by Paul Lisicky
Guesthouse
I have never met a dog who doesn’t like me, but Zadie is no fan. She growls and threatens to bite me when I’m lying alongside Noah in his bed. And then she does bite me, not exactly breaking the skin, but scaring me, and the three of us are never exactly the same after that. I never know what part of me she’s going to lunge for next: will it be a nip out of my arm, or my fingertip? My side? Throat? She just wants me to know she could hurt me if she wanted to. Don’t get too comfortable in my beautiful bed, sucker. I lie perfectly still, my heart beating, trying not to roll too close to Noah, to hold him or be held. I’m unsettled because I’ve always loved dogs, and she shakes up my sense of myself as a friend to the animals. And I feel like a trespasser.
Am I a trespasser? It is Zadie’s house, Zadie being the innkeeper’s dog, who’s now attached herself to Noah, and vice versa. Once Noah took the job at this new guesthouse he stopped sleeping over at my place. In logical terms, he has a room of his own now, with a dresser and queen-size mattress on the floor. His move makes sense: that twin bed with the soft mattress was giving us both bad backs, and I was tired of slipping down into the space between the window and mattress. So it was decided I would go over and sleep at the guesthouse: a restored Cape Cod with wood beams, wide-plank floors, a fireplace, and glass bowls full of pears, oranges, and apples. The inn markets itself to a high-end crowd, hundreds more per night than the desperately randy Manchester Inn, which is as close as you could get to a bathhouse in Town. Here sexuality lives behind closed doors—no one needs to spell that out: the price and atmosphere assume you’re in on the news. I would be foolish to balk about staying with Noah here. I’m getting two worlds, my privacy during the day, and nights in a snug, welcoming house, where visitors, excited about their stay in Town, sleep in the rooms to the right and left of us. Occasionally I run into some guest in the hallway outside, and we laugh sheepishly about seeing each other in our underpants.
I leave the guesthouse early, as I do every morning. The street is empty at 6 a.m., a few carpenters driving to the Lobster Pot for coffee and blueberry muffins. The sunlight holds cold in it. It seeps up my wrists, inside my coat sleeves, which trap it for a while. I’m used to feeling underdressed in New England, bearing into the chill, as if that chill is a test. I haven’t even bought gloves this winter, and I think I might get through February without needing them. Already there’s a richness to the light, a deep yellow warmth that rubs some of the hardness out of the cold. It gives you a positive and negative charge at once. Polarity.
A friend of mine appears in her truck just outside my house and parks. She sticks her head out the window to say hi and I might as well be naked. I haven’t had coffee, haven’t brushed my teeth or taken a shower—I would never take a shower at the guesthouse; I always wait until I get back to my own place. As a rule, I always leave the guesthouse before anyone I know in Town is up and about. I realize it sounds like sneaking around. Maybe that’s a way to keep things fresh for myself so that our relationship doesn’t feel so domestic, but tinged with the heat of an affair.
“He should come and stay with you sometimes,” my friend says. She doesn’t say it with judgment, doesn’t suggest I am complicit, or that I am allowing myself to be pushed around—any of the things she could be saying. She says it with a big smile, lightness and play lifting her voice. It’s as if she’s already seen Zadie leave a red bite mark on my stomach. The tone is simply: consider this. And she won’t judge me if she sees me coming home in the same spot, on the same street, a week from now. She’s aware she has the power in this exchange, and doesn’t want to impose herself.
That’s it—it isn’t about her but about me. And I love her for speaking up, as much as I could love someone I’ve never spent more than five minutes with at a time. She speaks up. She speaks up.
“You’re right,” I say. “Thank you.”
The truth is, Noah hasn’t stayed at my place in so long that it feels some allegiance has shifted. He isn’t interested in the innkeeper, a fellow I’ve known in Town, in a sexual or romantic way. But Simon seems to have a hold on him that makes him feel like more than just another boss. Perhaps Simon is able to give something to Noah that I can’t give him: a sense of rules, boundaries, expectations? And there I am with all my needs, though I put so much effort into suppressing and denying my needs. With Simon, at least Noah has a real home, but it’s a home with freedom, without the usual encumbrances and obligations, which can take the joy out of being with someone.
It will take me years to find out that might not be a bad place to be. When I first came to Town I thought I needed someone else to complete me: I wanted a collaborator. I was hungry for some information and experience I couldn’t possibly have grown up with, some negotiation and pushback. At a certain point I didn’t need that anymore. It’s not that I was complete: who would ever be full enough? It’s just that when I look at myself now I might be enough to myself.
