by Paul Lisicky
I walk through the garden, come in through the kitchen. I’m told I don’t have to knock. A bell hangs from the back of the door, rings, and Arden, a black curly-coated retriever, barks and rumbles up to check me out. “It’s good,” I say to him, and sink my hand into his fur. “All’s good. I’m just coming for a visit. I’m so happy to see you.”
Up until this time, I have seen Wally only up and down Commercial Street, Wally in the garden, hairy Wally in drag. The Wally I have known has always been eager for conversation, eager to speak in that baritone voice, which is surprisingly gentle and fatherly, as if his voice box were made for singing. Not the way men sing now, straining their voices into androgyny, but the way men sang in the 1940s, like Perry Como. But Wally is quiet today, lying on the living room sofa beside the two windows almost smothered by rose vines. Light barely gets in. It doesn’t seem like he much wants to talk—or even can today. The lamp is on beside him. Wheel of Fortune blares on the TV. Arden sits by Wally’s sofa with a look of worry in his eyes. It’s as if he decides the very arrangement of us, our two defined roles, sick one, well one, have conspired to make Wally feel worse.
I’ve known plenty of people with AIDS, but this the first time I see the illness’s less dramatic repercussions up close. I try to get past the feeling that I don’t belong here, that I’m an imposter among the sick and the grave. This role is for people with actual experience, better kindness. I ask if he wants anything, needs anything from the store, but Wally doesn’t. The situation is puzzling: I’d feel useful to go out and get him some, say, chocolate fudge brownie frozen yogurt, but Wally has no appetite and doesn’t want me to go out of the way.
“It’s only just down the street.” I point in the direction of the L&A Market. “It’s really no trouble.”
“Nn nn,” he says, shakes his head back and forth on the pillow.
So I pull up a chair and we talk. We talk about people in Town, people we think of as funny, people we approve of, people we don’t. There is a transgressive thrill in taking down a member of our community whom everyone professes to like, is required to like, and we talk of his narcissism, his meanness and aggression—can he even dole out a compliment without a firm backhand on it?—with relief, as if we are the only two people on earth who have ever spoken the truth. In effect, we are saying we like each other. We think alike, we trust each other, and if only our conversation were happening in relaxed circumstances, on the steps outside the post office, or the bench outside Spiritus, the main pizza place in Town.
He’d make the perfect boyfriend at a different time and place, and I sense he can see that in my posture and expression.
When these topics run out, I find myself bringing up my crushes, my failed dates. I fear that I am talking too much about myself, or more precisely, the objects of my desire. Am I conjuring up too much hope? Is talk of desire talk of hope? What are accounts of longed-for boyfriends, and all the awkwardness, all the attempts to connect, if not failed stabs at hope? But maybe it is better simply to be distracted, to get lost in the channels of narrative than just to sit here together, in time, to feel it flooding over us, like we’re on the banks of a lake after a hurricane.
I wonder if I ever allow myself to take in how afraid I am. It’s hard to admit that I am waiting for a catastrophe. I haven’t yet lost anyone close. Uncle Joe, of course, when I was a teenager. Uncle Steve, Aunt Anna. My high school friend Paul to diabetes. Plenty of people, but not close people. The loss of someone close still feels like an abstraction to me. It happens to other people, and I feel embarrassed about it, the way I feel embarrassed about not knowing how to be fluent in other languages.
We never talk about Wally’s health, how his body feels this week, if he has headaches, or if his feet hurt. To go there would be to etch something he might not want known, even to himself. So sometimes we just sit together in silence, the lamps on. We listen to the steps outside the window, no car noise or tourist noise to bandage those sounds. We look to see who it is—a carpenter with an awl in his hand? a Visual Fellow drawing in on a cigarette, swallowing back a cough?—while Arden lies fully on his side, looking up at me with one eye, legs stretched as far as they can go, as if he’s trying to fill the room with himself.
