“I’d agree with anything that buys the two of you more happiness.” I realize that in my own discomfort, which mirrors his, I must be wearing a smirk. Which earns me David’s retort.
“Q.E.D., Fenno. Only Americans see it as a commodity.”
I let him have the last, glib word; obvious to you and me, perhaps, but he hasn’t the slimmest notion how different life would be if happiness could be bought and sold. Or simply bartered.
FIVE
CLEVER HOW THE COSMOS CAN, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic. The day my dissertation was approved, Ralph and I found Armand, a few hours dead, in the little flagstone garden behind the bakery. He was slumped at one of the bistro tables he’d put out for customers once the weather turned warm. And warm it had been, unseasonably so, but even in soaking up the sun, Armand had worn a thick wool jumper, the sort of sumptuously patterned garment native to the slopes of Davos. It was Monday afternoon—he was closed on Mondays—and but for the bright scarlet of that jumper, he might have lain there overnight. I had dropped by Ralph’s flat with a bottle of champagne, and as he reached for flutes on a shelf above the rear windows, he happened to gaze down through the branches. His first reaction was a small cry of delight; he mistook the flash of red wool for a box of the geraniums Armand loved to plant out back every spring.
Armand had tried, too late, to sell his business; now, a sister showed up from Connecticut to sell off its artifacts: the antique display case, the milk-glass cakestands, the ovens, the garden furnishings, even the arsenal of elegantly industrial whisks, mixing spoons, and ceramic basins in which puffs of ethereal dough had once risen, awaiting metamorphosis into brioche. I would miss Armand’s almond brioche; Ralph would miss his habanero cornbread.
It was Fleet Week of 1986, and we had just bombed Libya; that I thought “we” on hearing this bit of news, and not with pride, startled me enormously. I was, apparently, home. I was thirty-three and working halfheartedly as the research assistant to a biographer of the artist Joseph Cornell. The job was beneath me, but it paid my lease on the studio flat I’d had since coming here. For two years, stubbornly and sparingly, I had taken from my windfall dividends only the necessary funds for groceries, other everyday sundries, and airfare for a yearly fortnight in Scotland.
Just after dark on a night too lovely to spend indoors, Ralph and I sat together on the front steps of his building to talk about the bookstore. He’d done some research and worked out expenses, he said, showing me his calculations. Then he sighed and clutched the pad of paper to his chest. “It’s only fair to confess that I could get you an interview—and I mean a significant interview—down at Hollins. I just got wind that their Edith Wharton expert up and had an infarction.” Another sigh, in case I’d missed the first. “But it’s practically the Bible Belt, and the nubility is not of our persuasion.”
He looked at me as balefully as one of his spaniels might, and just like that, suppressing a vision of my father’s horrified face, I threw over the possibility of a respected academic career for a future in trade (the second horrified face which swam into view was that of my father’s father, with whose money I’d finance my fall from grace). That taken care of, Ralph began reciting figures. I listened carefully enough while watching passersby with a strangely sharp attention, as if this were a fateful moment in need of memorization.
Four teenage girls in platform shoes came by, talking loudly about the oafishness of their boyfriends. Dogs, one after another, strained leashes ahead of their owners, pressing hopefully west toward the rich smells of the river. The tallest trees made a watery swishing, like an overhead creek; emerging repeatedly from their shadows, white shirts and dresses glowed in the streetlight. Once in a while, there were little bands of delectably young, well-scrubbed sailors; their uniforms would change from lavender to citron and back as they swaggered through the eddies of shade, laughing to broadcast their freedom.
Older couples, dressed for Palm Beach, emerged from Ye Biddecombe Inn, a restaurant with deliciously old-fashioned decor and not so deliciously old-fashioned food. (Mal, who made it a habit to retitle all establishments he deemed self-important, called it Ye Better Come Out. Within a few blocks, Venezia Mia! became the Gondolier’s Pantyhose. La Chambre Rose—they do make a good coq au vin, I used to protest—is still in my book as Le Codpiece de Santa.)
