by Paul Lisicky
The look on his face, this voice—they’re not his, they don’t belong to a person who insists on lightness, a person critical of anybody taking himself too seriously. The voice has gravel in it, age. Rage, too, as if cleaning rooms and attending to guests’ needs should be enough. Why should one extra thing be demanded of him?
The look on his face—I don’t know what to do with its inwardness, inscrutability.
“This—” he says again, tossing his hand up. “Us. There’s nothing here.”
A curious calm, as if we’ve slipped into a movie of animals. In thanatosis animals fake death in order to get a predator to leave them alone. Is he a predator now?
Then I get it. Us. The two of us.
He doesn’t say he’s unhappy, doesn’t say there’s a hidden boyfriend, doesn’t say he’s moving back to Montreal to go back to Henry or even to his family.
Then emotion feels stacked in a way that there isn’t a single word for, because it has too many layers. Unhappiness? It would be one thing to hear he was unhappy; I could take that. Unhappiness could be examined, cut up on a table for study as in a biology class, but—he’s never let on till now.
We try to talk it through, but it’s all hunches, stammering, simmering, red faces, urges, awkwardness from two people who despise awkwardness.
“Let’s take a walk,” I say. “It’s way too hot in here. When did it get to be so hot?” And Zadie needs to go for a walk anyway, which is just a built-in excuse to keep moving. We need to keep moving.
We walk across Bradford, walk down the steps toward the A-House. Walk through the tight alley past the Julie Heller Gallery, with its big sign—ART. We walk toward my place on the beach. The night is humid, thick, as if the clouds had poured lotion onto it. The dog behaves as if none of our motions are especially unusual, but that’s probably her tactic to bring the night back to routine. More than anything Zadie wants routine right now. She must smell the adrenaline, the panoply of human hormone coming off us.
But we don’t finish the sentence, because we don’t know how to find our way through its logic. Whenever we’ve tried to imagine through to the end, we’ve disrupted it, defused it, laughed it off. A sentimental education went into that. The work of years.
So maybe it’s easier just to void a pact than it is to say there was something here to lose, right? There’s nothing here. There was nothing ever here. Null set, zero.
I can’t negotiate from this position, can’t agree that we didn’t happen, never mattered. Didn’t sit and sleep together in a room, not just last night, but the past 365.
Until now, I didn’t know there was no point to us, to me.
Canceling time? I will not stand by the idea, no. Je refuse.
Up ahead the spotlight shines from the beam above 411’s ground floor. Its joke of light barely illuminates the dune grass, the stand of ragged yuccas along the beach.
I say, “I’m going to stay in my place.”
“Come on,” Noah says.
I tell him I’m staying in my own bed tonight. I repeat it, as if I’m saying it for someone in the future, who isn’t in front of me. Someone I don’t know yet. “And you know what? That’s it. This.”
“Paul.”
I can’t get the words out without sounding dramatic, and I know Noah is repulsed by my screwed-up expression, the lack of control. But to stay back at the guesthouse tonight? No way. If he wants control, he’ll get only half the plate.
Someone else would grab my arm, wrench it behind my back until I punched him, against a bone that wouldn’t hurt. We’d talk into the matter until our thoughts calmed. Until we were able to claim ourselves, together and alone again.
We might have made jokes as we strolled back home.
We might have even had sex, hurried sex, along the way. Rough.
But even from the look on his face I can tell he wasn’t planning to go here—the night took him out. Probably he expected to have just another Tuesday, and he opened his eye, the wind blew, and a speck of beach got in. And that doesn’t mean I forgive.
How long do I cry? Hours? The weekend? The sobbing feels medicinal, as if it’s cleansing away possible emergency. I am sobbing for an idea—and I don’t even want to know why. But my body seems to require it, this drowning, a bath of warm, salty fluid. The tears stinging my face, my cuff rubbing my cheek over and over until it’s skinned, chafed.
