Brandon Moy lived with Daisy for five months, but during that time, he was frequently unfaithful to her. He suddenly discovered that if he was alert and willing to following the rules of sexual courtship, it was very easy to bed a woman. He was an attractive man with an athletic body, blue eyes, and a dazzling smile that lit up his face, even when it had a wistful tinge. Some of the coffee shop customers, especially women who were there on their own, would sit watching him, intrigued, and order another drink to draw out the time. Moy learned quickly how to discern their gestures and interpret their intentions. If he was attracted to one of these women, he would return her glances furtively, so that she wouldn’t think he was brazen or lecherous. He would go out of his way to treat her well and would take great pains with the service. He always left it to her to start the conversation. Then everything was simple; Moy knew that after a certain point, boldness paid off, it livened up the game and speeded desire. They would arrange a date, choose a place to go, and sleep together. Moy, who had always been very fastidious with regard to matters of the flesh, began little by little to grow intoxicated by that erotic whirlwind and after several weeks was obsessed with having sex with all the women he liked, as if he wanted to suddenly make up for the period of abstinence during his marriage. He paid attention to older ladies, like Daisy, and girls that were little more than teenagers. With each age, he found a sensual uniqueness and an aesthetic sensibility; Daisy’s delicate flesh, her stretch-marked thighs, and flaccid breasts belonged to a different zoological species than that of a girl of twenty, in his opinion. The lovemaking skills of one woman as opposed to the other—obscenity as opposed to inexperience—were like different genres of literature that could not be compared, like chivalric romances and lyrical poetry.
He regretted having spent so many years unconcernedly committed to the sexual ceremonies that he and Adriana repeated out of habit and that, although pleasant, didn’t make him lose himself or forget about death. Orgasms now, in Boston, shocked him—in an instant all his thoughts were erased and the only thing he could see was a brilliant expanse that blinded him. Then he would collapse, exhausted, on the bed, and it would take some time to regain consciousness. He experienced such extraordinary happiness that he couldn’t let a single day go by without seeking it out. If he didn’t meet anyone at the coffee shop, he called one of the last few women he had been with, and if that move didn’t work either, he would turn to the classifieds in the Boston Globe, where it was always easy to find promising victims. He could not yet afford to visit prostitutes, but on those days when he ended up on his own or unsatisfied, the idea of doing so tempted him.
He broke up with Daisy, because he wasn’t capable of pleasing her sexually without neglecting those other desires that controlled him with increasing urgency. Sometimes she would show up unexpectedly at the coffee shop to pick him up, ruining the date he had planned. On other occasions, when Moy returned home at night after having been with another woman, Daisy would try to arouse him with flattery and embraces, and he, his vigor unable to withstand so many onslaughts, would have to feign some ailment in order to excuse himself. In the end, he started to look for a place he could move to, so as not to find himself under the same conjugal obligations with Daisy that he had wanted to break away from with Adriana. The separation was not dramatic. She cried but made him promise that he would continue visiting her. Moy, who at that time still owed her a thousand dollars of the loan she had given him to pay for the Albert Tracy ID, more than kept his promise, since on days when he didn’t manage to make a successful pass at any other woman, he would call Daisy and spend the night with her.
During those first few months of his new life, Brandon Moy only allowed himself irrational chaos in this one area. In all other matters, he strove to once again maintain a suitable balance—he followed a strict schedule, behaved professionally at the coffee shop, kept a stringent check on his income and expenses, and in short did not do anything that could compromise him or cloud his judgment. One day, by chance, he found himself in front of the window of a music shop, and knowing full well that he did not have money to spend on luxuries, he went in to ask the price of the saxophones. Over the course of those several weeks, he also wanted to sign up for a writing course and a French course, but he couldn’t pay for either of them. Women became the only desire he could access free of charge and in excess.
He would jot down his future plans in a notebook. He made a list of professions that appealed to him and included some that were ridiculous and he could never do: jeweler, taxi driver, astronaut, landscape architect, photographer, riding instructor (although he had never ridden a horse), topographer, singer, ship’s captain, and tailor. He also considered the possibility of continuing to practice as a lawyer, since despite the irritating tedium he had endured for years at Robertson & Millyander drafting contracts for bankers and financial agencies, he was aware that there were other legal activities that better suited his temperament. Moy had always voted for the Democratic Party and had even worked as a volunteer in Al Gore’s electoral campaign a few months earlier. He was interested in the areas of civil rights, legal aid for detainees without means, and social work, in which he knew some participating activist organizations that desperately needed experienced lawyers.
In the same notebook, which he still had when I met him, he also made a list of things he dreamed of and challenges he’d set for himself—as well as learning French and taking up the saxophone again, he wanted to go up in a hot air balloon, go scuba diving, study anthropology, travel to Europe, attend a bullfight, get involved in car racing, have a homosexual experience, take hallucinogenic drugs, sail on the high seas, take piano lessons, do fencing, and learn how to dance the tango, the samba, and the foxtrot, as Daisy had wanted him to do. With the exception of two of them—the anthropology, which he only pursued by chaotically reading a few books, and the fencing—he fulfilled all his aims. But in so doing, he didn’t find the satisfaction he had hoped for.
