by Gwen Cooper
I should hasten to add that, given how much space Laurence had, the vast bulk of these things were neatly stored in closets and drawers; he wasn’t one of those crazy people you read about who lives their everyday lives amid towering piles of discarded stuff. Laurence’s apartment was invariably tidy, and you wouldn’t have known all that stuff was there unless he made a point of showing it to you.
Still, I was a reader and apt to think in metaphors. It struck me that Laurence wasn’t leaving any room in his inner life—literally or figuratively—for the addition of another person.
Laurence also had a fearsome temper, one thing even the people who knew him best would never deny. It wasn’t frequent, but it was deadly. His anger came from some deep, physical source, and he would seem to come at you like a bull. Laurence wasn’t a person who you normally thought of as physically intimidating, and to my knowledge he never struck another person in his life, but I’ve seen people twice his size back up when Laurence was angry, instinctively fearful for their safety. His deep, booming voice, which I loved so much, became a brutal weapon when Laurence was angered. It roared at ear-shattering volume, and—if he was especially enraged—he was capable of saying very cruel things. The unfailing brilliance Laurence had in knowing exactly what questions to ask you, the questions you would be most interested in answering, let him know intuitively what things it would be most painful for you to hear—and he would say them.
I had found it easier to stand up to the burglar in my apartment than I did to stand up to Laurence when he was in a temper. I had a deep-seated dislike of loud “scenes,” and my response, on the few occasions when we were really furious with each other, was to coldly withdraw. “Clearly,” I would tell him in an even voice—a voice that was deliberately many decibels lower than his—”you are not capable of discussing this rationally right now.” Then I would leave.
I would have said that I was merely trying to have a “productive” argument, as opposed to an illogical and unfocused one. Laurence would have said, sighing in mock dismay, that I was simply no fun to fight with. What was less fun, when you felt like screaming, than somebody who wouldn’t scream back?
But when we had calmed down, we were both anxiously willing to listen to what the other one had to say. It was more painful for me to be at odds with Laurence, to feel that I had somehow compromised his good opinion of me, than it was with any other person I knew.
And to his credit, Laurence never had to be told when he had gone too far, never had to be bullied into making an apology. If Laurence was sure he was right, you’d never get him to apologize simply for the sake of making you like him again—but if he knew he was wrong, his remorse was instantaneous and no false sense of pride kept him from expressing it. Yet he was never one to plead for forgiveness. Laurence was precisely aware—without, as far as I could tell, ever having to consciously weigh the matter—of the extent to which he was wrong and how much restitution he owed. Beyond that, you could take it or leave it.
I think it was that utter lack of affectation—that core inability to do or say anything, or to refrain from doing or saying anything, merely so you would like him, or forgive him, or think of him a certain way—that ultimately made Laurence who and what he was. It was the thing that made him not a guy, but a man. One of my favorite novelists, Anthony Trollope, once wrote: “The first requirement of [manliness] must be described by a negative: Manliness is not compatible with affectation.”
Laurence was innately incapable of doing that which was essentially wrong or unmanly. It was the quality that all his other good qualities stemmed from—how he could be funny without ever being obnoxious; how he could talk without trying to dominate a conversation, and listen without being impatient. He was never remotely envious of the success or attainments of those around him. He would share his time, money, and possessions with lavish generosity, but nobody was ever foolish enough to make the mistake of trying to take advantage of him.
I had to think about the balance of things like this all the time. I would never be as instinctively close to getting it all right as Laurence was. And as the years of our friendship passed, it was what I came to respect and admire most about him.
I had never known anybody quite like him.
OBVIOUSLY, I WAS in love with him. Just as obviously, I was the last one to know it. By the time we were close friends of some three years’ standing, it seemed as if somebody asked me every day why the two of us weren’t a couple. I always demurred when this question was asked, although not from coyness or any attempt to deny the obvious. My experience with falling in love was that you met someone, were attracted to him right away, and then, as you got to know him, figured out if that attraction was substantive or merely the delusion of a few weeks. I had never experienced love the other way around—where first you got to know somebody and then realized your interest was deeper than friendship. Having never experienced it, I didn’t recognize the thing when it happened to me.
Truly, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
Then one late-summer Sunday afternoon, as Laurence and I shared hot dogs and piña coladas at a beachy, outdoor grill at Chelsea Piers, he told me that he was dating someone, and my world fell apart.
It wasn’t as if Laurence and I had passed the three years we’d spent not-dating each other also not-dating anybody else. Various boyfriends and near misses had come and gone, and I had shared with Laurence the details of all of them. Now that I thought about it, though, I realized Laurence had never discussed with me the women he’d been involved with. It wasn’t that I’d assumed he’d remained celibate all this time. Truth be told, I hadn’t thought about it much at all. I had taken it for granted that a man like Laurence would have a hard time finding a woman who could capture his serious interest, but that when that woman came along, he would tell me about it.