The White Dory
An opportunity arises in which the Work Center will subsidize my rent each month if I can find a place off the compound. I grab it without hesitation and find a winter rental in the far East End, as far from the center of Town as possible. I tell myself that no group experience could equal the group of my first fellowship year, and I don’t want my second to be a letdown, to be one simply of comparison. But I think the real explanation is deeper, and more disturbing to attend to. My psyche is likely more exhausted than I’m willing to admit. What right do I have to retreat? But just the idea of a soundfree world, of snow pinging the windowpane—a life frozen for a while, suspended as in some paperweight … well, all of that seems as blissful as a fireplace on a night that’s so cold.
The new place is on the second floor, with a tight view of the harbor through one of the living room windows. I must look out and over the roofs across the street, one of which is Norman Mailer’s house, the other the Motherwell compound. I’m anxious, though, about the electric baseboard heat, the price of which could possibly be enormous, far exceeding my housing stipend. Dee, my landlord, probably knows what she is doing by escaping to Key West for the winter. Even when she’s fifteen hundred miles south, it is impossible not to think about Dee at all times, as her paintings are on every wall, colossal scenes of the ocean. But they look redundant in this space, given the harbor across the street. So much for the limits of representation. With care and great guilt, I take just about all of them down and stack them in the second bedroom, which I’ve closed off and turned down the heat in. Dee is a tiny woman, with a tan speckled throat and arms, even in the off-season. She does not like a wide range of food, period. She winces even at the very name of the Box Lunch’s Organic Pocket, a vegetarian roll glued together with mayonnaise, so it is no surprise her paintings are so big. She is making her body so small and has to attend to the opposing impulse.
It doesn’t take long to experience the shaking—the whole structure shakes when a 35 mph gust hits from the north, which proves to be unsettling in a place already built to withstand high winds—don’t some call it the windiest place in the world? But the bigger problem involves clams and gulls. The roof, which is nearly flat, a fifteen-degree peak, proves to be the perfect canvas for gulls to break open clams on. They take them from the beach and drop them from a height of thirty feet, with a force like bombs. One day a clamshell is dropped right over one of the skylights. It cracks the glass and tears a hole open to the sky above. Drafts of cold air blow through the hole, underneath the flapping blue tarp, which threatens to blow off like a magic carpet until the glass can be replaced.
How long does it take me to figure out that no one lives in the White Dory in the off-season? Not just here but in this end of Town? The place is but a five-minute drive to the Work Center, and another five minutes to the A&P and the gym, but in terms of walking, or even taking a bike? Figuratively, it feels as far from the hub of activity as Braintree does from Boston, and in order to resist the isolation, I’m out for much of the day. Beneath me lives the painter Emily Farnham, a former student of Hans Hofmann and the biographer of Charles Demuth. She’s so eager for someone to talk to, so relieved that a new tenant is living above her that I cannot help but feel her aloneness, despite her smile, her wry, enthusiastic voice. At eighty-one, she’s outlived all her friends, and she’s unthinkably alone out here. We have great conversations when we run into each other on the steps, but I find it hard to get away once we’re talking. She seems to want something I’m not sure I have it in me to give. Not just taking down a bowl from a high cupboard shelf, or moving an ottoman from one end of the room to the other, but something psychologically costly—am I thinking about my mother? That’s it—my mother. When I see
Emily’s gray Volvo station wagon crushing the oyster-shell parking lot, I make sure to stay inside for a while, even if I’ve packed my bag to go to the gym. I wait till I hear her door close; I wait a full five minutes, even more, then I walk out down the steps, as quietly as possible. I do not like this about myself. Perhaps my own fear that, like her, I’m going to lose everything makes me hide.
Funerals
On the long walk to the UU Meeting House people linger in groups of twos or threes, solemn, too well dressed for Provincetown. Their heads are lifted as if it’s work to keep them up. The mourners are young and I don’t even have to know what kind of funeral it is. I walk a little faster to my destination, just so I won’t be pulled into it. Not just a conversation with somebody I know, but the energy. I’m rattled into my psyche and soul, which I don’t want to admit, even to myself.
