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masonmontz · 3 months ago

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hellooo everyone :) hope you like it

REMEMBER: english is not my first language

angst word count: 9,5k

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“Y/N has a new boyfriend” Declan spoke and silence was the response he received. Mason felt his heart skip a beat and then fall to the floor, causing Mason to get a lump in his throat.

He just stared at Dec, trying to swallow the food he had put in his mouth before hearing the news. It took a lot of effort to swallow.

“I’m not hungry anymore” Mason pushed the plate away, feeling the strange sensation in his stomach, the same feeling that kept him awake at night.

Lauren looked at him with pity and Mason felt like an idiot. Declan cleared his throat, realizing he shouldn't have told Mason the news, but what could he do if you were friends with him and Lauren too?

“Sorry mate, I shouldn't have said that” Declan apologized to Mason, but he shrugged it off, not placing the blame on Declan.

“Who is the guy?” Reece asked, because after all he is also your friend. The restaurant seemed silent with the awkward atmosphere that remained at the table and Mason just stared at the plate he barely touched.

“David. They work together” Lauren spoke and Mason looked at her, but Lauren was already looking at him waiting for Mason's reaction. Mason looked down and felt everyone's eyes on him, Dec, Lauren, Ben, Reece, Aimee and Henry.

Mason felt like he was a bomb about to explode and everyone wanted to see the moment it happened.

“Sorry guys, I’m going home” Mason got up quickly and without looking at his friends, ‘cause he already knew that everyone noticed how affected he was by the news that you were dating, but he didn't want to see the pity in everyone's eyes. “Declan, pay my portion and I'll give you the money later.”

Mason left the restaurant quickly, but he heard Aimee's heels behind him and he sighed, knowing he wouldn't be able to outrun the stubborn woman running after him.

“Mase, wait-” she called him, and Mason only stopped walking when he felt the cold air on his face, needing some fresh air. “Hey.”

“I can't take this anymore, Aimee. I can't” Mason's voice was cracked, and the state he had been in for almost two months was deplorable. “She left me in the shit.”

Mason knows that Aimee is your best friend and he knows that you two talk daily, but he needs to talk to someone ‘cause Mason feels like at any moment he will reach his breaking point.

His eyes filled with tears, and he was looking out into the cold night but Aimee could see his eyes were wet.

“I'm so sorry, Mase. I tried to talk to her about it but she won't let me” Aimee hugged Mason from the side, putting her arms around his shoulders, even though he was taller than her.

Mason looked at her devastated, and Aimee felt her own heart ache at the sadness on Mason's face.

“I really can't take this anymore, it's too much for me, Aim” Mason sighed and brought his hands to his face, because he still felt his heart tighten in his chest, he wasn't hungry and he felt like he could vomit ‘cause of the emotions that were going through him.

He missed you.

He was sad.

He was alone.

And you left.

“You know you can talk to all of us, right? We're your friends, Mason, and you can run to us whenever you need to. You don't have to deal with all of this alone” Aimee held his hand and Mason nodded, but he knew Aimee had been busy lately because she was planning her own wedding with Henry, but she was so nice that she offered to be Mason's support since you left.

“I know, thank you” Mason tried to smile, but he knew he gave the saddest smile anyone had ever seen. “Tell them I apologized for ditching dinner.”

“Don’t worry, but please, take care of yourself.”

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

You and Mason have been friends for years, you met in school and you had some friends in common. Everyone knew that Mason had been in love with you since you were a teenager, but you were never able to see him as anything more than a great friend. Not since the night you kissed for the first time.

You also knew that Mason was in love with you, but sometimes things don't happen the way we want, and even though he always treated you much better than your boyfriends, there was nothing you could do if you didn't like him back.

The night you were celebrating your twenty-fourth birthday in a place where all your friends were was when Mason decided to make the first move.

He asked to deliver the gift he bought for you away from the others, and he gave you the most beautiful bracelet you had ever seen, it was gold and had your initial as a pendant, but it also had shells and stars, books, teacups and everything you liked the most. It was so delicate that you were moved when you realized how much Mason knew you.

When you hugged and thanked him that's when Mason kissed you, and that's okay, at that moment you didn't care and kissed him back. It was terrible to realize that that was the best kiss you had ever had, no one had ever kissed you so intensely, with so much love and passion.

Your mistake was going home with him after the party, ‘cause Mason was all over you the whole night and everyone could tell something was up, and you were also wrong for kissing him back every time, maybe giving Mason hope that it all meant something.

At first it didn't really mean anything, but after weeks of having sex with him, even you who had an impenetrable heart found yourself attracted and in love with him. Mason made you smile, Mason treated you well and always put you first, and when you realized that, you also realized that you never put him first. And you never would.

You were working so hard at work to get the job the company was offering in Australia that it wouldn't be fair to him ‘cause you wouldn't be able to give him what he deserves if you had to move.

Mason didn't accept staying away, so he said he didn't care if you didn't give a name to what you had. You weren't just friends but you weren't dating either, you knew his parents but not as his girlfriend, and Mason accompanied you everywhere just as... someone you were sleeping with. That was it.

For months it was like this. It was your house that Mason went to after games, it was you he called when he lost a game and wanted comfort from someone he loved or when they won and he wanted to celebrate with someone. You, always you, no one else.

Mason loved you so much that he felt his heart jump with joy every time someone said your name or when he saw a message from you on his phone. Everyone thought you were his girlfriend, but Mason was too embarrassed to tell you that you weren't his girlfriend. Even he couldn't understand what was going on between you, so imagine telling others.

But your time was limited, and everyone knew it.

Almost a year later you received the proposal you had dreamed of for so long, and you were so happy that the idea of leaving England wasn't scary at all, it was wonderful. You only told your parents at first, then Aimee ten days before you left.

You didn't know how to tell him that you were moving, especially since you knew Mason wouldn't handle it very well. He was injured and had some problems with his Chelsea contract, and Mason was looking to you every day for comfort to feel good.

He found out before you could tell him, and only because you left the plane ticket where he could see it, but it wasn't intentional, you just forgot to put it away. You still remember his face when Mason turned to you with the ticket in his hand, and you felt your heart skip a beat as you realized the argument was closer than you thought.

“Why do you have a plane ticket to Australia?” He asked quietly, but deep down you knew Mason knew what it meant.

You couldn't lie to him anymore and you had to be honest, no matter how much it hurt.

“Cause I’m moving to Australia” Mason looked at the paper in his hand once more, probably wanting to see the date. The day you would leave.

“In ten days?” You just nodded, sighing when you saw Mason’s lip tremble. He put the paper back where he had found it and stared at you. “And when were you going to tell me? When you were getting on the plane?”

“I was planning on telling you right away, you weren't supposed to find out like this.”

“It wouldn't hurt any less if you had told me sooner. How long have you known you were moving?”

“Almost two months” Mason agreed and you could see a piece of his heart break, then another and another. “C’mon, let's talk about it.”

You held out your hand to Mason, but he didn't take it and just stood there staring at you. You walked over to him and grabbed his hand, pulling him onto the couch with you. Mason sat on the couch and you knelt on the floor in front of him, resting your arms on his knee as he stared at you in so much pain that you felt your heart clench.

“Mase, you know how much I wanted this job, I worked really hard for this transfer and I finally got it” you explained to him, gently stroking his leg. “Don't be mad at me, but we knew I would have to move if I got the job.”

“It's not that I didn't want you to get the job, I just didn't think it would happen, it seemed so far away and you didn't tell me. I'm the last to know” he spoke, staring at his hands without looking at you, but you brought your hand to his chin and made him look at you. “And we both know that our relationship isn't going to work out.”

“We just don't date because you don't want to, if it were up to me you know you'd be my girlfriend” he spoke softly and you sighed, knowing it was true.

“Mase, I know you have a crush on me and yeah, I have a crush on you but-”

“Y/N, I don’t have a crush on you, I’m in love with you. I love you” he said and you felt your heart race ‘cause you never let Mason confess his feelings to you, and you knew that what he felt was much bigger. “How can you say that I have a crush on you when I've been doing everything for you for almost a year? It's not fair to me.”

“Well, I never asked you to do anything for me. Mason, I'm sorry, but I also never promised to offer you more than I already do” you got up from the floor and sat next to him, but Mason continued to stare at the floor in front of him.

“I love you and I've loved you since before I kissed you for the first time, how funny is that? And even after months of sleeping next to you, having sex, wanting to be good enough for you, you don't feel anything for me? How can you be so cold?”

“I never wanted this relationship to go ahead ‘cause I always hoped to go to Australia. You've got Chelsea, you've got enough women to last you the rest of your life, live it, Mason.”

“I don't want any other woman, it's always been you, Y/N. It's always been you, and you acting like it's nothing is what hurts me the most” a tear ran down Mason's face, but he quickly wiped it away, which was in vain because he couldn't stop other tears from falling, and before you knew it Mason was crying, sobbing. “Why are you doing this to me?”

You didn't know how to respond, so you stayed silent as you watched Mason cry. And the scene was sad, because there was nothing you could do to comfort him, what was done was done.

“I will wait for you to come back” he whispered, and then turned his face to look at you.

“Mason, that’s the point. I don’t know if I will ever come back. What if I like Australia? Or if I find someone there?” At that moment Mason felt like he was going to have a panic attack, and he was sure he was running out of air to breathe. “Go and live your life and forget about me, that's what I'm asking.”

“I can’t do this, Y/N. I can’t. I love you and I have loved you since I was eighteen, how can you ask me to forget you? How can you ask me to forget you after sharing so much of myself with you?” He stood up, putting his hands in his hair and breathing quickly.

“Don't forget me then, but I won't promise you that I'll come back.”

“How can you pretend you don't feel anything for me? You can confess it, no one has to know.”

“Because I don’t love you back.” You said it, and even Mason knew it was a lie, but it still hurt.

“You do. Don’t lie. If you don’t love me you shouldn’t act like you do” he said between sobs. “Don’t do this to me, please. I’m begging you to stay.”

“I already made my decision long ago, you're not going to change that Mason” you spoke with a lump in your throat, wanting to cry but refusing to cry in front of him and making things more difficult.

“Just say you love me back” he begged, and Mason looked like the saddest man you'd ever seen.

“I'm not going to say anything ‘cause things can't get any harder than they already are. Everything it's over between us, Mason. In ten days I'm going to Australia and you're going to stay here and conquer the world. Without me.”

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

Mason sighed as he entered his quiet London flat. It was strange to return to a place that had once been the place he considered home, but now London was no longer his home, and neither was Manchester.

Because the place Mason considered home for a long time was in Australia, and now it was someone else's home.