He didn’t put literature down either on the list of professions in which he wanted to work or among the dreams he wanted to realize, but he did devote several pages to it in his notebook, making a disorganized record of a range of books he had to read and scribbling some notes with plot lines for stories he intended to write. Since his college days, when he had written a set of science fiction stories with Fergus that naïvely examined alien life, the mechanisms of human evolution, and technical development, reveling (he more than Fergus) in descriptions of fantastical machines and spacecraft with almost magical capabilities, Moy hadn’t written anything other than legal reports and financial contracts. Despite the fact that it was an activity he thoroughly enjoyed, he had never subsequently missed it with any great longing, unlike his other, more burning passions such as the saxophone or mountain climbing. During those days in Boston, however, he felt the need to scrawl disjointed ideas and personal reflections in his notebook, which enabled him to let off steam. Everything he couldn’t tell anybody—that he had abandoned a woman he loved, that he felt a terrible sense of guilt over the imagined unhappiness of his son, that life was a vortex from which there was no escape—he wrote in the notebook. He came up with several ideas and began to draft some stories. He had never been interested in poetry, and he didn’t have any background in the lyrical arts. He had never written verse. It was therefore quite unforeseeable that he would end up composing one of the most original and brilliant poetry collections of the early twenty-first century and becoming a cult author. Just like most important life events, like his escape from New York, it happened by chance.
One day in Quincy Market he met an Australian girl who was studying literature at Harvard University. He accompanied her to the dorm room she shared with two other students and slept with her. Afterward, they stayed in bed talking, both of them naked, and the girl passionately explained to him who her favorite authors were. There were a few that Moy had never heard of or at least only knew of vaguely. The girl, wh
o undoubtedly felt for him the kind of existential admiration that older men elicit at a certain age, saw the chance to grow in his estimation, and so, feigning shock at Moy’s ignorance, she got out of bed, rummaged through the piles of books that were stacked on the floor of the room, and handed him a bilingual volume of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, about whom Moy knew absolutely nothing. He, flattered and amused by that unexpected burst of literary training, flicked through it in front of her and then threw himself back into the conversation. Later on, when he left the apartment, he took the book out of courtesy. He had no definite intention of reading it, but when he got home, he sat in an armchair, piqued by curiosity, opened it near the beginning, and began to study it with more enthusiasm than he had expected.
They began to meet up regularly, and the poetry always came after the impropriety. The Australian girl introduced him to the works of Kokoschka, D’Annunzio, Henri Michaux, and Sylvia Plath, whose names were completely unknown to him up until that moment. In this way, little by little, they created a bond, or a fellowship, with each other, and one day, sullen and saddened by the mood swings he just could not bring under control, Moy dared to tell her his story. She listened to him attentively for two hours. Then she got out of bed, dug around again among the clutter of books, and presented him with a brief work by Constantine Cavafy, opened to one page. Moy, still undressed, lying on the Australian girl’s bed in the dark, read the poem “The City” aloud in a quiet voice, and as though it had been written just for him almost a century earlier, it tore his heart to pieces and made him weep until sorrow left him exhausted.
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
Up until that moment, Brandon Moy had considered that perhaps novels and poetry were first and foremost highbrow entertainment, a sophisticated, refined hobby, but that day, upon seeing the essence of his life story encapsulated in sixteen lines by a Greek poet who had died long before he was born, he realized that literature possessed a dark, syrupy essence that served as a skeletal support for living. He was frightened by the prophecy, as if instead of having read a poem, he had heard voices in a séance or had witnessed the appearance of a specter in the middle of the night. He felt that perhaps everything that was foretold there would come to pass, and that then he would have to regret abandoning Adriana and Brent in vain. That feeling of terror, which he had never before felt as a result of reading something, seized him completely. The next day, at his house, he continued reading the poems from the moment he woke up, and was so enthralled by them that, for the first time, he arrived at the coffee shop late. On leaving work he called the Australian girl, and they met up again to talk about literature. After Daisy, she was the woman in Boston with whom he had the longest relationship. She was fascinated by having a mature, experienced lover, and he received poetry lessons between sex sessions and borrowed books from her that he devoured with almost erotic fervor. He didn’t find any other omens in them, but he was learning how to find his way through labyrinths. It was still a long time before he started writing his own poetry, and when he did so, he discovered, disheartened, that the intricacies of his own words brought him less relief than those written by others that he endeavored to read.
