A Way With Words - Chapter 62
Many thanks to faithful commenter gilli_ann for stepping in to second freetraveller15 in beta help. (Might as well disable comments now.) Another 1 or 2 chapters to go and I will finally be done.
July 29 & 30, 1989
You’d have thought it would be awkward to interact with Chris during the day after the conversations with Jack Tornado at night. But I found it easy to separate the two people. Everything about Jack Tornado was lighter: his voice, his humor, his attitude. In the daytime Chris seemed tense and preoccupied. I remembered Eve’s melancholy request of me, to be a good friend to him. He spent every morning in his bedroom, writing; I could hear the computer keys clicking away. When I finally got up and went down to the kitchen at noon, he would go into his office for a little while and make phone calls. I was careful to put away Jack’s faxes before I left the room.
When Chris joined me in the kitchen on Saturday, he was carrying my copy of the Independent.
“This was on the floor. You want me to toss it?” he asked.
I knew he meant onto the recycling pile. There was no curbside pickup in those days; the environmentally-minded had to haul their papers to a special recycling depot. Good German that she was, it was Eve who took care of that. I noticed the stack was getting pretty high.
“Go ahead, but I want to save an article,” I replied. I took it from him and tore off the back page. “A friend of mine is in this photo.” I pointed to Joe’s face. “He was my college roommate and my… It’s a photo exhibit in Washington, where Joe lives now.” I couldn’t bring myself to describe Joe as my best friend. It seemed so long ago and so inadequate.
Chris took the page from my hand and peered at the picture. Then he looked at the headline.
“Oh, Mapplethorpe.” He pronounced the name wrong, I noticed. I remembered being corrected by Jay. “There was an exhibit at South Bank a few years ago. Amazing still lifes.”
While he made tea I told Chris about my brief encounter with the photographer in 1980, on the street in New York. How he’d given me his card, and showing it to Jay four years later had helped launch our relationship.
“Who was Joe to you besides your roommate?” Chris asked, setting my tea on the counter in front of me. I lifted the mug to my lips only to keep from answering right away; I didn’t really want to drink anything while I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I took a tiny sip.
“Joe… he was my best friend.” I opened the bread box, stalling for time, but all it contained was the dense, black loaf that Eve had traveled halfway across London to track down. What I wouldn’t have given for a bagel right then. “We shared a dorm room and then an apartment all through college. But he was never my… my lover. Just a good friend. He went to Washington after graduation and got into politics. Well, working for politicians.” I stirred a cloud of milk into my tea. “He didn’t take my coming out too well.”
“Freaked out?”
“No… not exactly.” I blew on my tea, then took a gulp. For the first time I understood why the English took comfort in this drink. I felt the warmth going down loosen something in me. I sat down and told him about Joe, especially about the trip to Kansas during our senior year, the night in the motel, then his distance, the new girlfriend, the way he introduced me to Jay, graduation, his foray into politics. Then I described the evening in the Indian restaurant when I told him I was gay, that I had a boyfriend..
“He made out like he’d always suspected, that he’d wondered about me. Right. He was like, ‘Me? Oh I’m totally normal. But you?… hmmmm.’ He made a face when he thought I wasn’t looking,” I said, all my bitterness coming out. “The worst part was, I wasn’t sure he was disgusted by me being gay or by being with a guy who wasn’t… American. And then a few months later he told me he was getting married. Just like after the night in the motel, suddenly he goes and gets serious with a woman.”
Chris didn’t ask any questions, just let me rant. By the end we were sitting at the table side by side in front of our empty mugs. He was gazing absently at the picture in the Independent. “To find out someone isn’t really who you thought they were… it can suck.”
I made a little grunt of agreement. More silence. Then Chris said quietly, “There is someone else you haven’t talked about.”
Reading Jack’s first letter, running to the Heath, meeting Janet Turner, learning her son’s story, Elliot… it all flashed through my mind. I didn’t want to let Chris into that space I was making with Jack, with our faxes.
I turned in my chair to look at him. “Did you ever hear of a musician named Nick Drake?”
After a pause he said, “Yeah. We had a couple of his albums at KU but that was the folk music section so not my department. Why?”
“That Quaker woman I met, her son was friends with him. At least he tried to be, it sounds like, before he met Elliot, the guy I knew in Boston who died of AIDS. Well, Elliot was a friend of my girlfriend. I didn’t really know him.”
“I know Nick Drake died young, in the seventies, but apparently he was pretty influential,” Chris said. “I don’t think I’ve heard his music. At least, not that I’m aware.”
I thought about the unlabeled cassette tape I’d found in Elliot’s couch the day we cleared his apartment, finding it again three years later in a box of tapes and listening to it for hours on the drive to Toronto. When I asked Chris if I would find his albums in a store now, he said I’d probably have more luck in Camden Market, in the used record stalls.
I walked to Camden Town that afternoon. After searching the stalls with no luck, I went further up Chalk Farm Road and found a small store selling used vinyl records. By that time CDs were taking over, people were getting rid of their turntables and stores like the one I found were being flooded with albums.
As soon as I saw the album called Pink Moon, I knew I’d guessed right. Elliot’s tape had contained all the songs listed on the jacket, plus more. On another album cover I saw what Nick Drake looked like: straight brown hair to his chin, full lips, didn’t smile much. I wondered why Julian Turner had made such an effort to befriend the singer, and whether Nick Drake had cared when Julian stopped trying. When the shop owner saw me looking at the records he said, “He lived right up the road for a while, you know, in Belsize Park.”
