by Paul Monette
“You don’t mind if I stay?” she said, glancing over the pool as if to ask it of the city. So Peter’s question as to how remained unanswered. Nobody really knew.
“No, no,” they protested, both at once.
And in the silence that followed on that, they looked across the table, each of them darting his eyes back and forth between the other two, as if to gauge the relationship each was not a part of. There were no rules from here on in. As best they could, they had to live in a house whose story was over—at least as far as the world was concerned. They began to smile at the same time, but so slowly they hardly detected the change in each other—could hardly feel it, even in their own unclouded faces. Each of them sensed that he somehow completed the other two, though, with nothing to compare it to, how and why would always perhaps escape them. They were just as alone as the three lost dreamers they’d brushed against in dark and smoky passages, all this winter. The difference was, they’d come through to the end together—that is, without being hobbled or put into chains, no walls thrown up by a despot, all their luggage accounted for, and through no special talent of their own.
They heard a whirring above their heads, and the parrot dropped and lighted on the edge of the bowl. They glanced down once, all three, but not for long. They’d passed the point of being startled some time back. Hey was laid up, and the bird slipped out of the cage again and again, whenever they fed him or changed the papers. They cornered him with brooms and threw their sweaters over him. None of them said it was time, but the day came when the gate to the cage was tied wide open for good. They made him take charge of his own life. He beaked at the salad’s surface now, skimming off the pumpkin seeds and shreds of mint. Then he popped up and tilted his head and said, “Machu Picchu,” though whatever it might have meant to him once, he didn’t seem bent on going there now, He homed in on Crook House to eat and sleep, and the visionary gleam he used to affect when he couldn’t fly free had vanished.
“Open it, Peter,” she told him.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, tossing it onto his empty plate, the decision clearly final. For a moment they could hear the stones inside rattle just like dice. “I’m going to wait.”
“Not allowed,” Nick said. “Everything’s got to be out in the open.”
“Does it?” Peter asked innocently. “Well, then—I promise to have the two of you by me when the time comes. But it won’t be till I’m an old man—which won’t be for thousands of years. We’ll sit in a row on a park bench somewhere. Then we’ll all tear off the wrapping and see if it surprises us.”
“But what if it’s money?” she pleaded. “What if it’s a map?”
“We don’t need money,” he said. “What we’re going to need at the end is something for you two to open. When all we’ve got left is a box apiece of everything we wanted saved.”
“It’s a deal,” Nick said. “And none of us is allowed to die in the meantime.”
Rita could see that Peter had raised his last objection. Something very Russian had finally overtaken him. All this talk to do with time, no doubt. He seemed to understand that the lion’s share of his melancholy was a long way off. Nick and Rita, who had a daily quota, were a fair bet to put it all behind them in the end. They’d probably turn into pensioners full of eccentric passions. Peter would need them then, she supposed, as much as they needed him now.
“They’re here!” Hey shrieked from deep inside the house. And they stood up fast, as if on command, ready as they’d ever be. The parrot let out a tight-lipped squawk and took off, skimming low across the water. They watched him float away downhill. When they turned back, there was a bright blue feather on Rita’s plate. Without thinking, she picked it up and stooped to the box. She knew right off the drawer where the feathers were kept, and she pulled it open and dropped in the fresh one. When she stood up, she felt the peach dress fall in a perfect line. She put a hand on both their shoulders, and they walked together across the terrace. They all looked thoughtful. Actually, what they were thinking was that they got too serious sometimes. They didn’t have to. All they had to do was move along and see what happened.
“I still don’t understand what we’ve decided,” Peter said. “What are we going to do?”
“Nothing special,” Rita said.”
“Same as always,” Nick concurred.
They were going to live in Crook House. That was all they knew. They were all on record about their chances. It couldn’t go on forever—they’d said as much—so how long, then, would be just enough to get the story straight? If it turned out they were staying on only to duck the future, time would find them out. They all knew that. They might be only kids who couldn’t bear to go back to school, because the summer sky was haunted with the dreams the real world was never the equal of. But if they were right, and what they’d been through was the story, somehow, of what they were after, then for once they were in a field and not on a road that went only one way. And as long as there were three of them, they’d try to want nothing from one another but the truth. If their living together lasted six months as good as today, they’d be lucky. And they didn’t promise it wouldn’t be sad later on.