Mason was going crazy and he was sure of it, but he swears that when he threw himself on the bed where you used to lie he smelled your perfume. That's where Mason broke down.

“Why did you do this to me, Y/N?” He spoke to himself, closing his eyes and feeling the tears run down his neck ‘cause he was lying down. A sob escaped his lips, it was the first time he had cried since the last time he saw you and Mason realized that he didn't know how to deal with the things that were happening in his life.

His contract with Chelsea ended and Mason joined Manchester United, but he was far from a happy man. Even with so many insults and threats, he didn't cry once, and every smile he gave when he went to Manchester United was fake.

Mason was just surviving and doing whatever he was told to do, ‘cause all his thoughts were about you, from the moment he woke up in the morning until the time he lay down to sleep.

And Mason even had the false idea that you were also thinking about him, but no, because now you have a boyfriend. Mason feels his own body heat up with anger when he thinks about another man touching you, kissing you in the same way he did.

Mason's phone vibrated in his pocket, and he sighed because he didn't want to look at the message. And it was something that had become a habit for him, if no message was from you, why would he be excited to receive one?

But he still picked up his phone to check and was not at all surprised to see Aimee's message.

Mason threw his phone on the mattress, looking around the room and seeing that you hadn't left anything there, not even a sock, and it was as if you had never entered that room.

The worst part is that every time Mason saw Aimee he remembered that you two were always together too, because you were like twins, you were always together and did the same things. He also heard that you and Aimee had a falling out over your decision to move to Australia, but had talked things through before you traveled.

Y/N has a new boyfriend. Declan's voice crossed Mason's mind again, and that phrase had been haunting him ever since he heard it.

Mason knew you loved him, he could see it in the touches, the looks and even the secrets you shared with each other. You were too stubborn to tell him that, and Mason knew it wasn't fair to ask you to give up on a dream, but he wished he could have heard at least once the three words he always wanted to hear from your lips. Just once was enough, because then Mason would know that all those months together had been worth it.

Mason can't understand how you don't miss him, someone you shared everything with until months ago and now he's a stranger. How can you not miss him when Mason has been missing you even when he's sleeping? Don't you miss him when you're taking a shower with your new boyfriend? The thought makes Mason want to vomit.

But now you have a boyfriend and it's him you say I love you to, it's him who asks to hold your hand, it's him who admires you sleeping.

Mason didn't know it was possible to feel so jealous of someone while having a broken heart. It's been five months since you left and Mason feels like his heart hurts more every day, and he doesn't know how long it will take for him to heal.

He needs to forget you ‘cause you've definitely already forgotten him, but he doesn't know how. Mason discovered that he needs you the same way he needs air to breathe.

But you moved on and Mason moved on with a broken heart, in a helpless state, and even though he'll never open up to anyone the way he did to you, at some point that pain has to pass.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹ 3 months later ✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“No, I didn't forget the dress, mum” you said in a phone call walking through the London airport while talking to your mother. She was traveling to Ireland and wouldn't be back until next week, so you were alone for the next few days. “Yes, I will wait for you to come back, you know I will stay in England for twenty days. I know. Yes, I will. Bye, I love you too.”

You almost groaned at the amount of people walking around London airport, and it would be much harder to find Aimee than you thought. After eight months, you are back in the rainy, cold weather of England, and you missed it so much that you felt like you could cry at any moment.

Aimee and Henry's wedding is in three days, and that's why you've brought yourself back to England, ‘cause you wouldn't miss it for anything.

Australia is a great place to live and you love your job there, you've made some friends but... Australia is not London.

“Y/N!” You heard Aimee's voice before you even saw her, and your eyes filled with tears when you saw her waiting for you at the airport exit. It was like a scene from a movie, but you ran and hugged each other while you cried.

“How can you go and live far away from me? My God, I hate you, I was dying missing you” she cried, and you didn't let go of each other for long minutes. “Did you miss me?”

“Of course I missed you” you wiped the tear from your tear-streaked face, and it was impossible to stop smiling when you knew you were home again. “You look so beautiful. How is everyone? Are you looking forward to the wedding?”

“I can't believe I'm without my best friend when I get married, let's start there. And yes, everyone is fine, everyone is excited to see you again” you and Aimee walked towards the airport exit carrying your bags, and the reception you received was heavy rain at the exit. Nothing better than being in England.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“I heard you have a boyfriend in Australia” Henry said with a smirk on his mouth, and you blushed. “Why didn't you bring him?”

“First, we’re just having sex, he’s not my boyfriend. Second, why would I bring him to your wedding?” You put a piece of pizza in your mouth, wanting to ignore what they were talking about.

Josh wasn't really your boyfriend, you worked together and enjoyed being together, but he was in love with someone else and you knew it, so you never wanted anything from him. Your heart was only half in Australia too.

“And what was that photo you posted on Instagram months ago?” Aimee asked and you looked angry at her. They were nosy and wouldn't change.

“He mentioned me in his stories, what could I do?” You shrugged it off, because it really wasn't that big of a deal.

“Everyone saw it” Henry said, and he emphasized when he said “everyone”.

You looked at him and thought of Mason. In fact, Mason hadn't left your thoughts for months, he was what you thought about twenty-four hours a day. You looked at the table without looking at the two of them, and even though you didn't want to show that you cared about Mason, they were able to read your face like a book.

“You know he's coming to the wedding, right?” Aimee asked and you agreed. “It's the international break and he has a few days off, he'll be in London during those days.”

“I know.”

You were nervous about seeing Mason again after so long, even more because you left without saying what he wanted so bad to hear.

It wasn't fair to confess your feelings when you were moving to the other side of the world. It wasn't fair to him and it wasn't fair to you, that's why even after so many months with him and knowing how much he loved you, you refused to tell him how you felt about him, because you knew it would be worse.

Deep down you know that if he brings someone else it will hurt, but you can't feel hurt when it was your decision. Maybe, just maybe, if Mason is over you it means that going back to Australia and moving on is the best option, even if you feel incomplete.

God, it's so hard to love someone and want to do the right thing.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“Should I wear red lingerie?” Aimee asked and you looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“You’re not supposed to have sex until the wedding” you looked at yourself in the mirror, admiring your bare legs in the long-sleeved black dress. “Do I look hotter or is it just me?”

“You are hot, baby.”

You and Aimee are getting ready for her bachelorette party at a club in London, one you used to go to as teenagers. She's invited her bridesmaids and other friends, and it's sure to be an amazing night.

You can't believe your best friend is getting married.

The club was full of people, the music was lively and soon you found the place reserved for Aimee's bachelor party, because there were balloons, glitter, feathers and lots of pink and white.

In Australia you made some friends but it was different being with the people you grew up with, who know you inside out and like the same things as you.

Aimee cried every fifteen minutes when she remembered that she was going to marry the love of her life in two days, and in the end someone always cried with emotion with her. She and Henry loved each other since they met, it was incredible to see how well they worked together, how much Henry treated her well or did everything for her.

You always wanted someone like that by your side.

As you watched Aimee talk to Kylie, probably about the wedding or about Henry, you remembered that you had a person like that for you.

And you ruined everything.

You felt your heart skip a beat when you thought about Mason again, and even after the drinks you had already had, you felt sad when you remembered that besides pushing Mason out of your life, you were also alone.

A few months ago, before you moved, you asked your mother how she knew that Richard, your stepfather, was the right person for her. She and your father had a bad marriage and she was not happy, and you and your sister suffered the consequences of that failed marriage, but with Richard she was glowing with happiness.

“It needs to be someone special.”

Someone who doesn't argue with you, someone who celebrates the little things, someone who makes you happy most days. Happiness isn't eternal but it's moments, and if someone makes you sad more than happy, there's something wrong.

You had someone special, and you realized it when you stared into that empty, silent apartment in Australia, far from everyone you love.

You were lost in thought, but you came back to reality when Aimee screamed and pointed behind you, and then you heard male laughter.

A laugh that you could recognize anywhere.

You smelled Mason's scent before you even saw him and your legs went weak as you realized what was happening.

“Hi boys” Aime squealed, cheering as Henry walked up to her and kissed her in front of everyone, causing the girls to clap. You’d have smiled if you weren't feeling Mason's gaze on your back.

It was ridiculous that you were afraid to turn around and look at him, but you were scared to death. You turned so you could look at his face, even if it was the only time that night. You couldn't help yourself ‘cause you needed to look at him, so you turned around.

You met his eyes before you could react, because you knew he was watching you, his gaze heavy on your back. His face was serious now, and the worst thing was that you noticed that his eyes no longer had that sparkle they had when you were together.

You were the one most to blame for this.

You couldn't look away from him but you couldn't say anything either, you were just taken out of your thoughts and had to look to your side when Declan shouted when he saw you. You smiled at your friend, happy to see him, because Declan was your family too.

“Hello, D” you hugged him, closing your eyes and feeling emotional. You don't know how you managed to go so many months without seeing them. “How are you?”

“I'm fine. And you? Did you realize that England is your place?” Lauren walked over and Declan wrapped his arms around her neck. “This woman has been talking about you every day since you moved in, I couldn't take it anymore.”

“That’s not true” she complained and rolled her eyes smiling, because Lauren was also one of your best friends. “By the way, we missed you, Y/N.”

Mason was standing in the same spot and you finally turned to him after talking to Declan, and you almost rolled your eyes when you saw them all move away purposefully. It was like seeing a ray of sunshine after a storm, and you felt like nothing else mattered when Mason had his eyes on you like you were the only woman in the room.

It was ridiculous to try to explain how handsome Mason looked. He was wearing black pants, a black men's tank top, a white wool coat and Converse.

“Hello Mason” you said, and even with the loud music he would hear, because it seemed like there were only the two of you there.

Mason scratched his throat before answering you, he seemed as nervous as you were, and deep down, you were glad for that.

“Hello” he mumbled but you could read his lips. Oh, how you missed his voice.

You took a step towards him, ignoring that everyone was looking at you, and you were lost with the Mason colony around you.

“You good?” You asked and Mason just nodded, but then Reece appeared hugging Mason by the neck and breaking the bad mood between you. He was drunk and you noticed, he was laughing at nothing and holding onto Mason. You smiled, because you had missed him too.

“Oh, did you remember you have friends?” You rolled your eyes and hugged him, feeling Mason's gaze on you. “I missed you, Y/N.”

“I missed you so much, Reece. There is no one like you in Australia.”

“Mason missed you too, but he doesn't tell anyone” Reece whispered in your ear and you smiled, not looking at Mason so he wouldn't realize his friend was talking about him, but before you could do anything, Mason left and went to Declan and Lauren. “He's been a complicated boy these past few months.”

