30. Memories and Those Who Stayed

There’s very little—and very few people—I actually miss. Sometimes it seems that I had no choice, that if I tried to hold on to any part of my life—much less anyone else’s—I’d die, though not from the effort. I’ve always guessed that it’d be something like drowning: It’s not the work you put into getting in over your head that destroys you; it’s the stuff that you’re in that’s submerged you.

I haven’t tried to remember, or hold on to, mother. It seemed that no matter where I was, she was always on the other end of the line. Now, that’s not so benevolent, as I’ve seen, as I’ll probably see again and again. I don’t think I could not’ve spoken to her as I did, just about every week. Over time, I stopped visualizing the woman who stayed on this block because that was all she could do for me after I left.

This isn’t to say I didn’t need her or she didn’t need me. To the contrary: We were—still are—the only constant in each other’s lives. Or in her death. Will that change? After all, she won’t be there when I die, when my body ends up wherever it does. As far as I know, I don’t have a soul or anything that transcends my own bones. I never did tell that to mother: Even after all I’ve described, I still wasn’t about to break her heart—or that of any other living person—unnecessarily.

Soon she will be buried—just like everyone else who dies on this block, including Adam—and then what? I don’t know where she’ll end up in my mind, in my recollections, much less in the chaos of the cosmos.

I think about the what-next mainly because that’s what she would’ve wanted me to do. Will I think about her wishes, desires, ten, twenty years from now—if I’m around that long—if I survive the operation? Will it matter? As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s thought about Adam for a very, very long time. I must say, though, that I have no wish to bring him back. Even when I was young, just after he’d died—been murdered, really, just like every other man on this block who stayed—I felt this way.

Maybe mother thought of him, or more precisely, thought back to him. And what does it matter now? Maybe she’s taking some image of this place—of the light that didn’t fill rooms or spaces of any kind, that ended but never quite brightened or reflected colors, like the glass panes inside the front doors of some houses.

All those days in the shadows and in bound, muted illumination, passing one after another like all things never heard because they’ve repeated the same dull and pointlessly violent echoes you hear when you pass through some place you’re bound to return to because you don’t know that you are. Sounds, words used to muffle a scream, a shout of anger, murmur like rumbles buried deep in the ground and return to the surface when you stay on this block, wherever you are. And when the sun visits, shadows spread across windows and open eyes.

And so Vivian gave me one of the few, if not the first, of the experiences I would miss, that I miss now: an autumn afternoon, not much different from this one, maybe chillier or more brisk because we in those flat, open and, at this time of year, deserted areas around the beaches. There was no place where you couldn’t feel the late October sunlight, rippled and whipped across water, sand, rock and splintered wood, as it turned to wind. The young, oiled bodies were long gone. Vivian’s car, like the others, rattled along the sand-swirled road but never stopped or hesitated.

The people—especially the men—seemed as if they’d been there forever and would always be there, their days stretching ahead and sometimes around them, even they knew they would end, perhaps that winter or the one after it. They, like Vivian’s father, had been left there; the tide would not take them back out even if they’d flung themselves into it. They’d come ashore from everywhere in the times before mine, before Vivian’s: the wars, the wars from which they’d escaped; they came, the onetime surfers and musicians.

One man, who’d been fixing fishing rods and making shell and pebble bracelets for as long as Vivian’s father could recall, said he survived his first twenty-seven winters on codfish, potatoes and beer. In the summer, there were lobsters and farmers offered up corn and fruits; in the fall, the women baked pies. And she was the first to bake one—cherry, my favorite (I hate pumpkin!)—for me.

29. Their Stories

I’ve never been much of a storyteller. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s because I’ve never had any tales to tell or simply that I don’t have the gift of gab, or whatever it takes.

Seems that the ones who can weave tales are the people—usually men—who can find a moral , a lesson or some kind of point in something—usually in their childhood—that happened to them. They somehow get the idea that it’s going to matter to someone else, somewhere in the world.

Truth of the matter is that people are born, people suffer and people die and other people forget, or never notice. Women—most, anyway—bring the beings—or the lives, I’m not sure—into this world to begin all those endless, repetitive fantasies, all those experiences that tumble, like pebbles from cliffs, into chasms of forgetfulness that close in all around them.

Men look for rhyme or reason, as if the universe is some kind of orderly machine or a chant that marches in time. People, at least on this block do the same things again and again.