Well, now she had. And he did.
My first thought was that Laurence’s and my days as friends were numbered. It was hard to imagine that any girlfriend would tolerate his close friendship with the likes of me. Then I immediately hated myself for thinking of me, rather than being happy for my friend’s happiness. But as soon as the word happiness crossed my mind in relation to Laurence and some woman who wasn’t me, my head shut down and my body went numb. I felt as if I were in shock, like somebody who’d walked away from a car accident.
I tried to conceal all this from Laurence, to act as if everything were normal, but I don’t think I did a very good job because he kissed me on the cheek more gently than usual as he put me into a cab bound for home.
The insomnia set in that night, and it went on for weeks. Poor Homer, who slept when I slept and—so it would seem—didn’t sleep if I didn’t, got very little rest himself. I took to pacing the floors, and Homer dutifully followed me step-by-step in slow circles around our one-room apartment. I felt bad for depriving him of a full night’s rest, but I had a lot to think about, and there was no point in wasting eight perfectly good hours sleeping.
I tried to reason myself out of my funk, to convince myself that I only thought I wanted Laurence now because he wanted somebody else. I was the worst kind of cliché and, more than that, I was selfish. I was spoiled and selfish and used to having all of Laurence’s attention to myself, and it was clearly the attention—and not the man—that I was suddenly so covetous of.
But then, as the sleepless nights rolled by, I understood—in a way that was so clear, it was shocking I’d never seen it before—that I had compared every man I’d dated over the past three years with Laurence, and they’d all come up short. They were never as funny as Laurence, never as smart as Laurence, never as manly or strong of character as Laurence was.
Anybody with two eyes in her head would have seen, long before this, that the essential complaint I’d had about all these men was that … they weren’t Laurence. I thought I’d been evaluating them on their own merits, but really all I’d done was reject them for committing the unpardonable sin of not bein
g the one man I was already in love with.
Perhaps it had taken me so long to recognize that I loved him because he didn’t look the way I’d always thought the man I would end up with would look—he had none of the skinny, bookish appearance of the men I customarily dated. Then I thought about Homer. Homer lived in a world where vision didn’t exist, where the way things and people looked wasn’t only an irrelevant consideration, it was no consideration at all.
I could wrap things up with a nice neat bow right now if I said that I learned from Homer that love is blind, that it doesn’t always grow in a straight line from the way somebody looks.
But that wasn’t true—looks did matter. No matter how much of a life I’d been able to give Homer, no matter how much happiness he’d been able to carve out for himself, the one thing I could never give him was the specific joys that vision could bring. It was the easiest thing to take for granted, how looking upon a well-loved face could lift your spirits in a way that nothing else could.
So it wasn’t that I realized looks were irrelevant—it was that I realized that nothing in life made me as happy as seeing Laurence’s face. Sometimes, if I was meeting Laurence somewhere, I would pick him out from a crowd while he was still yards away. When I saw his face, even at a great distance, I would laugh—not because he looked funny or was doing anything particularly humorous, but because seeing his face made me so happy that some of my happiness had to spill out in the form of laughter, or else it would make me too giddy to stand.
I had been given a gift. There was something I could see with my eyes that filled me with joy every time I saw it. Not everybody was as lucky as I was.
Still, I had no more reason for supposing now than I’d had when I met him that Laurence would ever be interested in fully committing to someone. I had even less reason for thinking that “someone” might be me. Now there was this other woman—Jeannie or Jeanette, or whatever Laurence had said her name was. For all I knew, Laurence, like me, had never thought of the two of us as anything more than friends. Or maybe he’d thought about it, I was pretty sure he’d thought about it, but that had been three years ago. How could I know what he thought about me now?
What scared me the most was the prospect of losing our friendship. I didn’t know what I would do if I tried to be Laurence’s girlfriend and wound up losing him altogether. And yet, I’d barely been able to speak with him since he’d told me about the woman he was dating. I might be terrified of moving forward, but moving backward was impossible and even standing still was rapidly becoming an unrealistic option.
That was something else I’d learned from Homer—sometimes, to get the things that were good in life, you had to make a blind leap.
It was Homer, I realized, who had brought me most of the insights I’d acquired about relationships over the past few years. It was Homer who had taught me that the love of one person who believed in you—and who you believed in—could inspire you to attempt even the most improbable things. Somewhere along the way, I had decided that because Laurence and I had yet to find a lasting love with another person, we were somehow fated to be unable to do so—at least not with each other. But where was that carved in stone? If anything, Homer was living proof that dark predictions about potential happiness were nothing more than an opportunity to prove all conventional wisdom wrong. Wasn’t Homer someone who was supposed to have been timid and fearful, someone who might go on to live a life but who would never have an exceptional one? Yet who had I ever seen find as much to celebrate in the midst of the everyday than Homer?
