The Sketching Date

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

—Lillian Hellman

          

          I.          

          

          The email arrived in all caps.

          BILL, I HAVE AN IDEA [...] IF YOU BRING YOUR PAINTS, WE CAN HAVE LUNCH AND PAINT. YOU AT ONE END OF THE COUNTER, ME AT THE OTHER.

          I'd been so busy all month that the absurdity of it seemed like a divine relief.

          Aleksandra and her husband John had built the log cabin after camping on the land for years. They raised six kids in one of the mansions of Rye, New York. When they got ready to move to Maine they told each one—now adults—to put their name on whatever piece of furniture or artwork they wanted. The nine bedroom house was emptied, and Aleksandra and John started all over again.

          "This time, honey, can we have some red and blue?" Aleksandra had done the estate in pale coral, sugar snap pea pastel, and seafoam ivory, like mint cream candies.

          "L.L. Bean. I get it!" was her reply. John died in 2011.

          And it is consistent. Everything is scuffed, weathered, and like a theater stage nothing is added to disrupt the vast negative space of the single room with the wall of French doors staring out at Taunton Bay. Yet the eye keeps discovering picture frames and iron soap cradles and objects of delicate comfort arranged with great precision. It is L.L. Bean if it had turned slightly steampunk—then lunched at Bergdorf's.

         

Spring Report

           This past week the last winter coat hanging on the pegs in the hall got taken upstairs. Its alpaca lining always felt like a hug. But the scarves still sleep twisted on top of one another in their basket like tartan cats, and my Astrakhan hat still reigns from the shelf above—expensive, authoritative, wonderfully inappropriate. 

          I feel hollow and chalky white in shorts.

          This year the dandelions are so dense one would describe the yard as dotted with green rather than the reverse. Gary pulls them sporadically in the same way that he finishes up the dishes and scrubs the stovetop—with a gentle, persistent optimism that breaks my heart.

          The hummers disclose their little bodies furtively at the feeders, or alight on a branch—animating the lilacs. The males have gorgeous necks like ruby Arrow collars, but the females are friendlier.

          It still isn't warm at 4:30, when we sit with sweaters on the deck, drinking and eating olives. It used to be 5:30, then it became 5:00. I can't remember proper nouns anymore, or last night's dinner, but living seems pointless without a Happy Hour.

          A succession of daffodils provided a centerpiece for a few weeks. I transplanted a brace of them I discovered blooming—as out of place as my Russian hat—in the brown, trash-filled gulley below our yard. The moment I saw them I said, out loud, You're coming to my yard. 

          I do so love a hopeless case. Is there really any other sort of beauty apart from tragedy? The bravery to shine when nothing or no one is watching; to do one's best simply on principle. The quality of not questioning the goodness and supremacy of life, of believing past all evidence—the kitten in the trash can. 

          Gary's Publisher's Clearinghouse bulbs laid on the kitchen countertop in the envelope for a month. Three of them died, but the last one is basking in the morning sun in a huge pot of rich soil, the object of frequent baby talk from me.

          The elegant gray-green fists of the grape vine are cupped in anticipation. Slugs dangle from the iris. It's going to 79 today but my fingertips are cold as I type.

          Our lives run alongside one another, a series of non-concentric circles—the aged and the young, the luckless and the fortunate, intersecting in a few moments of quiet clarity that become our happy memories.

          Now up and down the block the lawnmowers wrestle with the turf, spitting stones, stalling out into brief, delicious silence.

Peppermint Tea

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily remembrance of things as they were.

Marcel Proust

          I got a huge bottle of Halston 1-12 on eBay for ten bucks and free shipping but it didn't quite remind me of getting ready to go out in Philadelphia in 1984, but Celestial Seasonings Peppermint Tea—even as I am opening the box, which hasn't changed in 40 years—is able to put me right back into the pyramid at the top of the Chelsea Hotel sometime in the 1970s. This sensory umbilical cord has never weakened, much less been severed. It persists, powerfully, to this day. Like C.S. Lewis' wardrobe, there is always an exciting trip waiting inside.