I didn’t buy a record; I’d learned what I needed and didn’t want to listen to those songs again. That evening I told Chris what I’d found, and explained about discovering the cassette tape in the couch. That led to telling him about Elliot, and more about Jay. He in turn told me about his non-existent love life in college, how he’d felt like a misfit and couldn’t wait to go far away. He talked about his childhood, that he’d been the oldest of four boys but there was a 10 year gap between him and the others because his mother had left his father, then remarried and lost a baby daughter before the other sons arrived at two year intervals. He was different from his siblings in every way but gender.
“And I wasn’t completely sure about that, either,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I had to help with the little ones, because who else was going to do that for my mom? Not my step-father. And I had to help cook, same reason. So then I’m called a sissy in high school because I know how to do those things, and don’t mind.”
It was after midnight when I went to bed. I decided the next morning I would go to the Quaker meeting. I hadn’t paid attention to the route we took to reach Janet Turner’s house in Highgate and I wanted to talk to her again. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, the fax machine started up with its familiar stutter.
I am not like you. Soon as I got back from Ed’s I sat Lureen down and told her. I knew this guy was the real thing and not just a fuck. Told her I was gay, had tried to change after she saved my life, thought she was the answer, etc. I couldn’t imagine carrying on as normal, feeling the way I did, even though crushing her like that tore me up. Actually, it wasn’t that she was so in love with me. I knew that. It was that I used her. That’s the way she saw it and was spitting mad and yeah she was right but it’s not like I could’ve used just any woman. I mean there had to be some connection, right? And there was. We had a lot of the same attitudes and ambitions. But she went on a fuck spree that summer to see if she had the stuff. Crazy, cause you know her, she’s gorgeous. School over and she didn’t really need to work so she cut loose.
Me, I didn’t see all that cause I was off with Ed. I moved out of our apartment but just into the one upstairs cause the student tenants moved out. His place was just 15 minutes walk from me and he was free all summer too. We went to New Hampshire and Maine, camping in the middle of nowhere. Logging areas where the forest was all scarred up by the big machines but cause of that nobody else went there. Swam in lakes, cooked over a fire, hiked around, fucked day and night. When we got tired of a place we packed up and found another one.
He read to me. Lots of poems, but only novels about gay men. For hours felt like, sometimes. Cause when he got to a part in one of the books from back in the day when they couldn’t spell it all out, we’d fill in the blanks. When I told you about that time, the night you were shitfaced in the bar, well you sure pricked up your ears. Like reading and fucking at the same time would be a dream come true. At the bar across the street from EW I saw a lot of those titles in the bookcase behind you. Just seeing the spine of a book reminded me of the place where we were camping when he read it to me. Every detail. Bird songs, or the wind, pine needles under my knees or sun on my back, his balls in my hand or my dick in his mouth.
That was five fucking years ago. Six months is all we had in the end but how could something so good fuck me up so bad?
I sat down and wrote back to him, something short because I was tired and I had a question.
Wish I could be like you and just say what needs saying at the time it needs to be said. Sometimes I say the right thing by accident and things go off in a direction I didn’t expect. Especially with women.
Just because I don’t have as much experience with men doesn’t mean I don’t have any stories as good as your camping one. How about having mango juice licked off my body? OK then, one story. But I did go camping on Lake Ontario with Kaj, just one night. Somebody there gave us a fish and he cooked it over the fire. Then we fed it to each other. Guess that pales in comparison, though. I tried reading to Kaj once but he fell asleep. It was a long scene about baseball so that might explain it.
What was your favorite book of the ones Ed read to you?
I fell asleep as soon as I lay down again and stayed very deeply asleep because in the morning another fax was hanging down. Jack was writing feverishly and sending them through as soon as he had two pages filled. When I sent a question he answered it wherever he happened to be in his narrative. I could see by the time stamp that he stayed up late.
September came. Back to school for all of us except Lureen changed her mind. Dropped out of business school and got a job in sales somewhere. I don’t remember where because I was not paying her a bit of attention. I went to class at night, studied in the morning and spent most afternoons at Ed’s. Once he said why didn’t I just move in? But it didn’t feel right. We had a lot of space and freedom that summer and it wouldn’t be the same cooped up together in a one-bedroom.
Something else though. We talked about everything about our lives except there was a big hole in his that he just circled around. He was older than me and I when I counted back the years I saw the big blank was during the war. I asked him did he go to Vietnam. He said the war changed everything. Those years were the best and worst times of his life. Said he would tell me about it when he knew me better. So when he disappeared I wondered was he afraid to get to that point?
You would like the book I remember best. When you told me the story of Joe at the Cantab I thought of it. England before WW1, a man in love with his best friend in college. He’s going mad because the friend actually tells him that he loves him in every way but wants it to be pure. He won’t even kiss him. After college the friend goes into politics, marries a girl, tries to get the hero to forget the gay. The best thing about it is the story has a happy ending. You know how rare that is for novels about guys like us? (And cause of that it couldn’t be published while the author was alive.) The hero falls in love with a man completely out of his class: the gamekeeper on his friend’s estate. AND THEY GO OFF TOGETHER IN THE END. Nobody dies or goes crazy and you can tell the married ex-best friend is going to be the miserable one. We took a long time to get through that one because of all the beautiful blanks to fill in. Ed said he hoped the two men left Europe because if they stayed they’d soon be sent off to the trenches. Couple of years ago they made a movie of it. Maurice. Did you see it? It was even better than the book but it killed me to watch it, remembering. So of course I went back too many times.
I hadn’t seen the film, though I vaguely remembered seeing the title on the marquee of the Harvard Square movie theater. It came out around the time I began visiting the Tamils in the detention center. When I saw Jack at the law firm for the first time. No wonder he didn’t smile.
