Ideas of Heaven Page 4

  I was an undereducated slob, compared to him, but one thing about being a dancer is you know how to pick things up. “I like that line you sing,” I said, “about how I’ll only grieve if I should lose the burdens that I bear.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

  I WENT TO more rehearsals. I didn’t scold or correct and I said “bravo” or “stupendo” when he was done. I patted him on the arm and once I hugged him. We talked about Verdi, which I at least did not sound like a fool about, and about the history of New York office buildings, and about what he had to do to keep his voice in health. I did not ask, really, about his health.

  “I am all fire and you all ice,” he sang. I told him they were torch songs. “Gender reversals of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet,” Carl said. “A woman bragging about her unquenched longing. Very modern.” What a swooner he was, how in love with pure feeling. And he was a huge hit at rehearsals. He had a theory about this too. “No good words are said anymore,” he said, “on behalf of torturing yourself for love. Everybody’s told to get over it. But a little bleeding is good.”

  I had noticed that hopeless passion was still in high style in certain corners of the gay world, but I kept this observation to myself. “The pianist needs to practice,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  I wanted to cook for him, this flimsy little Carl, and I got him to come for dinner on a Sunday night. “Whoa,” he said, when he saw my tenement apartment, which had been carved out of the wilderness almost thirty years before. “You’ve got everything packed in, like a ship.” For supper I fed him beautiful food that was good for his vocal cords, no dairy or meat, only bright and cooling flavors. Blue Point oysters, cold sorrel soup, prawns with pea shoots and fresh ginger, purslane and mint salad. Everything vibrant and clarifying. Golden raspberries and bittersweet chocolate for dessert. I had knocked myself out, as he could not fail to notice.

  The food made him happy. He said that when he first came to New York, he had been so poor he had eaten nothing but tofu and Minute Rice. Even now I had to show him how to eat a raw oyster. I felt like his uncle. That was not who I wanted to be.

  “This is as good as food in Italy,” he said. “In my Surviving Partners Group there’s a guy who’s a chef. I’m sure his food isn’t better than this.”

  “Surely not,” I said.

  His Surviving Partners Group met every week. It was a great group, he said. But for him personally what was most helpful was meditation.

  “Eating is good too,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I forgot how good it was.”

  A beautiful suspense hovered around the table when he left for a minute to go off to the bathroom. When he came back into the room, I stood up and I put my arms around him. He was so wispy and slight, much shorter than I was. He ducked his head, like someone sneaking under a gate, and he slipped right out of my arms.

  He did not mean to mock me, he had only been embarrassed. Neither of us moved. I felt old. A vain old queen, a self-deluded old fruit.

  I asked if he wanted coffee and we sat down and drank it. He praised my espresso so lavishly that I couldn’t tell if he only felt sorry for me or if he was trying to be friends nonetheless, if such a thing were possible with a grotesque old lech like myself.

  AT THE NEXT REHEARSAL Carl waved when he saw me. He came over and told me about how much better he sang ever since he’d eaten my dinner. “When I do my vocal exercises now,” he said, “my voice is so good I move myself to tears.” I thought he did like me. And perhaps I had not allowed him the time that someone like him needed. Perhaps the situation was not entirely hopeless.

  When I went home after rehearsal, I lay in bed musing about what might happen between us after all. If I were patient. He had not been with anyone since his lover died and I had not been with anyone in years. I had underestimated the depth of the enterprise, the large and moving drama involved. He would probably have to make the first move. He would surprise me, and we would laugh at my surprise.

  In the middle of the night I got up and looked at the condoms in my night table drawer to see if the dates printed on the packets showed they were past safe use. I threw out the one that was expired. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear, hunched over, with my head buried in my hands. I had never asked Carl what his HIV status was. I was ready to go to bed with him without any protection at all, if that was what he wanted. All those years of being so careful I wouldn’t risk going out of my own living room, and now I would have bargained away anything to have Carl. I was beyond all reason.

