Martin and John (23 page)

When at last we unrolled the blanket, it seemed that
buckets of salty-sweet water rolled off the bed as the last fold parted. Though untouched, the sheets were soaked, and I remade the bed before joining Martin in the shower. His thin back was bent over a fern he kept on the deep window ledge; his fingers pulled a few brown leaves from the pot and let them fall in the tub. Because you love me, he said. And because you love her. I said, What? He said, I think you should, if you can, if you stay healthy, you should help Susan. After I’m dead.

After he said that, I didn’t do laundry for two weeks, didn’t do anything, and when I came across those sheets again they were wet as if we’d used them just minutes ago, and covered in places with a thin green layer of mold. I held them in my hand and felt their green sliminess stick to my fingers and I didn’t know what to think: if this was the product of fucking Martin, or if this was the product of nothing, or, worst of all, if this, the product of fucking Martin, was nothing.

After he died I didn’t tell anyone for fifteen hours. I left his body in the hospital bed in the living room through the day, pulled back the covers once and looked at it, and then pulled them up to cover what was there. From seven in the morning until ten at night. I might have left him like that forever, but Susan came over to check on us. I brought her into the apartment and sat her down, and then I walked over to Martin and kissed him on the lips. They didn’t taste like him. Nothing happened. I looked at Susan. She was crying; I remembered
that she’d known him longer than I had, that she’d introduced us. I said, I wanted to do that in front of someone, so that when he didn’t wake up, I’d know he was dead. And after Martin’s body was gone and his bed sat there empty because they pick up bodies any time but they only pick up beds between nine and five, weekdays, I sent Susan away and then I went out myself. The air was hot and dry, the only moisture spat by air conditioners. I didn’t want to be alone with my grief, I wanted to give it to someone, to the whole city. I stopped a man on the street, put my hand right on his chest. Martin, I started, but the man ran away. Didn’t he know I could never hurt him? I walked a long time, until I had no place else to go, and so I went to the Spike, where I met Henry.

TWO YEARS HAVE passed.

In this world, Susan says, there’s as much nihilism in having a baby as in having one by me. I can’t argue with that.

Science says I have nothing to protect her from. But still.

Part of the arrangement with the adoption agency was that every year, on Stephanie’s birthday, Susan received an update on her daughter’s life. The letters, addressed “Dear Birth Mother” and signed “The Adopted Parents,” were always short, and came with two or three severely cropped polaroids of Stephanie. Only fragments of bodies—hands, the side of a leg—indicated that she didn’t live alone. When Susan moved
from Kansas she didn’t leave a forwarding address with the agency.

The situation presses against me like … like what? Like trampling feet? Like uplifting hands? We weren’t prepared for this—any of this. There are times when the past overwhelms the present, and nothing will happen, and there are also times when the present overwhelms the past, and nothing that happens makes sense. Here, today, the equations are changed: silence equals death, they teach us, and action equals life. And though I no longer question these anymore, I sometimes wonder, Whose death? Whose life?

Martin’s life resided in his right hand. He pointed it out to me with his left; his right hand rested on my thigh and he said: Look. I looked for a long time and then, just when I was about to ask what I was looking for, I saw it, his pulse, visibly beating in the blue trace of a vein in the patch of skin where his thumb and forefinger met. For a moment I considered pressing my own finger on it, as a joke. I don’t remember if this was before or after we knew he had AIDS. I don’t remember if I put my finger on the vein.

Mouth open, teeth resting against Susan’s inner thigh just above her knee, I stop what I’m doing as I realize I’m crying. My body trembles slightly. I feel, don’t see, Susan’s head lift up. “Dale?” she whispers.

Then John puts his hand on her pussy, where soon he will insert his dick and for all intents and purposes plant his seed; he runs fingers through her bush and teases her clit, and her
head sinks to the pillow. She can’t see his face or the tears streaming down it. He remembers suddenly what he wanted to tell that man on the street: Martin, he would have said, Martin is dead. Martin is
so
dead. And he remembers a piece of sado-babble that Henry had whispered to him. You will never be free of me, Henry had said, and John realizes that, though this isn’t true of Henry, it is true of Martin. And Susan. Even more than he fears what he’s doing now, he fears what will happen when Susan finds someone else, falls in love, leaves him. He admits something to himself that he’s always known but never accepted: that he wasn’t her first lover—just as she wasn’t his—and that they won’t be each other’s last, as well. That, even as his passion for Martin has become this lament, his grief, too, will pass away, and Martin will be even more dead. And whatever else happens, the person that may or may not have been conceived tonight won’t be Martin.