From a distance, I watched an old man make his way carefully in our direction, leaning on a patient young companion at his side. When they drew near, I saw that the “old man” was in fact young, probably younger than I. His clothes were quite fashionable but hung as if damp from his shoulders and hips. He wore terrycloth slippers—also fashionable, but meant to be worn at a spa, with a bathing costume, not on crooked pavingstones. Meticulously, he watched his footing.
I had just beaten back the fear that I might face this very decline, yet paradoxically, I’d had to make myself an old man of another sort to achieve such secret, shameful triumph. Within the past year, three men I could certainly call friends (and I did not have legions of friends) had died of AIDS—of its complications, as obituaries now properly read. I had spent small stretches of time with all three while they were very ill but had not been present when they died (all in hospital). Still, I heard stories—both wanting and not wanting to hear them—and was assured that my friends had felt no peace, no acceptance, not even resignation. Frederick, toward the end, yanked the mediport out of his chest. George, whose meek nature was consistent with his expertise in Sara Teasdale, fought the onset of his coma with uncharacteristically tigerlike strength. Luke was forty-eight when he went: ancient to me at the time, but what kind of consolation was that? In fact, these men had yet to see a single gray hair in the mirror.
Before the first of those deaths, I had stopped going to clubs altogether. I told myself I was relieved not to have to battle the modesty I’d once found so frumpish; I could now cultivate this irritating foible with pride. But of course I wasn’t relieved at all; I was queasy with dread. I would still go to Uncle Charlie’s, with and without Ralph, because everything there felt mannerly and controllable. I needed, still, to know that I could draw an invitation, and often I was sorely, achingly tempted. I was like those weekend anglers who find pleasure in the fishing but throw every fish they hook right back in the water. Yes, I was the king of catch-and-release courting.
Upright, I would tell myself as I savored the visual innuendos of a trimly mustached business student, as I pictured us falling together into my bed. Stay upright and you will stay alive. Mornings after these encounters, I’d take long walks: “Constitutionals,” my Presbyterian forebears called them; frustrationals, I renamed them. Upright, upright, upright, I’d silently chant, a little mantra to the beat of my stride, until one day I recalled that this was the word used most often to praise my father. Upright, upstanding, upbeat. (In retrospect, I can’t help imagining Mal’s retort: “Christ, I’d rather upchuck.” But this was before I’d met Mal.)
When I moved to Bank Street, into the flat below Ralph’s, I began to walk nearly every morning. My preferred route was down along the piers into TriBeCa, across Desbrosses and back up Greenwich Street. When the river route was too bitterly windy or tropically scalding, I’d head south on Washington instead, toward the distant skyscrapers of Wall Street (uprightness deified). This took me past the Federal Express terminal, where uniformed drivers lined up awaiting their freight. In warm weather they wore shorts, and as I passed alongside the vans I could see their exposed legs through the open cabs. Those calves alone, without exception so exquisitely muscled and tendoned, just the sight of them, would send a forlorn heat up the backs of my own less admirable legs.
On good days, when that unselfconscious display became a virtual chorus line of choice male gams, I would think of a darkly impish man named Hubert whom I’d met at Uncle Charlie’s. After a couple of friendly drinks, I asked him about a manila envelope which he held by his side, never setting it down. He laughed a little manically and told
me—though he did not show me—that it contained a large black-and-white glossy displaying him in his full (and I gathered impressive) naked glory. If Hubert encountered anyone, anywhere, who struck his fancy—waiter, housepainter, loiterer, clerk—he would introduce himself by presenting the envelope with a courteous smile and an invitation. I was astonished to hear that the worst trouble he’d incited was a kick in the groin from the superintendent of his apartment building after Hubert offered his pictorial tumescence to a fetching young man eating an ice cream cone in the building foyer; the young man was the super’s sixteen-year-old son. Only Hubert’s articulate, convincing remorse and his record of prompt rental payments spared him eviction. Thereafter, he had to repair his own leaks.