28. J'accuse

One thing I’ve noticed since I left this block: all of the sentences that began with “You aren’t…,” “You can’t…” or “You are not to..” have been replaced with ones that begin, “Why do you want to…”

I’m thinking of Vivian again. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me now: it’s been how long? Last I heard, she wasn’t living far from here. Not that she ever did, or would do otherwise.

Near here. With or without a man. Or a woman, perhaps. Then I probably wouldn’t recognize her. No, she wouldn’t recognize her as she was when she drove me through her old seaside town, not so far from here. Or as she or I was on the morning when I first woke with her, when for the first time since early in my childhood I wasn’t thinking about a cup of coffee, a drink or breakfast. Or any other drug, for that matter.

Until that moment, my body’d never caught up to my mind, or at least the rages, fears and other waves that swirled behind my eyes and ears. The spirit had been ready, so to speak, but not the flesh. But on the morning, my body craved, for the first time I remember, the touch of another. My pores had opened, throbbing like buds after the first April rainstorm.

And her gaze: It stunned me, even blinded me temporarily. Twinges of needles, glancing without piercing—and I wanted more, because she could open me, if only for a moment, without rending.

For the first time, I felt—or at least relished the illusion—that someone’d taken from me exactly what I’d taken from her: whatever we could absorb through our mouths, through our skins. Of course we began and ended through our orifices; one of us, as it turned out, sweeter than the other, more bitter than the other. She, always a woman, on my tongue; I, becoming a woman—or so I thought—between her lips.

And through those hours, those days of chatting before that first night; the hours that followed; the days when I loved, when she loved: her supple touch. I, the supple touch, like the steady wind against her curtains: I turned to waves as cool as her linens against my skin.

No man could’ve loved me that way, I thought: no man could be loved so. That word I’d always swirled around, like sand around those mounds where boys believed they’d built castles, all dissipated in waves and wind. Boys rise, men fall; Vivian and I lay facing each other, her eyes opening to my gaze.

I knew I wasn’t going to die and go to heaven. I’d always known that. There was always another day, whether I wanted it or not. After what, it didn’t matter; there was always the day, the night, they year after. No way out of it, no way to fight—but on that day there was no need to fight, at least some things. Later she’d tell me it was the first gentle night she spent with a man. Was that the same as telling me I was the first gentle man she’d met? I know that’s something I’d’ve never been, not for her or anybody else.

On that night, I merely did what I’d done ever since a man—another one who disappeared from this block—pushed his pants down from his waist and pulled my face toward his crotch. There was no way out of the moment, which lasted an eternity; there was only the moment; there would never be any other. There was only him; there was only her; there would be this moment, consisting of women. And no way to leave it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was one major difference between that moment with Vivian and the others that preceded it: I’d had no urge to resist, to flee or even to protest. I could only accept her, in that particle of time, in the others that flew away from it: only me, only her, and no other force in the universe.

If she’d understood that I simply acted as I always had up to that moment, would she’ve declared that I was the first, the only, man for her even as I wrapped my body—at that moment clad in a black lace bra and panties—in her kimono and shuffled into the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee and the sun flooded the window? Well, if I was savoring an illusion, who’s to say that she wasn’t, too?

So, her question—her plea, her accusation—“How could you…” when I started taking hormones, when I talked about surgery, seems inevitable now, even—especially—had she seen me, or I her.

Something else I hadn’t realized then: the moment someone exclaims, “How could you!” it’s a sure sign you’ve survived, or at least progressed in some way, however small. The moment you’re not a subject—which is not necessarily the moment you cease to submit, if you ever do—someone somewhere feels betrayed. Actually, it takes only a moment of happiness, or at least equanimity, to make someone believe you’ve taken it from him or her. Look at all those parents who resent, overtly or covertly, their children’s success—which for most children, for most people, means nothing more than getting what they want. The son dreams of moving to a penthouse in the city; the father wants him to take over the family’s hardware store and father his grandchildren. And girls inspire jealousy in mothers who’ve stopped sleeping in the same beds with their husbands but have no desire to sleep with any other man. They’d sit shiva; they’ll schedule exorcisms (or psychotherapy, which is usually the same thing) for daughters who realize they’ll find love, in all its glory and cruelty, only inside the curtains of another woman.

Contrary to what some churches teach every day and others teach on Sundays, love is not forgiving, and it can only lead people to seek it by whatever means and for whatever ends.