#thinking about the crabapple tree in the front yard by my bedroom window

[duckbeater]

I Would Like to Reflect Some More on My Romantic Past

Nicholas has always had a great curt way of correcting me, it’s an impatience with inexact or insufficient language. It’s one reason we liked one another as much as we did, when we did. When I became boring to him���the last day we shared together, a freezing afternoon on the Upper East Side, he told me I no longer made sense, that when I talked I wasn’t saying anything—he dismissed me. If he had not dismissed me, if he had turned his statement into, say, the form of a question, possibly we would be living together in New York City. He was not unkind. We held hands through our mittens. He seemed genuinely perplexed by how boring and trivial I’d become. 

I was perplexed, too. The trick of it was that I sympathized with his assessment. It’s hard to discount the intelligent appraisal of such a curious, articulate man. He was generous, too, at least materially: he had purchased my airfare, and did none of the annoying managing of arrears lovers sometimes do, “Oh, you can pick up this meal?” A wholly rational creature, he figured if we wanted to sleep beside each other for a long weekend, it was his turn. We did want to sleep beside each other all weekend. His brother’s cat, Musubi (named, I think, for the Hawaiian dish made of Spam, and not the Shinto god of love and marriage), bit our toes at night and ate the edges off the books I’d purchased. (I arrived Thursday, very late, and spent Friday morning walking through Yorkville and then down Madison Avenue in a daze. I purchased two Fitzgerald novels at Crawford Doyle Booksellers. My copy of The Gate of Angels lost its corners, gnawed blunt, to the cat.) We stayed awake. We drank the Peroni in green bottles and ate Kraft cheese slices, and Nicholas carped about my crap diet, but my body was strong and lean and quick then, more or less as it is now, despite my subsisting on grilled cheese sandwiches.

We had our comforting routines. He watched “30 Rock” episodes while cooking; he listened to Respighi—especially the symphonic impressions of church windows—while drafting in CAD; if he did not go on a light evening jog, he would take an hour’s walk after work. In Columbus, and Miami, this was to beautiful neighborhoods or waterfronts where he could enjoy birdsong and flowers and captivating details etched into masonry and doorways. Now that he’s in Manhattan, he strolls through Central Park, often cutting north, to visit Greg Wyatt’s Peace Fountain at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. (The ecstatic giraffe particularly delights him, as do the pincers of the crab). I like that Nicholas supports his interior life through ritual, if not compulsive external behaviors. He doesn’t just think about classical music, but plays the French horn and the mellophone, though only the one time in front of me. For the last two years he’s been on a Charles Dickens kick, alternating with Roman histories and studies of antiquary art (he studied architecture in Rome under Ingrid Rowland); he is in a gay marching band; he takes classes where he learns to make jewelry. (His weekly visits to the Met stimulate his love of the lapidary’s craft.) “It would be appropriate to call me a goldsmith, or maybe silversmith,” he said, when I texted him for this sketch. He also reminded me that he’s read more of Sybille Bedford, meaning her biography of Huxley.

I am resorting to proper nouns to make him reappear—and they’re not failing me, necessarily, but they’re not conveying the pleasure of simply knowing him, of holding him as a friend at a consoling distance. Stacking Respighi and Ingrid Rowland (whom Nicholas described as “diabolical”), and now Albert Speer (that Nazi and neoclassical architect), and cat’s eye gemstones, and the flowering trees in the park (pale pink crabapple and lacy white hawthorn)—to list the things he cherishes seems a curator’s effort to make him cherishable. This is preposterous. I called the other evening out of concern for Musubi, whose temperament never improved. (The brothers accommodated her viciousness by packing everyday life items—books, remote controls, tea sachets, headphones, phone cords, laptop chargers, game cases, tchotchkes—into lidded bins.) His brother recently moved out, and Nicholas switched rooms, throwing the cat’s world into profound disarray. For most of October she paced at night at the foot of his bed, attacked his toes again, batted at his closed eyes, whispered everywhere in a dire, husky cat cough. “Probably searching,” I offered. 

“Yes, there is probably a psychological or rather scientific explanation for Musu’s misbehavior,” Nicholas said, preferring his innovation: “but I have a friend, he’s a queer witch, and we’ll be exorcising my bedroom, in case there’s a ghost or restless spirit tormenting Musu.” 

“You think—”

“I think she’s irritated Zach is gone and distracted by the traffic lights or whatever, and I don’t know if I believe in spirits anyway, but I think it will be fun to use the Ouija board and to make a witch bottle. Do you know what a witch bottle is?”

“Um—”

“It protects your soul against contamination. You bury a bottle in the yard outside. You fill it with rusty nails and wine, and even your urine. I don’t know if I’ll pee in the bottle, but I don’t see the harm in it.”

There’s an insight I’m either failing to capture here or quickly circumventing, which is not the point of this exercise, I am not actively attempting to write dialog between precocious school boys. It might be that the quality of our voices, or manner of our speech, when we talk at all, remains reserved, although hurried, and incredulous. We don’t quite know—rather, I don’t quite know—what to do with our dismembered expectations. It’s inconceivable that caring about one another as much as we do will simply be the state of affairs for our lives, that living is savaged by exactly this quality of minding. I suspect our reasonableness will grow tiresome.