“I fucked up with him and he hates me now” and it was true, Mason probably started to despise you after you were such a bitch to him.

“He loves you, but he is so stubborn ‘cause you hurt him.”

Mason was now on his back, and God, you just wanted to hug him and feel safe again as you felt his arms around you.

Mason ignored you perfectly for a long time, you couldn't get close to him and you didn't know how either. Was it fair to want to talk to him and then leave again? Maybe Mason is just protecting his own heart because you already broke his heart once, it's not right to break his heart again after so many months.

Henry said that he had decided to come to the same club as Aimee ‘cause he wanted to have fun with her and the boys, and you smiled at his confession. Aimee knew he was coming and hadn't told you anything, who thought it would be a girls' night.

“Where's your boyfriend, Y/N?” Declan asked hours later when you were both sitting on the beanbags, the music lower now and you could talk without shouting.

Before you could answer Mason stood up, saying he was going to get a drink from the bar even though the table was full of drink options. You looked at him disappointed ‘cause you wanted to be able to talk to him or tell him that you don't have a boyfriend, and he preferred to leave than hear you talk about another man.

“Our boy Mason is jealous” Reece laughed and you decided to go after Mason, without answering Declan's question.

It wasn't hard to find Mason, he sat in one of the chairs at the counter and had his back to you, so you quickly sat next to him. He noticed when you sat down next to him but didn't say anything, just continued to stare at the untouched drink in front of him.

“Running away is not something you usually do” you said and Mason finally looked at you, raising his eyebrows.

“I used to do a lot of things that I don't do anymore” not that you deserve Mason being rude, but it's clear that Mason still resents you.

“And that's why I know things between us aren't resolved yet” you saw Mason sigh, and you wanted so much to be able to hug him, but if you asked him to he would probably run away from you.

“Yes, everything is resolved. We resolved it when you decided to leave” Mason held the glass and threatened to get up, but you grabbed his arm and stopped him from leaving. “Please let me go, don't make me suffer again.”

“I don't want to make you suffer, Mason, I just want to talk to you for a while” you practically begged him, but Mason was still trying to pull away from you.

“Talk about what? About how my life went to shit after you left? That I was here suffering while you started a new life in fucking Australia? You wanna know about that to laugh at me because I was an idiot?”

“Don’t do that, please” you whispered, because Mason had no idea how much you suffered away from him. You never told him, of course he doesn't know.

“I gave my all to you, Y/N, and that's the worst ‘cause I still love you so much that my heart feels like it's going to jump out of my chest” he said looking at you and you felt your own hands tremble, Mason always had that effect on you. “You can't just leave and come back wanting to talk to me like everything is fine, because it's not.”

“Please don't act like it wasn't difficult for me too” You felt your eyes water and Mason shook his head in disbelief.

Because it was really difficult. You spent weeks thinking if you did the right thing, if leaving everything in England was the best option, if ending the best thing that had ever happened to you was the best choice, and there was only one answer in your head.

“Yeah, I know. By the way, where's your boyfriend? Is that why your life was hard in Australia?” Mason asked and drank all the last drink he had ordered. “I went to hell after you moved out, and while you were there enjoying your new life I stayed here because I was dropped off without notice. Don't feel rejected because I don't want you to fuck me again, you rejected me first.”

Mason turned his back and left the club without saying goodbye, leaving you alone with the guilt and regret consuming you.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

You took at least five deep breaths before ringing the bell on the white door in front of you. You also don't know how or why, but your fingerprint was still registered at the entrance to the building where Mason has a flat in London, and after convincing Aimee to tell you if he was there, she finally said yes.

You regretted it the second you rang the doorbell, especially since it was only seven thirty in the morning, but you had been up all night and would go crazy if you didn't go there. You raised your finger to press the doorbell again but heard a grumble coming from the other side of the door, and you hated yourself ‘cause you probably woke Mason up.

He opened the door wearing only underwear and a crumpled face. You swallowed hard.

“Y/n?” He spoke in a hoarse voice, and before he could tell you to leave, you entered the apartment cause you needed to talk to him. “Is there something wrong?”

Mason closed the door and looked at you, waiting for you to answer. You took another deep breath, but it still wasn't enough to make you less nervous.

“It was difficult for me too, it still is” Mason raised his eyebrow. “Don't think that just because I never said what you wanted to hear, I didn't feel anything, I just knew that our time together had an end date and there was nothing to change that.”

“Look, I don’t want to-”

“You’re gonna listen to me, Mason” you stopped Mason from speaking, and then he kept looking at you. “It's not fair for you to say that I didn't suffer, because no one was in Australia with me to know that, you don't know how many nights I cried on the phone with Aimee wanting to give up everything to go back to England and to you.”

“And I don't care if you think I don't care about you, but know that you were one of the best things that ever happened to me and you can't treat me badly like you treated me yesterday, it's not fair to me either” you stopped for two seconds to breathe, and Mason looked at you without saying anything. “You know how much I always wanted this job, Mason, and you can't imagine how much it hurts me to realize that I'm gone and I was much happier here than I am in Australia.”

A tear fell from your face and you wiped it away, Mason brought his hands to his face and sighed, taking a step towards you, but you stopped him from getting closer.

“I'm not here to ask you for forgiveness, I just needed to say a few things.”

And you were gone as quickly as you arrived, leaving Mason and his own thoughts alone.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

Mason felt like shit for the rest of the day, mainly ‘cause he knew he treated you badly. The problem is that Mason gave you everything, and when he least expected it, you broke his heart into pieces.

Those were terrible months, Mason was training, he was irritated with everyone and especially on the field, which caused him to be sent off and made the coach discuss with him. Mason spent months without sleeping through the night, got drunk at every party he went to, and even spent weeks without talking to his own family so no one would ask about you.

Aimee and Henry's wedding is tomorrow and Mason would rather be anywhere but there. He can't even imagine what it's going to be like to see you so beautiful and in a relationship with another man who's oceans away, but Mason knows it's going to be very difficult.

“Why do you have such a shitty face?” Declan asked as he took the beer Mason handed him, and Mason had been quiet for minutes while they were watching an old football match that was on the television.

“Y/N came here this morning” Mason spoke softly and threw himself onto the couch, sighing as he remembered the words you spoke to him. “I feel like shit again, bro.”

“You've been feeling like shit for eight months, my friend” Mason rolled his eyes, but he couldn't disagree. You came back and turned over all the feelings that Mason thought were gone, when in fact they were stored and emerged to squeeze his heart again.

And he knows that in a few days you'll be gone again, he knows it'll be shit again and it'll be another eight months to forget everything.

“I feel like we haven't ended things between us yet, but I'm not ready for that. Man, I love her so much, she's gonna kill me again” Mason confessed, and for months he hadn't talked about you to anyone but Aimee. His mother would always ask, but Mason wouldn't talk about it to her, or anyone else.

The funniest thing was that even the fans said that there was something wrong with Mason, but he always said that everything was fine while putting that sadness deeper in his heart.

“Don't let her bring you down again then” Declan said it like it was obvious, but it was easy for him because he had Lauren, Jude and he was happy.

“It's not that simple.”

“Make it so.”

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“You look so pretty, I'm gonna ruin my makeup from crying this much” you said as you shook your eyes to stop crying as you looked at Aimee in the wedding dress. “I have never seen such a beautiful bride.”

“Please, stop, you're making me emotional and I can't cry” Aimee said looking at the ceiling, and then you approached and hugged her, saying once again how beautiful she was. “You look beautiful too, that color looks wonderful on you.”

“I know, I really look good in blue” you joked, and she laughed as the two of you checked to make sure everything was ready for Aimee to get married. “Let's check if we have everything.”

Aimee agreed and went to the window to see the place where the ceremony was taking place. All the guests were already there and in a few minutes it would be her turn. The day was beautiful, and everything was perfect. You walked over to the window, looking down at where the guests were sitting, and even without meaning to, your gaze quickly found the person who had been your thoughts for months.

Mason was laughing with Declan and Reece, and he had no way of seeing you there but you could even see his eyes closing as he laughed. He looked so happy, he didn't look like the same sad-hearted man you'd met two days ago, and for a moment you felt good that Mason was smiling.

“Did you talk to him?” Aimee asked, and you nodded.

“He hates me” you shrugged because it's the truth.

“He doesn't hate you, don't be silly, Mason loves you so much, he just didn't know how to deal with you leaving.”

“It doesn't matter now” you wiped away a tear and turned to Aimee, smiling at her. “So, something old?”

“My grandmother's earrings” Aimee pointed to her grandmother's gold earrings, and they really were beautiful.

“Something new?”

“My dress.”

“Something borrowed?”

“My shoe.”

“Something blue?”

“The sexy lingerie I'm wearing underneath.”

“Oh, spare me the details” you rolled your eyes, and then smiled nervously ‘cause the time was finally coming. Aimee's father came in to call her and you finally left, but not before wishing her good luck.

You went down to where the ceremony would be and greeted a few people, some surprised and happy that you were back in England. Lauren waved and called you over, so you quickly walked over to her, sighing because Mason was there too. You felt your hands sweat as you walked down the hallway, as well as your heart racing.

“Hey guys” you said and almost groaned when you saw that the empty seat Lauren had saved was next to Mason. “Is this place for me?”

Mason looked at you and you almost forgot how to walk, because he had this effect on you, making you nervous with just a look. He was so handsome, he looked like he was ready for his own wedding. You quickly looked away from him, but Mason didn't stop looking at you for a second.

“Sure” Lauren smiled and you wanted to kill her. You sat next to Mason, controlling your breathing, and even so he didn't stop looking at you, leaving you blushing.

“You're drooling man, control yourself” Reece spoke softly to Mason, and Mason cleared his throat and shifted in his chair, making RJ laugh. You were talking to Lauren because you had nothing to talk about with Mason, but his cologne was all around you, making you drunk by the smell of the perfume he had been using for years.

Everyone cried or got emotional when Aimee walked in, especially Henry who cried like a baby when he saw her walking towards him. You and Lauren were almost sobbing throughout the ceremony, and Declan was already laughing at you.

When they said their vows was when you and Mason looked at each other, and a racing heart because of his deep gaze on you made you come closer and hold his arm, leaning your face against his suit in a loving way, and it was the closest to love you had come in eight months.

Because Mason means love to you, and not even so many months apart have changed that.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“I'm nervous, I forgot the speech paper” you whispered to Anthony, Aimee's brother, and he shrugged with a laugh.

“Not my problem, Y/N, I've already said my speech.”