They were at the door leading to Rita’s room when Hey burst out. “What are you doing?” he thundered at them, but he couldn’t wait to hear. He spoke in a torrent. “Where’s your sense of drama? I’ve just got them in there. Give it time. They’re pouring drinks. I’ll bring them in a tray of food. Then I’ll call you. You wait here, okay?” They nodded. Then he looked straight at Rita and dropped his voice nearly to a whisper: “Say you’re staying.”
“For a while,” she said.
“Then everything’s fine. It’s all going to work,” he concluded, a bit too rapturously for the three of them. They glanced away here and there and tried to look dispassionate. Hey didn’t notice. He beamed at them and spun around and retreated as fast as he had come.
Still in a line, they did a swift and nicely timed about-face. They must have meant to wander in the garden, leaving well enough alone, to make a show of being on their own. But their eyes all fell on the juggler’s kit. The props were scattered around the box, just where Peter and Rita had left them when the movies called them away. They all had the same idea, but Nick got to it first. He scooped up a set of three batons, striped like a barber’s pole, and tossed them razzle-dazzle over his shoulder, one at a time. Peter crouched like a shortstop, caught all three, and held them high and took a bow. Rita, meanwhile, running a finger over the shelf of colored balls, decided only the green was right for the dress. They didn’t talk. Their smiles went ear to ear by now, but they didn’t want to jinx it. They had to get a little bit away.
Rita had two balls going and sent up the third, but they all shrugged off in a tangent and bounced away. While she rushed about retrieving them, Nick twirled a plate on the end of a stick. The trick of it came too easily, though, and he wanted both hands full. Peter had the red balls out of the fitted shelf. Nick took the yellow. They all put up two right away and began to go with the rhythm. They swayed and bobbed like snake charmers. But they had to really let go to do three, and you couldn’t call it juggling till they did. They couldn’t have done it alone. Having gone so far, though, none of them wanted to be odd man out. One by one, they stepped out into midair, as if off a cliff or an airplane’s wing. Nick got it first, and the balls that came under his spell began to loop and go weightless. Rita went into it haltingly, but the motion took, and she danced around behind a veil of moons, an astonished look in her eyes. And finally Peter. He was surely the most reluctant, but he showed a kind of equestrian grace when he entered the inexplicable orbit whirling through his hands. For one long moment, they had all nine in the air.
“Now!” Hey shouted, with a clap of his hands above his head like an itinerant magician. And when they looked over, they felt the colored lights go slipping through their fingers. In an instant, the whole nine fell in a meteor shower. It could have been the worst sort of ome
n. Where only a moment ago they were out of this world, wrapped in a constellation, they could see about their feet a ruin of bouncing balls, all doomed to lie on the earth. But now was the time to show that, above all things, they were good about time. They came together and threaded their arms round one another’s waist. They appeared to take the same simple pleasure in walking away as they did in a float through space. Asked what they’d been up to, they would have told the simple truth as well—they’d just had lunch in the garden. The balls had nearly run down to nothing as the three of them swooped up Hey and paraded into the house. A few balls hopped about like drunken rabbits. But they were still as the terrace, still as the pool—the whole domain of Crook House, high as a cloud above the city—by the time Rita’s voice came drifting out the window, telling the story.
A Biography of Paul Monette
Paul Monette (1945–1995) was a prolific, award-winning American author and prominent AIDS activist. His novels, memoirs, and poetry gave shape to a volatile era in which gay men forging their new identities confronted the unforeseeable and devastating AIDS epidemic. Late in life, Monette wrote, “AIDS is the great cleave in the world, and nothing will ever be the same again.” A winner of the National Book Award for his memoir Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Monette helped establish the broad cultural significance of gay and AIDS literature.
Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1945, to Paul Monette Sr. and Jacqueline Monette, Paul was considered by all accounts “perfect.” Attending the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a “townie” on scholarship, he grew increasingly tormented by his suppressed homosexuality and the class divisions he observed all around him. In Becoming a Man, he describes those early years as a time in which he never lost his temper or raised his voice: “A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.”