I hid the fax with the others and got dressed. I put on my cleanest jeans and a dress shirt that Chris had lent me when I told him I planned to go back to the Quaker meeting that morning. Before I went downstairs I switched off the fax machine. Jack had been sending the faxes when it was late at night In England, after he finished work. But it was Sunday and he was on a roll; I didn’t want Chris to read any that might come through while I was out.
Instead of going through the Heath I walked to Camden and took a bus to Hampstead. It was only 10:30 so instead of heading up Heath Street toward the meeting house right away, I wandered the streets around Hampstead tube station. I had a sense of déjà vu: the shops and architecture reminded me of Charles Street at the bottom of Beacon Hill in Boston.
As I passed by a bank, my white shirt reflecting in the big empty window caught my eye; I turned my head and was startled by the sight of my whole figure in the glass. It had been five months since I’d cut my hair and it had grown out shapeless and shaggy. I tried to smooth it down. I tucked my shirt into my jeans and noticed they were looser on my hips than they’d been when I arrived in London. I made a mental note to find a barber and try to eat more regular meals. As if I were planning to be there indefinitely.
The meeting house was closer than I thought, and when I came to the entrance it was quarter to eleven. I wanted to talk to Janet Turner afterwards, not before; I walked past the gate and turned right down the side street, the way I followed her after meeting the first time. But that street made a ninety degree turn to the right and looked to bend again toward Heath Street so I cut through an alley, emerged on another street, turned a corner, then another and was soon lost. Eventually I arrived at an odd convergence of narrow streets, and when I glanced to the right I spotted ten yards away the red phone box and the bench Janet Turner and I had sat down on the previous Sunday.
The bench was occupied by a lone woman. Something about her straight back and her profile was familiar. She had curly brown hair to her shoulders, streaked with gray, and was dressed much like me, in jeans and wearing a light colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She was gripping the edge of the bench seat with both hands, her eyes were closed tightly and the corners of her mouth turned down. Normally I would leave a sad stranger alone, but I felt weirdly drawn to this woman.
I stepped slowly, quietly toward her. When I was less than eight feet away she sniffed, opened her eyes, looked down at her lap and then turned her head away from me, toward the phone booth. I followed her gaze and saw both our reflections, mine behind hers, in the glass panes of the red box. She stiffened, then whipped around to look at me, her blue eyes wide open. Then she narrowed them.
“You!” she shrieked as she sprang up and lunged at me. Taken completely by surprised, I flailed my arms to fend her off but her fist banged sharp against my nose. I swore from the pain, lashed out and socked her hard, losing my balance and stumbling against a lamp post at the same time as she sprawled backward and fell with a thud onto the bench.
Behind me I heard a voice cry “Jessie!” and then Janet Turner rushed past me. She helped the woman to sit up; Jessie was holding her palm to her eye and grimacing, tears flowing down both cheeks. Janet Turner looked up at me but her expression was sympathetic; she mouthed I’m sorry to me as she sat with her arm around her daughter.
“I saw you walk past the meeting house and look in. I wasn’t sure you’d come back so I followed you. Are you alright?”
I took my hand away from my nose. Blood was dribbling down my lip. Janet Turner fished a tissue out of the pocket of her loose gray trousers and held it out to me. When I stepped forward I heard Jessie mutter through her tears, “He looks just like him.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The man who killed my brother!”
I frowned, confused. “I thought you said Julian lives in Highgate,” I said to Janet Turner.
Jessie looked up and glared at me. “He’s in Highgate Cemetery!” she spat out. “Mum twists herself in knots trying not to blame that man for killing Julian!”
Her mother closed her eyes and looked pained. “When I told Jessie a man who knew Elliot in Boston had come to meeting, she came down from Glasgow this weekend, in case you returned.”
“Is it true he’s dead?” Jessie asked me.
I nodded.
“Good.”
The dismay in Janet Turner’s face told me everything about the past 15 years: Jessie’s horror at the sight of Julian being pulled in front of a bus by a man she had just married only for love of her brother; the hatred that had poisoned her life; her resentment of her mother for forgiving and continuing to love the man.
I dabbed at my nose; It had stopped bleeding. I carefully folded the tissue and stuffed it into my pocket. “If it’s any consolation,” I said when I looked up again, “Elliot died alone and miserable.”
“Good.”
“Alone by choice.” As the two women sat on the bench I paced around in front of the phone box and described Elliot’s withdrawal from his friends when he had his diagnosis, his weeks in the hospital unable to speak and clearing out his apartment after his death. I told them that I’d found the Christmas cards and the picture of him embracing Julian from behind.
“I took that picture, right here,” Jessie said, pointing to the phone box. “I was working on a documentary about Victorian wash houses in London and they came with me when I was taking some stills of that one.” She gestured toward the hulking red brick building across the street. The Wells and Camden Baths and Wash House was carved in a long band of marble across the length of it.
“They rang a friend from there, both of them squeezing into it, and I took their picture.” Jessie’s voice had softened. “They were so happy together.”
I suspected her mother hadn’t told Jessie that Elliot had found love again in the year before he died. I said, “Your mother told me your brother was friends with Nick Drake.”
“I suppose. It was an odd friendship, really. They never went anywhere together, just talked on the Heath. I was in film school and one assignment was to produce an interview with someone. I asked Julian to ask Nick, since they were already doing nothing but talking in one place, and he said yes. But then Elliot came along and swept Julian off his feet.”
Bitterness crept back into her voice at these last words. It wasn’t hard to imagine the jumble of feelings the young Jessie had experienced. It was one thing to have your brother preoccupied by a quiet boy his age who could be useful to you, another to have him pried away from your side by a more worldly, experienced man.