“Okay, I can do this” you took a deep breath and he helped you climb onto a chair. Everyone had already eaten dinner and everything was so spectacular, it would be a wonderful night for your best friend.

You trembled as you saw all the eyes on you, but you held the microphone and smiled to pretend you weren't nervous.

“I wrote some words on a piece of paper but I forgot the paper at home, so I'll have to improvise, I hope the bride and groom don't mind” everyone laughed at what you said and you felt your cheeks heat up, speaking in public wasn't very easy, speaking at a wedding was even worse. “I remember the day Aimee came to me when we were in college a few years ago and said she met the coolest guy in the world and I said "impossible, no man is the coolest in the world" and yet she said he was.”

“In fact Henry, you proved that you are really a very nice guy and Aimee was right, ‘cause she shines when she looks at you, just like we can see in your eyes how much you love her. I could tell you all about some of the embarrassing moments of the two of them, but I prefer to talk about love cause I think everyone would like to hear it.”

“I once asked my mom how she knew my stepdad was the right person for her and she told me it had to be someone special. It's a person who doesn't mind being silent by your side because they know that everything is fine even without talking. It's someone who makes you happy just by remembering that person for a minute of the day or the whole day. It's someone who doesn't judge you, doesn't embarrass you or devalue what you feel.”

Even without wanting to, your gaze fell on Mason, and he was staring at you on top of that chair with a microphone in your hand. He was paying attention to every word that came out of your mouth and you almost lost focus because it hurt so much knowing that you would never have him in your life again.

“You two are each other's special person. I'm sure everyone here has someone special, and it's worth dropping everything when you know you have someone by your side to love you and go through everything with you, because that's how love works.”

Your eyes filled with tears and you had to stop looking at Mason ‘cause even he got teary-eyed listening to you. You looked at Aimee and she was crying and trying not to ruin her makeup as she ran her hand over her eyes, and Henry next to her smiled as he wiped a tear that ran down his face too.

You also had to wipe away the tear that ran down your face.

“Here's to Aimee and Henry. May their lives be wonderful” you raised your glass of champagne and everyone raised their own, toasting to their new life together. Anthony helped you down from the chair and you quickly went to your seat, but in reality you wanted to go out and cry.

Mason didn't take his eyes off you and you started to feel suffocated, especially since he hadn't even wanted to come near you for two days and he still left you in pieces when you tried to talk to him.

“I've never heard such beautiful words, Y/N” Aimee Aimee hugged you and you smiled, still with tears in your eyes. “Thank you for coming, thank you for being my best friend. I love you so much.”

“I love you too, Aim.”

You didn't even make it to the table because everyone stopped to congratulate you on your beautiful speech, and when you finally got there, Mason was no longer there.

“Where is he?” you asked RJ, and he said that Mason had gone to the bathroom, before anyone could stop you again, you went to look for him.

You waited a few minutes before Mason came out of the bathroom and saying that he was surprised to see you waiting for him was nothing new. You stared at each other for a few seconds before another guy came out of the bathroom and you and Mason had to break contact, so you pulled him by the hand and walked down the hallway until you found another door.

Mason didn't say anything as he followed you, and when you saw that it was a warehouse and there was no one there, you went in and pulled Mason with you, pushing him against the wall.

“I love you” you whispered and Mason's eyes widened, shocked because he finally heard the three words he wanted to hear so much. Maybe it was too late and you would never be together again, but at least you got your feelings off your chest and told Mason. “Oh my God, I love you.”

“What?” Mason put his hand over his mouth, not wanting to show his smile, but he was smiling so much it was impossible to hide it. “I didn't hear.”

“I love you, I love you, I love-.” You had never felt such relief when Mason reached out and pulled your mouth against his.

Kissing Mason is like Christmas morning, or the morning of your birthday or the birthday of someone you love. Feeling Mason's arms is like feeling like nothing in the world can bring you down ‘cause you have someone protecting you from everything and ready to fight with you.

“Does he ask to hold your hand?” Mason whispered and then kissed you again, and you couldn't respond because you were busy feeling the wonderful taste of his lips. “I bet he doesn't kiss you like I do.”

Mason held you with both hands on your neck, and then he brought his hand to the back of your neck and grabbed your hair, making you pull your mouth away from his and look at him.

Why did he have to be so handsome?

And that stupid blond hair, that made you want to take his clothes off completely.

The look on your face was probably desperate with desire ‘cause Mason smiled and ran his tongue over his lips, staring at your mouth.

“No” you confessed, feeling Mason smile. “You're the only one who knows how to touch me and how to love me.”

Mason smiled when you responded and pulled your mouth against his once more, wrapping his arm around your neck and holding you against him. It was okay, you didn't want to be anywhere else but in his arms.

Mason pushed you against the wall and you gasped ‘cause his body against yours gave you protection. How did you manage to go so many months without him? You only knew one home, and that was next to Mason.

You'll never be able to live in Australia alone again.

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

“Are you ready for a wedding?” Mason asked as he kissed your skin, and he whispered it because of the blue panties you were wearing. You weren't discreet when you left the wedding together and you heard your friends cheering when they saw you get into Mason's car, and you hadn't been able to stop smiling for hours, ever since he kissed you for the first time. “Something blue…”

You sighed as Mason showered you with kisses, you were numb with his body on top of yours. You didn't know how much you had missed this, these moments with Mason where you completed each other like soulmates, because only he knew how to drive you crazy.

“There is still something borrowed and something old missing” you said, closing your eyes and bringing your hands to Mason's hair. His breath was on your groin and you almost moaned, because you were tired but you needed Mason so much that you felt like you were going to explode. “But we can think about it.”

“I don't want you to think about anything but me right now, love.”

✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

It's been a month since you got back to Australia and you and Mason have been trying to keep things at arm's length, but it's really hard because when you're waking up, Mason's going to sleep or when you're working, Mason's waking up.

But ever since you set foot in England again, you knew that this was where you belonged, and when you returned to Australia, you didn't think twice when you asked for a transfer again.

Your boss agreed and said that you could get the same position in England, but you would have to wait a few weeks for all the paperwork to be ready. No one knew you were coming back because it would be a surprise to both Mason and his mom or his friends.

And at that moment you were at Manchester airport ‘cause the first place you were going was home. Mason. You don't even know if he's at home, if he's training, he might even be with someone else there and you feel like you might faint when you think about it.

It's already getting dark and cold, but you’re at an Uber with the only two suitcases of stuff you'd taken to Australia with you. The car dropped you off in front of Mason's house and if you weren't so nervous you would roll your eyes at the size of the place.

You rang the bell at the gate and after a few rings you heard a bark and raised your eyebrows, because you didn't know Mason had a dog.

“Hello?” His voice was hoarse and you almost cried, you were missing him so much it was making you sick.

“Hi, were you the one who asked for a girlfriend?” you were smiling and everything was silent for a few seconds until you saw the door to the house open quickly. Mason ran barefoot on the wet grass and you couldn't stop the tears from falling down your face.

“What the fuck? Are you insane?” Mason pulled you against him, lifting you off the ground as you jumped against him and wrapping your legs around his hips. “I thought you were in Australia, my god I missed you so much. I love you, I love you” Mason whispered and squeezed you, without letting you go.

“I love you, I'll never leave, never again” you cried as you hugged him, trying to hold onto Mason everywhere so he would never let you go again. “You are my home Mason, I'm sorry for everything, I know I don't deserve it but I just want to be with you forever.”

“I can't believe you're back, I'm dreaming” Mason finally let go of you and put you on the ground, then he pulled you in and kissed you after more than a month away from your lips. “You're still going to kill me by doing these things to me.”

Mason pulled your bags and pointed to the entrance of the house, and you walked as he pulled your things. You stopped when a puppy ran out of the house towards you, and you bent down to pet it.

“Oh my God, we already have a child?” you joked and Mason just smiled and crouched down to be close to you. The puppy jumped on your legs and then ran to Mason, who petted his fur.

“This is Ace, he’s a boy and he has been my new company since you left me alone.”

“Ahh, poor boy, he had to put up with you crying for long weeks.”

“His mommy is home now” you stood up and looked at Mason, kissing him once more.

“My home is wherever you are.”

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the-end-of-art · 6 years ago

Text

Still this persistent urge to want to die

Why Should You Be One Too? by Spencer Reece in Granta

I was eighteen when the drinking started. It was 1981, and I was heading off into the Maine woods, under the huge deep green pines, to attend Bowdoin College. Behind me, in the dark living room in Minneapolis, my parents sat with their wine glasses like a queen and king overseeing a fading empire. I was shy and reserved, a reader, a Reece. I was far from the sad Southern town of my father’s family and the tattered, run-down north end of Hartford where my mother’s Lithuanian immigrant family had landed. My parents had invested much in me. They had, in my mother’s words, ‘jumped class’, and they banked now on an even greater success: me.

Pimples grew from my temples. I looked like I was about to rut and grow antlers. I was turning into a man who loved men, or at least a man who loved men and women, but men more. But I did not know how to be that kind of person in the world.

At the time no one really used the word ‘gay’ – not that I remember – only the clinical ‘homosexual’, which carried undertones of a disease that electric shock might undo. Only later in the decade some of the American states would begin to repeal their anti-sodomy laws. Homosexuality would be removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. But not yet.

Libidinous impulses surged inside of me. When I arrived in Brunswick Maine, the small town that houses Bowdoin College, I found my way into an old independent drugstore with high ceilings, creaking wood floors and no mirrors. It stocked Playgirl. There I discovered the golden buttocks of naked blonde farm boys who lolled on haystacks in barns in Louisiana. I couldn’t bring myself to buy a copy, because that would be admitting that I was homosexual to another person, the shopkeeper, so instead I shoplifted. I would buy extra tubes of toothpaste to make up for my theft. I wedged the glossy magazine against my midriff and my body throbbed against it with expectation. I would take the magazine like an animal with kill in its teeth back to a bathroom in the Economics building where I masturbated in a cave of shame – my body shaking like a washing machine. Then would come the horror and revulsion that would course through every fiber of my body. I’d throw the magazine away. I would pray to die.

I wanted to be like all the other boys. I wanted to be a part of something. I did not want to be different. And so I drank. I attended fraternity parties and drank Cape Coders, gin and tonics, kegs of beer. I found that with the aid of liquor I could chat with girls like every other boy around me. I could dance with them.

