An Ocean Without a Shore
Page 3
“There’s a University Gay Freedom Alliance?” I asked, though I was of course aware of its existence.
“Sure. But don’t worry. Everything here is on the q.t. I don’t tell and you don’t tell.”
“Of course.”
“So now what do we do? Your turn?”
“Oh no,” I quickly said. “Maybe some other time. I made it with Cindy King this afternoon and my downtown is sort of shuttered up for the rest of the day.”
“Okay, then. But it’s now or never.”
“Well, maybe a rain check.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said with a laugh.
Chapter 3
Uncle Morris
Fourteen hours after ending my phone call with Thaddeus I was expected at Morris Posner’s apartment for dinner. Morris was Thaddeus’s uncle, his mother’s younger brother. I first met Morris years before at Thaddeus’s parents’ apartment in Chicago when Thaddeus and I had driven in from Ann Arbor to attend a Stevie Wonder concert at McCormick Place. I often reflect back on Thaddeus’s mother’s expression when we appeared unannounced. You’d have thought that Thaddeus was a Jehovah’s Witness and not her son by the look Libby gave him—something between blank and beleaguered. Two long moments of silence until she said, “Well, come in, come in, Morris is visiting and we’re just sitting down to dinner.” Thaddeus waggled his brows up and down, hoping to assure me that this was all somehow comic, but I felt sick to my stomach as we followed Libby into the dining area, watching her long graying braid go back and forth like a windshield wiper between her bony shoulder blades.
Morris was happy to see his nephew. He looked secure, playful, and prosperous with his graying hair as long as Leonard Bernstein’s, a striped shirt, suspenders, a bow tie. When he learned we were in town to hear Stevie Wonder, his immediate response was “Oh, I wish that was what I was doing. Stevie Wonder is our Beethoven. He thinks in music, he breathes music, he is music.”
Somewhere along the way I mentioned my plan of moving to New York after graduation, and right before Thaddeus and I left for McCormick Place, Morris tore out a sheet from his prescription pad, circled his phone number, and wrote Call Me on it. “I am not known for idle invitations,” he said. He saw me and I saw him and his forwardness frightened me.
Morris ran his Upper West Side pediatrics practice as if he lived in Grover’s Corners, without an office staff, or an assistant, answering his own phone. He didn’t send out bills but took cash or a check right after the appointment, and he’d sooner accept seashells than run a credit card. He saw children whose parents could not afford to pay, as well as cossetted children whose parents lived nearby on Central Park West, some of whom he had taken care of when they were children. His office was in an apartment building on West Sixty-Seventh Street, and his apartment, a six-room duplex, was in the same building. He’d been living alone when we first started our monthly dinners, but now his boyfriend, a Jamaican orthopedic surgeon named Robinson Kingsford, was there most nights. Robbie owned an apartment near Roosevelt Hospital, but I think he rarely slept there. Morris was tall, lanky, pale like Thaddeus, but without the contrasting rosy cheeks. He had a soothing voice and he spoke slowly, with the cadence of those who are rarely interrupted. Robbie, on the other hand, vibrated with nervous energy, like a doctor making his rounds, his eyes and his body radiating his anxiety over being detained. He was a full foot shorter than Morris, fleshy, round faced, with a light reedy voice.
The two of them, engaged in the joint project of dragging me out of the closet, really gayed it up on the evenings I was invited over. They did everything short of wearing kimonos and putting Streisand on the stereo, while they brought up matters pertaining to same-sexing at every turn. Naturally, many of them health and death related, but they both envisioned a time when civil unions between a man and a man or a woman and a woman would be legal. They thought New York City would soon have an openly gay mayor, and Morris insisted the city had already had a few mayors in the closet. They also teased each other with a lot of name-calling—Miss Thing, Nurse Ratched, Baby Cakes, you old queen you. I found it outrageous, and to calm myself, I tried to believe that this name-calling was actually evidence of how free Morris and Robbie were with each other, and how content they were with their own human nature. Yet I could not help but wonder if that nasty talk was really a way of releasing the pressure of self-doubt and shame—maybe they were not so different from me and they, too, felt the wound of the straight world’s contempt.