          I don't remember how old I was, or when it was that we went to New York, or how many times we went (I think it was more than once). I just remember that I was a teenager, that Amtrak was so crowded we had to stand the whole way from 30th Street Station in Philadelphia—how my mother bitched!—and that she was using a set of pink luggage.

          I remember the luggage because my brother said "Oh MOM! It's the color of PEPTO BISMOL!" Always the exaggeratedly queer inflection, a sort of mash-up of Phyllis Diller and Margo Channing.

          Actually, Tim Curry in Rocky Horror is spot on, as if he had modeled the manner of speaking on Bruce—which I have occasionally thought he did.

         

The Yard in Summer

          Just outside the window, in the absolute last light of the July day, in which objects are visible but monochromatic, like a graphite sketch, the heads of the fleabane swayed drowsily in the breeze. I paused my episode of "The Crown" and ran outside to walk around in the chalky remnants of what had been a brilliant yet cool day. By the time I walked back inside, covered in mosquito bites, night had fallen.
          All day I had wrestled buttercup roots from the ground and carried armfuls of 6-foot valerian to the dump, sidestepping stands of peppermint but bruising the knapweed. When I was skinny, and 24, and living in tiny apartments in big cities, I collected used books on wildflowers, looking at the drawings like you'd stare at a pretty word of a foreign language. Now I'm fat as a Buddha, crawling on my hands and knees to pull torpedo grass out of the iris beds, and my yard is overrun with wildflowers—crowding the embankment behind the garage, swallowing the $14.99 perennials from Home Depot, choking off the junipers and boxwood, and generally making a mockery of the prissy astilbes and peonies. Only the wild ferns and the rugosa—so rugged and ubiquitous here on the Maine coast—can hold their own in a patch of Dame's Rocket. 
          Contrapuntal, the different wildflowers swelled and decayed through May and June—themes within a seasonal fugue: first the blue starflower, then the delicate webs of Forget-Me-Nots like the veils of a stylish hat, then mounds of pink or yellow anemone, the sturdy towers of lupine the color of Welch's grape jelly, and then the riot of Oxeye daisies. I couldn't keep ahead of it, and, instead, I tried to take photos of the crowded flowers in the sun—always disappointed with the electronic images I got.
          Under the noontime sun, the plants give off a heady aroma when broken or crushed underfoot—herbaceous, vaguely sexual, something like the stuff in those necklaces Minnie Castevet had in "Rosemary's Baby." The smell makes you stop for a minute—think about things that aren't really appropriate for your age: certain city memories of Sunday mornings in somebody else's apartment, a stranger's records playing, the furtive little adventures of one's twenties, being surprised at the end of a long party by the person who'd ignored you all night ... being surprised at all, by anything, anymore.
          Then those thoughts pass, and you're up to your elbows in composted manure. The sun moves out from behind the enormous White Pine and the bee balm simply bake, stretching their stalks up like a cat's neck being scratched. Tireless, constantly dangling, the bumble bees have their work ethic. You could make tea from the water that pools in the garden hose.
          With the first drink of the evening we wait for hummingbirds. I lean on the deck rail with a sweating glass of cold white wine, waiting for that mechanical whir when a bird circles my head or pauses midair in front of me in a kind of cheerful yet slightly hysterical—and always brief—greeting. The sound is like a tiny box fan on low. 
          Below us, an enormous embankment of yellow loosestrife grows unchecked.
          There is nothing I can do. I can't keep ahead of it all. Our yard is wild. And, I think—dropping my hoedag on the floor of the shed in profound exhaustion, smelling like citronella and perspiration, my tube socks caked with dirt—that suits me just fine.

