“Sure.”
“No kidding. He’s wondering what in hell he’s doing sleeping with me now that he’s seen you. He’s wondering how to drop me and get in the sack with you.”
“It’s not going to happen.”
“I know that. And Craig knows too. That’s why he’s sulking.”
“You really pick ’em.”
“What about you and the Christmas Child?”
Mark’s own sometime boyfriend back in New York, nicknamed because of when and how he’d first appeared in Mark’s life and because of his puerile temperament.
“He’s no better,” Mark admitted, then went into a long story involving the Child that ended with us both shaking our heads.
The sun was hot, the breeze off the water intermittent, all of it quite delicious. We lay on our towels enjoying.
“We have good luck with beaches,” I said.
“I’ll say! We seem to spend a lot of time together on them.”
It was true. The long shorelines of Fire Island Pines, where we shared a house for a decade of summers, the more ragged, high-cliffed beaches of Truro where we’d take a house each September, the Hamptons, the nude beach at San Gregorio in the Bay Area, Las Tunas whenever we were in L.A., Jones Beach, Far Rockaway Beach, Gilgo. Our new favorites were on Turks and Caicos Islands. Mark’s business partner owned a place and we’d begun going there a few weeks at a time in the winter: wide white beaches, five shades of green-water Atlantic on the north, with a western shore only ten minutes from the house by boat, a strand so untouched we’d see no one, not a boat, not a footprint, all afternoon, and fish so unused to humans they’d bite your toes, while birds with markings unlike any I’d ever seen perched on our sun hats and pecked at the designs on our T-shirts and towels, thinking them edible. The east side was limestone, rocky inlets, half harbors, dreary fishing dock areas. South was Sapodilla Bay with languorous pale turquoise waters where I snorkeled; beachless, although the house was built on coral shelf perfect for sunning under papaya trees. We took boat rides with a local named Hammerhead Joe (he’d lift his shirt to show you the long knotted black scar from a shark he’d fought off) to nearby Shell Cay, Pine Cay, or to unnamed islets favored by plumed egrets, or populated by iguanas the size of Dalmatians.
“At least I have beaches to remember,” Mark said in that suddenly dark tone of voice he’d used earlier on the cliff: this time it was laced through with something else: irony? bitterness?
I wasn’t thinking when I replied, “I, for one, plan to go to the beach when I’m so old I’m doddering.”
“Not me,” Mark said. “You saw. I’ve lost all my strength.”
What was he saying. Surely he didn’t mean…?
“It was your nightmare. You said…”
“At work I’ve got to take naps every afternoon,” Mark interrupted. “I close the door and tell Cindy not to let calls through, and I put my feet upon the desk. Sometimes I curl up on the rug in front of my desk. Every afternoon. One, two hours.”
“I didn’t know that. Since when?”
“Every afternoon,” he repeated. “It’s started,” he added in a smaller, less certain voice. “I know it. It’s…started.”
That electrical jolt rushed up my spine again.
“Sue noticed right away when I got out here,” Mark went on. “And I don’t mean she just noticed how much I’m sleeping since I got here. She…we always take photos of each other every time we see each other. This time she wanted to wait till today. After I’d gotten more color is the way she put it.”
“Mark! You’re not saying you’re…?” Symptomatic was the word. Or sero-converted.
“I’m saying it’s started,” Mark said flatly. Then, “Do you like him?”
The change of subject was so odd that for a second I thought Mark was going to say that Craig was symptomatic too.
“We have good sex and all,” I said. “But I don’t think it will develop into anything or that he’ll move East to be with me. In fact, I’d say my being here these past few days has pointed that out.”
Not what Mark wanted to hear. I remembered how much he’d encouraged me to get the air tickets, to reserve the room in the Balboa Park Inn. I’d thought because he’d wanted my company here.
“I’m not that disappointed,” I began.
“Because I’d like to know that you have…you know, someone…you like.”