My lungs are lakes. I am moving through clear fluid—one of my mother’s babies. Parchment? The vanishing twin?
One of us was supposed to die first—one of us was supposed to die.
Sink to the bottom, see?
“Hold them while you can,” Mark says.
And I don’t know how to deal with the fact that we’re both probably going to live.
Sweethearts
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, Paul.”
“You OK, Mom?”
“What’s the matter, sweetheart? Your voice sounds funny. You sound like you have a bad cold. You’re not getting a head cold now, are you?”
“I’m not sure, I— Well— I just wanted to hear how you were doing.”
“I’m doing fine, honey. You’re my sweetheart. You know that, Paul, don’t you? You’re always my sweetheart.”
Inappropriate
Out at Longnook Beach, Polly doesn’t talk about Noah, or say anything about me. She knows what it is like to be a public couple in Town, to break up, and to deal with the stresses of people taking one side or the other. People saying the inappropriate, as if a bald criticism of the ex would be a comfort. She knows what I’m in for: people using my breakup as a way to bond with me, or as a way to deal with feeling enraged with their own lovers and partners and that might be why she takes me to the beach, barely a seam between water and sky. A fishing boat out there, and perhaps seals, sea turtles as large as Volkswagen Beetles—invisible beneath the surface. The people on the beach lie out on hot sand as if they’re trying to cook the thinking out of themselves.
Sorry
Billy rushes through the door of Waves, where I’m sitting in the hard seats, waiting to get my hair cut. It seems a little strange to be sleeping on my own again these days, which might be why it seems very important to get a haircut, to keep the floors swept, to floss my teeth all the way down, inside the gum line. Billy tacks up an AIDS Support Group Auction flyer to the board. Glances on the way out, stops, then stops again just as he reaches for the door. An old emotion holds him in place.
“I’m sorry,” he says, slowing down to look at me with that face he gets when he wants me to see him. It’s like he’s reached down into the hidden part of him and pulled up the kindly parent. And I don’t even know he’s there. He’s always been there.
The corner of my mouth feels heavy, a little numb. What am I giving off?
Then I think, Yom Kippur? (But he’s not Jewish.) Then, Step Nine?
“It was a bad time for me, crazy, complicated. It had nothing to do with you. You know that, right?”
Chemical smell so strong that Jimmy, my haircutter, has to apologize for using it on the woman in the chair. Hair-straightening product that manages to wend its way through my nerves. Billy is still thinking about the two of us, but as for me? Those days are as far away as childhood now.
I thought he just wanted to hunt me, and once he saw he could have me, and more, he lost interest.
“It’s OK,” I say, just because I’m embarrassed, and I don’t know what else.
“That’s good,” Billy says. “You doing OK? You’re looking good. We’ll get coffee, catch up sometime.” Then he is out the door before I have the chance to answer.
Billy will die of AIDS-related complications in December 1995, my father’s birthday.
Caricatures
Above the booths of the Mayflower is a hall of fame, silhouettes of Portuguese locals, both men and women, in caricature. They are both mocking and affectionate, sloped foreheads, big chins and no chins, clown eyes. Not a single face is familiar to me, w
hich means that they’re a hall of the dead, dressed up to look like jokers. They have been up so long that the brown paper they’re on has been water stained. If anyone took them out of their frames and touched them, that paper would darken and deteriorate, absorbing the oil from their fingers. So they leave them in place.
Noah and I have agreed to meet here, a week after our split. It’s no longer the edge of summer, but near Memorial Day. Visitors shifting in their seats: anxious, bored, starving, joyous, electric, mean. We sit near the door, when we should have sat all the way in the back, hidden. If we were in Manhattan, no one would see us or care. But here, in the place of theater, hungry for drama, every gesture is scrutinized, held in, and passed on.
Everyone is too hungry in this town.