  AT WORK the next day the phone rang, and it was Carl inviting me over for brunch on Saturday. He was ashamed to cook for me, he said, but he could buy bagels as well as the next person.

  He lived in a remote and dull section of Queens, on a street full of what had once been private houses. He had a nice little back apartment, with a view of the yard. “Welcome to my monkish cell,” he said.

  It was not cell-like—it was quite cozy and bright—but I was spooked by the shrines in it. On a small table, spread with a white linen cloth, was a collection of photos of his dead lover, who was a pleasant-looking young man, dark-haired and stocky. Jonathan waved from a deck chair on a beach, he stood in front of a Roman ruin and a bright blue sky, he laughed against Carl’s shoulder at someone’s birthday party. In another corner was an altar to the Buddha, with a stone statue of a thin, pigeon-chested Buddha facing into the room, and a fatter, calmer Buddha embroidered into a square of fringed brocade hanging on the wall. A single deep-blue iris, pure and wilting, stood in a vase. I did not like any of it.

  But Carl had clearly wanted me to see it. He gave me a tour of all the photos, naming every guest at the birthday party. He gestured to the Buddhas and said, “Those are my buddies there.” He told me that he did Vipassana meditation, adapted from what they did in Burma and Thailand, but that was a Tibetan tanka on the wall. “Very nice,” I said. “It’s the medicine Buddha,” he said. “That’s his healing unguent in the bowl in his hand.” I chewed my bagel and nodded.

  I gossiped about the rehearsals, just to get us somewhere else. “Did you see,” I said, “how Brice is ogling that first violinist in the quartet? I expect him to drool all over the man’s bow any minute. It’s not subtle.” Brice was the show’s organizer.

  “I missed it,” he said. “I’m bad at noticing who’s after who.”

  “Brice is so obvious.”

  “What can I tell you?” he said. “I’m away from all that. It’s not in my world.”

  What world was he in?

  “People don’t think enough about celibacy,” he said. “It hasn’t been thought about very well in our era. It has a long history as a respected behavior. It has its beauty.”

  I knew then that he’d brought me here to say this, with the fittings of his cell as backdrop. “The Buddha never had sex?” I said. “I thought he had a family.”

  “That was before he was the Buddha.”

  “Don’t get too carried away. You know you’ll want someone sometime.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s unnatural at your age.”

  “I’m not unhappy.”

  Oh, honey, I thought, I didn’t tempt you for a second, did I?

  “A sexless life will ruin your voice,” I said. “I’m not kidding. You’ll sound like some wan little old lady. You already have to worry about that.”

  “Oh,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  “You already have some problems in the lower register.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You’ll sound like a squawking hen in a few years.”

  “No more,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  I WAS DEPRESSED after this visit, but lack of hope didn’t cure me either. I didn’t stop wanting Carl, and what I wanted kept playing itself out in my mind over and over. At home I would sometimes be slumped in an armchair, reading a book or watching TV, and not even know that I was lost in reverie, until I heard m
yself say out loud, “Oh, honey.” It was terrible to hear my own voice like that, whimpering with phantom love. I was afraid I was going to cry out like this at my desk at work, with other people in earshot, but I never did.

  We were civil with each other at the last rehearsal. Actually, Carl was more than civil. He made a decent effort to converse, while the string quartet was busy going through its number. “I read,” he said to me, “that Rome is all different now because they’ve banned cars from parts of it.”

  “You know what I read?” I said. “I read that there was a man who was very high up in a Buddhist organization who went around sleeping with people and giving them AIDS. Lots of young men. He knew he had it and he didn’t tell anyone he slept with. He thought he could control his karma.”

  “Oh,” Carl said. “That happened years ago. When did you read it?”

  “A while ago.”

  “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Those are the guys you want to emulate,” I said. “Those are your shining models.”

  “No,” he said. “That was one guy.”

