You look for summer in repeatable signs, different from preceding and subsequent days but identical to other summers, as if in concentric loops you enter again the same zone with the same apprehensible attributes: that dust smell of the dry weed field by the river, the pancake of heat, or these swollen roses puffed on the dining room table, creaming pale magenta, lavender and pink in a moire pattern, fading color into color the way silk does, seizing light and inhabiting the shine from within. And, too, repeatable, here at the annual 4th of July picnic, the talk has turned to weather, as over the palomino Sonoma hills stream the first incursions of a coming sky-wide fog.
On a low brick garden wall I pull at my turkey burger, eyeing suspiciously the shredded carrots embedded, as Steven nudges his marinated off-the-cob corn. Last week the heat was bone Cretan, we say, but this imminent chill at the pool party is really the way summer seems to be heading. It’s OK to talk about the weather after twenty years of casual friendship. We’re all familiar here, even those of us who don’t know each other, familial, safe. We show our aging bodies in the sun shamelessly, shorts or swim suits, shirts or not, because at this point our physical changes, as communal as they are inevitable, are endearing, and if we comment we complement each other, not because we’re liars but because we appreciate—and distinguish—the difficulties. [“You are astonishing, you look as young as ever,” the Duchesse de Guermantes tells Proust the narrator, and he moans to himself, “another melancholy remark, which can only mean that in fact, if not in appearance, we have grown old.”] But to us even our moderate age is, we know, a rarity in plague-time; which of us will get to be old? This information passes among the passing clouds and passing sun. A barbecue is trying to nail down summer. Steven and I are laughing. Hamburger juice dribbles. From the corner of my eye I see, halfway down his calf—I hadn’t known—the bright purple flower of a KS lesion.
Zalman has built a new pool; its consecration is the official business of this year’s party. The pool is lovely, but the enclosure is dramatic: a white graduated stucco wall with a capping of Spanish brick hides the pool from the suburban house, and tilts the brief ascent toward Hollywood—a white terry robe could slide down your shoulders before you reach the water. In the center of the wall glass blocks turn the sunlight aqueous, and, from poolview, place us among the lapping waves of a domestic aquarium. The water is too warm, but it suits the too-threatening sky, whose heat, we see, will be short lived. A handsome man I don’t know who I resisted flirting with is talking to Richard. At the end of a watery ear trumpet I hear him explaining, “The doctor wanted me to go on an IV drip just in case.”
I slip-on my huaraches and stay in my wet trunks—they’re new—and wander from pool to patio to kitchen, sampling the garbanzo and eggplant dips (but not the tofu) and suckling a beer. I find out the two young boys I was watching play in the water with such complete rolling body contact [Little Seryozha squirms in Anna Karenina’s lap so he can touch her body to his body in as many ways as possible] that I thought, delighted, their early friendship was a paradigm of homoeroticism, are brothers and not buddies, and I wonder why their physicality now seems less sensual, as if the genetic/social sanction makes their touching unfelt. (I don’t tell this to the mother.)
As usual, at parties, I’m drifting from group to grouplet, sampling conversation (but not the tofu). In the kitchen a trace scent of marijuana sparks my interest, “Do I smell something?” No answer, so I repeat it (that smell creates desire!) Marie must explain to Richard, who has the pipe, that I’ve asked for a hit, since I’m next to his bad ear, deaf from an AIDS infection. He lights the pipe, coming alive with his good ear, and we brighten together; the others, I believe, drift away. We drift in place.
“How are you …?” (The disequilibrated ear has had him dangerously ill, poisoning his bloodstream. I tell him that a ringing in my mother’s ear during menopause brought her close to breakdown, though others saw it as “just a little ringing.”) “ …You seem better.” He avows he is feeling better, details some doctory stuff I lose in the smoke, and adds: “I’ve been seeing a healer—a body and a spiritual healer—who said I should get ready for the final phase. He said to prepare for death by preparing my friends to let go of me.” For a loving man, I see, the shape of egress is correspondingly generous: he’ll relinquish life by urging his loved ones to relax their hungry love that quickens him. This is posed as casual chat; the kitchen still has six desserts on the side table, the stools we sit on are these four-legged beechwood stools. Focused, we hug.
Conversational groups reform and I return to the fog-shredded light. It is not repeatable summer.
I heard someone say that he quite looked his age, and I was astonished to observe on his face some of those signs which are indeed characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he was in fact old and that adolescents who survive for a sufficient number of years are the material out of which life makes old men. (Proust)
Gene—a dentist and a superb chef—has cooked a glistening tart, so that the bright cherries on top are completely rounded, globular, bursting, and we joke that he must have, after baking, injected them with a dental syringe to replump them. Its perfection makes this cherry pie a sign for cherry pie. The artifice of it we recognize as drag; flour, butter, sugar, fruit in drag as a tarte aux cérises.
Fleeting disguise—the present constantly remakes itself, remasks itself, shifting. The present only stands for the present. I write this, now, on my computer, to bring to completion a book about AIDS, and it’s the first piece written to be in the book. I’ve been rereading, you’ve noticed, part of Remembrance of Things Past, and it’s being reread because I find I’m in it. I’m writing now on a log in the sun in the park and I’m back at my gray marble desk (it used to be a partition in a men’s room), attempting to end a book whose original title was Breathing Holes—gasping up from under the ice to air—but has become, you will have read, Unbound.
Proust’s crepuscular Baron de Charlus begins a litany:
Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!
and my sepulchral rhymes beat instantly: Jackson Allen, dead! Charles Solomon, dead! John Davis, dead! Leland Moss, dead! as I recognize, circumnavigating, a repeatable unrepeatable necrology.
I creep into the living room to take off my still-wet trunks, almost smoked dry by the barbecue. Richard is asleep on the sofa, his long pale body soft like a child. I skinny into my green shorts quietly, not to waken him. Robert waves goodbye through the plate glass window and blows a kiss. There’s some blackberry cobbler I haven’t yet tried which I keep empurpled in my mind until I’m back in the kitchen eating it. Though long cooled, its deep mushy richness gives the flavor of warmth.
[1995]