“On his couch we found a Walkman with a tape of Nick Drake songs,” I said. “It was probably the last music he listened to before he went to the hospital.”
The women were silent, each lost in thought. A bruise had formed below Jessie’s left eye.
“Sorry about the punch,” I mumbled.
“No, it was my fault.”
A moment passed. I said, “I’ll just say goodbye now. I’ll be going back to Boston soon.” I hadn’t been thinking that at all until that moment, but I knew it was true. It felt as though my mission was accomplished.
Janet Turner stood up. She held out her hand and I took it. “Thank you,” she said. “I wish you a happy future.”
I took my time going back to Kentish Town. I wandered down through the Heath, past the swimming pond. The afternoon was hot and sunny and the grass was crowded with bodies but I didn’t look for Jeffrey. I went to the top of Parliament Hill and watched the kites, took in the view of the city. At the café at bottom of the hill the children licked ice cream while their parents read the Sunday papers. On the corner on the other side of the street down from the entrance I stopped at the Bull and Last for a pint and a sandwich before walking all the way back to Jeffrey’s Place.
I was sorry Chris and Eve were not home. I wanted to tell them about my day, take them out to dinner. In the morning I would call British Airways to book a flight home.
As I climbed the stairs I heard a familiar buzz start up in my room. I was sure I’d turned the fax machine off but maybe Chris had had to use it. I stood next to it and read as the paper inched out.
By December things were going really well with us. I decided to go out to see my folks for Christmas and tell them the truth. I hardly ever talked to them since Lureen and I moved east. Not that I had any little bit of hope that they were going to pat me on the back and say We just want you to be happy, son. I mean, they weren’t thrilled about Lureen for some reason so how the hell were they going to accept their only son as a fag? But I felt strong and I just wanted to tell them something that for once they couldn’t cover over with make believe. Ed said his folks were dead and he hadn’t done the Christmas thing in a long time but he didn’t want mine to know I’d hooked up with one of their old customers so he declined my insane invitation to come to Colorado with me. He asked me to just bring back a cowboy hat for him.
So I went out for Christmas and it was exactly as I expected. I wasn’t even nervous flying out. I did tell them when I called home that Lureen and I had split and they made all the right sympathetic noises but I could tell they weren’t even surprised.
I told them Christmas day. That I was gay and had a boyfriend and that’s why I left my wife. My old man ranted and raved and my mother cried and my uncle just looked at me and shook his head like why in the world did I need to do this now? But after the big blow up a cousin of my mother and her family came for Christmas dinner and they didn’t say a word to them about me. I stayed the whole week because it snowed and it would’ve been too hard to get out and anyway I had a plane ticket I couldn’t change. Everybody acted like nothing was different except my marriage. I didn’t even force the issue. That was the way they wanted to deal with it so I thought OK I’m done here. It’ll be just Ed and me.
I called him up Christmas night to tell him how it went and that I’d mailed him the black hat he got to wear when he came to the ranch, and I was going to wear another one back, for me. I thought he sounded tired, and he said it was so but that he was usually exhausted by the time a school vacation rolled around. That was the last time I talked to him. I called every day after that and only got the answering machine.
When I landed at Logan on New Year’s Eve day I called from the airport. He knew when I was getting back but no answer. I went straight to his place but he didn’t answer the buzzer. I walked around the block looking for his car and finally found it. Thought maybe he got my return date wrong and went to a party. Went back the next day, still nothing, car in the same place. So I’m calling every day leaving messages, sending notes, scared to death that he had an accident and nobody knows about me. Because I never met any of his friends, didn’t know exactly the name of the high school he worked at. All he said was that it was down on the South Shore.
Law school starts up again and I go but I’m a mess. I start looking for his car twice a day and most times in the evening I find it on one of the streets but never in the same place and sometimes it’s nowhere to be seen. Once when I see it’s there I go to his place and ring the buzzer but nothing. I call, nothing. One day I call and there’s no answering machine. I go over and his name’s still on the doorbell and when I look in the lobby I don’t see mail sticking out of his mailbox so somebody’s getting it. I ring the super’s bell and he says he saw Ed go out that morning. I started out worried but now I’m mad as hell. I send him a letter and say fuck you, coward. You robbed me.
I was thinking about the war and the nightmares he had sometimes. He wouldn’t talk about them but he said if he ever hurt me, I should leave him. He meant for good, not just for the night. I’d say, Yeah right and laugh like he was joking. I should’ve pushed it but I didn’t. I should’ve made him tell me what happened but I thought if I went the extra step and pissed off my folks by telling them about me, cut all the ties like he did, that would be the thing that would do it. Open him up.
So I get back from doing just that and realize that fuck it, he took the decision himself. Stole all the power for himself, deciding when to end it with me for my own good, no discussion. In one month I went from feeling like I’d never love anyone like I loved him to feeling like I’d never love anyone again. Last scrap of love in me burnt to a crisp by anger.
I was too messed up to go on with law school. Dropped out, got work as a paralegal. Once in a while I took a detour and walked by his building on the way home from work. Never saw a light on in the window. By spring I didn’t see his car anymore. Figured he moved away.
One day I was driving by and saw some people come out of his building carrying a couch. His couch. The one we fucked on the first time. And other times. Looked up and swore I saw him in the window watching them, listening to his Walkman like he used to. Looked down at them setting the couch on the curb next to a lot of trash bags. Looked up and the window was empty. Then the people were hugging each other and crying. That’s when I knew he was dead. After they went back in I parked the car. Went over and took the dirtiest cushion that had all the stains we made. That is the only damn thing I have left to remind me.
