Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  “Yes,” Mrs. Strauss would say, “what the world is coming to these days.”

  Often a news article would remind Mrs. Strauss of something from her native village, and she’d carry on at great length about things which couldn’t possibly be true. Once she told a story about her brother Karl and a prize watermelon. “He watered that melon, and watered it and watered it, until it grew bigger than he was and in order to water it he had to climb a ladder!”

  Every day was the same. After breakfast you took a walk, which you referred to as your morning constitutional, and returned with a bag of groceries, which Mrs. Strauss made into the afternoon’s meal. You’d read a book in the parlor, or on the front porch (that summer you were working your way through Nietzsche), then retire to your room for a brief nap. Before work you sat at the piano and played the classical pieces that you loved so much, but that weren’t to the taste of the philistines, as you called them, at the bar. You made frequent reference to a symphony you were composing, which took the brooding and passion of Beethoven and sifted it through what you called a reduction machine.

  “Interesting,” I’d say.

  I don’t expect you to understand, you’d say. But someday you will, someday the world will understand.

  After the first week, when Malinda still hadn’t shown up at the Oasis, it occurred to me that she might have taken a job somewhere else in town, and I spent my days walking around the shops and restaurants, showing her picture around. I stopped at every hotel, every bed-and-breakfast, and came to know the town quite well. One of the most notable features of Ogunquit, it turned out, was its gay population. The town had been one of the first in the country to declare itself—its hotels and its restaurants—friendly to gay couples, and it had since become so popular with them that now it was a shock to the system to see a man and woman holding hands in the street.

  This was 1994, before the widespread use of protease inhibitors, and so that year there was a subset amongst the gay population—the men who were dying of AIDS. These men were wasted down to skeletons. They went about with canes, with aluminum walkers, they went about in wheelchairs. They wore long pants and long-sleeved shirts with cardigan sweaters, they wore hats pulled down over their faces. Their skin, what you could see of it, was pale, translucent, so ghostly that it made the robust health around them—the suntans and the exposed flesh—seem in poor taste. These dying men were always surrounded by friends, enthusiastic and gregarious people who seemed to do nothing but point out the pleasures of their surroundings. “Smell that fresh ocean air!” they said. Or, “Taste this! It’s divine!” But I never saw any of the dying men look anything but completely indifferent to his surroundings. A dying man could see straight through the fleeting distractions of the life around him. Whenever I locked eyes with one of them it was as if I could see, for an instant, what they saw, and it was chilling. The party we were all casually strolling through—the health we enjoyed, the sunshine, the freedoms, the fine foods—this party was temporary, this party was over.

  The Bavarian attracted the occasional guest, and whatever variety we had in our daily life was their doing. For two weeks in June a gay couple, Mark and Addison, stayed at the Bavarian and swept us up into their bizarre, tumultuous love affair. Mark and Addison looked like brothers. They were both short and trim and well-muscled, they both had deep tans and sparkling white teeth and blond hair, which they gelled into perfectly vertical spikes. Like brothers, they fought all the time—it seemed their relationship depended on it. Sometimes they’d sit side by side complaining to me about each other. Mark, Addison said, had a problem with going off in the middle of parties with other men. Addison’s problem, Mark said, was that he tired too easily and always wanted to go home right when things were starting to get rolling. Also, he was too possessive. The problem with Mark, said Addison, was that he was shallow. And stupid. And couldn’t hold up his end of even the most trivial conversation. “Never go to a movie with Mark,” he said. “The movie ends and you ask him what he thought and he says, ‘The popcorn was too salty.’”

  “Well, his ass,” said Mark, “is getting fat.”

  “Well, fuck you,” said Addison.

  “You wish,” said Mark.

  “No, you wish.”

  “You’re the one who’s going to be sorry.”

  “You think for one second I can’t find somebody else?”

  “I’m sure Mary here would be happy to date you. And your fat ass.”

  “Oh please. Don’t make me vomit.”

  Whenever Mrs. Strauss appeared Mark and Addison would change entirely. She’d come through the door with a pan of strata and start filling our plates, and Mark and Addison would sit up straight and smile. “Thank you, Mrs. Strauss,” they said. “Thank you, Mrs. Strauss.” During breakfast they listened attentively as Mrs. Strauss relived one or another of her childhood memories. “When I was a girl,” she’d say, “Father used to start off every morning with a raw egg. He’d crack it into a short glass and then swallow it in one gulp, right down the hatch, and Karl and I would be squirming in our seats. Oh, we thought it was horrible! But Father swore by it. You’ve never seen anyone in such health!”

  Mark was a compulsive sycophant who always encouraged Mrs. Strauss to keep talking. “That’s fascinating,” he said, “I should try that. I’ve been trying to eat a healthier diet. I’d like to put on some more muscle.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea!” said Mrs. Strauss. She practically leapt up from the table and disappeared into the kitchen, then reappeared with an egg in a glass, its yolk bobbing.

