remember the wet snow breaking against Wally’s red down vest, my wet shoes, my misery; it was still those early days when one thinks each fight means it’s over, that it’s all been a mistake.
Here the doorway at the Butera School of Art, where a homeless woman whose life I always used to try to imagine lived, huddled in many scarves and hats, a shopping bag filled with…what? No more school of art now; looks like it’s become condos. And no homeless woman, at least not today; did I think I’d see her here, twelve years later, when half the people I knew who had roofs over their heads are gone? Across the street, in one of these buildings, was the office where Anne Sexton’s psychiatrist had been; I used to like to imagine her coming here for sessions, then walking, afterward, on the Esplanade, along the river. Here, a mailbox a tall, broadly built black man claimed for his own. He used to dress in black plastic trash bags, in inclement weather, and he’d use a pushbroom to clean his piece of sidewalk, the space around the mailbox he claimed as his. He seemed to own nothing but the pushbroom.
And here is the doorway of the building where we lived: 115 Beacon Street. It looks—well, untouched, except perhaps the double doors’ black paint peels a bit more, the windows of the bay fronting the sidewalk (once they were my windows!) grimy and unrevealing, sealed as they are with heavy venetian blinds.
I’ve brought along a camera. I’m standing at the foot of the steps, trying to get the entryway framed just right in the lens, when a dark shape enters the frame—the back of a man in a black coat forging brusquely into my view. He doesn’t look back as he says, “Don’t photograph me going in here.”
I tell him I won’t. “I used to live here,” I explain, “years ago.”
He hesitates a moment, deciding whether or not to talk to me, and then turns, halfway up the steps, so I can look up into his face. “You know,” he says, “the old girl’s in a nursing home now. She’s a hundred and two.”
The “old girl” is Miss K., the landlady, already ancient and close to senile when we’d known her a dozen years before. Her father bought a string of Beacon Street brownstones in the Depression, elegant bow-fronted rowhouses, which had fallen, over fifty years, into various states of disrepair, as their condominiumed neighbors were polished till they shone. She lived in the front room of one of the apartment houses, a bay-windowed parlor stuffed with her father’s immense Renaissancerevival furniture, a virtual warehouse of Chinese porcelain: blue and white ginger jars, umbrella stands, big tureens and platters swimming with carp and chrysanthemums and clouds. She slept on a grayed cot in the corner, and sat at a little worktable in her housecoat receiving rents and writing receipts. The huge mahogany armoires and china cabinets—with their carved profiles of Dante and Beatrice, their claws and beaks and garlands of fruit—blocked the windows, absorbing the light, so she’d sit beside a scholarly little lamp which illuminated nothing much besides her account books. She was quarrelsome, suspicious, and easily confused. She ran her houses like the rooming houses of another era, collecting rents by the week, but by those days she had a hard time knowing who was who and who lived where. Her tenants—whose boyfriends came and went, who shifted between apartments in new configurations of friendship and romance—didn’t help matters much. And because she was losing both her sharpness and her eyesight, people began to cheat her, bringing back the same rent receipt again and again with the dates changed to show her they’d already paid. And carrying and selling off the heavy Victorian stuff that furnished the apartments, replacing it with things found on the street. Wally said that Miss K. still had an attic, in the brownstone of which she herself was dowager empress, stuffed with princely beds and sideboards, unwieldy configurations of walnut and marble, sphinx-headed and brass-footed extravagances—useless now, in days of diminishing rooms, when what used to be a dining room or a second-floor parlor was someone’s whole apartment.
The man I’m talking to is in his sixties somewhere, I guess, with a slightly furtive quality that begins to relax as we talk. I explain that I lived on the first floor, alone, and then on the third-floor front (I can see the beautiful built-in shutters we lived behind, up above my head, closed over windows which seem to me now almost legendary) with Wally. I explain that Wally died in January, that I’m back to see the old places, and by confiding in this man I open a conversation.