My first drink brought me to life. My soul opened in a way I had only experienced with poems and books up to that point. I doubt I would have used the word ‘soul’ then, but that part of me that was not flesh was alert and looking for clues. Booze, like poems, unlatched that. The next drink went down flawlessly. The ice, the charge, created an alchemical click inside. There was another drink and another. Suddenly everything that had been stuck was greased. I wasn’t bad after all. Liquor flowed through me and I leaned into my new nerve.

I sat hung-over in the back row of a course called ‘Religious Poets’. My brain felt like an aborted fetus pickled in the jar of my skull. The class met in the oldest building on campus, filled with crooked staircases and tiny fireplaces. On the syllabus were just three poets: TS Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Bishop. Much discussion revolved around the fact that Bishop wasn’t religious like the other two. So why, our provocative professor slyly queried, had she presented her this way to us?

Our professor was a bohemian Jewish intellectual who dressed in tweed skirts and LL Bean boots, her wild hair looking like it hadn’t been combed since Woodstock. I never gave her an answer then. I mainly stared at the floor in class. But I did like the clarity of the poems. I was doing the reading, and it helped that the font of Bishop’s poems had been made larger, which I assumed was done because she had written fewer poems than most. There were religious allusions, but the whole tenor of her work was secular. There were no traces of the homosexuality or the alcoholism that our professor kept gingerly referencing. She told us Bishop had an exotic lover in Brazil named Lota. The class laughed. Homosexuality was always cause for a good laugh. Maybe, the professor coaxed us, Bishop had faith in poetry, in the clarity and accuracy she strove for there, and could that serve as a kind of religion to her, a way of navigating the world?

We studied her poem, ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,’ which ends:

Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges

of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen

this old Nativity while we were at it?

—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

colorless, sparkles, freely fed on straw,

and, lulled within, a family of pets,

—and looked and looked our infant sight away.

She seemed to be coming at faith sideways, acknowledging it out of the corner of her eye, the nativity scene reduced to ‘a family of pets’, which I loved. This felt perfectly natural to me.

Through the prism of this poem, I recognized my stalled life: I’d read my way through much turmoil. Reading had always been my escape hatch. Now, in college, much of life – the fraternity parties, the dating, my parents drinking, my drinking – confounded me. So I didn’t need to be prompted more than twice to ‘Open the book’ and ‘pollinate’ my fingertips.

I joined the literary magazine staff, and began trying to write my own poems. I would type them out on a manual typewriter and then cross out the lines. It was like painting more than writing, I suppose, just mixing colors. Something in the action of saying and erasing, saying and erasing, gave me solace, and perhaps a deeper solace even than reading. This private, useless act aided me immensely. I was often drinking, whole bottles of wine now, sometimes a bottle of Vodka, the steel clarity of that clear liquid giving me some semblance of peace as I barricaded myself against my impulses. The call of the drink increased, and it began, quickly, to overtake the poetry, until I gave up writing altogether – my ‘infant sight’ shrinking, becoming jaundiced.

Though my writing dissipated, I kept reading Bishop. The amber and umber leaves fell across the window panes and blew against the Andrew Wyeth houses. Students started dating one another, but I dated no one. I remained alone with Bishop. Her poems had a slow, burning effect on me, unlike the immediacy I was used to from reading Sylvia Plath in high school. I was drawn to Bishop’s sound and rhythm first, before I captured her meanings.

One element of that sound was something you might call ‘Yankee’. I associated that term with the Northeast, where my mother’s people came from and where I was now enrolled in college. The Yankee diction meant: keep a distance from your neighbors, recall Robert Frost’s stone fences, allow people space, keep your guard up. Yankee meant Anglo-Saxon. Yankee meant houses on Cape Cod and Harvard legacies and trust funds. My mother wanted to be part of it. She liked the Yankee mentality even though she was Lithuanian, the child of immigrants. She wanted to assimilate. She wanted to pass. My mother would always say, ‘We are private people, Spencer.’ She repeated this phrase about privacy to me like a chant, and during my weekly calls home I could imagine her shaking her head like Katherine Hepburn all the way back in Minnesota. Privacy manifested itself in her muteness over anything personal: the screaming inside our living room was never to be mentioned outside the home, or even really to her. Certainly I was never to ask her about why she had once slid down a wall in tears. I was taught that people would respect repression more than confession. Because of my mother I associated privacy with dignity. Bishop’s poems supported this private way of living.

Bishop said proudly that she believed in closets and more closets. She said that she wished the confessional poets would keep their revelations to themselves. Her poems built pressure and force through strenuous evasion. Her silences riveted me: she seemed to be all about what she wasn’t saying, which neatly encapsulated what I knew growing up. And the way I was living now.

I read and reread ‘Crusoe in England,’ where Bishop writes of sad, lonely Robinson Crusoe and his famous encounter with Friday:

Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it

another minute longer, Friday came.

(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)

Friday was nice.

Friday was nice, and we were friends.

If only he had been a woman!

I wanted to propagate my kind,

and so did he, I think, poor boy.

He’d pet the baby goats sometimes,

and race with them, or carry one around.

—Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

There it was – the pretty body, pretty to watch. Out in the open. Was describing gay male attraction a way of keeping some distance from her lesbianism? Coyly she kept it all private, and yet she managed to write about it even so. As soon as I had what amounted to a sexuality I started throwing my voice like this, forcing my listener to focus on anything but me. When I saw this poem I knew exactly what Bishop was doing. She loved to track the mind in action. And here with her repetitions of Friday being nice (has nice ever been used better in a poem?) I saw a mind hesitating to say the truth the way my own mind hesitated when I felt attracted to men and said I wasn’t. ‘Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.’ I saw that line as a mumble, exactly the way I would have mumbled it to myself as I woke from my bed, having had another wet dream about my muscular, hairy roommate. I lived under a tyranny of watching, of being drawn to pretty bodies that the world told me were the wrong gender.

Bishop became a manual for me as I entered college. The poems had friendly, unobtrusive sounds such as:

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

I appreciated her plain chant. These words didn’t make demands on me. I knew that child drawing inscrutable houses. I was that child. I knew how to plant tears rather than shed them openly.

I went beyond the assigned poems and read more, read what scant biographical information I could. I learned that despite all the prodding from fellow poets May Swenson and Adrienne Rich, Bishop couldn’t bring herself to publish about her lesbian self. What she left was a set of poems that held back and that drew me in. Slowly.

In adapting her life to her gay self, Bishop never had to contend with parental disappointment. By the time she was six her father had died and her mother had gone to a mental asylum. Bishop never saw her mother again. In her sixties, she received a prize from a university in Nova Scotia. She sat on the stage. Over the heads of the audience, across the street, was the mental hospital where her mother had died when she was twenty-three. Over the decade since her mother’s death, Bishop had tried to find out more about her mother, but it proved challenging. No one knows if she managed to find out much. The clinical records state: she threw her clothes out the window, she ate plaster from the walls, she sat unspeaking for days. Whatever Bishop learned she didn’t discuss it. Bishop said that she didn’t dote on the fact she had a classically horrible childhood. She was like my mother that way, not wanting to draw attention to what makes us vulnerable. My mother always said, ‘Everyone has tragedy, you don’t need to go looking for it.’

A few years before her death, Bishop said to a former student, Millie Nash, that maybe she’d been better off without a mother. She hadn’t had to deal with a mother. Her early independence did give her a certain freedom with her sexuality. In the 1950s and 1960s, still such a repressed time for homosexuals, she lived her private life as she pleased, with many lesbian affairs. She tried to regulate her binge drinking as best she could.

Closeted, alienated, drinking – I found myself aligning with all of this in Bishop. But Bishop hadn’t dealt with the disappointment of a mother. I was at a sorry crossroads with mine, the bittersweet separation perhaps all mothers and sons have, where I seemed to disappoint her and she disappointed me, in the way we all sooner or later disappoint each other. That disappointment churned in my head and stomach every phone call home. I was growing unexplainable to her. I gave vague answers to all her questions. There set in a rift and a cliff. She’d ask if I had a girlfriend. Sometimes when she called me her words slurred. I read more.

As the first term closed, we read ‘In The Waiting Room’:

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

I gave a sidelong glance

—I couldn’t look any higher—

at shadowy gray knees,

trousers and skirts and boots

and different pairs of hands

lying under the lamps.

I knew that nothing stranger

had ever happened, that nothing

stranger could ever happen.

In the poem, a child Elizabeth shyly tries to take in the pendulous breasts of the naked African women in a National Graphic. As I read this poem, I knew the shame creeping into the poem, the way it felt to be a child a little too fascinated with the same sex. Now, at eighteen years old, I could scarcely look in a mirror, much less a magazine. If I was what I thought I was, what Bishop thought she was, then I needed to murder me. The thought kept coming, with the plodding, simple logic of Bishop’s three beat tri-meter lines. The more I repressed those naked men, the more they appeared. But if I killed the person I could kill the sex.

I looked out through the white-trimmed window in my dorm room. The window had six panes on top and six on the bottom. There was nothing more to say. Pine cones near the window swung like corpses.

The term ended. My suitcases were packed so I could spend Christmas with my family. Up and down the hallways of Moore Hall students planned, exchanged presents, laughed on the phone with their parents, waving plane tickets. It was night. I walked out the front door and went to the graveyard. I took a bottle of Southern Comfort with me, and a bottle of sleeping pills, and I emptied them both into my mouth. I lingered in the snow with the graves. I passed out. As my cure started to take effect some muscle inside of me reacted. Some voice said, ‘Get up!’ I took myself to the infirmary, dizzy, told the nurses I was sick, went into the toilet and vomited all that I had swallowed.

The next day I went home for Christmas break. I’d rarely changed my clothes the whole first term. I had razor cuts on my wrists, which I kept covered with the torn, stained sleeves of the one sweatshirt I wore. The sweatshirt had the name of my prep school, Breck, in faded letters, and had bleach and food stains on it. A widening chasm had grown up between my mother’s emotional world and mine: her attention was divided between a series of real estate interests and the pressing need to buy decorations for the tree. As a small boy we’d been close confidantes – now we struggled. She sensed something was wrong. I’d become monosyllabic. She must have felt helpless. What could she do?

One night I went out with old high-school friends to a movie, and my mother read my diary. She confronted me, sobbing, when I returned, but it wasn’t the suicidal thoughts that had brought her to tears.

‘Are you a homosexual?’ she asked. Her tone was filled with disgust, and hatred. Or was it love cloaked in fear?

‘No,’ I said.

‘They tie each other up in Greenwich Village and have anal sex,’ she screamed. She looked like she was watching a horror film. She didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t know what to do with me. My father said nothing. I thought he had pity for me but I wasn’t sure. His silence widened the space between us. I wanted to disappear.