His collection of poems, titled The City, like the poem by Cavafy, was translated into Spanish by a Mexican publisher in 2008. That’s the version I read, since I have a very limited mastery of English, and although I don’t have much capacity for judgment when it comes to poetry, through its pages I understood the bleakness that Moy had felt during his journey from New York to the end of the world and, at the same time, the joy harboring within that grief. In order to understand the true basis of his thoughts, I found (as has happened to me also with some other writer friends) that painstakingly poring over his poems was more useful than the confessional conversations we had. Friendship and alcohol hone frankness, but writing goes further, reaching the innermost recesses of what a person knows and can tell.
Brandon Moy’s romantic adventures steered his life for some time. Among all the women he met over the course of those months, the most important one for his future was Laureen, who was married to a somewhat elderly and influential Italian diplomat. It was she who, like in the myth of Pygmalion, completed the task the Australian student had begun, educating him in certain artistic disciplines and acquainting him with the cultural circles of the city. She introduced him to painters, musicians, and writers and later, when Moy had left Boston, put him in touch with Richard Palfrey, the Los Angeles editor who published his poetry collection. He always showed devotion to this woman and met up with her again years later in Europe. He visited her in Rome, where she had retired with her diplomat husband, and they journeyed together around several Italian cities.
After he had left Daisy and was living alone in a rented room in Back Bay, Moy met a wealthy woman through the classifieds in the Boston Globe who became infatuated with him and started to flaunt him at high society get-togethers, different charitable events she attended, and meetings of Republican Party political committees. This lady, who had just gone through a period of depression following the death of her only child and who took half a cupful of painkillers, hypnotics, and sedatives everyday to balance her mood, welcomed him into her home, just like Daisy, and offered him a job as her personal assistant. Moy had immediately understood that one of the great advantages of his new situation was being able to invent a past at his convenience, adorning it with amazing achievements or making it suit the situations that arose as required, and he told her a farfetched story in which there were deaths, betrayals, rejections in love, and corporate conspiracies. According to this tale, Moy had for two years been the personal assistant to the president of a major telecommunications company, the name of which he did not divulge, in order to maintain confidentiality. He kept this man’s private accounts, managed non-transparent companies in tax havens, and generally dealt with all those matters that required some kind of discreet legal advice. After a time, he had started a relationship with the boss’s wife, who shamelessly flirted with him. They saw each other secretly in hotels or in the house when her husband was away. On one of those occasions, he left a scarf in the bedroom, and his boss found out about the affair. He had been forced to bolt from the city without any of his belongings but had taken with him some compromising documents that protected him from the wrath of the jealous husband. For a few months he had been counting on his lady friend joining him in Boston, but then soon realized he didn’t really love her. He was working as a waiter in a coffee shop while he put his life back together.
The melodramatic stories with which Brandon Moy introduced himself to the people he met after escaping from New York, like this one about the corrupt, jealous businessman, which sounded like something out of a mediocre screenplay, enabled him to indulge in risky, exciting exploits without the danger of actually going through them. As writers often do to fulfill fantasies that are out of reach, Moy recreated in his imagination the extraordinary events to which he was drawn. He told people about astonishing happenings, and ev
en he came to believe that his existence was less humdrum than in the past.
The tasks this wealthy lady entrusted to him involved accompanying her to social events, writing letters for her by hand, helping her when she went shopping, and warming her bed at night. For a time, Moy remained faithful to her, but not because he wanted to, rather because it was impossible to escape her watchfulness. And so for him, seduction not only became a sexual challenge but also a test of his cunning, since finding daring ways of outsmarting her surveillance was something he found provocative and pleasurable. If one day, during the course of an evening, an ugly, repulsive female looked lasciviously at him, Moy, who would never have been interested in her under other circumstances, felt frustrated at not being able to approach her and make a pass. Gradually, however, he started creating schemes and tricks to accomplish his desire. On one occasion, he slept with one of the woman’s friends, having been sent to her house in order to return a powder compact she had lent to his lover the night before. At one of the hotels where they would stay on their weekend trips, he took advantage of the woman’s deep sleep to go to the bedroom of an employee with whom he had flirted during dinner. And he insisted on being the one to take the woman’s hound dog for its nightly walk, in order to have some short-lived fling nearby.
Those days were accompanied by the presence of a new temptation, one he ended up satisfying. Since the woman was very rich and he had access to her secret accounts, which were difficult to trace, he planned to embezzle the funds and escape to Mexico, following in the distant steps of Albert Fergus. According to his testimony—which might not be honest—the risk of committing the crime was more attractive to him than the money he would be able to amass. But he was afraid that if caught by the federal police, his previous life might be discovered and he would be exposed in front of his wife and son, which for him, at this stage of his adventure, was the very idea of hell. He therefore decided to be cautious and only extract small amounts that would lessen the danger. He put to use all the knowledge he had gathered over the years at Robertson & Millyander, and despite his wise restraint, he managed to accumulate thirty-five thousand dollars in a few months, which according to his calculations would allow him to live easily for a year in Mexico, devoting himself to literature, diving, and the study, paradoxically, of lucha libre and ballroom dancing.
The Same City Page 5