  “Lust crops up,” I said. “Can’t keep it down.”

  “That’s not what that story means,” he said. “It’s about arrogance and delusion, not lust. He could have used condoms.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sure. You’ll be like him. You’ll see.”

  He reddened then. I’d forgotten that his HIV status might be positive, for all I knew, which did deepen the insult. He shook his head at me. “Oh, Duncan,” he said, sourly.

  ON THE NIGHT of the concert, I dressed very nicely. I wore a slate-blue shirt, a beautiful celadon tie that Andre had once given me, a stone-gray sports jacket. I hadn’t looked that good in years. I sat with some other people from work in a chilly section of the orchestra seats. The string quartet was first, playing a stodgy piece badly. I really did not hear anything until Carl walked onstage to sing Jonathan’s songs. He looked pale as marble, an angel with a shimmering crewcut.

  He had a few intonation problems at first but sounded lovely and sure once he got going. Jonathan had written him easy music, except for a few jagged rhythm changes “Viver ardendo e non sentire il male,” he sang. “To live burning and not to feel the pain.” Wasn’t it enough that I suffered at home? Did I have to come here and hear my beloved wail about the trials of the rejected? I wanted to shout in protest. I should not have come, I saw. Who would have cared if I hadn’t come?

  Then my protest and exasperation fused with the plaint of the songs, with their familiar trouble, and I had a bluesy ache in my chest that was oddly close to solace. I felt the honor of my longing. This idea did quite a lot for me. My situation, ludicrous as it was, at least lost the taint of humiliation.

  When the songs were over, I was surprised when the applause did not go on for hours, but people seemed to have liked the pieces well enough. I was still in a faint trance when the concert broke for intermission. I stayed alone in my seat while the others milled around. The second half was a woodwind quintet I had never liked, and they did three numbers. When they were finally done, I moved through the crowd and found Carl in the lobby, surrounded by people clasping him in congratulation. “Bravissimo,” I said to him. “Really.” He gave me a sudden, broad smile—praise from me probably did mean something to him—but he was busy thanking people.

  I stayed around long enough to get pulled along with a group that went out for drinks afterward. I did not ask if I could come, and perhaps I wasn’t welcome, but no one said so. We sat at a big round table in a bar with peach-tinted walls. The accompanist, whose playing hadn’t been as bad as I’d feared, kept leaning toward Carl with an excited attention that looked like a crush to me.

  Carl himself was busy introducing everyone to a young giant of a man who turned out to be the chef from his Surviving Partners Group. “My very good friend,” Carl called him. “Duncan, you should talk to Larry about his food. You’re the one who’ll really appreciate what he does.”

  “Oh, I will?” I said.

  “I like food,” someone else at the table said. “I like it all the time.”

  I was about to say, “Cooks who are fans of themselves tend to show it,” but then I didn’t. I decided to shut up, for a change. There was no point to my baiting anyone at the table just for fun, in front of Carl. No point at all now.

  But it was hard for me. I stayed sullenly quiet for a while, sulking and leaning back in my chair. When Chef Larry told a funny story about his poultry supplier, I didn’t laugh. When Carl talked about a production of Wozzeck that he was about to go on tour with, all through Canada, from Quebec to Vancouver, I didn’t ask when he was leaving or when he was coming back. I didn’t say a word. And when the pianist said he had been practicing too much in a cold room and he complained of stiffness in his elbow, I gave him a very good exercise he could do at home. I explained it without sarcasm or snottiness or condescension. I was at my all-time nicest, for Carl’s sake, for Carl’s benefit. I don’t know that he, or anyone, noticed.