He says he was afraid I’d come from Miss K.’s lawyer, or a real estate agency. “Her lawyer,” he explains, “is running everything. But he can’t kick us out, since he’d have to find us apartments in the neighborhood at the same rent. Which don’t exist. So he just doesn’t rent out the apartments as they open up.” And open up they have; out of the ten or so places in the building, only two tenants remain. Where have they all gone? Disappeared, moved away, and mostly, of course, died; this was a house full of gay men, in 1981, and now it’s a house full of no one.
First there was Bobby, Wally’s best friend for years, who lived on the first floor, in an apartment he painted and wallpapered a dozen times just in the years I knew him. He and Wally had been lovers for a short while, as kids, when each had first come to the city; their relationship had simply drifted into a friendship which sustained both men for years. They’d worked together at Laura Ashley, selling cozy sprigged and flowered fabrics and clothes and wallpaper, so they shared a private lexicon of pattern and colors. “R–22,” one would say to the other, and they’d both dissolve into laughter. I was jealous of him, at first, and it took me a while to understand that Bobby simply came with the deal, like a favorite aunt or a big unsightly piece of family furniture. Not that he was unsightly, exactly, but whenever he was around he was a presence, someone to be accounted for: center of attention, storytelling, raconteuring, singing show tunes, not listening much. He was absolutely devoted to Wally and hardly listened to him, a duality which would, eventually, distance them.
After we moved away from Boston, we gradually saw less and less of Bobby, though every Christmas he’d appear with armloads of gifts, mostly things for which we had no use, things people had given to him, or stuff he’d stolen from the stores where he worked. The dishonest streak in Bobby’s character seemed to grow more pronounced as he grew older; he’d give Wally a new watch—something we both knew he himself would never pick out—and weep crocodile tears, moved by this beautiful present he’d chosen especially for his oldest friend. He wanted to give us so much that he’d be indispensable to us, that we would be wildly and forever grateful, that he’d have a permanent home in our lives. Which he already had, though never an entirely easy one.
Though you can grow weirdly fond of those traits in friends you don’t admire, so much do those aspects seem like essential parts of someone. It was impossible to separate Bobby’s dishonesty from his generosity, somehow; his falsehoods were often so touchingly transparent, and the size of the lies seemed allied to the size of his heart. Bobby moved away from the Beacon Street apartment when he found a lover, a man he clearly did not love, another instance of the dishonesty we couldn’t abide. The lover was someone Wally and I detested, but they were together for years, living in a big house in a well-heeled suburb of the city. When Bobby came back from the hospital after his first bout with pneumocystis, the lover told him to pack. Homeless, ill, he tried the patience of his parents and his friends, and lived with us for a hellish month in which we arranged our lives around his suddenly burgeoning needs. In a month he’d made a considerable recovery, and felt well enough to be really impossible. (I still think I hear his ghost sometimes, over my shoulder, when I’m at the stove, complaining about my cooking.)
He wound up living in the YMCA in Cambridge, in Central Square, in a place I can only think of as the end of the road, the very walls and floors redolent of hopelessness. The last time Wally and Bobby saw one another was at Mass General Hospital; both there for tests, they met in the hospital lobby. Wally couldn’t walk well; Bobby couldn’t see well; without the energy to go for lunch, they sat in the waiting room and talked, two men in their forties who might as well have been seventy. At the end of the visit, Bobby asked Wally for cab fare; he accepted the ten that Wally offered and then ducked out of sight down the hospital steps, heading for the train, not the taxi stand, so that he could use nine of the ten for other things—a final moment, in Wally’s eyes, of dissembling, fully in character.
The fellow I’m talking to on the stairs had moved into a basement apartment while Bobby was still upstairs pursuing a life of continual redecoration. Less guarded now, he starts to tell me about himself. He’s a retired antique dealer, he says, with a knowing look. He lives downstairs, in what was once the kitchen of the great house, its big iron stove still filling one entire wall; it was the apartment where Doug lived once, with Wally’s brother Jimmy. Doug, who moved away to San Francisco, was the first person I knew to die of AIDS, the first from the building to vanish.