In the hopes of fixing me, we as a family agreed I would see a psychologist when I returned to Bowdoin. There was the idea in the air that if I really did think I was homosexual, a psychologist might be able to talk me out of it. I was like a puppy that just needed to be trained. There was hope in my mother’s voice now. Although I still denied the charge of homosexual, I was hopeful too. Maybe I could be changed. Maybe I could be like everyone else. Maybe.

The college psychologist was from Argentina, in his mid-fifties, but still as dashingly handsome as a bullfighter. He had a fairly heavy accent and mispronounced words and forgot others, which, considering our topic of conversation, added a heightened level of comedy to our sessions. I sensed that he wasn’t understanding everything I was saying. We sat in a little room in the infirmary, mostly taken up with his bicycle and various bicycle parts.

My heart sank about one minute into our first meeting when I realized I wasn’t going to say the word ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’, and neither was he. There was no book in his office resembling anything that might be helpful. We were going to pretend like my homosexuality didn’t exist.

Our conversation was laughably leaden. We were like two very bad actors in a college play.

‘How you?’ he would say.

‘Fine,’ I would respond, my body language hopelessly awkward and robotic.

‘Your mother had spoken to me and said you try to attempt suicide.’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you now?’

‘Fine.’

‘Do you want to commit suicide now?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

This was the caveman-like level of our communication. The sessions were completely useless.

In a year or two everyone would start dying of AIDS. But we didn’t know that in his office. What we knew was silence, elaborate and subtle and vast. What I knew was an avalanche of shame. He was married to one of the tenured professors on the psychology faculty and I began to suspect this job had been given to her handsome husband as a sort of compensation: something to keep him busy between his bicycle races.

Instead of curing my homosexuality our sessions seemed to provoke it. I found myself drawn to his dark skin, deep black Latin eyes and muscular build – especially the lower half of his body, those thighs and buttocks tightly encased in his pants as if with shrink-wrap. I had to repress the attraction every time I looked at him. This wasn’t how The Bell Jar had gone. There, Esther Green, Sylvia Plath’s stand-in, had returned to Smith after her dramatic suicide attempt triumphantly. In her real life Plath resurrected herself nicely, galvanized to embrace a new life in college with her dyed-blonde pageboy bob. They wrote her up in the newspapers. My suicide attempt had generated no star treatment. I failed my classes first term. To the college I was an embarrassment. I was going backwards. Drinking called me.

The psychologist kept telling me to enjoy my life. His hands were full of grease and chains. He had started working on his bicycle during our sessions, and as he worked he would hardly look at me. Something Bishop once wrote to her physician, Any Baumann, began to haunt me: ‘I feel some sort of cycle settling in.’ So it was going with me, a cycle of drinking to get through the days. After our sessions I would go back to my room and pour myself a glass of wine to blot out what I’d been feeling: the attraction, the unspoken homosexuality.

James Merrill said Bishop was always impersonating an ordinary woman. Her years were spent carrying out those impersonations: Vassar girl, a woman smiling with perfectly manicured nails, then wrapped in furs like a Scarsdale matron, later a woman with blue eye-shadow in a light blue pantsuit. I too was eager to be somebody who could pass. I was now doing my best to curb my theatrical gestures. Intellectually I constructed a genuine interest in girls. Sometimes it worked. When it did not, which happened more often than not, I felt I did not want to linger much longer on the planet.

I told my parents I was better, and they seemed to believe me. I seemed to believe it too. I stopped seeing the psychologist soon after we started our sessions, having decided the answer to my problem lay in drink rather than therapy, but I would still see him zooming around the campus on his bike. I would still have to repress my fantasies about the two of us naked. I began to drink more and more heavily to cope, and it took a toll. I found myself unable to make it into the classroom. I was going down some dark tunnel. I kept lurching into fumbled romances with women, pushing myself towards normalcy, but I was so drunk they became nurses instead of lovers.

In a moment of sobriety in the dining hall at Coles Tower, someone said Wesleyan was the most liberal of the schools in the Northeast. I thought that if I changed schools, I might change too.

My junior and senior year were spent at Wesleyan. I rented a small room in a wooden clapboard house with three other students across from a little liquor store called Sunshine Farms.

Every night I walked through the door of Sunshine Farms and the owner said hello a little too knowingly.

‘I will have four bottles of the white wine,’ I said, and felt the same guilt I used to feel when I shoplifted Playgirl.

These wine bottles were Italian, had a colorful label on them like lovely Florentine stationery: green and rose squiggles with some gold strewn throughout. When my housemate, Laura, moved in at the beginning of the year, her parents had bought her one of these bottles to celebrate. Two or three nights in, I drank everything in the house, including Laura’s bottle. The next morning I left her a note: ‘Dear Laura, I am so sorry for drinking the bottle that your parents gave you. As soon as Sunshine Farms opens I will replace it.’ And I did.

Laura never drank that bottle. I did, every night. About a month later, I decided to stop writing her notes and bought a case of bottles instead. Then I drank the case. I must have replaced Laura’s bottle at least one hundred times.

I had found myself a girlfriend. Maybe I could add to the happy world of heterosexuality after all, and leave my parents pleased, or so I hoped. K and I met at a party in one of the many dark tunnels that connected the dormitories at Wesleyan. She was kind and smart, the two qualities I love most. I thought all my problems would be solved if I drank my way through the sex with her. I bet myself I could do it. And maybe I would enjoy it too. I was not un-attracted to her. And I figured the drinking would kill or subdue the part of my brain packed full of gay desire.

K studied classics and looked almost exactly like Patti Smith. She would translate Catullus until dawn. She was willowy with smudged mascara that gave her a raccoon look. Night after night in her bed we explored, aided by my inebriation. The record needle skipped on a song by the British band The The, singing This is the day your life will surely change. In a dirty crumbling student house with the paint coming off the ceiling – This is the day – I drank enough to kill an ox.

One morning I woke in K’s bed blinded, and she had to take me to the hospital. Somehow in my drinking I had managed to rip my corneas. ‘Have you been drinking?’ the doctor asked. I said, ‘No, not much,’ yet even I could smell the pungent acrid tang of alcohol pushing through my pores.

After a week of healing my eyesight restored, and I managed to make it to the library. I went to the room where they kept the records and played the voice of Robert Lowell, Bishop’s best literary friend. Lowell read ‘Skunk Hour,’ which he had dedicated to her. I grimaced when he got to the part about the fairy decorator:

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;

there is no money in his work,

he’d rather marry.

No money, a pathetic effeminate sales clerk: now that, emphatically, I did not want to become.

My life at that time was a series of evenings in which I was carried out of parties and thrown into bushes. In the early evening I would suddenly fall down on the dance floor to the tune of the Go-Gos singing brightly, or the Smiths at one of their sarcastic dirges.

People started telling me not to call them back. People stopped inviting me to parties. People said: ‘I saw you.’ And I would have to wonder what it was they saw. ‘I have a red light that goes on and tells me to stop,’ my mother told me over the telephone, talking about the drinking. Red light. Where was my red light? Never had such a light. Only green. I did not mention anything about girlfriends or the poems I scribbled. The list of subjects we did not discuss always seemed to be lengthening. What had happened to us?

One night I drank all of Laura’s wine bottles, and suddenly I was in the street in front of Sunshine Farms. My blue terry-cloth bathrobe was half off, mud on my naked body. I’d dyed my hair white like Billy Idol. Mascara dripped from my eyes. I had a cigarette in my hand. My self-hate and repression had gone mad. I exploded out in my drunkenness now with an aggressive flamboyance, more auto-da-fé than drag queen. I dared anyone to stop me. My tongue grew vicious. I was Lear’s fool breaking down the fourth wall. I ran pell-mell into the audience.

‘We are going to have to take you in. This is the tenth time the neighbors have complained about the noise here,’ said the policeman.

Crapulous thing, I said something unintelligible.

‘Listen, the neighbors have called again, we’ve received three calls a week from them.’

A record skipped from the bedroom above –Marianne Faithful singing ‘What Have You Done for Beauty’s Sake.’

The officer gave me a fine and retreated. I’d drunk my way through the dark night and now the dawn began to push its tints into every little thing. The silverware shone; the telephones gleamed; the mirrors glinted; the windows flashed. The sun rose and I belonged nowhere. The little house in front of me looked forlorn. I trudged up the stairs as my roommates woke to their studies, and I recalled the night in pieces: naked, the yellow Sunshine Farms sign, the terrible thought that I would need to apologise to Laura again, replace her bottles, and what on earth was it I’d said? K, who had been keeping pace with my drinking and still managing to keep her classics grades high, had begun to step back into the shadows. I was alone with all this in my bedroom. The lawnmowers would soon start. Paperboys were throwing papers onto doorsteps. Birds rang in the trees. I had a set of crossed out poems next to the typewriter. How would I ever enter this world?

The phone rang. The receiver shook a little in its cradle and the noise jangled me as if I had launched myself into a circus ride. The sky was full of colors already and I was drained of them. It was my aunt from Tennessee. My aunt who never called me. I held the receiver with one hand. In the other was the tattered fine I’d been given for disturbing the peace.

‘Spencer, how are you?’ There was a pause, maybe she was smoking. Her Southern accent expanded the syllables so they dripped like candlewax.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘John Steven is dead,’ she said, and perhaps she herself was surprised to hear herself say this news so plainly, so flatly. There are certain sets of words that change and rearrange the world. And those four words certainly did that. John Steven, my cousin, my kin, the same age as me, had been having trouble with his drinking too. That much I knew. Someone had wanted to get him into treatment. His storyline tumbled through my mind from pieces of telephone conversations I’d had over the years. We hadn’t seen each other much.

‘What are you saying?’ I asked. My bed was still wet with last night’s urine and vomit. I was sweating. I shook.

‘We don’t know. Grandpa Reece is very upset as you can imagine. Your Aunt Pattie is beside herself, and your Uncle . . . Well –’

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What happened to John?’

‘He was in a bar, down there in Florida. His sister Kathy said he saw somethin’ he wasn’t supposed to see. I don’t know what. He – well they – well, some men I guess took him to the river down there in Saint Augustine. He’d started drinking again and his sister has small children and she said he couldn’t stay there if he drank and I guess he drank and then, well. He went to this bar I guess and they drowned him. Aunt Pattie is beside herself. Your Uncle George had trouble identifying the body. They think the police are involved somehow. They don’t know who did it. They don’t know.’

Her Southern accent carried the sadness of the American South as I had always imagined it: the slow way the hours passed, the relatives gone mad with drink, the long ballad of surrender. Slowly my aunt’s words came into that morning and took dominion over time – the seconds, the minutes. In the Connecticut air, the birds flew through car exhaust.