He’d encouraged me to come out here and go after Craig following our hot little affair in Manhattan two months ago, because Mark wanted someone to be around after Mark was gone. This was too much.
“Look, maybe this is all just stress?” I tried. “All the work at the firm? The paper you had to deliver at the convention?”
“Maybe.” Mark didn’t want to argue. We never argued.
“Soon it will be summer. You’ll hang out more. And in the fall we’ll go back to the Caribbean. That always restores you.”
He let me go on, looking at me in that fond way that he had for no one else in the world, no one, so I felt calmed again. The subject had been breached and we’d shoved it back.
We went back to reading, listening to music, sipping soft drinks. Above us, hang gliders in loose formation, blotting out the sun, speckled the sands with shadows. I wished…
Craig chose then to return, his shorts already dry.
“I did not have sex!” he declared, unasked.
“No doubt you were asked by scores,” I said.
“It was sug-ges-ted,” Craig said, suggestively, looking at where Mark lay, gorgeous on his towel. “But I told them some nasty older guy down here had at me so voraciously I had nothing left to give.”
“Poor you!”
“Had at me night and day,” he insisted. “You’re burning!” he said and used that as an excuse to turn me onto my stomach, straddle my hips, and seductively and thoroughly rub my entire back and legs with suntan lotion. When that had completely aroused me and failed to get Mark’s attention, Craig climbed off, declared he had to wash the gook off, and headed for the water.
He decided to go for a walk. When he was too far to be seen, Mark sat up, put on a T-shirt. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“The ammonite fossils? I haven’t really looked.”
“Let’s look!” he said. I too put on a shirt and we aimed toward the nearest cliff face, the direction opposite where Craig had gone.
The cliff was layered like a wedding cake. Actually many more times than that, but the strata were all clearly delineated.
“Hard to believe each layer is hundreds of years,” Mark mused.
“More like thousands of years.”
“And this green streak?”
“Believe it or not that’s aquatic life, algae and other early water plants. As they died, they dropped to the surface and were squashed. The streak represents a time when this was all covered with water. Given these sediments below and above, I’d hazard it was a huge shallow lake for a couple of thousand years. Then land rose, emptied the water, and covered it with soil.”
“Your fossils would be there?”
“If it were a branch of the ocean they should be. They were so common then. Far more common than fish or shellfish today. The ocean was thick with ammonites during the Mesozoic. They comprised ninety percent of sea life. Eighty percent of all the animal life on the planet. They were wiped out during the great same extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. You can see the line where it happened on the big cliff. It’s known as the K-T boundary.”
“A giant lake,” Mark mused. “With its shoreline where? Out there somewhere?” pointing to the Pacific.
“Pretty far out, I’d guess. Then it became desert. But of course during that time this exact chunk of land wasn’t here at thirty-two degrees north of the equator. It was much farther south. Somewhere off what’s now Peru.”
“Continental drift,” he said. “Big plates moving slowly. When was that, about sixty million years ago?”
“Scientist
s call it deep time. Remember back in 1987, on my birthday, when we read about that star that went nova in the Southern Hemisphere, the one in the lesser Magellanic Cloud? That took place about the same time. Because it was so far away, it’s taken all this time for the burst of light it caused to reach us. All this time for the light made in that huge explosion to stimulate our vision.”
“Deep time.” Mark was beginning to perspire. I moved us along a section of the cliff out of the sun. “Eighty percent of the animal life just vanished forever… There must be shallow time, too,” he suddenly said. “The shallowest of all time.” He laughed and turned and sat down on a little sand hill hidden by this bend of cliff. “That’s my time.”
“Mark.”
“Go on looking. I want to think about eighty percent of all life vanishing forever and no one even noticing.”
“They were noticed.”
“You can’t even find their fossils! And you’re looking!”