  CARL WENT ON tour for six months, as I discovered from his phone machine when I called him later. It didn’t surprise me that he hadn’t said goodbye—I was probably someone that he wanted out of his life. Still I dreamed of his return. How could I not? When he came back, I would tell him how I had begun to think of myself as a celibate too, that I had moved toward a different respect for that as a way to be, and perhaps we could be friends now on a new basis. It made me happy to think of our new comradeship, his easy and constant company, his profile next to me at operas and plays. But I knew, even as I imagined our lively and natural conversations on topics of real interest to both of us, that my reasoning was insincere, only a ruse to win Carl to me in whatever way I could.

  But since I could not talk to Carl, who was off singing to the Canadians, I was left with my own recitation of why I treasured austerity running in a loop through my mind. I was the captive audience for what was meant to disarm Carl. This was not the worst speech to be trapped with. It made the tasks I did in solitude—my exercises, my errands—seem finer.

  The exercises were a particular annoyance to me. I had done exercises all my life (except for some goofing off during the booking-agency years) but now I had arthritis, plague of old athletes and dancers, in my knees and just starting in my hips. All that hopping and turning and high-kicking had been hard on the cartilage. I had to go through a full range of motion every day to keep the joints flexible, which they did not want to be anymore. Some of this hurt and I hated being a sloppy mover. But now, swinging my leg to the side, I felt less disgraced by it. My routine, performed alone in my bare bedroom, had its merit and order. An hour in the morning and stretches at night. I had my privacy and my discipline.

  Every Tuesday evening I went to a guy named Fernando for bodywork. I lay on my stomach while he bent my knees and hooked his thumbs into my muscles. The word ouch did not impress him. He had been a dancer once too. “Stay skinny, that’s important,” he said. “Good for arthritis, good for your sex life.”

  “Good for what? I can’t remember what that is.”

  “You can remember, Dunc. You’re not that old.” Free flirting came with his massages.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I like my quiet. A life of abstaining isn’t as bad as people think.”

  “So they tell me,” Fernando said. “I do hear that.”

  “See?” I said. “There’s a lot of it going around. It’s an idea whose time has come.”

  “For some. Maybe.”

  “I think I’m happier. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That I believe.”

  I HAD NEVER been able to throw away the program from Carl’s concert, and it lay on a small table near the door, where I saw it whenever I came in or went out. I would read over his name with a ripple of intimate recognition. A ripple or a pang, depending on my mood. The very casualness of its placement on the table pleased me.

  I knew from the message on Carl’s phone machin
e that he was returning from Canada at the end of September. Once he was home, I would call him, and at the very least there would be friendliness between us. The wait seemed very long. Thirty days hath September, and in the last week I went to movies every night to keep busy. I saw too many bad, raucous comedies and bloody cop movies. The only thing I liked was a biopic about neurotic artists in the twenties.

  When I came out of it into the lobby, there was a crush getting to the doors, and a man in front of me said, “No one pushes like this in Toronto.” I took it as a good omen to hear some word in the air about Canada. The man who spoke was not bad-looking either, nicely muscled in his T-shirt, and he held another man by the elbow to keep from getting dragged away by the crowd. It took me a second before I saw that the other man was Carl. His neck was sunburned and he had let his hair grow longer.

  And Carl saw me. “Hey! Hello!” he said.

  He acted perfectly happy to see me. Once we were all out on the street, he introduced me to his companion. Josh, the man’s name was, and they had met backstage in Windsor, Ontario.

  “And then what could I do? I just packed up and went with him on the rest of the tour,” Josh said. “I have heard Wozzeck performed more times than any other human being on the planet. Berg is not that easy on the ears either.”

  “I like him,” I said.

  “It was great to have company on the road,” Carl said. “You know how the road gets. You and I talked about that.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I had fun hanging out with the tour,” Josh said.

  “Are you back here for good?” I said.

  “We’re looking for a bigger apartment,” Josh said. “I like Queens though. It’s not how I thought it would be.”

  “Some people like Queens,” I said. “Certain timid types like Queens.”

  “Don’t mind Duncan,” Carl said.

  “We’ll invite you over when we get settled in,” Josh said.