Things began to take on a magical quality. Everything was a sign. I saw the world and my friends with a tenderness I had never imagined. Their lives were so beautiful and filled with work and love and ideas and longing, and I loved them in their flesh, in their reality in a world that was becoming more dreamlike by the minute. The closer I got to my own death, the more I loved the world I would no longer be a part of, its startling moments of quietude and beauty, moments that seemed to belong only to other people.
I had never been a part of it, really. The rewards of everyday life, the job well done, the loves explored and lost with bitterness or regret, the loves that expanded into an eternity, the waking up next to the skin of somebody you desired with all your heart, the simple brushing of your hair or the taste of beer, had all seemed to me like things that were happening to other people. I wasn’t real in the way they were. I envied them their acceptance, and their assurance.
I had wanted to die since I was twelve.
I wasn’t safe. I wasn’t permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn’t there. There was nobody home.
I lived alone. I had always felt alone, isolated from real people, even when I was involved in one of my failed love affairs, affairs that failed through my own lassitude, through the desultory small cruelties of the people, men and women, I had chosen to love. My love for them was real. Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.
I had started to drink heavily when I was thirty-one. Liquor gave me the ability to endure the company of others, to endure the burden of my own self. I was going through the end of two affairs I had carried on simultaneously, one with a woman with the most beautiful hands, the other with a man who was married.
The first time I saw the woman, at a dinner party in Philadelphia where she lived, a party given by my lover and his wife, she made a particular gesture with her beautiful hands, holding up her left hand as though she were holding an egg to the light, and I was thunderstruck. She had a small tattoo at the soft part of her hand between the thumb and her first finger, and as she held up the egg, a small bird rose in the air.
On our first date, she came up on the train and we went to the ballet, the first time I had ever been, and we saw Serenade, the Balanchine masterpiece. The curtain rose, and there stood two dozen women in long tulle skirts, their arms raised, their hands making the same gesture. The gesture she had made at the dinner party. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I knew I loved her.
The first time we had had sex, after the ballet, she had said to me, “Either this leads to my having a baby in two years, or I want to stop right now.” I had said, “We’ll see.” A week later, she had moved to New York from Philadelphia and found a loft near NYU and we were living together. I felt like I was living somebody else’s life.
She said once, “You always want to know the end of the story before the story’s even started.”
She said, “You don’t win arguments because you’re right. You win because you argue better.”
I said, “What happens to us every day is what we’ll remember when we are old. Don’t you understand that?”
We had a lot of fights. She hated all my friends. She hated my family. She hated the idea of my family.
A friend of hers who slept on the floor of her loft several times when I was there for the night, having sex with her at the other end of the loft, told me two years later, “I always hated you, not just because you suffer fools gladly. You suffer fools too gladly.” He was from Philadelphia, too. He worked in the garment business. We met for drinks in a hotel so he could tell me this.
After a year, we broke up. After a month, we got back together again. The sex was fantastic. She said so. I lived for it.
The man I had been seeing for five years. We met in Greece, and I knew the first time I saw him that we would be sleeping together, that we would have sex before the summer was over. He was dark, handsome, a photographer. I loved him as I have never loved anybody. The memory of a night when I came back to my white house on Páros and found him waiting on the steps, waiting for me with those eyes in the dark, it pierces my heart.
I loved the first touch of his body as we embraced, the first brush of his chest on my skin. I loved the secrecy of our affair. I loved the darkness of his eyes, his small, pretty hands, his thick legs, the hair that covered his chest and stomach. There was something masculine and feminine about him at the same time. I loved every part of him.
We would get into bed in our underclothes, as though we weren’t really going to have sex. Only once, years later, did I pull back the covers to find him naked and waiting. I was touched.
We would make love in the calm waters of the Aegean. He took pictures of my torso. In the photographs, I look so thin, the way young men do.
He was married to a nice woman. I knew her. She was a painter. She once said to me, “I think he’s happier since he’s known you. I hope you are sleeping together.” She was sitting in my kitchen in Greece when she said it, and I had nothing to say in return. I figured my silence was a confession, that she knew and accepted the truth. Like Jules et Jim through the looking glass.
I wasn’t the first man he’d slept with since they had been married. Years later, while they were divorcing, I thought, well, of course she knew.
He once said to me, standing by my bed in his clothes, in Greece, ready to climb the hill in the twilight to his wife and his dinner, while I lay naked under the sheets, twenty-four years old, “One day you’ll need me. One day you’ll call me in the night and tell me that you need me. And I won’t come. I want you to understand that.” So I knew the rules. It’s not that I didn’t know the rules. I kissed him, and he went home.
I didn’t know what they wanted of me, either of them. My lovers. I didn’t know who they thought I was. I was ugly and fatal. They must have seen that. But I know this: During the time I was sleeping with them both, I was happier than I’ve ever been.
When I made love to him, I was making love to the body I wanted to have. When I had sex with her, I was loving the masculine part of myself, like making love to a man through her body, and I loved my ability to give them both pleasure, one shy and secretive, the other passionate and public.