The murder went unsolved. Thirty years later a relative told me in passing that John might have been gay-bashed. This casual off-hand speculation shocked me. I’d never considered that when Mary Sue was on the phone with me in Middletown. I’m fairly certain the word ‘gay-bashed’ was something we never said in 1984. John had been undetectably gay, rough and tough, unlike me.

What happened to him that night? Was the bar dark? How did the men grab John? Had he said something? Had he touched someone? Did he yearn for love that night the way we all yearn for love? Had the men said something? I began to see it and what I saw I can’t unsee.

The men yanked John. They ripped out his beautiful hair in patches. They punched him in the stomach. They held him down. They kicked him in the head. They broke his fingers. They broke his ribs. They broke his legs. They broke his teeth. They grunted. They spit. They laughed. They dragged the body, and the body picked up trash and thorns and burrs. The laughter of the men mixed with the sound of the wind moving the leaves in the sassafras trees. Dirt was on John. He pleaded. Gravel was shoved into his eyelids. He had sand in his throat. Blood came out of his ears. They held his beautiful head under the mucky water until John screamed no more, until the last mercurial orb of oxygen bubbled out from his lips. The men walked away. The corpse floated. The world went on. The men went on.

After John’s death my drinking worsened. I would drink three or four drinks before I went to parties so it could seem like I was only drinking as much as everyone else at the party. I started drinking after the party too, with a sense of release that I wasn’t being watched or monitored. I drank Scotch ‘neat’, now, just ice. I could drink an entire bottle of the stuff. The side effect of this was that my stomach was so full of acid the following morning that I couldn’t keep food down. I grew thin and my face bloated. When I was drunk I was dramatic and gleeful, unlike my shy self. This was fun for others to watch, but at other moments I skittered into disasters: I fell down stairs, I picked a fight with a friend over something I couldn’t remember afterwards, I babbled incoherently into phones to people who would cut the calls short and leave me talking to a dead line. Bishop said to her psychiatrist, Ruth Foster: ‘If only I didn’t feel I were that dreadful thing an alcoholic.’ Her dread matched mine.

Sometimes the drinking did work. On those nights it was like nuclear energy – all the lights went on. I kept drinking, trying to get back to that magically connecting moment, but it happened less and less often. And at the center of my drinking now swirled the bloated body of John. I kept thinking about his drinking, where that had led him. Uncle George said he couldn’t recognize him. The body was purple, swollen up. He could only recognize him through his teeth. Aunt Pattie had started seeing him in grocery stores. She said that he was speaking to her through the birds.

The drinks I took led me into a kind of hell. All the charming phrases and flirty behavior diminished. More often than not I ended up ignored.

One night the beautiful white Congregational Church stared down at me from the top of the green. Strict prim traditional Yankee New England was all around me. I went to a fraternity party at Chi Psi, and I could barely stand. The men in the fraternity were muscular and beautiful in their polo shirts. The place had an animal stench of sweat mixed with sweet colognes, and K was in the library reading Horace. I smoked a cigarette with a gesture more Bette Davis than Gary Merrill, lingering too long in my leering look at one of the men. The young fraternity brother had biceps like a cougar’s haunches, his chest was large, and erect nipples could be seen through the tight shirt like nails sticking out from a hunk of wood. I salivated.

‘God damn faggot,’ he said when he caught my look. He came over and punched me in the face. He and his cohort with all their horse-muscle threw me out onto the lawn, and my body lay splayed out much as John’s must have been. The town spun. I couldn’t speak to anyone about what had happened, not even K. Muteness deepened in me as my cheekbone stung from the bruise I woke up to the next day.

Even if I was at the most bohemian liberal college in the world it still could not undo the level of self-hate that mixed in with each neat Scotch I threw back.

The one creative writing class I took at Wesleyan was taught by Annie Dillard. She was already an acclaimed nature writer, pregnant for the first time, close to forty, hair dyed Marilyn Monroe blonde. She chain-smoked Merits. I was amazed by this woman. We all were. She’d won the Pulitzer for her Thoreau-like book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She radiated intelligence like an electrical storm. Gave off wisdom like heat. Her wit whipped around that room like a cyclone and we almost had to hold our notebooks down.

Between classes, I slyly went to the Olin Library on campus and found her work in the stacks. I read:

It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

She bowled me over. Her verbs! And how she ended that sentence ‘never a less’. The text sparkled in the stacks. The idea, too, of something ‘holy’ whispered to me, although the idea of religion still felt completely remote to me then. Of all the creative writing teachers on the planet, this one landed in front of me like a space probe.

At the time creative writing wasn’t held up as a major in undergraduate programs. Not knowing where to place us, the university gave our class a room in the chemistry department. Perched between Bunsen burners, Dillard sat in front of us like a Greek goddess. We brought in poems like offerings.

More and more I longed to be a writer. How to get there? In those classes a new determination began to stir within me. Where that came from I wasn’t sure. Some kind of self-awareness had sparked. Dillard seemed to believe in me too, although I wasn’t sure what that was based on. All I knew was that I was sitting before a woman who had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. That was my absolute.

I desperately wanted to communicate something true on paper, something about the way my life swung between buttoned-up repressions and drunken outbursts. I tried valiantly to stay on top of our assignments despite my drinking. Even though the class met in the afternoons I sometimes had trouble getting there, and when I did I smelled as rank as a sticky bar room floor. My favorite assignment, which we did weekly, was to type out the poems of the poets we liked so we could feel the words go through us and onto the paper. I felt that if I kept typing Bishop’s poems some of her brilliance might rub off on me.

Then I read some more of Dillard’s writing. On Christmas break her memoir, American Childhood, came out. The sentences and paragraphs practically burnished. Like Bishop’s Yankee sensibility, the memoir steered clear of anything shameful. Keep your guard up, the book seemed to say. I followed her example, and kept trying to write.

By a miracle I graduated from Wesleyan in 1985. I felt a perfect failure, and the night of my graduation I drank to black out, and remember now only brief glimpses of things: a set of dark green trees, a person pulling me out of a ditch, making out with a man or a woman, I can’t be sure which, pulling the fire alarm in someone’s dormitory, hitting my head on a rock, waking up with a scab and blood caked on my cheek. No, The Bell Jar this was not. No Mademoiselle scholarship. No Fulbright to Cambridge. No poems in the New Yorker. No typing my thesis on Dostoevsky while on the roof of my dorm to improve my tan.

I didn’t know what to do next. I had applied to a graduate program in England to study the poems of George Herbert, but there was a fear in me. How long could I keep bluffing my way through classes? The way I drank I was fortunate if my academic work was mediocre. What good was it to study? Would they ever take me? And why was there still this persistent urge to want to die?

I applied too to the Breadloaf Writers Conference. Dillard encouraged me, and wrote me a letter of recommendation. I was accepted. Before I left Dillard puffed on her cigarette and said: ‘Spencer, if you want to write, and I hope you will, study something else.’ This last zen koan of hers seeded in me the confidence that would keep me writing, wherever I went.

When I arrived at Breadloaf I was struck by a woman standing in the lobby – blonde, tall, young, smart – a Piero della Francesca angel, attentive, listening, glittering with a golden aura, coming with some bright news. Maybe because most of the people were older, or because of the somewhat mischievous glint in her eye, I found her irresistible. I immediately introduced myself. She said her name was Katherine Buechner: quickly, I learned she was the daughter of Frederick Buechner, a theologian and writer of religious books I’d heard of rather than read. We were fast friends.

She was twenty-seven, and contemplating being a minister. A woman considering being a minister in those days was novel and brave. I admired her for it. I wondered for the first time about ministry, about what that word exactly meant. She told me Howard Nemerov, who was her instructor there, had called her ‘another one of those smart-ass Bennington girls.’ Her head titled back as she said this, in a kind of, well, Yankee way – deprecatory and convivial at once. I tried to mimic the gesture.

Most of Breadloaf I spent with Katherine. We became inseparable, together through the barn dances and evenings in the old rockers rolling in the twilight breeze and the cocktail hours and conversations with casual references to where Robert Frost did this or that, where Carson McCullers had sat, what Anne Sexton had done. Through it all Katherine was not drinking. This struck me. As did the way she never said much about it. She just did not do it.

One night I got separated from her, as drinkers often separate themselves out from sober people. I got so drunk that I woke up at a desk where I seemed to be writing a poem, only to find I was not in my room but a stranger’s. I don’t remember if it was a man or a woman. I don’t remember what they said. I had to be escorted back to my room – or did I stumble there myself? When I got up the next morning I was horrified. In the long breakfast room at a long table, my eyes all puffed up under dark sunglasses, I said to Katherine: ‘Why don’t you drink?’ My headache was intense. My eyes felt like they were being unscrewed from my head. I kept glancing up, worried I would run across someone from the night before.

‘It was a problem for me,’ Katherine said. Her tone was casual.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. The clock with the painted face and roman numerals clicked behind us. Dust increased on the court cupboard with the inlaid ash and maple wood.

‘Just couldn’t stop once I started,’ she said.

We moved to the lobby. The writers had gone off to workshops and we skipped our appointments to poke and prod poems like lab animals. We sat in two tattered armchairs where hundreds of other writers must have sat, the butterscotch upholstery molted onto the small of our backs. I thought of what Bishop had said about her drinking: it ‘had to stop’ followed by her hopeful statement, ‘It can be done.’ Aspiring writers passed us, talking about workshops and agents.

‘Now I go to meetings,’ Katherine told me. It all seemed so simple. Tall spruce darkened in the distance, hayfields deepened to orange, speckled with little bits of brown. Fresh mountain water sluiced through the dolomite and granite rocks. Fall was coming, things were rolling up, things were being put away, vegetables canned, hay bales picked up.

‘You really don’t drink anymore? And it’s okay?’ I asked. I was thinking of my parents drinking every night in their living room, how the drinks mounted and mounted and I watched, mute. How necessary it all seemed. Then I pushed that thought away.

She smiled at me with mysterious welcome. I wasn’t ready to stop drinking, but her example held me. Some bright news on that Vermont mountaintop had been declared, and I had noted it.

Later that year I was living in a thirty-three-story high-rise in Minneapolis. My parents were nearby, and I was visiting them regularly, despite my sexuality remaining awkwardly off topic. They emptied countless wine glasses and spoke about the Republican party with droning tedium. When I visited their living room, bottles would come and go. I drank with them one night: we sounded like we were underwater. We got maudlin, laughed, held our heads up, but I felt some deep portentous and ominous layer of dread. Would this be how my life would go? My brother disappeared from the room.