“Did you know David?” my new friend asks. I did. David and Bobby had been boyfriends for a while, and used to sing together at a rather fusty neighborhood bar called Napoleon’s, a piano bar wrapped in red-flocked wallpaper where it was not uncommon for the patrons to wear suits. Since the men there were mostly of a certain age, Bobby could enjoy feeling youthful there, and his singing and stories made him a social star.
“Is David still here?” I ask.
“Oh no.” Then a lowering of the voice, a confidential angling of the head. “Rumor has it that he has a terrible disease.”
I wince, internally; I hate the covering up, the notion of AIDS as shameful or unspeakable. But I remember this man’s age, imagine years of the closet; it’s not up to me to tell him how to deal with the epidemic. I ask if he knows where David is now.
“There was a terrific storm one evening,” he says, “and we found water pouring down the steps”—the great marble stair that winds down the spine of the building—“and it was pouring out from under his door, because his windows were all open in the rain. We had to break in—we thought he was dead in there—but he was gone. Just the windows open and the rain pouring in. Then we heard he’s in a hospice somewhere.”
I’m remembering David’s old apartment, big paper fans—red?—spread out on his marble fireplace, and his red face lit up with cocktails and show tunes and the ambient glow of Napoleon’s ruby wallpaper. David and Bobby, both of them out of work, watching TV in their bathrobes at eleven in the morning.
Before I can think what to say, my new friend says, “You can come in if you like.”
He opens the heavy black doors with his key, and suddenly I am almost overcome by a sense of wonder and strangeness. It is as if he were opening the gates of a tomb, some ancient place, little disturbed, still containing the artifacts left with the dead.
It’s dark in the big vestibule, under a dusty chandelier. The building might as well have been sealed a thousand years, only a wraithlike tenant or two slipping in and out because they have somehow retained the magical property of moving back and forth between realms. A sideboard upon which Bobby used to lay out everyone’s mail is still here, its dark varnish gleaming Victorian in the gray light, but now there’s only one yellow envelope waiting there, someone’s electric bill. The black and white marble floor is dirty, the staircase stained where rainwater from David’s abandoned windows streamed in. And here’s the door to the studio where I lived when I first met Wally, my little white room—probably once where the parson used to wait to be received—mostly occupied by an enormous mirror-topped fireplace. A room in which I was mostly occupied with love; in memory, in that room, I am always waiting for Wally to come home from work. Or I’ve been away to teach, and I come home to find the room decked for my homecoming—candles and streamers and shiny letters of metallic foil hung on a wire across the room saying—what? HAPPY BIRTHDAY, probably, I can’t recall. I was twenty-eight, and this was my first great passionate love as a gay man, my first headlong risky adventurous union with somebody my own age, for whom this love was as risky and new and full of promise and threat as it was for me. I’d staked everything to be with Wally—given up my job and apartment in New York (admittedly a dumb job and an unpleasant apartment) and landed myself in Boston, living downstairs from him, not much money, no job but temp work, my eyes huge with stars.
Which were not quite bright enough to keep me from being miserable—oh, I was gloriously alive then, in those months of risk and passion, right on the edge, but it was also terribly hard, since I’d entirely rearranged my life (such as it was) to come to a new city, to live with a man I barely knew.
It happened like this. At twenty-eight, I was between lives. (“How many lives,” my friend Lynda wrote in another poem, “have fountained through my own…”) I’d spent most of my twenties in a heterosexual marriage, living in the Midwest. I’d married young, in flight from both my family and a sexual orientation that scared me half to death. In 1971, I’d been a freshman in college when I met Ruth, and I was dazzled and fascinated by her. The fact that I’d never met a self-identified adult gay person was also, of course, a serious shaping factor; I didn’t know, living as I did in a place and time where gay people were hidden, erased, what kind of life I could have. I thought maybe lots of men felt the way I did, and then went ahead and lived the way they were expected to anyway. Maybe if you ignored homosexual desire, it would go away.