Futurity
At another time, decades ahead, I’ll be in the lucky position to think about the future. I’ll be having that necessary conversation with my department chairman about reappointment and tenure, the procedures I need to go through to make that happen. In the days leading up to that meeting, I won’t sleep through the night. I’ll take an over-the-counter sleeping pill. I’ll pee three times during the night at two-hour intervals. On the way to the meeting I’ll notice my hands shaking. They’ll feel ten degrees colder than my shoulders, which are furnacing. I’ll sweat through the fabric of my shirt, and by the time I sit down with my department chairman I’ll worry that the bacteria will betray me and I’ll smell. I’ll think of myself as a fraud. I’ll think I have no right to be thinking of a future. Doesn’t he know I’ve been dying all my life, since my twenties, and there’s no way I can start undying now—even if I haven’t seroconverted? It’s too late to undo all that, don’t put me through this, please. It hurts to be told I have more life to be accountable to, more calendars to manage. The person I have to be right now: he’s only a phantom, an act of language; he’s pretty good at appearing as someone with actual flesh on his bones, an expression on his face. And if he has to betray his relationship to time (leap of arrogance), does that mean the day ahead of him will be less precious, less singular? Will it lose its vibrancy and color? And, by turning toward the future, am I losing what’s left of my youth?
To think I have all the hours in the world now. To think I was protected by time.
Ambition
I’m sometimes glad to think that in ten years I’ll be dead. By then the only gay people left will be those whose lives were ruined by watching the rest of us die.
WALT ODETS, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS, quoting a twenty-three-year-old two weeks after an HIV blood test
The phrase can come up anytime, in the restaurant or at the beach with friends. Usually it’s just when the two of us are together. “I have no ambition,” Noah says. He says it as if his entire vision is represented by those four words. He says them with a tired smile. I don’t think he wants to wield them as one would a weapon, I don’t believe he wants me to hear them as aggressive, but he certainly must see the confusion on my face, in response. It feels personal, mysteriously—maybe I’m thinking only selfishly, and if I could only see around my feelings, I’d be detached enough to see that his feelings might have nothing to do with me. Why should I expect my presence to lighten his dark days? It doesn’t occur to me to ask what ambition means to him. For me it is wound up in the stuff of purpose, agency—it’s hard-won, and not necessarily corrupt. If his answer were, say, money and power and competition, the characteristics he associates with being a lawyer—I’d understand. I refuse that kind of ambition, too, but I think he’s talking about a graver matter: the future, a sense of it being hopeless, a maw, an empty drain with no bottom.
One day I have a good writing day, and the increasing rarity of that kind of day is cause to communicate it. Noah’s lis
tening, his face intent, locked on me, though he might be asking himself, Why is he so excited? I’m glad he’s happy, but does he have any clue that this makes me feel lonely, separate from him? I tell Noah that when it’s going well I feel a little like God, and instantly Noah cries, “Paul,” with such shock—his voice shoots up an octave, as if he’d watched me knock over an old man without apology. And shame cracks me apart, because I hadn’t been prepared for any response but enthusiasm. What did I do? Maybe I sounded arrogant, blasphemous to someone who doesn’t even believe in that kind of God, which is the worst kind of blasphemy. I should have said, I felt a part of God, or with God, or in God, but there’s no way to take it back now, and the memory of the good writing day has evaporated. It’s transformed into something self-involved and a little sinister, and I do whatever I can to speak in a more casual voice in order to pull the day back into a position where everything is just so. We eat and chat about who’s checking into their rooms tonight. I’m still shaken. And God goes.
I’d understand Noah better if he were reading Thich Nhat Hanh: “Freedom here is freedom from craving, from anger, from hate, from despair … [pause] … from ambition. All these afflictions make you not free. The happiness of a person very much relies on her freedom. If you have … worries, anxieties in your heart, you are not free.”
But neither of us is sitting with our Buddhist monks. We probably should be, but it doesn’t occur to us to do that in a place in which we’re supposed to be happy.
Would Noah have ambition if there were no AIDS in the atmosphere?
Axiom
Didn’t Noah once say, “A couple has to want the same things”? We use that axiom to talk about the couples we know, especially the couples we’ve watched breaking apart, after a long time. Of course we’re too much inside our own relationship to talk about us with any clarity, so we focus outward. “A couple has to want the same things.” Whenever he says it, it hangs in the air for a minute, like a banner spun silently from a toy gun. X wants to be a writer, Y has no ambition. I don’t want to make a math out of dividing these statements against each other, but why does Noah bother to stick around?
Runner
The trick is to disappear myself. At least this is what I think, as I walk back and forth in front of the crowd, holding a painting on either side. I’m working as a runner for the AIDS Support Group Auction, and my gut feeling is that a painting will have more power—and thus rack up bigger bids—if I try not to exude too much personality, thus directing more energy to the painting than to the look on my face. I hold the painting out in front of me, covering myself, which seems appropriate given the imperative of the cause, though we also want to make sure we’re having fun. This one is a Duane Slick, a field of off-white on white, spread onto the canvas with a knife. We are halfway through the night, two more hours to go. How small can I make myself? Queer people have learned how to do that from way back. And the bids keep going higher and higher.
Harness
If he could look me full in the face and say, I want what you want, and say it with belief—would I be able to stand there and take it, all the way down into my heart? Would it disperse all my anxieties? Would it feel like I was finally coming home to my body, the fears of so many years arrowing toward that moment? Would I say, outright, You’re here, and would it feel like more life, better life?