The sum of life isn’t experience, I realize, isn’t something that can be captured with words. Inevitably, things have been left out. Perhaps they appear in others’ stories. Perhaps they were here once and John’s forgotten them. Perhaps some things he remembers didn’t really occur. But none of that matters now. Even as Susan takes John inside her he knows that this baby means something, though I’ve fought against that; even Martin has become something abstract. A symbol, like the rose John once put in Martin’s lapel, like Susan’s African violet, like the fern in the shower. But after tonight, Martin’s face will be inseparable from Susan’s, from
John’s own, which is just a mask for mine. How can this story give Martin immortality when it can’t even give him life? Now I wonder, Has this story liberated anything but my tears? And is that enough? I want to ask. To which I can only answer, Isn’t that enough?

I thought I’d controlled everything so well, the plants, Martin, John, Susan. Even the semen.

In this story, I’d intended semen to be the water of life.

But, in order to live, I’ve only ever tasted mine.

I divide my life in two: before Martin, and after Martin. There are many places I could make the division: before my mother’s death and after, before I ran away from home and after. Before, and after. But Martin. I loved him. That’s nothing—if someone is weak enough, or strong enough, I’ll love them. But he loved me back. Now, I feel the lack of him every day. Oh, he hated me at the end. Every day he wished aloud that I would get sick and die before he did. But I never stopped loving him. I won’t say he didn’t hurt me. There were times when I got picked up and stayed away for two or three days, so that when I came home Martin would clutch me and beg for forgiveness. The sight of him always filled me with guilt. Within minutes Martin picked up on this and turned cold on me. Now, if I think about him for too long, I get tired. I go to the bedroom then, and I use only one pillow and I ball up the blanket and I hold it in my arms, and I tell myself the only thing I know: that my life is divided in two now, irrevocably, by a chasm as wide and deep and
unfillable as any canyon. But I still can’t decide if that chasm is Martin’s life, or if it’s his death.

I live by a routine now. Every morning I wake, usually without the alarm, which is set for nine, and I get up and I feed the cat and I take my vitamins, which sit on the shelf next to a bottle of AZT I haven’t needed yet, and then I make and drink a pot of tea. While I’m drinking it I decide what I’m going to do during the day, besides write, and when I’ve decided, and when I’ve finished my tea, I take a brief shower, just enough to wash the sleep from my eyes and the dust from my skin, and then I go back to the kitchen to wash the morning dishes, mine, and the cat’s as well, if it’s finished eating. The cat strayed in. It came by during the winter, thin and shivering, and I fed it so much that now it’s become fat and lazy, and so I’ve put it on a diet and feed it only twice a day. Already it’s begun to lose weight. As I watch it become slimmer, more active, I think that if people had such a controlling force in their lives then there wouldn’t be half as much chaos as there is. Sometimes I think that the cat is my controlling force. I could sleep late these days, but I don’t: instead, I awaken to the sound of the cat calling for its food and the smell of dust. It’s summer, and by ten the last of the dew has burned off, and it’s a year since Martin died.

Sometimes you have to start over. The stories you make up for yourself don’t seem to have any relevance to the life you lead; the horrors you imagined pale beside the ones you experience, and in your mind there’s a battle as it tries to find something to grab
on to, whether it’s a memory of something that happened or a memory of something you imagined, a story you told yourself. I remember making up my first stories at night, kept awake by the sound of my parents fighting in the other room. Every fiction is always opposed to some truth, and the opposition in these stories was easy to spot, because they were about a happy mother, happy father, happy John. But this changed. Soon the stories I imagined were as horrible as the one I lived. I found a power in it, and that power increased as the imagined horror became more and more like the events of my life. You can search for a meaning in that. I tell myself that by reinventing my life, my imagination imposes an order on things and makes them make sense. But sometimes I think that horror is all I know and all I’ll ever know, and no matter how much I try to loose my mind from the bonds and the boundaries of the events of my life, it returns to them always, obsessively, like a dog sniffing for a bone it buried too deep and now can’t find.