Once, I made love to her without taking off my watch. When I put my hands up along her face, the way men do in the movies when they kiss women, cradling their cheeks in their hands, I could hear the ticking. She said, “I knew you’d leave your watch on.”
She was a photographer, too. She took my picture naked, on my thirtieth birthday. It was midnight. I was aroused by being looked at, by being seen by the lens, by her piercing eye. That split second would always be there. I would be naked forever. In the photograph, my hair is still wet from the bath.
I loved the fact that I could have both halves of what I wanted. I loved the fact that my desire had found its full expression. I loved kissing them on the mouth, the taste of their tongues. I think kissing is what separates us from the animals and makes us divine.
I loved going from one to the other. He knew about her and was glad. She knew nothing about him.
Both affairs ended almost simultaneously. She and I broke up on a plane on the way back from a trip to Europe, a trip when she had behaved more and more badly, her fears that I didn’t love her, that I didn’t love her enough, ruining Paris, ruining London, causing me to stop every day at the flower market, until our room at the hotel looked like a lavish funeral parlor.
Her father had abandoned her as a child. She had watched him leave on a train. He had been handsome. She had dated a handsome man before she met me. She was afraid everyone would leave her.
“We’re turning into the kind of people I don’t want to be,” I told her, and then I left. She had been right. I abandoned her without giving her a baby. We had
been dating for two years. I was her worst nightmare come true.
A month later, she called me up and told me I owed her a hundred dollars. She was rich and didn’t need it. I went to see her and paid her the money. We went to a hamburger joint on the Bowery, where I had a beer in the middle of the afternoon. She said to me, “You drink all the time now.”
That was the end of her story. I have seen her twice since then, on the street. We didn’t speak.
His wife found out he was having an affair with a man in Greece, cheating both her and me, and she asked him if he had slept with me and he said yes, and I got dragged into it, and I didn’t want to be dragged into it, and so I shut him out of my life. I was drinking wine when I told him to leave me alone. He said, “Don’t open another bottle for me,” but I opened one anyway, and then he left.
I have never stopped regretting it.
Then I stayed home in my filthy fifth-floor walkup in a bad neighborhood. I painted the whole apartment battleship gray, like a prison cell. I drank a liter of gin a day. And never once, since then, have I waked up to say good morning to another human being in my bed. Never once, since then, have I kissed someone goodnight. I have built around myself a wall of sexual invisibility, and the desires of my body, real and voracious, have grown totally separate from the desires of my heart, ephemeral and essentially kind.
I discovered anonymous sex, the desires of the pure body, the starvation of the heart. Sucking, kissing, fucking in the dark, in tiny, lonely rooms. I don’t know how I knew where to go, but I did, and I prowled the night like a panther, high on gin and cocaine. There were places you could go, then. The men always said something nice when it was over. And there was always liquor and cocaine and poppers.
Somebody once said to me that the rise in cocaine usage exactly matched the introduction of the cash machine, because suddenly, as long as you had an ATM card and a hundred dollars, you were good to go, twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes it was light out when I came home. After three years, I knew it was time to kill myself.
After the bookie had been in the hospital a month, as my birthday was getting closer and closer, I began to have hallucinations, or rather, I began to have a single recurring hallucination. Every day, as I sat in meetings at work, starched and attentive, as I sat with my friend in the horror show that was his daily life in the insane asylum, as I knelt in prayer in church or sat in Yankee Stadium, this chimera would lunge at me again and again.
The thin cardboard was getting looser on the razor, filthy from the oil on the tips of my fingers. My best friend was in an electrified haze with the worry fairy. There was no one to tell.
I could see with absolute clarity the underside of my arm, the white skin, the fine blue veins. I could see two fingers, the thumb and the first finger of my hand, spreading the skin taut. I could see the razor slice into the skin and watch the blood begin to spurt and flow. It wasn’t until years later that I realized there were three hands involved in the hallucination. One arm to slice open, one hand to spread the skin taut, one hand to hold the razor. It wasn’t until then I realized who the third hand belonged to.
I knew it was crazy. I knew I had to tell somebody. I was having sex with strangers. I was drinking and doing more cocaine than I could afford. I was going to slit my wrist open. I was going to die. And my birthday was a week away.
On the morning of my birthday, I saw a psychiatrist. I told him I was going to kill myself and I told him why.
“When?” he asked.
“Today,” I said. His gaze didn’t waver.
We talked for an hour. He told me mine was not a psychiatric dilemma but a spiritual one. He was a Jungian. Then he made an appointment for the next week and I went to work. In the afternoon, I reached into my pocket, and the paper had come loose from the razor. It was time. Then I went to the charming dinner and excused myself the minute the last bite of food was eaten and then I took a taxicab home and got into bed and slit my wrist.
I made a phone call. To one of the charming women. But when she answered, I didn’t speak. I couldn’t think of what to say. I hung up the phone and bled gently for an hour. The blood glittered on my skin, like red, sparkling Christmas lights. Then I got up, stopped the bleeding, put bandages on my arm, and went to sleep, the razor on the table by my bed, the blood now a thick brown coating on the edge. And then I got up and went to work.