When Noah tells me I think of him as the “love of his life,” he says it as if he’s been sentenced, with only a bit of wryness mixed in. I can almost picture the harness around him—not the sexy kind of harness, but something an animal might be forced to wear until he stops kicking, relaxes into his punishment, and goes numb.
The love of your life=expectations. The love of your life=future together.
I have yet to rest in the harness of that statement, which I can’t even say is true today. Maybe I’d feel it lifting me off the ground if the feelings between us were reversed.
31
Shaved Head
We’re in a store, Polly and I, and just as we’re heading for the door, I spot the back of a head on the closed-circuit screen. The hair is thinning on that spot and—freeze. It takes seconds to realize it’s me. It hits me so hard that I almost gulp for air. My heart is broken. How could that balding man be me when my father, mother, two brothers, and uncles on both sides have the thickest hair, low hairlines? Is this what stress means? I didn’t grow up to lose my hair, as do other men, who get accustomed to the idea through seeing who they might become through the examples of their relatives. My favorite men shave their heads, but it’s different to imagine taking on that look for myself. After I get used to the inevitable, I’ll have my hair stripped and bleached one last time until it’s silver-white. Perhaps, without knowing it, I’m getting used to the idea of looking old while I’m still young. I enjoy becoming another human for two months (except for the special purple shampoo that can be bought only at a beauty supply store in Orleans) and then get sick of people talking only of my white hair and thick, dark brows. I have it cut off, without ceremony—and from here on out I look like Hollis.
Employee of the Month
When it comes to buying clothes, people are as unpredictable as the Outer Cape weather. Either they take up too much time or they don’t take up enough, and I simply have to second their intuitions. If they’re feeling enthusiasm, then I tell them they look great. If there’s a dubious expression on their face, I shake my head, take the shirt out of their hands, and tell them I’ll put it back on the hanger for them. It’s surprising how quickly I take to selling clothes—and I’m grateful I get to work for Polly and my friend Stephen, who manage the place. There’s no wealth of jobs in Town, and you’re lucky if you’re working in a situation that isn’t downright abusive. A year’s worth of money to make in three months—the high rents. No wonder store owners are maniacs! For the people who walk through the front door, we do what we can to make the store look like fun rather than a duty, which involves wearing name tags with invented names (“Me Llamo Go Go”), pasting faces clipped out of newspapers onto dollar bills and handing them out as change, and playing music that might have a harder edge than what customers usually hear in other stores—say one of Millie Jackson’s extended monologues between vocal tracks.
At the register, people don’t really know if we’re being serious or not in our conversations, and it makes them nervous.
Sometimes I just tell someone, “You don’t really want that.” I’d like to keep my job and collect unemployment for the dark months of winter after the store closes for the season, but it’s for the sense of camaraderie. It’s good to shake up the structure every so often, especially when the owners keep talking about implementing what they call the Up System, which essentially pits store clerk against store clerk, attaching a name to each sale, but without giving us commissions.
Unfortunately, the possibilities of transformation are too much for some people. For some, buying a new shirt is simply a matter of play, and for others? Those others can be so mean, with a coldness that resents me for being the one to remind them they have a body, and they’ll never be their imaginary perfected self. Here, even the most confident person comes up against the fact that the inner and outer don’t match, and if they have to blame someone, they’ll blame me, as I’m standing right in front of them, and it’s easier to believe the store is mine. They wouldn’t even need clothes, dammit, if I weren’t standing there trying to fan the need.
The people I like the best are these people, the ones I’ve had some tension with. People I haven’t expected to like. This particular customer is someone I’ve seen in Town. She works at a gift shop not too far from the Work Center. I’m wary of her because she gives off the feeling of someone who’s pompous, who takes herself way too seriously. Though she might technically live in Provincetown, she situates herself in another town, doesn’t interact with my town, and would probably prefer that my town didn’t exist. She picks up an overdyed violet sweatshirt. She studies it a long t
ime—Town’s name appears on the front—as if she needs to be reminded of where she lives and works. When she walks out of the dressing room, her head is down, there is such shame on her face. She says something about hating the size of her breasts. I don’t know what to say to that, though the intimacy of it makes my face fall. There is heaviness and sorrow in her voice and it hurts. But within seconds she lifts her face to the mirror, and I can tell she likes the way she looks. All I say is “You look great.” And I’m not merely telling her what she wants to hear. It’s all true, the light in her face. Her intuition locks in at this moment and I’m its strike plate. Neither of us moves or talks for a minute. She stands before the mirror and says, “Yes, I do”—still testing out the idea, but on the way to being OK with it. And when she thanks me, she isn’t being simply automatic, perfunctory. She means it. It feels good to be together, just for this moment. And every time I see her wear that sweatshirt down the street I’m back to when we turned toward each other, saw each other, and categories fell away.