Diary entry >>
Scenes from Maurice: http://youtu.be/YwJvqjTJW10
The Wells and Camden Baths and Wash House does exist and there is a phone box across the street from it
July 29 & 30, 1989
You’d have thought it would be awkward to interact with Chris during the day after the conversations with Jack Tornado at night. But I found it easy to separate the two people. Everything about Jack Tornado was lighter: his voice, his humor, his attitude. In the daytime Chris seemed tense and preoccupied. I remembered Eve’s melancholy request of me, to be a good friend to him. He spent every morning in his bedroom, writing; I could hear the computer keys clicking away. When I finally got up and went down to the kitchen at noon, he would go into his office for a little while and make phone calls. I was careful to put away Jack’s faxes before I left the room.
When Chris joined me in the kitchen on Saturday, he was carrying my copy of the Independent.
“This was on the floor. You want me to toss it?” he asked.
I knew he meant onto the recycling pile. There was no curbside pickup in those days; the environmentally-minded had to haul their papers to a special recycling depot. Good German that she was, it was Eve who took care of that. I noticed the stack was getting pretty high.
“Go ahead, but I want to save an article,” I replied. I took it from him and tore off the back page. “A friend of mine is in this photo.” I pointed to Joe’s face. “He was my college roommate and my… It’s a photo exhibit in Washington, where Joe lives now.” I couldn’t bring myself to describe Joe as my best friend. It seemed so long ago and so inadequate.
Chris took the page from my hand and peered at the picture. Then he looked at the headline.
“Oh, Mapplethorpe.” He pronounced the name wrong, I noticed. I remembered being corrected by Jay. “There was an exhibit at South Bank a few years ago. Amazing still lifes.”
While he made tea I told Chris about my brief encounter with the photographer in 1980, on the street in New York. How he’d given me his card, and showing it to Jay four years later had helped launch our relationship.
“Who was Joe to you besides your roommate?” Chris asked, setting my tea on the counter in front of me. I lifted the mug to my lips only to keep from answering right away; I didn’t really want to drink anything while I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I took a tiny sip.
“Joe… he was my best friend.” I opened the bread box, stalling for time, but all it contained was the dense, black loaf that Eve had traveled halfway across London to track down. What I wouldn’t have given for a bagel right then. “We shared a dorm room and then an apartment all through college. But he was never my… my lover. Just a good friend. He went to Washington after graduation and got into politics. Well, working for politicians.” I stirred a cloud of milk into my tea. “He didn’t take my coming out too well.”
“Freaked out?”
“No… not exactly.” I blew on my tea, then took a gulp. For the first time I understood why the English took comfort in this drink. I felt the warmth going down loosen something in me. I sat down and told him about Joe, especially about the trip to Kansas during our senior year, the night in the motel, then his distance, the new girlfriend, the way he introduced me to Jay, graduation, his foray into politics. Then I described the evening in the Indian restaurant when I told him I was gay, that I had a boyfriend..
“He made out like he’d always suspected, that he’d wondered about me. Right. He was like, ‘Me? Oh I’m totally normal. But you?… hmmmm.’ He made a face when he thought I wasn’t looking,” I said, all my bitterness coming out. “The worst part was, I wasn’t sure he was disgusted by me being gay or by being with a guy who wasn’t… American. And then a few months later he told me he was getting married. Just like after the night in the motel, suddenly he goes and gets serious with a woman.”
Chris didn’t ask any questions, just let me rant. By the end we were sitting at the table side by side in front of our empty mugs. He was gazing absently at the picture in the Independent. “To find out someone isn’t really who you thought they were… it can suck.”
I made a little grunt of agreement. More silence. Then Chris said quietly, “There is someone else you haven’t talked about.”
Reading Jack’s first letter, running to the Heath, meeting Janet Turner, learning her son’s story, Elliot… it all flashed through my mind. I didn’t want to let Chris into that space I was making with Jack, with our faxes.
I turned in my chair to look at him. “Did you ever hear of a musician named Nick Drake?”
After a pause he said, “Yeah. We had a couple of his albums at KU but that was the folk music section so not my department. Why?”
“That Quaker woman I met, her son was friends with him. At least he tried to be, it sounds like, before he met Elliot, the guy I knew in Boston who died of AIDS. Well, Elliot was a friend of my girlfriend. I didn’t really know him.”
“I know Nick Drake died young, in the seventies, but apparently he was pretty influential,” Chris said. “I don’t think I’ve heard his music. At least, not that I’m aware.”
I thought about the unlabeled cassette tape I’d found in Elliot’s couch the day we cleared his apartment, finding it again three years later in a box of tapes and listening to it for hours on the drive to Toronto. When I asked Chris if I would find his albums in a store now, he said I’d probably have more luck in Camden Market, in the used record stalls.
I walked to Camden Town that afternoon. After searching the stalls with no luck, I went further up Chalk Farm Road and found a small store selling used vinyl records. By that time CDs were taking over, people were getting rid of their turntables and stores like the one I found were being flooded with albums.
As soon as I saw the album called Pink Moon, I knew I’d guessed right. Elliot’s tape had contained all the songs listed on the jacket, plus more. On another album cover I saw what Nick Drake looked like: straight brown hair to his chin, full lips, didn’t smile much. I wondered why Julian Turner had made such an effort to befriend the singer, and whether Nick Drake had cared when Julian stopped trying. When the shop owner saw me looking at the records he said, “He lived right up the road for a while, you know, in Belsize Park.”