Occasionally, Morris and Robbie invited some eligible bachelor to join us for dinner. The awkwardness and pointlessness was horribly embarrassing, being on display, having to think of a stranger as a possible partner, and, most of all, having to fear that tonight’s prospect might be someone who worked in my business, or knew, even vaguely, someone I knew.
Over the last couple of years Morris and Robbie had introduced me to several men—an anthropologist with a nervous laugh, a Taiwanese with an eye patch, the owner of a wine store who refused to drink what they served him, and an athletic-looking schoolteacher who I found really interesting and funny and who I even once called but who had no interest in me.
Morris and Robbie were strictly doctor-knows-best when it came to my monkish personal life. Once, I asked them to stop trying to pair me off with someone, and my tone was sharper than I’d meant it to be.
“If you want us to stop trying to fix you, then stop being broken,” Robbie said. “Choose someone, come alive, be a part of it.”
“And forget about my lousy nephew,” Morris had added. “Why fixate on a married man? Who is AC/DC at most, and even if he is would never admit to it.”
“Not everything is a choice,” I said. “Some things just are.”
“He’s in a whole different world, Kip. He may as well be dead.”
“Would you tell a Christian that about Jesus?”
“Are you kidding me?” Morris exclaimed. “Can you even hear yourself? And by the way, I do think our Christian friends are making a huge mistake.”
“And I’m not saying he’s Jesus or anything,” I said.
Morris made a show of wiping the imaginary sweat off his brow and flicking it off his fingers.
“But I am saying that just because something you desire might not be easy, or convenient, or even possible, that doesn’t stop you from wanting it.”
“At a certain point it should,” said Robbie. “It’s not surrender. It’s recalibration.”
“Well, I guess I’m not very scientific.”
Morris puffed up his cheeks and slowly let the air out. We were sitting in the front room of the apartment, which had recently been painted, and the smell of the fresh latex was in the air. Robbie had brought in three dozen roses to counteract the odor but the roses made matters worse. The TV was on without the sound, tuned to Comedy Central. Al Franken was hosting satirical coverage of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention. He was pointing at an overhead screen that showed Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore, the four of them linking arms while patriotic confetti swirled around them, looking pleased and groomed and profoundly well adjusted. Delegates danced in the aisles, their campaign placards going up and down like the pistons in an engine.
“You can change your mind,” I said to Morris and Robbie. “But feelings are stubborn. They’re not to be figured out. They have their way with you. They’re bigger than the mind.”
“Romantic poison,” Morris declared. “Feelings can be examined. They can be analyzed and they can shift.” He was, as Thaddeus had said, argumentative. Thaddeus saw little of Morris, and Morris had Thaddeus pigeonholed, calling Thaddeus Poor Thaddeus, or Our Poor Thaddeus, or Mr. Howyadoin’. He and Robbie had been up to visit Orkney just once, and Morris thought the place was pure folly, noticing every water-stained ceiling, every sputtering sconce. As far as Morris was concerned, the profusion of birds drawn to Thaddeus’s beloved feeders was a health hazard.
My plea for them to stop trying to find so
meone for me had no effect, and now, fourteen hours after Thaddeus’s early morning phone call, Morris and Robbie brought in an Israeli named David Beytenu, a molecular biologist in the middle of a two-year appointment at NYU. Beytenu commandeered the conversation. He had a long curly beard and a thick voice that made you want to clear your throat so he would clear his. He wanted to talk about determinism versus free will and argued vehemently against determination, as if he somehow knew that this was a worldview to which Morris, Robbie, and I adhered.