At the FedEx terminal, I would laugh at the thought of making such a presentation to one of the drivers lined up reading their Playboys (“Ah, just for show. Queens, every one!” Hubert would have insisted). Not in the blue moon of a more carefree era would Fenno McLeod have been so tempted, let alone so bold. Ironically, I was to meet my own sexual downfall a few blocks northeast on this very route. But in the first days of these walks, I was sure I had insulated myself from the fooleries of desire, sure by the same sad token that I had met another fate I once, much earlier, feared: that of boy as old maid. And whatever sense of defeat I did not march to exhaustion on the streets I could now pace to a fare-thee-well in my expanded accommodations.
The flat vacated by the happily fertile young couple (Ralph’s guess had been correct) was what New Yorkers call a railroad, but in its most presentable guise. In the back, one floor below Ralph, it overlooked the garden where Armand had died. Where he had placed café tables and flower boxes, I now envisioned two armchairs and a sale bin, all on casters. No plantings were necessary to beautify this niche, for it was sheltered by a large, virile magnolia tree. As I moved in, the last of its lavender trumpets brushed flirtatiously against the windows of my new bedroom.
I do not believe in ghosts, but I am not without a conscience. What did haunt me was the vulturish guilt I felt at having swooped in so soon after Armand’s death (how shallow my acquaintance with guilt was back then). I ran into his sister all too often during the awkward transition downstairs, and when she asked if I wanted to buy the velvet settee he’d kept up front as an elegant touch, I accepted on the spot and gave her the price she asked—though I had no intention of allowing this potentially necromantic object into my home. I paid for a lorry and had the driver deliver it promptly to a furniture auction benefiting the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization whose T-shirts and posters and petitioning foot soldiers confronted me everywhere in the neighborhood, keeping me upright as ever.
My first night in the flat, I lay awake a long time making plans. Ralph had suggested we find an “angle” for the shop. The Barnes & Noble megabibliopoli, with their cappuccino mezzanines and hangarlike vacuity, had yet to overtake New York, but quaint bookshops, places where a whiff of mildew incites only pleasant nostalgia, were as common in the neighborhood as mock French cafés. Earlier, unpacking my clothing, I had watched a bluejay squabble with a squirrel in the branches of the magnolia, and it brought back the fascination with birds I’d had for a time in my teenage years. Rather stodgily (the old maid ascendant), I’d kept painstaking records of all the species I spotted roundabout Tealing, and one Christmas my parents gave me a folio of Audubon prints Mum had bought at one of those jumble sales for which local aristocrats shook out their attics. I kept the prints under my bed and would look through them periodically with the material satisfaction another boy might find in a collection of coins or rocks; now and then I’d find other bird pictures on sale at frame shops (usually torn from old ornithology texts). Once at university, however, I forgot about anything so banal as birds. It was my mother, cleaning out the attic of Tealing (probably for one of those jumble sales), who’d shipped me the folio just a year before.
Knowing from her letter what the package contained, I hadn’t even opened it. At this moment, it stood tightly quartered in a box of framed pictures in my living room. So, I thought now as I began to learn the filigree of leaves and flowers that swayed across my ceiling, what about a bookshop hung everywhere with birds, perhaps with a special section of books about birds? I’d heard someone say at a party that there were quite a lot of diehard birdwatchers in this city of cities, people who rose at four in the morning to spend their dawn hours in Central Park or along the two rivers, scanning the sky with binoculars. There were, apparently, ospreys and egrets, cormorants and cranes, hummingbirds and exquisitely colored finches, all to be seen leading urban lives by those who knew how to look.
It was in fact just shy of four in the morning when I had the overpowering urge to unpack that folio of birds and see how they had weathered the years of neglect. To make myself fully alert, I groped about in the kitchen, by the tailings of streetlight traversing the parlor, to make myself a cup of tea. As I waited for the water to boil, I wandered to the front wall of windows. Directly across the street, lights burned in what I could see must be a handsomely furnished flat; at its windows, gray velvet curtains were pulled back with heavy gold tassels, and on the facing wall hung a beautifully figured carpet—Chinese deco. What drew my eye, however, was not so much the light as the surprising amount of commotion I could discern: From the play of light and shadow, it looked and sounded as if someone was dashing about in the recesses of the flat, to the dual accompaniment of music and shouting.