  “Down the hatch!” Mark said, and swallowed it. Something like this would soften Addison, and by the end of the meal they’d be holding hands under the table.

  Almost every breakfast ended with Mrs. Strauss saying how much she loved having boys in the house. “Such nice, strapping boys!” she said. She believed that they were brothers, and so fond of one another that they couldn’t bear to sleep in separate rooms. “It is so good for brothers to love each other so much!”

  Once, when Mrs. Strauss was back in the kitchen, they started kissing at the table, and you sat staring at them in disgust. Excuse me, you said, but some of us are trying to eat.

  “Hey,” said Mark, “why don’t you come out with us tonight? We’ll fix you up!”

  Oh please, you said, and went back to your newspaper. I’m retired.

  It was only by comparison with Mark and Addison that I realized I’d come to think of myself as a resident of the Bavarian. I regarded the hours they kept, and the noises they made, as interruptions to what I considered our usual routine. “They don’t understand,” I said to you once, “how we like to have harmony in the house. We really don’t like all this bickering.”

  Every night, when I was finished in the kitchen, I sat in the bar and watched your act. Once the season was in full swing, and the town was full of gay men, you changed your repertoire and sang show tunes, Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow. Between songs you made sexually suggestive jokes about the customers, the same jokes every evening. A handsome man would be sitting in the audience and you’d stop mid-song and ask if he was choking. I think this gorgeous young man is choking on his shrimp cocktail, you’d say. Does anyone know the Heimlich? No? No one? Do I have to do everything around here?

  Toward the end of the evening you’d stop to remind people that a full dessert menu was available in the bar. We have a very talented waiter who’ll take care of you, his name’s Foster, he’ll set you up with a banana. If you like chocolate, there’s the ever-popular Whitman’s Sampler. I wondered how you could keep cracking the same jokes, with the same enthusiasm, night after night. I suppose it was the crowd’s laughter. At the sound of it your face lit up, in a brief flash, and the satisfaction registered there never diminished.

  After the last customers left I sat at the bar and took a pill with you and Humphrey Bogart, who always stood silently polishing glasses with a rag. You talked endlessly about your childhood, mak
ing your way chronologically through the memories of your life. There was something overdone and unbelievable about the cast of characters you described. The way your maid, Lottie, doted on you as if she were your mother, how she cried in the evenings when she had to leave you and return home to her own children. There now, you’d tell her, wiping her tears away with your silk handkerchief, I’ll be right here when you get back in the morning. Right here.

  The villain of your childhood was the local sheriff, fat-bellied and swaggering, who had a son your age and who believed that you were afflicted with something communicable, that your “nature,” as he called it, might be catching. In your stories you’d be walking down the street, minding your own business, and the sheriff would pull you by your ear into an alley. His dialogue was straight out of a country western. You stay away from my boy, now, you hear? We don’t want any more of your kind around these parts. I don’t care how much money your grandaddy has, I’m still the sheriff!

  Though you sometimes stopped to acknowledge me—It’s so nice to have someone educated to talk to, you’d say, you have no idea what a cultural wasteland this is—for the most part I had the feeling that anyone would do, that you had practiced all of your stories on dozens of people before me and would practice them on dozens afterward. Indeed as Humphrey Bogart stood polishing his glasses he often rolled his eyes, as if he’d heard these stories many times before. I should write this all down, you often said. Or rather, have someone take it all down for me. I don’t care to be bothered with the writing itself.

  Days went by, one after the other, all of them the same. With all the pills I was taking I couldn’t tell one from the next, and yet at a certain point I realized that something had changed, imperceptibly. I had stopped thinking about Malinda as if she were scheduled to arrive at any moment, and had begun to think of her as some kind of figment of my imagination, some character in a story I told myself. I had more or less come to think of her the way children think of Santa—a person to be dreamed of, but never confirmed. If she had walked through the door of the bar—if she had actually appeared in the flesh—I would have felt myself in violation of the natural order of things.

  I had also lost any interest in going to graduate school. I was suffering, I suppose, the kind of existential crisis common to people in their twenties, the kind which often results in the rejection of entire systems of government, of moral and societal values—the kind which often results in a person’s permanent employment in a kitchen. Life was simple at the Bavarian—as simple as the happily-ever-afters described in fairy tales—and I started to imagine staying there through the winter. I saw the three of us snowed in, gathered around the fireplace, reading aloud to one another from books, singing songs. I believed I had found a place where I was known, understood, and the idea of picking up and leaving for yet another strange town now struck me as preposterous.

  My car had been parked outside the Bavarian all summer—I hadn’t driven it once, and doubted it would start when I finally tried. It had begun to look like a car that would never go anywhere again. I imagined weeds growing up out of its hood. Everything I owned was in it—all the things I’d brought from college, and had planned to take to graduate school—and sometimes I stood looking through the car’s window, as if at a museum exhibit, as if at the relics of an ancient people.