What do we talk about? I do most of the talking, and what do I say? Mostly it is pure sound, the sound of: You broke my heart, and I loved you, and you will hear me out. The ancient complaint in its various translations, Job and Jesus and Emma Bovary: Why have you abandoned me? Noah listens with his head down, not talking back. Every so often my eyes wander up to the caricatures because it’s hard to look at his face, hard to make him feel so bad. Hard to see my face reflected back in his, because feeling must make me look like one of those dead people up on the wall.
Enough
The prospect of open hours makes me anxious, which is why when I get the occasional free afternoon, I bike out to the far west end of Herring Cove. Guys hook up out there, sometimes down a hairpin creek, but more often in the matted impressions in the high dunes, inside a hem of grass, overlooking the sea. It’s always late afternoon, too late for the rangers, with their tickets. I have sex with anyone who seems interested in having sex with me. I’ve decided that there’s no point in being picky—maybe there’s something to learn from letting go of my idea of a type, and what I learn is obvious: that the men out there are probably sweeter than they know to themselves. One evening I have sex with an ottery middle-aged couple just as the sun is going down. They’ve let themselves go, as it is said when once-attractive people have stopped going to the gym, but they’re probably sexier for having given in. Afterward, we lie down, knocking the mosquitoes off each other. I fall asleep on their army blanket, a little crushed between them, as if I am their favorite pup.
Occasionally Noah bikes through Town when I’m outside the store on a break. He says hello, his grin as wide as his face, and doesn’t stop. It demolishes me, this biking away from me. One minute—he can’t check in for a minute? A mutual friend reports his explanation: “I can’t talk to Paul now. I need some time.” But I decide that that’s just a way for him to sound virtuous to himself and others.
As if he genuinely misses me.
Really, I think in the voice of Hollis’s Lou.
One day I stop my bike at the top of the highest hill outside the house of Stanley Kunitz and Elise Asher, a house once floated across the harbor from Long Point, fully furnished, intact. Stanley once found a wad of cash in that house that he claimed was the stash of a prostitute, which sounds like the subject of a poem tried out in multiple drafts and never finished. I look down toward the bottom of the hill and race down, my torso upright, without even holding on to the handlebars. I don’t even know how to ride a bike without holding on, and somehow I roll on out into flat pavement, by the Provincetown Inn, without crashing into a car or stone column. But there’s no one around to observe my feat, which makes me wonder whether it even happened, whether it would have been preferable to break my arm or knock in an eyetooth.
Nevertheless, the aversion of disaster feels weirdly significant. I have been protected in a time of little protection.
A few days after my bike ride, my body decides that it has had enough sex, enough people, even sexy couples gone a little soft. It has no hunger anymore. It has had too much. This body at least has limits and it is time to lay it down to rest.
Est-Ce Tout Là
At the DNA gallery, I’m giving a reading from my new novel, a thread that will eventually fall out of the book. The thread involves a young woman who’s photographed by an older man, a situation she’s agreed to, until the session starts feeling invasive, manipulative—even though it never has anything explicitly to do with sex. I’m not even sure why this story has captured my attention, and it doesn’t exactly help that the famous photographer—the photographer who took the Fellows’ portrait in the dunes—is in the second row. He’s leaning in, his face especially intent, as if he’s scanning me for false notes.
In the front sits Nev, a much younger guy I’ve been dating. Nev, the former model, who walked down the street like a human lion, looking straight ahead with vulnerability and hauteur. Closer to the back sits Noah, whose presence excites and agitates me. There is a subversive thrill in seeing the two of them together in one space, and I only inflame things by dedicating the reading to Nev.
As soon as I say it, I cringe inwardly at the manipulation, though I know to keep it entirely off my face. But everyone who knows me hears it, and it possibly swallows up their ability to listen to my opening paragraph.
“He never dedicated anything to me,” Noah says afterward, in my presence, to a mutual friend. We are in the back of the gallery near the wine, the seltzer, the grapes, the tiny blocks of cheese with their fringed toothpicks. His face is partly miffed, partly wry—the visual equivalent of: est-ce tout là.