I didn’t buy a record; I’d learned what I needed and didn’t want to listen to those songs again. That evening I told Chris what I’d found, and explained about discovering the cassette tape in the couch. That led to telling him about Elliot, and more about Jay. He in turn told me about his non-existent love life in college, how he’d felt like a misfit and couldn’t wait to go far away. He talked about his childhood, that he’d been the oldest of four boys but there was a 10 year gap between him and the others because his mother had left his father, then remarried and lost a baby daughter before the other sons arrived at two year intervals. He was different from his siblings in every way but gender.
“And I wasn’t completely sure about that, either,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I had to help with the little ones, because who else was going to do that for my mom? Not my step-father. And I had to help cook, same reason. So then I’m called a sissy in high school because I know how to do those things, and don’t mind.”
It was after midnight when I went to bed. I decided the next morning I would go to the Quaker meeting. I hadn’t paid attention to the route we took to reach Janet Turner’s house in Highgate and I wanted to talk to her again. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, the fax machine started up with its familiar stutter.
I am not like you. Soon as I got back from Ed’s I sat Lureen down and told her. I knew this guy was the real thing and not just a fuck. Told her I was gay, had tried to change after she saved my life, thought she was the answer, etc. I couldn’t imagine carrying on as normal, feeling the way I did, even though crushing her like that tore me up. Actually, it wasn’t that she was so in love with me. I knew that. It was that I used her. That’s the way she saw it and was spitting mad and yeah she was right but it’s not like I could’ve used just any woman. I mean there had to be some connection, right? And there was. We had a lot of the same attitudes and ambitions. But she went on a fuck spree that summer to see if she had the stuff. Crazy, cause you know her, she’s gorgeous. School over and she didn’t really need to work so she cut loose.
Me, I didn’t see all that cause I was off with Ed. I moved out of our apartment but just into the one upstairs cause the student tenants moved out. His place was just 15 minutes walk from me and he was free all summer too. We went to New Hampshire and Maine, camping in the middle of nowhere. Logging areas where the forest was all scarred up by the big machines but cause of that nobody else went there. Swam in lakes, cooked over a fire, hiked around, fucked day and night. When we got tired of a place we packed up and found another one.
He read to me. Lots of poems, but only novels about gay men. For hours felt like, sometimes. Cause when he got to a part in one of the books from back in the day when they couldn’t spell it all out, we’d fill in the blanks. When I told you about that time, the night you were shitfaced in the bar, well you sure pricked up your ears. Like reading and fucking at the same time would be a dream come true. At the bar across the street from EW I saw a lot of those titles in the bookcase behind you. Just seeing the spine of a book reminded me of the place where we were camping when he read it to me. Every detail. Bird songs, or the wind, pine needles under my knees or sun on my back, his balls in my hand or my dick in his mouth.
That was five fucking years ago. Six months is all we had in the end but how could something so good fuck me up so bad?
I sat down and wrote back to him, something short because I was tired and I had a question.
Wish I could be like you and just say what needs saying at the time it needs to be said. Sometimes I say the right thing by accident and things go off in a direction I didn’t expect. Especially with women.
Just because I don’t have as much experience with men doesn’t mean I don’t have any stories as good as your camping one. How about having mango juice licked off my body? OK then, one story. But I did go camping on Lake Ontario with Kaj, just one night. Somebody there gave us a fish and he cooked it over the fire. Then we fed it to each other. Guess that pales in comparison, though. I tried reading to Kaj once but he fell asleep. It was a long scene about baseball so that might explain it.
What was your favorite book of the ones Ed read to you?
I fell asleep as soon as I lay down again and stayed very deeply asleep because in the morning another fax was hanging down. Jack was writing feverishly and sending them through as soon as he had two pages filled. When I sent a question he answered it wherever he happened to be in his narrative. I could see by the time stamp that he stayed up late.
September came. Back to school for all of us except Lureen changed her mind. Dropped out of business school and got a job in sales somewhere. I don’t remember where because I was not paying her a bit of attention. I went to class at night, studied in the morning and spent most afternoons at Ed’s. Once he said why didn’t I just move in? But it didn’t feel right. We had a lot of space and freedom that summer and it wouldn’t be the same cooped up together in a one-bedroom.
Something else though. We talked about everything about our lives except there was a big hole in his that he just circled around. He was older than me and I when I counted back the years I saw the big blank was during the war. I asked him did he go to Vietnam. He said the war changed everything. Those years were the best and worst times of his life. Said he would tell me about it when he knew me better. So when he disappeared I wondered was he afraid to get to that point?
You would like the book I remember best. When you told me the story of Joe at the Cantab I thought of it. England before WW1, a man in love with his best friend in college. He’s going mad because the friend actually tells him that he loves him in every way but wants it to be pure. He won’t even kiss him. After college the friend goes into politics, marries a girl, tries to get the hero to forget the gay. The best thing about it is the story has a happy ending. You know how rare that is for novels about guys like us? (And cause of that it couldn’t be published while the author was alive.) The hero falls in love with a man completely out of his class: the gamekeeper on his friend’s estate. AND THEY GO OFF TOGETHER IN THE END. Nobody dies or goes crazy and you can tell the married ex-best friend is going to be the miserable one. We took a long time to get through that one because of all the beautiful blanks to fill in. Ed said he hoped the two men left Europe because if they stayed they’d soon be sent off to the trenches. Couple of years ago they made a movie of it. Maurice. Did you see it? It was even better than the book but it killed me to watch it, remembering. So of course I went back too many times.
I hadn’t seen the film, though I vaguely remembered seeing the title on the marquee of the Harvard Square movie theater. It came out around the time I began visiting the Tamils in the detention center. When I saw Jack at the law firm for the first time. No wonder he didn’t smile.