There’s a point in everyone who is interested in science’s life when you are suddenly faced with having to specialize. It’s a fearful moment, and the real fear is that you’ve missed something essential, some moment during that decade and a half of nature walks and difficult-to-explain-to-others experiments with planaria worms and dirt and matches and soot that all young scientists have experienced, some moment when—sitting in a shaft of sunlight, hidden in reeds, you watch an egg hatch, minuscule life emerge, kicking, clawing, scurrying—a moment that somehow you become aware of must happen. But in happening, forever will replace that other moment in which something else, somewhere else, equally directing in its potential, now cannot happen. There you are, however choosing: or having chosen for you: life—or once-life.
I’d decided on what had once lived over what was now alive. This, despite all indications that it was the wrong direction, that living nature, studying tadpoles and crickets and birds whose names you weren’t sure of—soon to become known as Ecology—that was the real future! I chose the past, although my favorite children’s books were Min of the Mississippi and Nature for Everyone. Dragged by something inevitable that told me some things were so old, immeasurably old, I chose, and instead of a botanist or ornithologist, I became a paleobiologist, a student of that paradox dead life, of life encased in stone and slate and if I’m very lucky, suspended in millions-of-years-old amber. In choosing, I found I’d also chosen to study the rock and shale and petrified tree resin wherein dead life might be located. Old rock. Dead wood.
I took it as a challenge, and on those few occasions when I felt compelled to explain my choice, I always said it meant that from now on I’d continually sharpen my senses, go through life opening my eyes ever wider, forced to see in the least hints of fossilized ferncombs and feathertracks the possibility of something greater. And by extension, that in life in general I’d always have the details. Never miss what was right in front of me. I’d prided myself on that.
But in the past few months, I’d missed something crucial. The man who above all I loved in this life, whose love I’d come to take for granted, even while I never once took him for granted, had become symptomatic, had sero-converted, and I had not seen it happen. Sue had seen it, although she’d told us last night she’d never met a person infected with HIV. Craig had seen it immediately though he was the most egocentric of human beings. And I’d not seen it.
I did now, walking away from Mark, ostensibly to look for fossils I didn’t expect to find, and for the first time totally feeling Mark there behind me, knowing this consciousness of Mark would never go away again—until he himself did.
Stumbling forward, I thought I would cry. No, I’ll wait until I get out of his line of sight, I told myself, there, behind that escarpment, where he can’t see me.
I’d just reached it and looked back to check that I wasn’t seen, when something huge and catlike leapt down at me.
“Gotcha!” Craig yelled as he dragged me down into the sand. He roared and pawed at me and in general acted like an animal. I don’t know what got into me, since we always fought as equals, but this time I cringed away from him, and when he half came at me, I cringed again, cowered, shaking.
Craig could see how upset I was as I stumbled trying to get away from him, but he caught me and slid me against the cliff and held me there, held me tight, his front to my back, his larger, stronger arms over mine, his beard burning against my neck, letting me shake myself out, silently sob myself out. It was the longest that we’d been this close since we’d awakened that morning in the hotel bed together. After a while, he let go.
Mark was coming past us, on the way to our towels.
“I think it’s time to go,” Mark said. “What do you think?”
Even with all the rest, the walk back was still too much for Mark and we waited with him on the same bench as before while he caught his breath. A few hours later, we drove him in the rented T-Bird to the airport to get his jet home. Much later, after dinner and more of our usual arguments at a diner in Hillcrest designed as though it were right out of the fifties, Craig and I went to bed together in my hotel room.
At first he was aloof. So I was too.
“He doesn’t have long, you know,” Craig said. He moved closer until he covered my body with his.
“I know.”
Craig pinned me against the sheets.
“He’s going to die soon.”
He began to kiss me hard.
“Your beautiful lover is going to die.”
He made love to me with complete wildness and total abandon and with the same unchecked ferality he’d displayed on the beach. And I responded in kind, both of us acting unforgivably, saying unforgivable things to each other as we did, as though knowing it would be the last time ever.