He had told me he had begun to measure our parents’ intake by marking the bottles with his pencil, because he didn’t believe what they said they were drinking measured up with what they were actually drinking. My father’s words slurred one or two drinks in. Five or six drinks in my mother was yelling.

‘You’re chicken shit!’ she’d say to my father. Her hair was frosted and she’d put on weight. What had happened to their enthusiasm? What had happened to the woman I knew who laughed like a hyena in her leather pantsuits and turquoise jewelry? I missed her. What happened to their joy in singing along with the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show? Still, they always trundled off to bed together, waking up to work and busy themselves and read and then repeat – the same evening all over again. My mother never laughed in a carefree manner anymore. My father looked defeated. I kept what I saw to myself and tried to unsee it. This erasure of former affability happened fast. I didn’t want to connect it with what was happening to me. Meanwhile, they paid my rent.

Miraculously (and that is the right word), I was accepted for the MA on Herbert at the University of York – Herbert was one of Bishop’s favorites: I love imagining her getting up from her chair and dancing to samba records in Brazil, maybe a little tipsy, while in her purse were her lipsticks, cigarettes, a fifth of Gin, and her marked-up paperback of Herbert. It was a brand new MA, so I figured the professors must have mercifully overlooked my spotty college academic records, the grades that looked like a fever chart. It was another chance.

In the year before I went to England I tried out various jobs. Each one ended a week later: I would call in sick, unable to return, my whole body aching. I’d smell like garbage left out too long in a hot kitchen. I soured with Scotch and beer sweat. I was a telephone answerer, a stage manager, a substitute teacher, a volunteer with the mentally handicapped.

My apartment was on the top floor. The elevator, the carpeted hall, the freshly painted walls, the modern windows – all this was lost on me. I drank alone every night. I woke up to weird, unexplainable bruises. I canceled appointments. I threw bottles down the long garbage shoot before the evening’s drinking began as a way to stop myself from drinking too much. I wandered out to the liquor stores and replaced what I’d thrown out. I staggered through the streets.

In modern Minneapolis, with all its clean sidewalks and cool glass buildings, there was a gay bar called the Saloon on Hennepin Avenue. Neon lassoes decorated the walls and the walls were constructed like stables. I would stumble in late at night, once the drinking had started. The songs of Annie Lennox and Boy George and Bronski Beat played through the darkness, ‘Karma Chameleon’ and ‘Missionary Man’ and ‘Smalltown Boy’. I danced by myself. I hoped to connect with a man. I swerved. The men made space around me. The alcohol altered me, made me presentable, or so I thought. I did incredible dance moves, more seizure than Baryshnikov. I claimed I was alive and available. Cry boy cry. Then I fell down. I wet my pants. I vomited in a sort of burp that became a liquid the consistency of pudding. I wiped it away with my hand. The bouncers would help me up, and out. I lurched. I careened home alone.

My revulsion with myself accelerated. I ignored the mirror in the bathroom of the apartment. When I looked into it Lowell’s quote about the ‘fairy decorator’ haunted me. Shame ate me. If anyone commented on the possibility of my being gay I flipped into a rabid attack, or sunk into a glum stupor that would last for hours. Sometimes the only way I could navigate socially was to stop speaking to people that questioned me.

I called Katherine. I didn’t know what else to do. My soiled clothes were in the washing machine, my head throbbed. I was ready to try anything. I asked her about AA.

‘What do they do at those meetings?’

‘Talk,’ Katherine said.

She made it sound easy. Why then was sobriety so elusive to me? I was frightened of going. Bishop had been exposed to AA, but it never took. What if it didn’t take for me? Then what?

But Katherine encouraged me. I decided, after some time, that I would try. I dressed up, wore a pocket square in my sports jacket – an attempt to pass as affluently cozy and secure. I looked out the apartment window from thirty-three floors up, thinking of all the days blurred with hangovers, sending half-finished bottles whistling down the metallic garbage shoot. Cool, white stone, the Basilica of St Mary’s sat on the Minneapolis cityscape like a sundial. I needed repair.

The meeting was in a skyscraper downtown called the Piper Jaffrey building, sixty or so floors of sparkling blue glass. In a boardroom, at lunch hour, I found a group of alcoholics. A woman named Mary appeared. Who was she? A housewife? A businesswoman? I can’t recall now. She walked into the meeting as I was sitting down with coffee in a Styrofoam cup. She came to my side and said, ‘Glad to have you here.’ Her touch was genuine, soft, unlike what I had grown used to in bars. I raised my hand when they asked if there were any newcomers.

Another man, a stockbroker with red suspenders, turned to me. ‘Here, you might need this.’ He handed me a big blue book, a manual about the size of Bishop’s Complete Poems. On the wall was a large placard made of a shiny material like those maps they rolled down in geography class in high school. The paper crinkled and cracked. Twelve steps were outlined in boldface. God mentioned more than a few times. This did not repel me immediately. My associations with religion were fairly calming: my prep school, although Episcopal, had more Jews in it than Episcopalians, but I had never minded the prayers. My agnostic parents had always encouraged me to investigate. I wondered if this might be a cult. But if the embarrassment would stop, I was willing. My eyes darted. I questioned.

AA was a kind of family, people related through suffering and joy, and I was adopted immediately. People asked for my phone number and took it down. No one had done that in a while. When I could look at people I caught a glint of something close to pure glee mixed with a non-judgmental love. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen such a look. They wanted me. When was the last time someone wanted me?

Church before church, a glimpse of heaven, I stood in AA with my cup of coffee – jobless, jittery, handkerchiefed. In that AA huddle, I thought again of my cousin John. His face surfaced in the fluorescence of that first meeting, as I contemplated stopping, actually stopping. I heard his voice. I saw his bloated corpse floating down the river. I heard the plash and retreat of the men after they’d finished killing him.

A Bishop poem came to me. ‘Little Exercise.’

Now the storm goes away again in a series

Of small, badly lit battle-scenes,

Each in ‘another part of the field.’

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a rowboat

Tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;

Think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

I wanted to imagine John in that boat, barely disturbed. But it was impossible. He was dead. Now I, inexplicably, was in the boat. Saved, somehow, for the moment.

I was managing to stay sober. I stopped smoking. The air grew clearer. I began waking each morning without headaches, and I could now remember what had happened the night before. Embarrassment left me. There was a hint with my AA members, who were indeed a diverse lot – ex-cons, librarians, cops, secretaries, every color and sexual persuasion – that the awfulness of drinking was going to be replaced by cheerfulness. My world was expanding, moving out from the fixed world of books. My fingers were now ‘pollinated’ with coffee grinds, and often I had medallions for lengths of sobriety in my palms. Maybe my self-loathing would dissipate too. But sober or not, I was indelibly gay. That desire rooted in my groin, heart and cortex. That still shamed me.

I began wondering about Bishop’s apparent ease with the sexuality she kept off stage. She said to Lowell once, ‘I never met a woman I couldn’t make.’ Maybe it was her orphan status that allowed her to so easily live out her desire. Maybe the drink gave her confidence. It hadn’t helped me that way. Bishop always said how shy she was, but apparently she wasn’t when it came to sex. I, too, was shy. And without the booze, at least for the moment, I became shier. Without my drinks, sex, there in Minneapolis, with AIDS coming onto the scene, vexed me. How on earth could I approach it without first blacking out? With me, blackouts did not lead to sex, it led to passing out, to vomit. I’d been a dirty, ignored celibate who pissed on himself, and was attended to only by police.

I felt there, in AA, in land-locked Minneapolis, I was in an incomprehensible sea. The waves of voices, the coffee cups like buoy bells, the strange mystery of it. What would my life be like now that I did not have the ability to immerse myself in drink? I hoped AA might save me. And if I couldn’t make a go of AA, I felt then that I would need to take myself out of life once and for. Why sexuality continued to confound me I did not know. I did not know either why sobriety suddenly started burning in me there in Minneapolis. I still don’t know. I might never know.

Bishop died in 1979 from a cerebral aneurysm. Her young lover, Alice Methfessel, discovered her in her Lewis Wharf apartment in Boston’s North End when she went to pick her up for a dinner party. Alice was 36, Elizabeth 68. The last poem Bishop published in the New Yorker came posthumously. It was entitled ‘Sonnet’:

Caught – the bubble

in the spirit-level,

a creature divided;

and the compass needle

wobbling and wavering,

undecided.

Freed – the broken

thermometer’s mercury

running away;

and the rainbow-bird

from the narrow bevel

of the empty mirror,

flying wherever

it feels like, gay!

I read the poem again there in my apartment in Minneapolis as I gathered my belongings, preparing to leave for England. The poem surprised me, and surprise I’ve come to see is the reaction I treasure most in poetry.

That narrow poem on a broken thermometer extended its hand to me, welcomed me, just as Katherine had at Breadloaf, as the AA members had in the skyscraper. She ended on that word, ‘gay’ with a ‘rainbow-bird’ above it. The prominence of the word ‘gay’ was finally creeping into the margins of the world. As I readied my steamer trunk and the Minneapolis skyscrapers glittered in the afternoon, San Francisco had adopted the rainbow flag for the gay community.

The sonnet had only two sentences, and each began with a past participle rather than a subject, emphasizing two actions, caught and freed, the way a bird can be, and the way any gay person can be, caught by society’s admonishing rules, but freed by the knowledge that they can be loved as they are. To be authentic then, a gay person had to break convention the way Bishop broke the sonnet.

I was beginning to feel my way to freedom. I placed Bishop’s poems gently into the steamer trunk. I tapped the cover the way one might tap the shoulder of an old friend. How on earth had she managed to balance her drinking with writing such lasting poems? What will, what despair, what exertion did she have to keep at bay to do what she did? The AA meetings had given me a way out of my daily embarrassment, of being a drunk, and maybe, just maybe, there would be more to life for me. Bishop’s poetry gave me something that I hadn’t found before. A space to breathe. A stance – the art moving through her, rather than about her – that would give me space to live and figure my way into a sexual life where I could claim to be ‘what it was I was’, the way I was starting to claim my sobriety.

This essay is an extract from a longer work, The Little Entrance: Devotions, an autobiography that contrapuntally is infused with the lives and poems of seven poets.

(https://granta.com/why-should-you-be-one-too/)

Article on Katherine Buechner Arthaud: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2017/11/06/listen-way-god-listens#

Older Spencer Reece interview I was revisiting: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n2/features/reece_s_040506/reece_s_text.htm

#spencer reece #poem #poet #poetry #elizabeth bishop #katherine buechner #katherine buechner arthaud #annie dillard

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