I’ve never even been inside for one of those funerals, maybe because no one I know would approve of all that fuss. Maybe it’s just that the people I know aren’t attached to family and big groups of friends, and to hold such an event under those conditions—well, that would be sad, too unbearably sad for the few who slid into the pews. I’m relieved that I haven’t yet been summoned to any of these rituals, but I know I’m not participating in an experience of Town, of this era, that’s too layered for me to comprehend. One day I won’t have a choice—could it be Billy? Philippe?—and I’ll be fused into Town’s history in a way that I’m not now.
In the meantime I picture my own funeral taking place in that—church? No, the UU Meeting House refuses to call itself a church. Not next year or the year after, but someday. I know it so deeply it isn’t something I ever discuss, not even with the people closest to me. I realize I take it for granted that they’ll be there to sing the hymns I’d have picked beforehand.
My shepherd is the Lord. Nothing indeed shall I want.
16
Welcoming Committee
It’s October 1, and I stand out in the parking lot with Tim Seibles, the new writing coordinator, watching the new crop of Fellows move into their spaces on the Work Center compound. I probably have the face of unsettling calm, as if I’m someone who owns and runs the place, when I’m typically Mister Anxiety. Tim and I are making jokes with the effortless silliness of those who have been standing out in this parking lot since before anyone had given a thought to paving it. Maybe with our laughing we are hoping to set the tone for the new year. We cannot help but feel, on some instinctive, unspoken level, that we are an unlikely pair of friends: Tim is black, I am white; Tim is straight, I am queer; and maybe we hope the new crew sees our joking around and ease as a sign that people from different backgrounds can be together. Not to dissolve that difference, but to love that difference.
A blondish woman walks up to us and introduces herself as Lucy. She doesn’t meet Tim’s eye, she doesn’t meet mine. I feel the history of every reaction to her face, simultaneously, from both men and women. She’s standing up to meet ours. She knows it so well by now that she’s probably not surprised by any complicated gaze—and she’s strong. But the three-second silent dialogue among the three of us—the deep pocket in time—feels more charged than it should. It’s as if she has jumped into my head and decided that I’ve decided that I don’t like what I see, and it’s animal and primal—and also not true.
Lucy is beautiful. I’m not even sure she knows that about herself, as much as she might directly say to herself: Yes, I am beautiful. Perhaps her forehead, her brow, her hair, her lithe, athletic body only call more attention to the small pocket out of her cheek. It keeps the corner of her mouth drawn in as if she is trying to hold sound inside. At the same time, she has the aura of a star, someone who knows she’s gifted, who’s been much talked about. Word has it that she got an advance of several hundred thousand dollars to write a memoir based on a piece she wrote for Harper’s Magazine. The piece details her childhood bout with jaw cancer and the numerous plastic surgeries she’s undergone since. She’s already a legend among her former classmates at Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—we’d missed each other by just a year, and I have friends who are friends of hers. There’s Ann Patchett, who was in my space the previous fellowship year, in which she wrote the first draft of The Patron Saint of Liars.
I’ve loosened up enough to see Lucy is wearing a motorcycle jacket, as small and as battered as the one I have on. She knows she is in Provincetown. A hank of blond hair falls over her right eye and covers at least part of her face.
In the weeks to come we become good friends. We defiantly believe in the possibility of love, sexual love, as a force that could transform us, and we are starving: we can never get enough. We find so much to talk about. We share with each other the details of our complicated love lives. But the friendship isn’t ever as easy as it is with, say, Polly. The friendship is like walking through and around so many obstacles. Lucy has the ability to make me feel loved, seen—she knows how to shine her light on a person, knows how to use it. Lucy also has the ability to say something that hurts, then infuriates me, but I don’t tell her that. Usually it involves stirring up competition about writing. She has the uncanny ability to locate and touch people’s sensitive places, to say something provocative—does she like to fight? Maybe for Lucy prickliness is a gateway to intimacy, and she craves intimacy maybe even more than she does a hand on her face, her stomach, her hip. Alfred Kazin on Carson McCullers: “She fastened on many people as she did on me—for affection, encouragement, consolation…. She was also … ironic, devilish in her humor, circuitous in her dealings, charming beyond words when she wanted to be, irresistibly unique even when she drove you crazy.” I don’t even know if Lucy knew Carson’s work, but truer words couldn’t have been spoken of Lucy. Add to that some punk rocker’s nihilism, an absolute disgust for complacency, sentimentality. Deep ambition. Lucy.