Memories of You

          You shaved at your kitchen sink and showered in a closet in your bedroom.
          You looked so good in a robin's egg blue dress shirt that I would steal glimpses of you in all those second-hand book shops and think—long before it was legal—my husband.
          Whatever happened to those paper umbrellas you had on the ceiling lights?
          In the cool spring evenings you played Gershwin, and I stared out the window at the old iron gates across Hanover Street.
          I had no idea where they were—where I was—in that tiny apartment with the emerald green wooden wheelbarrow next to the toilet. The steps to your door—a short flight, then a long, and then a narrow passageway I forget—turned so many times I lost my bearings.
          Which gave those long Boston weekends their quality of fantasy. The little shops in the North End that sold just one thing. The tiny restaurants with their fronts open to the street, only a handful of tables inside. Walking to Cambridge Saturday morning after sex and raisin toast and more sex.
          But I cried one Sunday night when it was time to catch the train—the kind of tears that come like a bloody nose, or jury duty—no warning. I just started to cry into the kitchen wall, as if turning to sneeze or take a book off a shelf.
          I didn't want to leave the little rooms with the carousel horse and the glass towel bars that made a prism of the window light and the arguments in Italian coming up from the street—the plaster chest with the Mardi Gras beads, or the plastic toilet filled with change.
          Remember your houndstooth phase?
          That T-shirt you left didn't keep your scent long enough. 
          One time my phone bill was over $200. You'd fall asleep and I had to wake you up to hang up. Then I'd smoke for several more hours, alone.
          It all came to a head our first Easter—your mania to make a basket to send to Hans. I still have the little wooden chicks in a basket you gave me, a powerful token. The stores with the neon signs sold bread with pink and turquoise eggs on top, windows full of marzipan, and little ricotta pies that made my jeans too tight, 30 years ago. 
          My boss said: Do you know how lucky you are?
          You were like color TV.
          Memories of you!
          

A Stranger's Grave

          Our plot was past where the macadam turned into two dirt ruts. My grandmother pulled off onto a grassy spot between two septuagenarian maples, leaving the Buick staring ahead at the frightening concrete reservoir my grandmother told me never to climb.
          Obscuring the sky, its dome rose like a cracked concrete circus tent at the southeast corner of the cemetery. Nearby, empty paper maiche baskets the color of brains were piled like fallen soldiers on the ground.
          In her dark Wayfarers, my grandmother attended the graves, bending sadly. 
          Although not architectural, our marker—Zeck, Fogle, Seaks—was a good size, and we had a nice population scattered in the plot. This added to the pleasure of my summers with my grandmother and her two sisters: we had a big house, a huge yard with every kind of fruit tree, a grape arbor and a fish pond, and a painted wooden glider with a canvas top that looked like a carriage from Oklahoma! On summer nights I pushed back and forth with my Aunt Ada as we watched lightning bugs. My family was not merely known but respected in the town.
          For three months out of an otherwise long, desperately unhappy year, I was the center of attention.
          Under the hot sun, my 10-year-old head cast a strong shadow on a marker that was familiar to me but unknown just the same. The stone had two lines: a name, CHARLES E. SEAKS, and, below that, a year of death, 1918. But both were too low on the polished face of the granite. A first line had been inscribed above the name, then—evidently—scratched or blasted away.
          At 10, I wasn't really dwelling on the fact that it had said Husband. But on this day, while my grandmother was looking down at another stone, her back turned to me, I asked.
          She must have turned around. I don't really remember where her voice was coming from. But she said "Charlie was my first husband, Billy."
          Above, one of the old maples shimmered in a brief wind.

* * *

          At 73, any worldliness my grandmother might have enjoyed had been set aside. She was still mourning the death of my father—her sometimes brilliant, profoundly bipolar only child—at age 33 ("The same age as Christ," she reminded everyone). Grief was in the air. There were Bible readings around the kitchen table at 5:00 every evening, and before bed we knelt—together—to recite the Lord's Prayer and the Nicene Creed. From the bedroom across the hall, Aunt Ada's voice quietly joined ours.

          My family's stories were carefully handed down to me, heavily edited.

          Once, while she was dusting the stairway banister, my grandmother responded to one of my questions about my father by saying "Billy, do you know what a homosexual is?" I dodged out of the topic, and she never finished.

          Sometimes I would stand behind her chair and brush her hair. She'd let me cover her cheeks with rouge and draw lipstick on her as she tried not to laugh. 

          I think I wanted to see them as they had been—before their peep-toe platform pumps and crocodile handbags started their long sleep in crowded bedroom closets of old coats and fox fur collars with little heads and jewel eyes. Stacked on shelves were hat boxes the size of breakfast tables and shoe boxes with names like Air Step and Caressa. On the dressing table mirror were hat pins with milky pearl ends and beveled glass atomizers. 