I hid the fax with the others and got dressed. I put on my cleanest jeans and a dress shirt that Chris had lent me when I told him I planned to go back to the Quaker meeting that morning. Before I went downstairs I switched off the fax machine. Jack had been sending the faxes when it was late at night In England, after he finished work. But it was Sunday and he was on a roll; I didn’t want Chris to read any that might come through while I was out.
Instead of going through the Heath I walked to Camden and took a bus to Hampstead. It was only 10:30 so instead of heading up Heath Street toward the meeting house right away, I wandered the streets around Hampstead tube station. I had a sense of déjà vu: the shops and architecture reminded me of Charles Street at the bottom of Beacon Hill in Boston.
As I passed by a bank, my white shirt reflecting in the big empty window caught my eye; I turned my head and was startled by the sight of my whole figure in the glass. It had been five months since I’d cut my hair and it had grown out shapeless and shaggy. I tried to smooth it down. I tucked my shirt into my jeans and noticed they were looser on my hips than they’d been when I arrived in London. I made a mental note to find a barber and try to eat more regular meals. As if I were planning to be there indefinitely.
The meeting house was closer than I thought, and when I came to the entrance it was quarter to eleven. I wanted to talk to Janet Turner afterwards, not before; I walked past the gate and turned right down the side street, the way I followed her after meeting the first time. But that street made a ninety degree turn to the right and looked to bend again toward Heath Street so I cut through an alley, emerged on another street, turned a corner, then another and was soon lost. Eventually I arrived at an odd convergence of narrow streets, and when I glanced to the right I spotted ten yards away the red phone box and the bench Janet Turner and I had sat down on the previous Sunday.
The bench was occupied by a lone woman. Something about her straight back and her profile was familiar. She had curly brown hair to her shoulders, streaked with gray, and was dressed much like me, in jeans and wearing a light colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She was gripping the edge of the bench seat with both hands, her eyes were closed tightly and the corners of her mouth turned down. Normally I would leave a sad stranger alone, but I felt weirdly drawn to this woman.
I stepped slowly, quietly toward her. When I was less than eight feet away she sniffed, opened her eyes, looked down at her lap and then turned her head away from me, toward the phone booth. I followed her gaze and saw both our reflections, mine behind hers, in the glass panes of the red box. She stiffened, then whipped around to look at me, her blue eyes wide open. Then she narrowed them.
“You!” she shrieked as she sprang up and lunged at me. Taken completely by surprised, I flailed my arms to fend her off but her fist banged sharp against my nose. I swore from the pain, lashed out and socked her hard, losing my balance and stumbling against a lamp post at the same time as she sprawled backward and fell with a thud onto the bench.
Behind me I heard a voice cry “Jessie!” and then Janet Turner rushed past me. She helped the woman to sit up; Jessie was holding her palm to her eye and grimacing, tears flowing down both cheeks. Janet Turner looked up at me but her expression was sympathetic; she mouthed I’m sorry to me as she sat with her arm around her daughter.
“I saw you walk past the meeting house and look in. I wasn’t sure you’d come back so I followed you. Are you alright?”
I took my hand away from my nose. Blood was dribbling down my lip. Janet Turner fished a tissue out of the pocket of her loose gray trousers and held it out to me. When I stepped forward I heard Jessie mutter through her tears, “He looks just like him.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The man who killed my brother!”
I frowned, confused. “I thought you said Julian lives in Highgate,” I said to Janet Turner.
Jessie looked up and glared at me. “He’s in Highgate Cemetery!” she spat out. “Mum twists herself in knots trying not to blame that man for killing Julian!”
Her mother closed her eyes and looked pained. “When I told Jessie a man who knew Elliot in Boston had come to meeting, she came down from Glasgow this weekend, in case you returned.”
“Is it true he’s dead?” Jessie asked me.
I nodded.
“Good.”
The dismay in Janet Turner’s face told me everything about the past 15 years: Jessie’s horror at the sight of Julian being pulled in front of a bus by a man she had just married only for love of her brother; the hatred that had poisoned her life; her resentment of her mother for forgiving and continuing to love the man.
I dabbed at my nose; It had stopped bleeding. I carefully folded the tissue and stuffed it into my pocket. “If it’s any consolation,” I said when I looked up again, “Elliot died alone and miserable.”
“Good.”
“Alone by choice.” As the two women sat on the bench I paced around in front of the phone box and described Elliot’s withdrawal from his friends when he had his diagnosis, his weeks in the hospital unable to speak and clearing out his apartment after his death. I told them that I’d found the Christmas cards and the picture of him embracing Julian from behind.
“I took that picture, right here,” Jessie said, pointing to the phone box. “I was working on a documentary about Victorian wash houses in London and they came with me when I was taking some stills of that one.” She gestured toward the hulking red brick building across the street. The Wells and Camden Baths and Wash House was carved in a long band of marble across the length of it.
“They rang a friend from there, both of them squeezing into it, and I took their picture.” Jessie’s voice had softened. “They were so happy together.”
I suspected her mother hadn’t told Jessie that Elliot had found love again in the year before he died. I said, “Your mother told me your brother was friends with Nick Drake.”
“I suppose. It was an odd friendship, really. They never went anywhere together, just talked on the Heath. I was in film school and one assignment was to produce an interview with someone. I asked Julian to ask Nick, since they were already doing nothing but talking in one place, and he said yes. But then Elliot came along and swept Julian off his feet.”
Bitterness crept back into her voice at these last words. It wasn’t hard to imagine the jumble of feelings the young Jessie had experienced. It was one thing to have your brother preoccupied by a quiet boy his age who could be useful to you, another to have him pried away from your side by a more worldly, experienced man.
“On his couch we found a Walkman with a tape of Nick Drake songs,” I said. “It was probably the last music he listened to before he went to the hospital.”