  At school you had been considered a promising talent. You weren’t the best piano player in your class, not the most inventive composer, but your work was more meticulous, more structurally complex than others’, and you were thought to have the kind of unusual personality that often resulted in greatness. At a time when other students went around in T-shirts and jeans, in thrift-store rags, you went about in your tailored suits. Equally out of place were your mannerisms, your formality, your comportment, the rigidity of your carriage. People fussed over the way you talked—the phrases of old society turned out in a southern drawl, finished off with the sibilant lisp common to gay men. Rumors went around about you—that you were the son of a senator, a governor, that you were heir to an oil fortune, that you had been raised in Paris—and you made no attempt to correct them. It wasn’t long before everyone at Juilliard knew your name. Often you heard it spoken as you walked about. That’s James Butler, people said, and you imagined this was only the beginning—you imagined your name spoken the world over.

  You developed a good reputation with your teachers and became one of their particular favorites. In your first year you composed a piano concerto that worked through slow and careful building, through the repetition of seemingly identical phrases that were in fact slightly different. Through a process of almost imperceptible shifts over the course of the work, everything changed, and by the end the listener arrived at a place that was, musically, in perfect opposition to the place he’d started. It was a theoretical work that appealed to the mind more so than the heart—very much the fashion of the time. Your teachers agreed that with the appropriate inspiration, perhaps a summer in Europe, you would make something of yourself.

  People were always trying to befriend you, but you rebuffed them, thinking them common, foolish, spoiled, talentless, crude. Often when people approached you, you dismissed them with a comment which they at first took to be genuine, but later felt the sting of. I hadn’t realized, you’d say, kerchiefs were back in style. How quaint.

  You lived in a small room in a boardinghouse, nothing more than a bed, a dresser, and a small desk. Your suits hung in your closet, two blue and two black, one gray. On top of your dresser you kept a silver grooming set—a brush and comb, a razor and dish—that your grandmother had bought for you. Other than this your room was unadorned. You believed in keeping yourself free from distractions. The music you hoped to compose was spartan, meticulous, and you believed it would only come to you in an environment of perfect order.

  Of course there were difficulties to city life. The noise of your neighbors, the blare of sirens and horns coming up from the street, the rush of planes overhead. For the isolation you needed you stayed late at school each night, working in the practice rooms, but this had its downside: On the walk home you were often taunted by groups of teenagers. “Hey, little man,” they said. Once you were mugged at gunpoint by a mere boy, probably ten years old. You’d handed over your wallet without protest but even still the boy punched you in the stomach, and you’d folded up and fallen to the ground. After that you’d stopped carrying a wallet and never kept more than five dollars in your pocket, but you were mugged, still, for sport. Three more times.

  You allowed yourself the occasional indulgence—you were human, after all. Your grandmother sent you a check each month, and you got into the habit of spending almost all of it in a single evening. You took yourself out to fine restaurants, and later to clubs, where you engaged in what you referred to as the pleasures of youth. You took up with different men, and sometimes went home with them to their rooms. But none of this really mattered, you said, not now, and not even at the time. You were determined to make something of yourself, to become the greatest composer in the world, and something so small as love, you thought, would never distract you.

  Then, in your junior year, you fell in love with one of the school’s professors, a middle-aged composer whose name you couldn’t bring yourself—even twenty years later—to speak. There was nothing particularly special about this man. Many times you’d recalled the moment you’d first met him, and thought little of him. On first impression he was nothing more than another balding, nearsighted professor in a tweed jacket. You’d met him at a cocktail party thrown by another professor, and you remembered overhearing him talking about the end of the war. “Everyone knows,” he’d said, “it’s a positively Malthusian model of warfare.” You’d thought him arrogant, dull. You’d spoken with him briefly and you’d noticed that his teeth were stained, that he gave off the odor of a stale pipe.

  After the party he didn’t cross your mind again until you recognized his name as you registered for spring classes. When y
ou saw him again, in the classroom, he gave off much the same impression as before. Halfway through calling roll he’d quit the process and thrown up his hands. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m not going to learn any of your names until you impress me with something you’ve written.” Several weeks later, after he’d looked at your work, he invited you back to his office so he might play a line of music for you, and after that you met every week to listen to records. He took you out for coffee. You took long walks in the park, talking of music at first, and then other things—books, politics. You said little. Every question the professor asked you turned back to him. You made note of all his habits and adopted them as your own. You tried to pretend that all your life you’d been reading and drinking and eating the same things he did. He read The New Yorker, you read The New Yorker. He drank espresso, you drank espresso. He gave you gifts, rare recordings. You used your grandmother’s checks to buy him gifts. A fountain pen, a rare cloth-bound Molière. And you can imagine what happened from there, you said. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say there were moments. There were moments of great passion. I became, I suppose, obsessed.

  Naturally there were complications. This man, this professor, was twice your age, and married with two small children. His wife was a plain woman with a great fortune. The quality of this man’s life—the relative luxury and leisure he was afforded—was due to her. He would never leave her. You understood this. But sometimes in bed you spoke of the future, of traveling together. You couldn’t help yourself.