“And this is your idea,” I said, “of a hangover cure.”
Regarding working her ass off: Suchitra did that every day, every minute of every day. I never knew anyone who worked half as hard and still had time for pleasure, in which category I was fortunate enough to be included. She woke early, went spinning, ran to her office, gave the workday everything she had, went running by the Hudson or across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, and still turned up fresh as a daisy and twice as stylish at whatever the evening had to offer, a gallery opening, a screening, a birthday party, a karaoke night, a dinner date with me, and had enough energy left for lovemaking after it all. As a lover she was equally energetic, if unoriginal, but I wasn’t complaining. I was scarcely a sex god myself and at that moment the love of a good woman was saving me from the black pit. Nero Golden’s tough affection and his heavy-drinking vodka nights, together with Suchitra Roy’s kindly, super-speed love, brought me through those days. I thought of the story of the paramedics in the ambulance playing good cop, bad cop after Mrs. Golden’s suicide attempt and realized that this time I was the one being put on suicide watch.
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN, OR, THE DOG IN THE BARDO
New York City was my mother and father all that summer until I learned to live without parents and accept, as Nero had recommended I accept, my adult place at the head of the queue waiting to see the last picture show. As usual it was a movie that helped me, Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet, “The Seventh Seal,” which the great film director himself thought “uneven” but which the rest of us revered. The knight (Max von Sydow, who would go on to play the boring artist Frederick in Hannah and Her Sisters and the immortal Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon) on his way home from the Crusades playing chess against black-cowled Death to delay the inevitable, so that he could see his wife once more before he died. Broken knight and cynical squire, Bergman’s unfunny Quixote and Sancho, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. Bergman had religious issues to work out, having come from a deeply religious household, but for me it wasn’t necessary to see the film in those terms. The title was from the Book of Revelation. “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). To me, the silence in heaven, the nonappearance of God, was the truth of the secular vision of the universe, and half an hour meant the length of a human life. The opening of the seventh seal revealed that God was nowhere with nothing to say and Man was given the space of his little life to perform, as the knight wished to perform, one meaningful deed. The wife I wanted to see before I died was my dream of being a filmmaker. The meaningful deed was the film I was dreaming of making, my film of my Gardens dotted with real and imaginary beings like an Altman ensemble cast and the Goldens in their house at the far end from mine. The “deed” was the journey and the “wife” was the goal. I said something of this sort to Suchitra and she nodded gravely. “It’s time to finish your script and start raising the money.”
And in the meanwhile the great metropolis, hugging me to its bosom and trying to teach me the lessons of life. The boat on the pond where Stuart Little sailed reminding me of the beauty of innocence, and the space on Clinton Street where Judith Malina was still just about alive and her Living Theatre was still enjoying getting naked spoke to me of old-school don’t-give-a-fuck irreverence. And on Union Square the chess players played and maybe Death was playing there too, fast games of Blitz that grabbed lives like they didn’t matter or slow games, off the clock, that allowed the black angel to pretend he respected life while still recruiting his playing partners for his danse macabre. Absences spoke to me as well as presences: the shoe stores gone from Eighth Street, the eccentricity gone from the Upper West Side where once Maya Schaper ran Cheese and Antiques and, when asked why, liked to reply, “Because these are the things I love.” Everywhere I walked the city held me in its arms and whispered comfort in my ear.
On the night of Apu’s second opening at the Sottovoce Bowery space a block from the Museum of Identity (these pictures were smart and swift and technically adept and energetic and pop-arty and they failed to move me), Laurie Anderson’s large paintings depicting the forty-nine-day experience of her beloved deceased rat terrier Lolabelle in the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist zone between death and rebirth, were showing across town. Suchitra and I were standing in front of one of the largest images of that sweet-faced dog looking wide-eyed at us from the afterlife when all of a sudden the words It’s all right formed within me and then I said them aloud. “It’s all right,” I said, and a grin widened across my face. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” A shadow lifted from me and the future looked possible and happiness seemed conceivable and life began again. It was only much later, when I thought back, that I realized that that had been the forty-ninth day since my parents’ death.
I don’t believe in the bardo. But there you have it.