“If we believe in determinism we will have to revamp our vocabulary, a total top-to-bottom renovation. We can say someone is great because they have beautiful eyes or some other form of beauty. But they did not will these things, this is just how they are. So. Here’s the rub. Can we use the same judgment when we praise a man for risking his life for another? For determinists—and this, I must tell you, is determinism’s fatal flaw—being truthful or brave is like being beautiful or tall. It is not a matter of choice, it is just a function of being, just something we are born with.” At that, Beytenu folded his arms across his chest and sat deeper in his chair, prepared to enjoy the looks on our faces as we realized the scaffolding to our belief system had just been dismantled and now everything we had once held to be true was crashing down around us.
Beytenu must have been disappointed by what amounted to our collective shrug, and he left rather early. The three of us sat in silence for a while, and then Robbie began to clear the table.
“Can someone please tell me where this guy got the idea that we were determinists?” Robbie asked, genuinely confused.
When our laughter finally subsided, Morris and I joined Robbie in clearing the table and cleaning the kitchen. They kept a small radio over the sink and Mozart wafted from the speaker. Morris and Robbie always made me feel that human happiness was not really exotic or difficult. It was a natural thing, and it was a daily pleasure to protect and maintain your domestic tranquility. You were polite, you put yourself second, and you were nice—a word I had not yet given its due.
After we’d put the kitchen back in order, the three of us returned to the dining table, where a bowl of Concord grapes had somehow appeared, their skin that dusty dark purple. Morris and Robbie were mindful about their alcohol intake and as we’d gone through two bottles of wine with dinner Robbie brought out a bottle of fizzy water, and a little plate of lemon wedges.
“So you didn’t like Mr. Determinism because . . .” Morris began.
“Did you like him?” I asked. “He was tedious.”
“Yes, he was tedious. But he was also quite smart, and a decent person. But really, does it even matter?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“We don’t understand you,” Robbie said. “Nobody can live the way you do. You’re going to go bonkers.”
“Nobody says bonkers anymore, Robbie,” Morris said.
“Yes, they do,” said Robbie. “I hear that word used frequently. But really, Kip, look around you. The world is changing. It’s already changed. Stonewall was a long time ago.”
“Yes, and AIDS is now.”
“All the more reason to speak up and be heard. You’re young. You have all the energy in the world. There is a movement and you should be part of it.”
“Robbie, history isn’t for everybody,” I said. “Most people just stand by and try not to be harmed.”
“Do you ever wonder if you’re using him as an excuse not to live your life?” Morris asked.
“I’m living my life. In my own way. Don’t I have that right? I’m not someone who jumps up and down and says Look at me. I’m private. I don’t actually want people to know anything about my goddamned sex life. People are mean, Morris. Mean, small, and dirty. In my business anyhow. They’re always looking for something to make fun of or use against you.”
“You’re so alone, Kip,” Morris said. “It pains us.”
“He called,” I said. “Today.”
“Here we go,” said Robbie.
When I explained why Thaddeus had called, Robbie seemed to withdraw into himself, his normally lively eyes suddenly flat and his expression vague. Morris’s elbows banged onto the table, and his forehead came to rest in his palm. He looked like someone who had just finished his income taxes.
“Well, that’s a very strange situation,” he said. “The whole thing is strange. The way he threw away his career. You adore him so you probably think he’s screwed up his Hollywood career because he’s—what? Too good for movies? Too principled? But I’m telling you, he courts failure. Failure is what he recognizes. And why? Because he was raised to be a failure. I’m no Freudian—and Freud was probably gay, by the way, he was totally obsessed with Carl Jung, way beyond reason—but here’s what Freud was right about: no man who is unloved as a child can ever be a success. Not here.” Morris pointed to his head, where, presumably, consciousness resided. And then to his heart, presumably the domain of our emotions. “I see it all the time. People say what they say about pediatrics, but I can tell you this—it’s just the opposite. Pediatrics is about as stressful a field of medicine as there is. Beyond brain surgery, beyond oncology. Every appointment lives are in the balance. It’s always an emergency. And that’s because childhood itself is an emergency.