I opened one of my own windows and sat on a crate of books to have a better view. The music was opera, though I couldn’t make out the language. The shouting, however, was decidedly Italian, the gist translatable by anyone. “Basta, basta, motherfucking BASTA!” I heard. A man’s voice.
There was, then, a silence (except for some diva singing blithely on) of a minute or more. I was about to get up and look for my birds when I heard from across the street the unmistakable smash of china, probably on a tile floor, followed by a single decisive “Basta!” Another smash. “Basta!” Smash. “Basta!” This continued quite rhythmically—smash, expletive, smash, expletive, smash—till I (and surely most of the neighborhood) had heard a dinner service for a small batallion hurled to smithereens and something, there was no telling what, declared to be monstrously, outrageously Enough.
I was leaning out my window by now, certain that a domestic dispute was about to turn physically violent (had it not done so already), wondering if I should ring the police. I listened for protest, argument, cries of pain. I could see nothing but the handsome curtains and carpeted wall, before it the surface of a table and a lamp (Arts and Crafts, from the shape of its shade).
Nothing. There was a long electric silence, and then I saw a hand in a green sleeve slip under the lampshade and turn out the light. A moment later, the flat was dark.
In the next few minutes, I realized that no other lights had gone on in response to the outburst I’d heard. Like the sleepwalker which I began to suspect I must be, I opened the box I had come to find, pulled out my mother’s package and began to work at removing the tape. Too stubborn or exhausted to find a knife or scissors in the kitchen chaos, I cut my fingers twice but finally bared the old folio. When I opened it, the first print I saw was Audubon’s Greater Flamingo. How breathtakingly sexual, I realized, not having looked at it since I was sixteen or so. I leafed past it to see his Trumpeter Swan, swimming black-footed through water like pleated chartreuse silk, turning its neck to marvel at a moth skimming its wake. Then a Whooping Crane, preying on small lizards. A brace of cross-eyed Great Horned Owls. Barn Swallows, breasts feathered tangerine, in their high-rise nest. Carolina Parakeets (long extinct), Common Grackle, Magpie Jays, and an American White Pelican which looked to me, under the intoxication of sleeplessness, like a comedian I’d seen on Ralph’s telly named Jay Leno. Peculiar the artifacts our memories unearth at such hours.
By the time I finished admiring the prints—all unharmed by exile—the sun had risen. I went to the kitchen and rehe
ated the kettle (I’d left it to shut off and cool, never making that first cup of tea). I warmed and filled my pot and carried it back to the front room. I reseated myself on that crate of books and stared across the street but of course could see nothing more than those curtains, that lamp, that hanging rug. Eventually, I showered, took a nap, and went about the day’s tasks: measuring the downstairs space for bookshelves and finding the least costly way to have them built.
The predawn tantrum I had witnessed assumed the aftertaste of a potent dream. But two mornings later, returning from my daily frustrational, about to cross the street to my building, I happened to glance into an enormous cardboard carton sitting on the pavement beside a row of dustbins. The carton was filled with broken plates. I caught my breath. Though the fragments were many and small, they were the remains of the same pattern—a Victorian flummery of Chinese pheasants and tropical blooms—that my mother the new bride had selected as her formal china. Through my childhood, they had been on display in a breakfront at Tealing, hardly ever used. By my teenage years, I could already see how bafflingly unlike my mother those dishes were; by the time I left home, I came to realize she must have chosen them out of sheer (and uncharacteristic) insecurity, as a young woman marrying decidedly up, choosing what she presumed would be chosen by the kind of young woman my father had been expected to marry. My grandparents were not so antediluvian that my father’s choice became a scandal, but Mum was essentially a maid and barkeep. Even today, that sort of match would cause a catty whisper or two.