Reality, of course, proved opposite. When the marriage ended, I stayed in Des Moines for another year, teaching, catching my breath after this dizzying change, and discovering what it was like to have a boyfriend, to enter into a new planet of activity. At twenty-seven, the divorce final, my temporary teaching job over, I realized I could go anywhere. With six hundred dollars to my name, and the kind of energy that springs from knocking down the closet walls and seeing around one a wide and unknown world of possibility, I put what I owned in the back of my little yellow Chevette and moved East, headed for the myth and actuality of Manhattan.
Young Gay Man Leaves Stultifying Midwest for the Urban World of Romance and Permission: a classic American story, and I won’t retell it here. Suffice to say it was thrilling, though the excitement was mostly about finding out that I could do it, that I had enough nerve and inner resources to land on my feet in a new realm. Though, truthfully, my days didn’t involve very interesting forms of struggle: finding an apartment was the hardest part, as mindless though reasonable work as a typist was everywhere available. I’d work every hour of overtime I could get, typing reports for marketing consultants in a glamorous firm on Park Avenue. I didn’t have the money to buy clothes I needed to wear to work, so I’d go out to a shopping center in New Jersey to use the one credit card I owned—a Sears charge, left over from my days in Iowa—to buy shirts. Of course I told no one.
The practical aspects of the day-to-day—how does one live in this city?—seemed to occupy all my time; New York, on a secretarial pool salary, was more about survival than pleasure.
I was lucky to have a part-time teaching job, in a program for writers in Vermont, a graduate school where students and faculty come together only for two weeks each summer and winter. It wasn’t enough to live on, but it helped, and it meant being able to feel like a writer instead of someone who did other people’s typing. This meant a trip north to Montpelier, and I decided to make the journey into at least something of a vacation, knowing there wouldn’t be many of those for a while. I went briefly to Provincetown, but it was rainy and cold, and I didn’t feel connected to its gay resort culture; I didn’t know how to thread my way in that unfamiliar world. (Strange to think that I walked then, another person, on the streets and beaches that have become, now, the landscape of my daily life.)
So I went on to Bellows Falls. In those days, in this little railroad town outside of Brattleboro, there was a gay hotel called the Andrews Inn, an imposing-looking brick building that sat square on Main Street, next to the Oddfellows Hall and a diner called the Miss Bellows Falls. This was very odd; the gay traveler is used to finding his hotels and guest houses out of the way, and—less so these days, but for most of my life, anyway—his bars black-fronted and lacking signs. But the Andrews Inn was centrally located in a town which resembled a set for a Frank Capra movie, and somehow it seemed to work. Restless in my room, early in the evening, I tried to read student poems in preparation for my residency up north. No good; I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the bar downstairs, had a gin and tonic, and tried not to look too much at the two or three others sitting around the bar. Eventually, bored, I went back to my room for another go at the poems, but they hadn’t developed any new nuances in my absence. So I decided I’d take another walk down to the bar, without it ever occurring to me that this decision would change my life. After the fact, we look back at such moments, the thoughtless time before something momentous happens; how odd it seems, not to have known then, when afterward we can hardly imagine ourselves without such knowledge.
A few more people had gathered at the bar and around the tiny dance floor and jukebox. While I stood ordering another gin, I noticed a man who was standing by the dance floor, his back to me. Tall, his hair close-cropped, he was wearing jeans and a blue football jersey with white sleeves. (A jersey I have still, packed in a trunk. Years after it was too small for Wally, it seemed important to keep it, and now it’s a precious thing, if also a terrible one.)
I walked over in his direction, emboldened—because I liked the shape of him—enough to go and stand behind him. When he turned around, as he did in just a moment, he looked directly into my face, his own countenance open and friendly and somehow with hardly any veil across it. What he said was, “Hi.”