I don’t deny it and don’t try to smooth out the discomfort either. I just let us hang there for a bit. Then he kisses me once on each cheek and walks down the steps.
It doesn’t occur to me till much later that he actually might have wanted to hear my work.
Doesn’t occur to me till much later that it was probably hell for him to come out tonight. My other friends, the people who once welcomed him, laughed with him, might have been practiced, cool. If they even bothered to look at him as he walked in their direction.
Augustitis
It’s deep into summer, the passage in which the locals are porous, cranky, exhausted from working three jobs, tired of demanding tourists who are always, Where’s the restroom? Where’s the restroom? Augustitis is the word commonly used. To be so taxed is to be in an alternate state. It’s a bit like abiding the flu, without any of the obvious symptoms. Or like being high when you’re not taking hallucinogens. For nearsighted people like me, it’s walking through the night without glasses or contact lenses. There’s a recognizable shape up ahead—is that Paco? Scott?—with no edges or defining lines. Halos around every light, dense with refracted rainbowy prisms. A hot fog. If everyone’s in that state, with none of the usual psychic barriers, anything is possible.
Polly and I bike out to the Love Shack at around 11. There’s still plenty of space on the floor, at least forty-five minutes’ worth. Then, as if all at once, the crowd grinds human movement to a halt. The air-conditioning all but wheezes out the vent. The smoke is already thick. People who don’t usually light up are bumming cigarettes because there’s no reason to put up with burning eyes and a scratchy throat without the nicotine. If I could pin a color to the atmosphere, I’d call it turmeric. Polly and I find a corner of the floor where we’re free to move, free to locate patterns in the bass we attempt to mimic, echo, physicalize. The point has always been to shut our eyes against sound that is so gorgeous it threatens to damage our eardrums and temporal lobes.
The floor fills up as it always fills up; people beside us dance with drinks in hand, and the loss of space is infuriating. (Bostonians!) These are not people who want to dance, who remotely care about it other than to show off, look popular. Too hot, too moist, and we stand off to the side to breathe, to check out whether anyone we like is here.
Who’s here? Noah—is that right? Noah, who’s been reclusive all summer aside from his late-afternoon trips to the beach. I’ve never seen him out at night, yet here he is, dancing with a stranger, a guy his height without facial hair, curls on his head, not at all his type. For a time I’m transfixed by the kiss (wonder? s
hock?), as if I’m watching an animal give birth. It would be one thing if the kissing were just between them, but the kissing is continuous, it’s performance, it’s ridiculous, a little sad—theater of the ridiculous not just for others, but for me. He must have seen me, he’s definitely seen me, and that’s all the more reason to demonstrate that he desires and is being desired.
It tears into some membrane of me, the skin between inner and outer. I cannot be reminded of my feelings.
I’m so exhausted I don’t even think my knees can hold me up.
“You’re an asshole,” I yell across frantic, dancing heads. “You’re a goddamn fucking asshole, Noah!”
I keep yelling the same thing until I believe he hears me, even though there’s no way he could hear above the din. But I could make him see me, all right. And then he does see me: leaping, pointing, aiming my accusatory face in his direction.
And I am the cartoon Tasmanian Devil from the bottom of somebody’s fever dream. Not my own dream, because I’ve never acted like such a total idiot in my life. I’ve never even called him an asshole, never called any other human close to me an ugly word. My father? Well, that’s different. And I’m not even drunk right now, not even close.
Noah walks toward me, but I won’t engage as I know it’s all too ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, when he stopped feeling any interest in sex.
And yet I put up with that.
Polly leads me out the door, leads me across Shank Painter Road. “Are you all right?” she says, and looks at me as if she doesn’t expect an answer. She feels my bewilderment too. She must be thinking of Richard, their breakup, and what led her to stay with me, but she doesn’t so much as venture his name.