“So now he comes to you because he can’t afford to stay in his house. But why would he continue to live in a house he can’t afford? Why would someone do that? And why would he make it someone else’s problem?” Morris sensed his voice was rising, and he folded his hands, reassuming his favorite self, good old Doc Posner, the kindly, commonsense country doctor out of Norman Rockwell. “Honestly, Kip. There’s something off here. Something strange. And that house of theirs is really strange.”
“In the right hands it could be very special,” said Robbie.
“It’s a white elephant,” said Morris. “Look, I am not as close to my nephew as I’d like to be. For some reason, or reasons, he has chosen not to be close with me. And Libby thinks ‘sexual perversion’ is a form of bourgeois selfishness. Sam figured out a long time ago that the best he can hope for is a peaceful household so he’s never going to cross her. Sam is not overly bright. Two years at Case Reserve, over and out. So whatever. Maybe they warned Thaddeus to stay away from me. I hate to think they’d stoop so low, but you never know in these matters.” He closed his eyes for a moment and gently massaged their crepey lids with his thumb and forefinger.
“Sam is a good person, with a big heart, but it’s a big broken heart. With Libby it’s different. She’s stern, and she was as a child, too. It’s in her eyes, and her jaw. Their lives have had terrible losses—all that socialism turned to dreck, that was a real kick in the ass for both of them. That bookshop has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for as long as I know. But think of it, think of what happened to them. Their child. Their little girl. Dead at six months. Life’s most hideous catastrophe. They blamed everyone. The doctors, the hospital. Libby actually blamed me, even though I’m a thousand miles away, still I should have done something. Anything. And they both blamed Thaddeus because he was a smiley-faced four-year-old little boy who committed the cardinal sin of surviving. Shame on him for surviving, shame on him for cracking jokes and doing little dances to make them happy. So what does it leave for our Thaddeus? A life of trying to please people who can never be pleased? That’s his legacy. Our parents tell us who we are. That’s what they do, even if they don’t know they’re doing it. They tell us who we are.”
“I think it’s sad,” said Robbie.
“Of course it’s sad,” said Morris. “But that kind of damage can create dangerous people. I see this in my practice all the time. I have watched so many people grow up. I see them from the very beginning. I know how it works. It’s not a theory, it’s observation. I see them bleed and I see them heal. And then a little later I see the scar tissue. Scar tissue. And what is it that distinguishes scar tissue from undamaged skin? Lack of feeling, lack of nerve cells. It’s just a covering.”
“Of course he has feelings,” Morris said. “Deep feelings. Wonderful, marvelous feelings. But you ignore the scar tissue at your own peril. The fact is these scars are the dead zones. Zones where he feels nothing, or very little. And that’s the danger.”
“I’ve never known anyone who goes so far out of his way to make people feel good,” I said. “Happy or noticed.”
“And that’s marvelous,” said Morris, with cheerful confidence. “I see that part of him, too. I know he’s been generous, and he signs all the worthy petitions. But the question is—why? Is it a way of keeping people in their place, so they don’t get to see the real person? Sometimes all that niceness is a way of making sure nobody quite sees you.”
At last, Robbie said, “I think Thaddeus really likes his uncle Morris.” He was using small silver scissors to cut away the stems that were now without grapes, each showing a little teardrop of pulp. “When we went to that Easter party at his house? He took me aside and he thanked me. It was very sweet. He said it made him rest easy to know his uncle was with someone who cared so much about him and would always look after him.”
“I don’t need looking after, Robbie. I find it quite condescending.”
“I don’t think he meant it that way,” said Robbie.
“Well, I’m not so sure,” Morris said. “That’s the thing about Thaddeus—you never know exactly what he means. He says things for effect. And when you say things for effect, it means in a way you are lying. I feel sorry for him, I do. He was a tender kid who was not treated at all tenderly. Not beaten or starved, but tolerated. It was appalling. And now we see the result.”
He looked at me searchingly, until I said, “Not really. I don’t see what you see. I see to the very bottom of him. I’ve never known anyone so completely, and I never will.”
“He loves him, Morris,” said Robbie. “I mean, come on. What are you trying to do?”