He came out of his stasis saying something about what an abyss it must be to be homosexual in a society whose every gesture of law and culture makes you feel unclean. It was a form of crucifixion. He himself couldn’t imagine anything more perverted than being forced to act against your sexual orientation.
I was just beginning to appreciate how deeply hung over he was. He took my hands and said An alcoholic promising not to drink again is roughly like anyone promising never to fart again, I’m aware, but never again, so help me, I swear.
I appreciated the impulse behind what he was saying, but I wanted one thing clear. I’m not an involvee, I said, and I’m not your mother. You’ll see me react to the way you are when you drink, if you drink, but never in my life will you see me wagging my finger. I have no interest in controlling another human being’s vices. I said My reaction was about never finding a reason to offer to dig up some wine just for us, or for me, even, but you say reciprocation, plus already having begun drinking, did something to your judgment, which is fine. I said that I also thought he associated me with the cardinal virtue of sobriety. I said Let’s just regard the whole episode as overdetermined and forget it.
This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table. Sail away, I thought, this being my personal phrase for moments of feeling perfect and at ease. I more sing it than say it, mentally. I only use it in extremis, so to speak, when I have to face the fact that nothing is wrong. I don’t know if the phrase comes from some cheap pop source. It may. I don’t know when I had used it last.
I was having an overwhelming experience of joyfully being with someone and not wondering what he or I should do next to maintain this. Nobody was entertaining anybody. Remorse is powerful with me. I said While everybody around here is apologizing I want to apologize for something myself: I want to apologize for calling my mother the Colossus of Duluth. He smiled, but he wanted us not to talk. This was extraordinary for him too, then. For me the feeling was like being in a bath and being fed at the same time, or thereabouts. But this also traces back to Nelson, who’d mentioned the theory of someone he admired that every abstract painting you instinctively admire is in fact a picture of a biomorph in a perfect environment for it, a homolog of the womb. As I recall, this was something he’d mentioned as an example of paradox, because the author of it was a literary fascist terrible in almost every other respect, although admittedly very smart. We must have been talking about bad people dot dot dot good ideas, how to deal with that, how to deal with taintedness, a theme of his.
I don’t want to hear the answer to this, really, I said, but if you were in a room full of women, thirty or so women, or ten, and you saw one of them and felt a deep attraction and you had a magic ring you could touch that would make people fall in love with you but not one by one, only in a broad zone, and this was the only way you could be sure your target woman would fall in love with you, sweeping all the others of various degrees of attractiveness along with her and presenting you with the problem of turning them off, probably hurtfully, would you still do it? I don’t know where this came from, to this day.
He said of course, no. Still he wanted us not to talk. I had the clear sense that he wanted the feelings this silence together gave us. My fear was that I was going to show I was less tolerant of perfect silence than he was, or than he assumed I was. Sail away, I thought.
Things intergrade. I had another touch of the feeling the next day when I got a fullfledged endearment from Nelson. When I got it I felt faint, which shows the level I was coming to this from. I had a klang association with being in a house where the mother is an accomplished cook and four dishes are in the oven at the same time, including baking, rolls baking, and the united fragrance is perfect. Which reminds me that as a child when I was invited to anyone else’s house for a good meal I had a secret fetish of putting something from each item on my plate on my fork each time I took a bite, which must mean something. Nelson was being sexually attentive post Harold and Julia. The endearment was more a conclusion on my part than an endearment direct and nonpareil, but still I clung to it when it happened. Nelson was up first that morning and when he heard me stirring he said Ah the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. So then am I your turtle? I asked. You are, he said, my dear turtle. He seemed to like thinking of me as that. He used the term affectionately later that day, and then on and off later on. I think he was grateful to me that morning over a discussion the night before during which I had been frank with him about cunnilingus. I’d told him I appreciated it but that he should relax about it. He’d gotten into a pattern of regularly descending every fourth or fifth outing. I explained to him I enjoyed it but only really enjoyed it when I felt it was undertaken out of being genuinely overwhelmed in that direction. Otherwise he should know I preferred our usual face to face but with the nice, graduated approach he had. He was relieved. They always are. There’s something infantile somehow about cunnilingus except at the right moment and the right interval. The subject is left communicating with the vacant air during it, for one thing.
Where Were We Going?
I think I was tentatively starting to pride myself on having a generally good effect on Nelson. He agreed, at least insofar as his attitude to keeping up with the news was concerned, something he was perpetually striving to keep from turning into a mania. He had conquered it as far as print went, because although he still saved all his Economists, he had disciplined himself to read them in batches, working backward from the most recent issue so that tributary pieces in earlier issues could be skipped. This was an old intention of his that had been honored more in the breach before my arrival. He was spending far less time trying to catch Deutsche Welle or the World Service than initially. In fact we had missed the attempt on Reagan’s life as a contemporaneous thing, about which he was grateful. I can’t tell you, he said, the amount of time I would have wasted, while it looked like he might die, trying to figure out which clique or faction was going to turn out to be behind this thing. It was all moot when he first heard about it, and he had saved hours of his mental life, indirectly thanks to me.
I also thought he was tending to be more truthful, or rather more truthful more quickly. There was one contraindication to this, when I asked him, lightly and en passant, how old he was, and he palpably hesitated before answering. We were working in the gum tree plantation. I was stunned for a second at his apparently revealing himself to be someone who thinks age is important. No truly adult male does. Then he said the only thing that could have saved him, which was that he didn’t know how old he was. He thought he was forty-seven, but he might be a year older. He had been born at home. His mother had already gotten pregnant, he gathered, by the time she began living with his father. His father had been trying to make a living as an apprentice to a man who sold redwood mulch and made coffee tables out of redwood tree boles and on the side did serious woodcarvings. This was in a collapsing Utopian colony founded by Finnish socialists in the nineteenth century, mostly abandoned by them, and feebly recolonized by Depression unemployed people. It was in Washington State, in the woods. Nelson’s father had delivered him. The birth certificate was gotten after the fact, in fact long after, and his mother’s sensitivity, as a good Catholic, may have had something to do with the date entered.