Matt, David, Alicia, Jane, Joshua, Mindy, Linda, Joy, Robert. In a matter of weeks it becomes clear that the primary characteristic of our new group is rebellion. Rebellion is an appropriate stance toward the times, when more people than ever are dying of AIDS, and the National Endowment for the Arts isn’t funding performance artists who use queer themes in their work (Karen Finley, Tim Miller). There’s so much to rebel against, it’s confounding how to proceed, especially when we’re in a place that values openness and acceptance and positions itself as a safe haven for sick people ready to die. So, in frustration, some target the Work Center itself. Why is it so hard to get a fellowship? Who was turned away? Why? There is an air of caution, incrimination, and wariness in our group. The possibility of fights, fallings-out. One Fellow, unhappy with her studio, throws open the doors on the coldest day of the season, turns the thermostat to ninety at a time when the Work Center is struggling financially, when there’s a threat of stipends being slashed, maybe the threat of the whole operation shutting down, sold off as condos. At least that’s the rumor.
My response to all this strife is to spend more time in my distant apartment than at the Work Center compound.
Elizabeth. Thank God that Elizabeth is a Second-Year Fellow with me. We were in the same class at Iowa, and it is good to have so many shared references, the same teachers, so many people in common. Dark-brown hair, dark-red lips, expressive eyes—when you first meet her you cannot help but be reminded of the young Judy Garland, without any of the craziness and need—and then that image falls away and she is just Elizabeth: no one else could be her. Besides, she is stronger and saner than anyone else I know. We enjoy making each other laugh, our humor so privately profane no one would know what to do with us. She is a brilliant writer, and part of that has to do with how her work’s attuned to speech, the ways it lifts and pauses and breaks open in unexpected ways. Like Polly, she has a distinctive speaking voice that sounds like it was made for singing, though unlike Polly, she doesn’t sing—she saves that for her sentences. It is good to see her back in a place she loves more than anywhere else. Good to know she’s back in 6 Fish Up,
where she gets the good work done. It breathes like a lung above the Work Center compound. It looks out on the buildings beneath and around it, but is not too much a part of it—you can hide up there and spy on the conversations at the two picnic tables on the green beneath and hear great gossip. She is writing a novel called The Giant’s House, about an unlikely friendship between a librarian on Cape Cod and the tallest boy in the world. After that tough year away, she knows how precious time is and works with so much dedication that sometimes she must take a day off. She checks in to the Holiday Inn out in my part of Town, draws herself a hot bath, and starts up on the writing when she gets back to the compound the next day.
Elizabeth and I have a favorite T-shirt that appears in a shopwindow in the center of Town: Knock It Off, Asshole, I’m a French Fry. Its accompanying graphic makes no sense at all, which is why we love it so, and our love of it has nothing to do with being stoned.
Aside from Elizabeth and Lucy? I fear I’m holding myself back from people, holding myself back from group life, which meant so much to me last year. But all that openness—I don’t think I can do it again. Or I don’t think I can lose it all again. I want to hold on to my vision of the ideal community, my utopia of last year. I can’t afford to have it diluted. It would seem a sacrilege to dilute that, and so I decide to keep myself back from deeper, more loving involvement.
Imposter Syndrome
We’re standing in the dunes one morning, where a famous photographer is taking a group picture of the new crop of Fellows for the cover of Provincetown Arts magazine. We were told to dress in black. For some of us that’s no problem. For others? It feels forced, an external idea of what an artist is supposed to look like. Lucy, for instance, decides to show up in a bright red jacket, with striped leggings. We’re told to climb the crest of one of the dunes. One of us laughs; the laugh reminds me of how my mother laughs at me when she thinks I’m being pretentious, when my outfit doesn’t match her idea of me, the child afraid of gym class, afraid of taking a communal shower with the other boys, but too embarrassed to admit that even to himself.