          Inside my grandmother's music case I had seen some of the old lithograph Verdi and Schubert song scores signed "Effie Seaks," but I still wasn't letting myself think about that. Besides, all her calfskin luggage on the attic was marked "EMF." She was the proudest—and, likely, the best—Fogle there was.  The thought of my grandfather as a consolation—rather than a manifest destiny, a (necessarily) reproductive calling, an only love—seemed selfish, and a bit sneaky.

          Not much more was ever said about Charlie Seaks—that summer or for the rest of my childhood. The marriage had lasted only a year. He was a nice guy—a description that seemed platitudinous and dismissive compared to what she said about my grandfather; thus I wasn't bothered by thoughts of my grandmother as experienced in anything other than baking or as a sort of layman physician—"Nurse Enquirer" as my grandfather called her because of her habit of reading the medical column of the Philadelphia Enquirer. 

          In fact, it wasn't too long ago that I realized Charlie Seaks had died, at age 34, in the 1918 influenza pandemic.

          Lately, my thoughts return to that cemetery often.

         

The Text

          It came in with two others, and I almost overlooked it. No name, just the number.
          Merry Christmas Bill.
          I recognized the area code—Philadelphia, King of Prussia, Norristown. This person knew me, all right. I replied politely, a little delighted with the mystery. I was like Bette Davis on "This Is Your Life," listening to the voice but not guessing the right name.
          Three hours later, the reply confirmed the game:
          I think we should Keep it a secret for a little while. Life offers so little mystery these days.
          The capitalized "K" is an easy enough mistake on the phone, but the statement about life seemed a little flabby for anyone I really loved. If anything, life was more mysterious at our age.
          Still, I was excited. I texted back some names, even mentioning that it could be my dead mother. I said I missed Pennsylvania.
          A little over an hour later:
          Do you? And of that fine group of possible well wishers, who do you miss the most? Excluding mother of course.
          Then, immediately after:
          And don't forget the possibility of my having moved from a different state Or perhaps even a different country! Remember?
          I sent another name just before bed. The reply came in 15 minutes: Or perhaps...?

* * *

          When I woke up at 2:00, I thought about how quickly I was ready to forgive Bob or Sara, or Jose. All that work I had done to nullify the excitement of those names, my longing for them simply to remember—so that I could exist. To be forgotten is the cruelest fate, to be put aside like a bad wine. My only dignity was in recognizing—fully accepting—that I was not the defining, blazing memory that they were for me. Such understanding seemed the accomplishment of my years, tinged with Buddhism.

          I had been a chocolate confection, tasted and put back in the wrapper without embarrassment. The stories of their lives had been recast, diverted around me like a traffic bypass. 

          Now the mystery texter was making an absolute fool of me. The size of my need for those old people—one wrinkled by too much sunny California tennis, the others consumed by their careers, tone-deaf and strident, wealthy and slim—is incalculable and beyond my manipulation. One word and my heart is back in the bucket.

          Such is the biography of lust, I guess. They listened, too, but not for long. By the time Gary came along, I had largely stopped talking—knowing, finally, that good sex just doesn't buy you all the pre-dawn conversations I needed. No one can make it better.

          The fact is there is plenty of mystery, and danger, and humiliation, left in life.

          And of that fine group of possible well wishers, who do you miss the most? 

          In the texter's question, the power is suddenly inverted. I am asked to choose from among old loves who would never choose me, faces that have peopled my dreams for 30 years. In every one, the behaviors and outcomes are the same, locked into place by memory, the subconscious heating up like a reel-to-reel film projector that stays depressingly on script.

          I can't read the boxes of old diaries I kept, filled with cards from bars and slips of paper with phone numbers and names I can't remember. I made lists of food, the money I spent, how many cigarettes I smoked, where I spent the night. It's too real.

          Perhaps I am a curator of stultified memories, like a person who hums a tune imperceptibly altered, remembered forever—incorrectly.

          This morning the texts have stopped. I looked up the number and found it's someone in Reading, PA.

          Just a wrong number.