The next night I did it again, more fiercely. And the next and the next. I stopped in the drugstore and bought gauze pads and gauze wrapping and every kind of bandage I could find that would cover a large area, feeling like a criminal, sure they would divine my insane secret. I still went to see my friend and the worry fairy every day, and then I went out to dinner and drank as much as possible. When the bill came, I was embarrassed to see the hatch marks indicating the number of drinks I had had. Eight. Ten. I got up the minute dinner was eaten and went home and slit my wrist. The whole area between my left wrist and my elbow was covered with deep cuts. I had to take off the bandages to get to the skin, and often the gauze stuck to the old cuts and they started to bleed again and always they hurt. They stung like fire.
But the cutting didn’t hurt, and the hallucination had stopped. I would lie on my sofa in my undershorts in the August heat and cut my skin open and smear the blood all over my chest and my arms, until the hair was matted to my skin and the blood dried and began to crack. Like those mud people.
There was an erotic pleasure in the cutting. I wept as I did it, and there was an erotic pleasure in that as well.
I saw the psychiatrist again. I told him I had cut myself deeply and repeatedly, and he never even asked me to roll up my sleeves. He didn’t want proof. I never saw him again. I never paid his bill.
The bookie and the worry fairy got out for the weekend, to see if he could stand the real world again. At that point, he had had sixteen electroshock treatments. He and his wife gave me a beautiful pair of antique gold cuff links as a present for being so faithful to him.
We went to their country house for the weekend, a small house near the sea. I was helping in the kitchen and reached for a salad bowl and the bandage slipped up my arm and she saw the first deep cuts on my wrist, the hard dried blood in the wound.
“Oh, you boys,” was all she said. Oh, you boys.
He couldn’t stand the outside world. He felt unsafe. He missed the electroshock. They had no health insurance, but he went back to the hospital, kissing his daughter farewell. I went back to cutting.
I did it everywhere. I did it in taxis. I did it in the men’s room at restaurants. The same monotony of composure and pain, the trip to the hospital, the dinner with friends, the dash home to the razor.
I felt, every time, the release of some pressure that was pressing on my heart. I felt free. I felt I was home, after a long time away.
One night, I had dinner at Orso with my oldest friend in New York, and, after dinner, she suggested we sneak into the second act of Dreamgirls, the Broadway musical. We were at the age when that kind of thing was fun. We sneaked in and found two seats on the aisle. The curtain rose, I excused myself, and went downstairs to the men’s room and slit my arm. I bandaged it with toilet paper. Then I returned to my seat, to the slightest glance from my friend, and watched the second act of a musical based on the career of the Supremes, the sixties singing group.
In the cab on the way to drop her off, I had to hold my arm upright, so the blood wouldn’t drip onto the floor of the cab. We stopped for a nightcap, and I could feel the blood pooling in my elbow and the lining of my jacket.
One night, I cut myself so deeply I needed to go to the emergency room. The cuts were getting longer and deeper and more vicious. I stood at the door, one bloody hand on the doorknob, almost fainting, and I couldn’t go to the hospital. They would make me stay. They would give me electroshock treatments. I would have a worry fairy of my own. So I sat up until dawn with ice packs on the wound, making the blood stop, and then I dressed and went to work.
At
lunch, I was eating a hamburger with a guy I worked with, when I looked down and noticed there were bloodstains all over my white shirtsleeve. He didn’t seem to notice. My arm was still bleeding from the night before.
I jumped up and put on my jacket and ran out, saying I would be back. I went home and changed my shirt again, rebandaging the wound, and went to the emergency room. It was like being on Mars. I forgot why I was there. I didn’t know how to pay. I had left my credit cards at home; I had very little cash. I knew they would make me stay. I thought they would call the police. I hung at the doorway, terrified of any alternative I could imagine, and then I went back home and put on ice and finally more bandages, a new shirt, my arm thick with gauze, and went back to work. I had been away for three hours. Nobody said anything.
My left arm was full. My left arm was hamburger. I started on my right arm, the thrill of fresh skin. My arms were a crochet of wounds. A spiderweb of blood. My apartment had blood on the furniture, on the walls, on the door handles. I hadn’t cleaned it in weeks. Mice sniffed at the blood on the floor. Blood doesn’t come out of wood. Blood leaves dark brown stains.
It went on for two months. The thrill of the cutting never ceased for a second. The pain was excruciating during the day. The secrecy was my deepest joy.
When you’re lying on your sofa cutting open your own skin, life becomes very vivid. There is a vivacity you’ve never known before. And you’ll never know it again.
A friend later told me that, all that summer, after the many dinners when I would rush into the night, she thought I was an addict. I was.
My friends meant nothing to me. Work meant less than nothing. The dozens of shirts I threw away, my beautiful cotton and linen shirts, meant nothing. Eloquence and sex and the pleasures of the world were hollow. The feel of hot blood on the warm late summer nights, alone in my derelict apartment, was all there was.
In September, I was called for jury duty, to start the fourth of October. I could see the irony of being put in a position to sit in judgment on others.