Everyone Has a Shazam!
He came in late, maybe twenty minutes after the reading had begun, certainly way past Roger’s usual seventeen minutes of intro-with-vamping for the usual contingent of latecomers having trouble parking. He slid in the door, and so was easily visible from where Roger stood, addressing the two dozen or so people. He found a seat, nodded at Roger, some kind of apologetic smile on his face, and settled in to listen.
Because Roger didn’t need glasses to read, he wasn’t wearing his distance lenses at the time, and so when he first came in and for the first half hour or so, Roger thought he was that film producer Roger had known way back when, he hadn’t seen in maybe fifteen years and who used to be a window designer working with Bob Curry and his partner, Candy what was her last name? How this producer had made it to Hollywood, Roger had never figured out, but he had, big-time, and if Roger remembered correctly the last time they’d had any kind of interaction it hadn’t been in a chic Vermont Village bookstore and it hadn’t been exactly pleasant either. In fact, Roger had called the guy a “consummate asshole” and had done so twice, first in front of about seventy people at Sunday brunch at the Fire Island Pines Botel’s Blue Whale restaurant.
The noisy table-full evidently being treated to lunch by the decorator-turned-producer had been annoying enough arriving loudly, confusedly seating themselves, boisterously ordering and reordering drinks, driving the waiter nuts with their lunch orders changes. The window designer/mogul was even more irritating, coming onto the nice, extremely humpy, waiter (Belmain a Swiss guy: he and Roger had done it once at the Burma Road) who made it clear he was not interested and definitely not amused. So when the waiter returned with their seven meals on a big tray, before he could even put it down on the table, the Hollywoodized window dresser had stood up, reached for the tray, and snatching it away from him, had hurled it over the metal railing, over the narrow strip of boardwalk and right into the Pines Harbor. He’d then said, “And that’s what we think of your lousy service here.”
To which the unconsternated Belmain had replied, “We’ve got your credit card number and I’m charging it all,” while the producer’s unfed guests bounced off the deck en suite, and down thirty feet away to where a water taxi had just s
ent spumes to wash the two-story stern of the yacht named Barbara, arriving in front of the Pines Pantry. The window dresser’s party then boarded, headed, everyone assumed, to the Grove for lunch. “He’s still paying for it,” Belmain said aloud, then gussied up the table, turned to the next group waiting at the stairs near the Pines Bus Service window, and said, “It’s all yours.” Roger’s comment had been repeated a month later at Nick and Enno’s dinner party on Ocean Walk, when someone who knew the window dresser told the story, expecting us all to support him. No one did, as they all knew and liked Belmain, and that was when Roger spoke out a second time. “I was there, Bernardo, and you can tell Michael that everyone at the Botel that afternoon considered him a consummate asshole”: words Roger was sure had been repeated back.
And here he was, doing what? Waiting two decades to get revenge? Who cared? Roger had a half-drunk, iced latte and he was fully prepared to throw it into the guy’s face at the first hint of trouble.
He waited till last, until Roger was done talking with the last reader/buyer person, then came up, and Roger was amazed to see it wasn’t the asshole producer, but instead someone he’d not seen for even longer, Cap Hartmann, his closest friend in college.
“So,” Cap said, holding a copy of the new book open to the title page, “sign it to the head of the L.A. chapter of the Colgate Alumni Association.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’ll hit you up for a donation later.”
“Colgate doesn’t know I exist,” Roger said. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“How? They’re better at locating people than the C.I.A.,” Cap said.
“After I made a big protest by not attending the graduation ceremony, they totally lost track of me. I was in Europe right after for close to a year, and when I returned to the States I moved to Alphabet City, where no one from Colgate would ever willingly step foot. Far as they know, I’m dead.”
“Lucky you. I was sure no one ever eluded them.”
The two men looked at each other and were once more delighted in each other’s words and company. How nice.
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