This is another classic story, one that’s particularly difficult to tell because the externals of it hold little to distinguish it. In truth I can’t remember much of what we said then, though I remember that we were soon having a wonderful time, and dancing, with an increasing sense of energy and connection. And if in fact I could reproduce here our conversation, I imagine it would be perfectly sweet but also thoroughly banal, on the surface, just like the surface of any such encounter.
All the life of such moments lies in what doesn’t show, in the buzz and sparkling within—or shows not in words much but in the gaze, in the look of a face opening to another, in all the little ways we communicate the fizzy stirrings of attraction, into which both of us were falling more deeply and thoroughly as we talked and danced. An excitement, the pulse-quickening buzz of flirtation, the pleasure of discovering that talk didn’t dispel the mutual attraction but deepened and strengthened it. Then, after I don’t know how long, we decided to go out to the balcony for some air.
We wound up various staircases and back ways to arrive at a broad metal platform on the top of the building, looking out over the backside of the town, a wide span of railroad tracks with a steaming engine, the gleaming black ripple of the river. Wally leaned against a brick wall, and then I took my first real look, my first full look, into his face, into his eyes—which were still tobacco-leaf brown even in the faint light from the lamps by the tracks. I wasn’t prepared for what I’d find there; they were the most unguarded, welcoming eyes I’d ever seen, and his whole countenance seemed alive with delight, as if he felt as much wonder as I did. And what I found myself thinking was, Here you are at last.
Not that it was all that simple. I was headed north for two weeks, then back to New York, he back to Boston. I had a sort of semi-boyfriend floating out there in the distance to be dealt with somehow, and I’d just gotten to Manhattan and what, exactly, did this glorious night with this stranger mean?
Thus it was a while before we saw each other again, after a breakfast of blueberry pancakes in the hotel restaurant and a long talk standing beside the open trunk of my car. It became clear, in the next few months, that my intuition, looking that first time into Wally’s eyes, wasn’t one to forget, and in a few weeks I was in Boston to see him, and he was in New York. I ended things with the sort-of boyfriend. Wally and I talked on the phone every day, wrote letters, waited for the weekends. Every weekend, back and forth between cities, and then, knowing each other all of three passionate months, we made a decision. He had a more established life in Boston than I had in Manhattan, a job and a world of friends, so why didn’t we try it there together?
Thinking of this today, it’s hard to imagine making such a choice after three months. What did I know? I was sure of profound pleasure in his body, delight in his playfulness and good spirits, acres of common ground in taste and sensibility and humor—but did I know him well enough to make this leap? I was certain of the dizzying force of that first night’s intuition, a sense of emotional certainty for which I was willing to toss caution and reason out the window.
A very little while later, it was myself I felt like tossing. The day I’d arrived from New York, ready to start a new life, Wally and I were to sign a lease on an apartment, a beautiful place in the South End, on Waltham Street, shot with sunlight, its little balcony looking down onto a courtyard garden. We could afford it; we had a date with the landlord; we were—I thought—ready. On the steps of the building Wally said we had to sit down and talk; he couldn’t go through with it; living together felt premature, too much of a commitment. I felt as if the stairs under me were crumbling; the world took on that peculiar exactitude of appearance it gets when we hear terrible news, so much so that I can remember to this day the nervous filigree of the fire escape across the street, the cracks in the steps’ cement balustrade which I must have kept looking at, fighting back tears, while he talked.
Of course, from any reasonable perspective, he was right, or rather the position he took was one that conventional wisdom would uphold. But I had no use, at that moment, for wise precaution; if wisdom interfered with love, to hell with wisdom. I had given myself over to love.
I had also given up my job and my apartment.
And so I moved into the first-floor studio in Miss K.’s tumble down palazzo on Beacon Street.