The women were silent, each lost in thought. A bruise had formed below Jessie’s left eye.
“Sorry about the punch,” I mumbled.
“No, it was my fault.”
A moment passed. I said, “I’ll just say goodbye now. I’ll be going back to Boston soon.” I hadn’t been thinking that at all until that moment, but I knew it was true. It felt as though my mission was accomplished.
Janet Turner stood up. She held out her hand and I took it. “Thank you,” she said. “I wish you a happy future.”
I took my time going back to Kentish Town. I wandered down through the Heath, past the swimming pond. The afternoon was hot and sunny and the grass was crowded with bodies but I didn’t look for Jeffrey. I went to the top of Parliament Hill and watched the kites, took in the view of the city. At the café at bottom of the hill the children licked ice cream while their parents read the Sunday papers. On the corner on the other side of the street down from the entrance I stopped at the Bull and Last for a pint and a sandwich before walking all the way back to Jeffrey’s Place.
I was sorry Chris and Eve were not home. I wanted to tell them about my day, take them out to dinner. In the morning I would call British Airways to book a flight home.
As I climbed the stairs I heard a familiar buzz start up in my room. I was sure I’d turned the fax machine off but maybe Chris had had to use it. I stood next to it and read as the paper inched out.
By December things were going really well with us. I decided to go out to see my folks for Christmas and tell them the truth. I hardly ever talked to them since Lureen and I moved east. Not that I had any little bit of hope that they were going to pat me on the back and say We just want you to be happy, son. I mean, they weren’t thrilled about Lureen for some reason so how the hell were they going to accept their only son as a fag? But I felt strong and I just wanted to tell them something that for once they couldn’t cover over with make believe. Ed said his folks were dead and he hadn’t done the Christmas thing in a long time but he didn’t want mine to know I’d hooked up with one of their old customers so he declined my insane invitation to come to Colorado with me. He asked me to just bring back a cowboy hat for him.
So I went out for Christmas and it was exactly as I expected. I wasn’t even nervous flying out. I did tell them when I called home that Lureen and I had split and they made all the right sympathetic noises but I could tell they weren’t even surprised.
I told them Christmas day. That I was gay and had a boyfriend and that’s why I left my wife. My old man ranted and raved and my mother cried and my uncle just looked at me and shook his head like why in the world did I need to do this now? But after the big blow up a cousin of my mother and her family came for Christmas dinner and they didn’t say a word to them about me. I stayed the whole week because it snowed and it would’ve been too hard to get out and anyway I had a plane ticket I couldn’t change. Everybody acted like nothing was different except my marriage. I didn’t even force the issue. That was the way they wanted to deal with it so I thought OK I’m done here. It’ll be just Ed and me.
I called him up Christmas night to tell him how it went and that I’d mailed him the black hat he got to wear when he came to the ranch, and I was going to wear another one back, for me. I thought he sounded tired, and he said it was so but that he was usually exhausted by the time a school vacation rolled around. That was the last time I talked to him. I called every day after that and only got the answering machine.
When I landed at Logan on New Year’s Eve day I called from the airport. He knew when I was getting back but no answer. I went straight to his place but he didn’t answer the buzzer. I walked around the block looking for his car and finally found it. Thought maybe he got my return date wrong and went to a party. Went back the next day, still nothing, car in the same place. So I’m calling every day leaving messages, sending notes, scared to death that he had an accident and nobody knows about me. Because I never met any of his friends, didn’t know exactly the name of the high school he worked at. All he said was that it was down on the South Shore.
Law school starts up again and I go but I’m a mess. I start looking for his car twice a day and most times in the evening I find it on one of the streets but never in the same place and sometimes it’s nowhere to be seen. Once when I see it’s there I go to his place and ring the buzzer but nothing. I call, nothing. One day I call and there’s no answering machine. I go over and his name’s still on the doorbell and when I look in the lobby I don’t see mail sticking out of his mailbox so somebody’s getting it. I ring the super’s bell and he says he saw Ed go out that morning. I started out worried but now I’m mad as hell. I send him a letter and say fuck you, coward. You robbed me.
I was thinking about the war and the nightmares he had sometimes. He wouldn’t talk about them but he said if he ever hurt me, I should leave him. He meant for good, not just for the night. I’d say, Yeah right and laugh like he was joking. I should’ve pushed it but I didn’t. I should’ve made him tell me what happened but I thought if I went the extra step and pissed off my folks by telling them about me, cut all the ties like he did, that would be the thing that would do it. Open him up.
So I get back from doing just that and realize that fuck it, he took the decision himself. Stole all the power for himself, deciding when to end it with me for my own good, no discussion. In one month I went from feeling like I’d never love anyone like I loved him to feeling like I’d never love anyone again. Last scrap of love in me burnt to a crisp by anger.
I was too messed up to go on with law school. Dropped out, got work as a paralegal. Once in a while I took a detour and walked by his building on the way home from work. Never saw a light on in the window. By spring I didn’t see his car anymore. Figured he moved away.
One day I was driving by and saw some people come out of his building carrying a couch. His couch. The one we fucked on the first time. And other times. Looked up and swore I saw him in the window watching them, listening to his Walkman like he used to. Looked down at them setting the couch on the curb next to a lot of trash bags. Looked up and the window was empty. Then the people were hugging each other and crying. That’s when I knew he was dead. After they went back in I parked the car. Went over and took the dirtiest cushion that had all the stains we made. That is the only damn thing I have left to remind me.
Diary entry >>
Scenes from Maurice: http://youtu.be/YwJvqjTJW10
The Wells and Camden Baths and Wash House does exist and there is a phone box across the street from it