These were awful weeks. Every reckless afternoon proved that an hour, I would draw away with a sick thrill, find myself saying, in the extremity of affected calm, "We aren't really one another's type, you know. You need someone neurotic, taller, silkier, not so verbose." On alternate days, I wanted to break laws for him, to take to terrorism rather than give up what little life with him I'd managed to win. I dwelt on the worst possible explanations for what was happening, the way someone who discovers a growth on a bone cannot help, several times an hour, feeling it to see if it has grown.
Breathless, off-balance, by turns willfully wanting to confirm the incurable worst, I would use my key privileges to his place. An attempt to track him down, to find out how he lived when away from me. When I let myself into his apartment, I always masked my humiliation in high spirits. It never seemed to bother him. He could jump out of bed as if he'd been waiting impatiently for me for hours. "So what do you know about fixing refrigerators?" Or: "You must be the French Maid. Shall we wrinkle the sheets once before ironing them?" No matter what hour I surprised him there, we did not stay around his place for long. Twenty minutes of talk or milting or cleaning up and we'd be gone, to an exhibition, for a meal, back to my place, where he would once again stay a couple of days.
I never appeared empty-handed, so that if he was not there, as he frequently wasn't, I would have some excuse for dropping in while he was out, some reward to leave him for confirming my compulsive need to prove him not at home. I'd bring by a novel, claiming I'd just finished it and it was so beautiful I had to make the impulsive crosstown delivery. I would sit at his kitchen table, too cluttered with tapes, art repros, delinquent library books, lid-less half-full peanut butter jars, and dire predictions torn from the Science Times to be used for actual meals, and compose scraps of occasional verse by way of saying that I'd been by and we had failed to connect.
These poems, more heartfelt than skilled, were the only means I had of telling him things without cloaking the sentiment in requisite irony. In reverting to a form that most lovers swear off of at eighteen, I compounded the dangerous instability, pushing myself where something would soon have to happen.
The first days of intimacy scare:
exchange of histories too keen to mean
anything yet but new threat of loss.
Why thaw now? Why lay bare
all that has held in a fine hide and stake
it here against chance green?
Because we haven't any choice.
Just as two tunes catch in a chord
care moves forward, fact-gathering.
Our measured steps might improvise
a way for winter to wind down,
ice flushing crusted puddles, freeing spring.
I would copy these pathetic fallacies onto a notepad he'd made up for himself: From the Couch of Franklin Todd. Then I would shuffle them into the stack by the telephone, among the ghostly phone transcripts and the portraits made from memory of the people on the other end of the line. He never mentioned discovering them. But the older ones were no longer there when I left an addendum. He pressed them into notebooks somewhere or threw them away.
Life above the antique shop, nights when he did not show, became unbearably acute. The furnishings I had carefully selected, the old crochets, the scents that had been so evocative once, grew too much, the way slight touch is acid to a skin oversensitive with fever. Coming home from work, in days that were struggling to lengthen and stay bright until a reasonable hour, 1 would look up at the intimate pool of light coming from the room upstairs. I knew that the Edwardian glow was turned on by a digital timer, just as the choker collar — still capable of eliciting response from him— wrapped the neck of a woman who, that afternoon, had spent half an hour procuring the feasibility of test bans.
Unable to sleep, I would call him at the office at obscene hours of the night. Each week was a new probe to see how depraved I might, under the prose binding, really be. "Do you mind if I touch myself while you talk? Say something that might get me bothered." Franklin loved these experiments, thrilled to play along over the phone. Sometimes he urged me to wait until he got home. Others, he was as happy to tease me, take care of me remotely via analog transmission.
1 had no clue where we were heading or how long 1 would be able to last. I only knew that every question I was asked all day long seemed a nuisance variation on the one I wanted answered. When I was away from him, I was frantic with possibility. When I was with him, it wasn't enough. I had stumbled into a cadence, begun to believe that love had to lead somewhere. He was waiting for the same revelation, each of us afraid to move lest we bring about the expected QED.
One early-spring Saturday I found myself, around two in the afternoon, half a dozen blocks from his apartment. He had not shown the night before; Fridays, with their end-of-week processing, frequently became all-nighters. I had no idea where in all the East Coast he had ended up, but his place was as good a guess as any. I decided to surprise him with afternoon breakfast. I ducked into a deli and bought bagels, cream cheese, coffee, oranges, and a horrible sucrose-dripping thing that Todd, with his sweet tooth, would doubtless devour instantly. I walked up to his loft and let myself in.
He was still asleep. Evidence of disorganized entry pointed to a rough night with the machines. I stood in the foyer, wondering whether to wake him. I took a few steps toward the bedroom, then came back to the hall. However good-naturedly he awoke and greeted me, he could only be irritated, and I'd only feel more desperate to correct the impression of desperation. But coming back into the foyer, I thought: So what if I tip my hand? What doesn't he know about me already? Affection, even overdone, must be preferable to more empty space. Back to the bedroom: but before I could make it all the way there, I felt my eagerness driving him away.
I have never felt such indecision, certainly not about anything so ludicrous as whether to get a male up for breakfast. My inability to take more than a step in either direction suddenly seemed emblematic. From some reserve of self-possession, I saw how pitiful I'd become. I laughed out loud, but softly, so as not to wake him. I went to the cluttered table, composed some verses, crumpled them up, and wrote instead, "Dearest Buddy. I came by. Left you a bagel for breakfast."
But just as I was quietly letting myself out, I was again overcome by desire. This might, after all, be the last time. Effusion was the least of the two vices, everything considered. I let myself back in, scolding and cheering myself at once. I went straight into the bedroom, relieved, leaned deeply over him, and kissed him on the shaggy head. He made a soft, pleased gurgle, which was answered by another in a higher register. On the pillow next to him, there moved a second, soft, blond angelic head. An incoherent female voice, lovely in unconsciousness, said, "I'm so hungry I could eat a house."
All I could think about was getting out before more groggy vocalizings brought them conscious. I made it back to the front room, went to the table, and with amazing presence of mind, crossed out "a bagel" and wrote, "Oops; two bagels," supplementing the first from the now useless bag. Out on the street, wandering at random through the press of the Village, I understood; fidelity was for stereos. Working his way through love's alphabet, the man was stuck on the A's. Annie was who he wanted.
XXIV
Canon at the Octave
He is within easy reach, unreachable. His last postmark, Dr. Ressler's forsaken Midwest grain oasis. Even there — only a thousand miles from me, on the same continent, identical landmass. Here. Now that I can't reach him, I want to. The letter I so long dragged my heels on, endlessly red-penned in my head, left lying for weeks on the bureau, and at last ambivalently sent off just before realizing my mistake has come back bearing an Indo-European grab bag of apologies saying that the addressee has vanished without forwarding address. The text of my sham indifference now sits urgent, priority mail, registered, express in my hands.