I write during the afternoon. Martin told me to. I don’t think that’s why I do it now, but he started me. Now I write because I can’t stop, but now isn’t so far from the days when I couldn’t start, when the thought of trying to get it out, to get it all down, seemed like such an enormous undertaking that I couldn’t even pick up a pen. Martin fell ill less than six months after we got together, but in my memory it feels like this happened a long time before. I remember that we lay in bed, we’d just made love or we were about to, and I was trying to figure out how I’d gotten there. Not just to Martin’s bed, but to that place in my life. I’m still trying to
figure that out, how I got here, and only recently have I begun to wonder where I am. I remember I started thinking aloud, and before I knew it I was telling Martin all these things I thought I’d forgotten. I told him about my hand, and about a man named Harry, and about a warm November day at the beach, and none of it made sense. None of it followed. And Martin asked me then if I’d ever thought of writing it down, a piece at a time if I had to, and putting those pieces in order, and of course I answered no.

Memory is my only possession, but it resists ownership. I remember the first thing I wrote: this is the worst thing I remember, I wrote, and then I stopped writing. Nothing came after that sentence; nothing ever did. Nothing announced itself as the worst of it all, although many, many things—images, sounds, sensations, sentences even, though I don’t remember who first wrote or spoke them—all vied for the honor. So I abandoned that first effort and I started again. I wrote: this is not the worst thing I remember, and then, I don’t know why, but I wrote something that hadn’t happened. Everything’s been a little confused since then, what’s real and what’s invented, but it all seems to make more sense too.

In the evenings I run errands. I’m always surprised when I remember how long I’ve lived here. Three years. People recognize me, they know my name. “Hi, John,” says Tillie, the sixty-year-old woman who rings up my groceries for me. “Hi, Tillie,” I say, and then we each say a few things, usually about the weather, to fill up the minute or so it takes her to check me out. In the evening, after I’ve finished writing, I often just sit on the porch and watch the sun set over the field across from my house. I watch the sun set a
lot. I look for flaws, for something to mar that beauty. How can someone trust those colors? I sometimes wonder why the air doesn’t collapse under their weight. In the red light I can just make out the grass waving in the wind, and I watch it bend in the air, and then sway back, and then bend forward again, endlessly, and I watch until it grows too dark for me to see, and then I go inside. Inside, there is the cat to be fed, and me, and while I eat I usually read over what I’ve written. I see it differently the second time around. It’s like I’ve taken a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle, and put it together all wrong, so that none of the pieces fit into each other, but are forced together or merely laid end to end. I look down on the picture that is supposed to be rectangular, but is circular. It glows with color. I see within it the barn it was supposed to be, but I see more too. The barn shifts, shimmers, changes before me in a way I can’t follow: it becomes a house for people, not animals, and then a mausoleum for the dead, not the living. Still, it has a definite shape. Though I can’t put my finger on any particular piece and give it a name, I can look at it and know what it is. It’s enough that way, the knowing without touching, without understanding, without dissecting. And then, when I’ve finished eating and I’ve finished reading, I wind the clock and I go to bed. It’s one of those new clocks made to seem old-fashioned: it’s round, with two bells mounted on top and a hammer poised between, and I keep it only because the other clock in the house is digital and when the power goes out I have no way to tell what time it is.

Already I know it’s not enough. Already I feel myself becoming bored. I’ve been idle for a year now and it’s all begun to grow off
me, the smell of dust, the sight of long grass rolling in a breeze. I’m used to things happening. But I’m afraid too. If I have nothing else right now, I have control, and I don’t want to risk losing that by doing something, meeting a man, making a friend, getting a job. I know I’ll have to do something eventually, but right now there’s just the bedroom, and that’s enough for me, the bedroom and the bed and the idea of sleep. One morning I’ll wake up and I won’t do something I always do, and then I’ll know it’s time to make the change; or else I just won’t wake up and that will be that. Sometimes in those last minutes before sleep my heart feels like a blood-filled bellows, and if I turn and look at Martin’s side of the bed, I can see it beside me. It labors mightily, inflating and deflating, and each time it deflates it spews out a viscous pool of blood that spills everywhere, and all I have ever felt is love and hate, rage and joy, terror and numbness, and there is no center to any of these spectra, only north and south poles that I sway between like a pendulum that exists only at its two high points. Nothing I know tells me that life can be any different from this, nothing except for the experience of these last few months, when there have been no high points, no polar opposites, no extremes of emotion, and it’s as if I’ve ceased to exist. Everything tells me that if I want to survive I have to find a middle ground, a place where I can stand and not feel as if on one side a sea rages to consume me and on the other side a vast open prairie waits deceptively to engulf me in immense emptiness. I don’t know what the place is I’m looking for, I only know what it’s not, and it’s not that, it’s not all or nothing. It’s something, but it’s not that.