Actually, I had found one person like that—and that person was Laurence. Like Homer, Laurence had that within him which was incorruptible, and which could find something to rejoice in among even the most grindingly mundane aspects of day-today life. Not only was it a quality I respected, it was something I aspired to. Perhaps that was why Laurence and Homer had become the most important fixtures in my life.
I had nothing but logical reasons why Laurence and I shouldn’t try to be a couple, just like I’d had nothing but logical reasons why I couldn’t possibly adopt a blind kitten—which only went to show that, sometimes, the thing you were looking for could only be found in the very last place you would have expected. It was Homer who had, from the first time I saw him, begun to change the ways I evaluated my relationships. When I’d met him, and recognized his innate courage and capacity for happiness, I’d understood that when you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in somebody else, you don’t look for all the reasons that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what.
In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.
Above all things, Homer had taught me that there was great joy to be found in great risks. I had been dating since I was fifteen years old, and in that entire time I had never once made anything like a declaration of love unless and until someone else made it first. The potential reward had never seemed to be worth the risk. Laurence had begun dating somebody else, and I had less reason now for thinking that risk might lead to an eventual reward than I ever had. I think, though, that I was almost more afraid of success than failure. The prospect of picking up the phone and making a single call that would, if it went the way I hoped, change the entire course of my life was terrifying. But if you were never willing to be fearless, you would never achieve anything worth having.
Homer had shown me that, too.
So, one Sunday morning in early October, I closed my eyes and leapt. That is to say, I called Laurence to tell him how I felt.
“Listen,” I said, “I have to tell you something, and it’s okay if you don’t feel the same way, but …” I paused, finding it difficult to know how to continue. Suddenly, I was too far in to back out, but I still had no idea where I’d land. “I think … I think I have feelings for you that are more than friendship. And I understand,” I rushed on, “if you don’t—”
“Yes,” Laurence interrupted. “I do. I always have.”
We talked for a long time—more laughing than talking, and saying very little that was coherent. It was a conversation that, now that we were having it, seemed inevitable. Yet it was equally hard to believe it was really happening.
“You know,” I said, “it could be really awkward if things don’t work out for us. Because of Andrea and Steve, I mean.”
“I’ve thought about that,” Laurence replied gravely. “There’s only one solution.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We’ll have to be madly in love with each other for the rest of our lives.”
Laurence and I hung up an hour or so later, having made a plan to see each other the following night right after work. I made a mental note to carefully review my wardrobe options. And I would have to call Andrea. Andrea had to know about this new and startling turn of events (although probably not so startling from her perspective) as soon as possible.
But all of a sudden, I found that I was too exhausted to think about any of that. Homer and I got into bed, and the two of us slept straight through until Monday morning.
22 • A Canticle for Vashowitz
May heaven grant you in all things your heart’s desire—husband, house, and a happy peaceful home; for there is nothing better in this world than that man and wife should be of one mind.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN MY OPINION THAT WHEN A COUPLE DECIDE TO move in together, they should find a new apartment rather than having one person move into the other’s home. I had developed this theory years earlier, around the time when I’d moved into—and subsequently moved out of—Jorge’s house. Humans, in my experience, can be as territorial as cats, and it’s best to head off any but I’ve always used this closet to store [fill in the blank] arguments before they crop up.
It was a fine principle, as such things go, but it failed to take into account that first commandment of Manhattan real estate: Thou shalt not relinquish a rent-controlled, three-bed
room/two-bathroom apartment with a balcony. Laurence paid less in rent than I did for my studio, and had more than twice the space. When we decided to move in together, it was never a question that my cats and I would move into his home.
Still, Laurence and I were a couple for a full year before I moved in. Shortly after my I’m in love with Laurence Lerman epiphany, I had begun writing a novel about South Beach. I couldn’t tell you why I had woken up one morning so completely convinced that what I truly wanted in life was to be a writer (although the four layoffs I’d endured in a two-year period had persuaded me of the glories of self-employment). Nor could I tell you why I persisted when everybody I knew in publishing told me that the only thing less likely than an unpublished writer’s landing a book deal was an unpublished writer’s landing a book deal for a novel.
But I’d learned from Homer long ago that the difference between “unlikely” and “impossible” was all the difference in the world. After many months and I don’t know how many rejection letters (I stopped counting when I reached twenty), I found an agent and the whole thing became an honest-to-God professional endeavor. Since I continued to work full-time, it took me just over a year to finish a first draft of the manuscript, and during that time—wherein Laurence patiently read, critiqued, and then reread every word I wrote—we agreed that it made sense for me to finish writing before I moved.
It would be misleading, however, if I were to suggest that my South Beach novel was the only thing keeping Laurence and me from cohabitated bliss. The truth was, Laurence was not thrilled at the prospect of living with three cats.