A dozen years later, in the vestibule, outside that old transomed door, I feel the whole weight of the past above my head, floor after unoccupied floor of history, mine, others’, the house’s own huge inventory of residents and years. Wally lived upstairs in a larger studio, on the third floor, behind those gloriously carpentered shutters; same building, separate apartments. In truth we couldn’t afford it, and spent virtually all our time in his place anyway, in that room up the sweep of these stairs, which is for me one of memory’s most laden locations, site of longing, pleasure, and despair. That room seems to me almost outside of time; up there it’s always evening, quiet above the city’s din and motion, a lit cube of memory hung in the immensity and safety of the night. A Cavafian room, it has become ancient, dense with meanings, erotic with the residue of passion the space has come to contain. Up there, in darkness and candlelight, firelight, and the warm parchment radiance of the shade, we burnished that room with the motions of bodies which no longer exist: every cell of my body replaced nearly twice over now, every cell of Wally’s body replaced and then burned to ashes. Does that room exist, except in my memory? Well, something does; there is a space there, in the physical world, but that same space has been plucked out of time, become emblem and artifact. It is, in memory, something I have made, like a poem or a vase. Now it lasts. In the room that remains there, in the building on Beacon Street, the plaster ceiling caved in—luckily, when we weren’t home, since hundreds of pounds of plaster fell right into the center of the room, right into the sleigh bed where we—sometimes—slept. (It hurts me now, to think of that bed, of the wood imbued with us, lonely without us, abandoned. Cavafy says of the furniture of one of his remembered rooms: “They must still be around somewhere, those old things.” What poignance that simple line has! Chairs and bed and wardrobe and mirror: the things that reflect lovers, that come to embody their moment.) I don’t imagine, in those declining days, that ceiling was ever fixed; those three big windows full of the rainy light of Back Bay in early spring probably still give onto a room piled with plaster fragments, a ruin.
Of the countless things I remember about that room, most of them nocturnal, radiant, passionate in either joy or misery, there is one diurnal memory of such force and beauty I want to recount it here. It was Christmas, the first one we had together, and we’d decked a small live tree bought from a little city lot on Charles Street in front of the toney grocery, with paper snow, lots of it, so that it resembled something from the forests of New Hampshire or Vermont—not a thing on the thick green branches but heaped and gleaming white.
The weather that December, though, was anything but northern, and Christmas Day itself was brilliant and weirdly balmy. Roasting (for once; the boiler was broken down more often than not), we pried open the windows which had been shut since October, and a warm wind redolent of fresh mud, cleaner than any city air down in the street below, came pouring in, filling our lungs with pleasure. But when the wind suddenly gusted, whipping off the river into the room, our tree’s tiny flakes all rose into the air at once, swirling around the room in the mildest of blizzards. We were englobed, inside the shook heart of a paperweight. Our room, which already felt outside the rush and pour of things, seemed still further set aside in space and time. In memory that snow spins still; our laughter and our wonder in the storm’s interior, lovers suddenly stunned into recognizing how small what’s divided and troubled them has been, how lovely their singular, flake-streaked moment is.
My companion—my Virgil, guiding me into this underworld?—doesn’t offer to take me upstairs, which is fine, somehow. I want to leave, to pull myself away. I tell him I feel as if I’m dreaming, as if I have stepped outside of time, into the house of the past. And he leans over toward me, conspiratorial, and says, “Well, just don’t you plan to come sweeping down those stairs in a big crinoline, honey, because we’ve got enough ghosts in here already.”
With that I thank him and am out the door, onto Beacon Street. I’m walking toward Berkeley and Clarendon, looking at the pouring traffic and the Emerson kids on the sidewalk and the shoppers on the way home from wherever—a world of radiant particulars, in bright late winter light seen through tears. I have never felt so implicated in a story. Until today, I have never felt what I’ve heard other men I know say, that they don’t understand why they’re alive, when so many are gone. I am alive walking down this street in the early March sun and all the men I knew in that house, that stacked repository of time and memory, are dead. Wally and Bobby, David and Doug, others I never even knew. I am here today, in 1994, walking a city street indifferent with its own hurrying life, and I am filled with the presence and weight of their stories. What am I to do with them?