After graduating from Yale in 1967, Monette descended into a dispirited period. He reluctantly taught literature and writing at preparatory schools, such as Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, and a women’s liberal arts college outside Boston called Pine Manor. Around the time he published his first book of poems, The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975), Monette met a lawyer named Roger Horwitz at a dinner party. The two men fell in love and soon moved to Los Angeles. There, Monette left behind what he saw as the strictures of the East Coast establishment and came out unequivocally as a gay man. Over the next decade, he wrote several novels, such as Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979), that were influenced by Hollywood and its lore. His early novels featured openly gay men as central characters. Monette’s second book of poems, No Witnesses (1981), also appeared in these years; mostly dramatic monologues of fictitious and historical figures, the book received high critical praise from the literary world.
While the sexual mores of the 1970s and early 1980s challenged his partnership with Roger Horwitz, the bond between the two men held. Before his death from AIDS-related complications, Horwitz declared to Monette, “We’re the same person. When did that happen?” It was Horwitz’s diagnosis of AIDS in 1985 that plunged Monette into a crisis that would come to define his mission as a writer and activist. His book of forceful, grief-stricken poems, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, and his highly lauded testimony, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, both appeared in 1988. The latter chronicled Horwitz’s illness and death and was among the first memoirs to bear witness to the epidemic’s devastating impact. New York Times reviewer William M. Hoffman celebrated the book, saying that Monette had “etched a magnificent monument to his lover’s bravery, their commitment to each other and the plague of hatred and ignorance they had to endure.”
In the years that followed, Paul Monette turned his focus almost exclusively to writing books that confronted the terrible effects of the AIDS crisis and the closet. He published two more novels, Afterlife (1990), about “AIDS widowers” in Los Angeles, and Halfway Home (1991), a story of two brothers, one gay and facing AIDS, the other straight. His last book of poems, West of Yesterday, East of Summer (1995), garnered acclaim for its arresting, lyrical narratives of grief, anger, and loss. In 1992, Monette released what is now his best-known work, Becoming a Man. A memoir of his life leading up to meeting Horwitz, the book illustrates the costs of sexual repression and affirms the power of living life authentically. About Becoming a Man, novelist David Ebershoff has written, “Monette’s interior life, his ghosts, his turmoil, his final peace—in Becoming a Man, they have become our literature.”
During the last seven years of his life, Monette became a vocal and influential AIDS and gay rights activist. With his partner Stephen Kolzak, whom he met and quickly lost to the epidemic, Monette participated in political protests against the federal government’s neglect of AIDS research and campaigned for the rights and social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. “No one will find the way out of hate and violence unless we do,” Monette declared in one of his many speeches from this time. “Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”
As he grew increasingly ill from AIDS complications, Monette published Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994). Alternating between rage and remembrance as well as the personal and political, these ten essays offer insight into the life and mind of a powerful and determined writer galvanized by the injustices of his times. A film documentary of the author’s life, Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, was released in 1996. The slim, eloquent Sanctuary, a fable of same-sex love, posthumously appeared in 1997 and was hailed by critics as Monette’s final gift.
He died at his home in Los Angeles on February 10, 1995, at the age of forty-nine and was survived by his father, brother, and final partner, Winston Wilde. Inscribed on his grave are the words Champion of His People.
A two-year-old Paul Monette in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1947.
Monette at his graduation from Yale University in 1967.
The author on a Provincetown farm in 1973.
Monette’s faculty photo in Milton Academy’s 1975 yearbook.
The author with his mother, Jacqueline Monette; his father, Paul Monette Sr.; and his brother, Robert Monette in 1977.
Monette in 1983 with his beloved first partner, Roger Horwitz, at the Monte Oliveto monastery in Tuscany. This was the original cover photo of Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.
Monette and Horwitz in 1984.
Monette and his second partner, Stephen Kolzak, wearing AIDS protest pins in 1990.
Response stationery for Monette fans circa 1993.
The author with his final companion, Winston Wilde, on Christmas in 1994.
A promotional postcard for Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End, a 1996 documentary on Monette.
All images courtesy of the Paul Monette papers (Collection 1707). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1979 © by Paul Monette
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-4804-7379-9
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