I wept when I saw his body in its grim finality. Ravaged as he had become, underneath it, I saw him the way he was when he was still healthy and young and full of hopefulness.
His family did not acknowledge me and certainly did not show they knew who I was. I stopped caring about that a long time ago and I did not flaunt being there. I was dressed conservatively, wearing a nicely cut dark blue suit from Mario Dessuti and a maroon tie on a white shirt. Very proper. But Bruce would have found it sexy.
It's nice wrapping paper, Babe, he'd say with a Bogart voice. Just makes me want what's inside that much more.
Good-bye, kid, I said sotto voce, looking at the great rosette at the end of the nave.
And then I was flooded with a funny kind of joy. His death did not make everything that had preceded it any less harrowing, and his death was not the glue to rejoin my heart so that it stayed, but, nevertheless, a sense of calm that was identical with that sense of joy I just mentioned, came over me.
I walked back from the church light-headed and horny. I wanted sex the way I had not wanted it for years, and it did not make me forlorn. It made my eyes open big and become bright as they looked at everything and everybody they passed.
He was all in black and young, and lean, and built, and he did not know a damn thing about what the world was really about. He did not know yet how easily things get broken.
I smiled wistfully; to myself, I thought; but it showed on my face, and since he was looking at me, and I was looking at him, he thought the smile was for him. In consequence, he smiled back.
He relaxed into the smile. He had been leaning in the doorway with his unlighted cigarette for nearly an hour, nervous because of his desire, and frightened because of the impending unknown. At least, that's what I thought.
My smile caught him, eased him, recognized him.
I said Hello to him and asked him what he was doing.
Waiting, he said.
For what? I said
That's just it, he answered. I don't know.
You're waiting for what you want, I offered, trying to be supportive.
I'm waiting to find out what I want.
Don't you know what it is? I asked, pushing him gently.
I know what you want me to say.
What do I want you to say?
That I want you.
Do you?
That's a leading question and I refuse to answer it, the young man said with a grin.
I took his hand and he let me, and I brought it up to my lips and kissed the clean open palm gently and looked into his eyes.
You are young, I said, and you will get old, and this beauty that surrounds you now and emerges from you will become tarnished. Things that are whole now will be broken. Things you are happy to think about now will become things it pains you to speak of.
I want to make love with you if you want me, he said.
I looked at him with that happiness I'd felt fleetingly, flooding over me now.
I said Yes.
I pointed in the direction I was walking. I live two blocks around the corner, I said.
He stuck the unlighted cigarette in the pocket of his leather jacket and gave me his hand to hold and leaned against me as we walked.
Tell me your name, he said.
Walter, I said.
Like water flowing over me, water I can bathe myself in, he said.
Like that kind of water, I said laughing.
Don't condescend to me, he said.
I'm not, I said. If thinking you're delightful is condescending, I'm sorry. But you'll understand when you get to be my age, I added in order to check if everything was still going to be fine.
Ok, he said smiling like a child and nuzzling his face into my neck and leaving a penetrating kiss there.
The dancers became fragmented into disconnected pieces by the pulsations of the strobe lights. Their stripped torsos shone from sweat as they threw themselves into ecstatic trances in The Cage in the Prison a few blocks from the Hudson River on Thirteenth Street.
I entered reluctantly but I knew he was there, and I had become too involved to let it go.
He saw me and his face remained blank, his eyes glazed with excitement I had not seen in them for several weeks now.
He was not bare-chested. He wore a skin tight, onion skin thin, sleeveless black shirt with i need to be punished written across his chest in yellow italics. His jeans were still on but he was barefoot and he wore a collar.
His companion was like a model and wearing an Armani suit over a tight scoop neck white t shirt.
He pushed Reed to the wall and holding his jaw, kissed him hard on his mouth. He stopped and moved back, looked at the boy and with a movement faster than sight, struck him on the cheek so that everything rang and the pain grew to a searing intensity.
Reed took that hand and brought it palm open, the palm that had stuck him, to his lips and, bending, kissed it.
It was a scene I knew then that I would see forever, for my eternal diminution. I was jealous. The man in the Armani suit possessed him. I did not exist except to feel not being there ^Ö to resign myself not to being there, where ever there was.
You don't need to watch me, Reed said.
Why did you do that? I repeated.
Look, Reed said, I offer you what I want to give. Anything beyond that is violation.
He was scorning my tears. I wanted to hit him.
You're jealous, he said, and that's not my problem. It's yours. And I don't have to deal with it. You do.
My belly was ripping with I did not know what. It was contracted. My jaw was tight. My breathing was hard.
You bastard, I said.
I did not slap. I hooked him in the chest with a punch that threw itself. Exhilaration I had never known escaped from me, whether I wanted it to or not.
Reed took my face then and brought my lips to his and gave me a long deep kiss into which he squeezed every glory he possessed.
And then he looked at me and smiled gently and he said, Now you know how all the men I kiss feel. I don't think any one person will ever be enough for me. And certainly, he added with a wink and a smile and an alluring twist of his neck, not you.
But I wanted him then with a want that turned me inside out and made me its slave.
He had been gone about an hour, and I had been in a painful paralysis. My body vibrated with negation.
Unable to bear it, it, a poisoned breath gripping my throat, I went into the street and began walking towards the river, enveloped deeply enough in a sense of my own dreariness that I had no spark. I could not look at anyone who passed me.
Hey, Walt; it was Tony. I stopped, turned.
I was glad to see him.
You look like shit, he said. Thinking of Bruce?
No, I said.
No, he said, surprised and curious.
Bruce is dead; he's ok. He's finished with it. Those of us who stayed alive have to put up with living.
You want to talk about it? he said, throwing an arm around me.
My petulant self-absorption did not last very long, I'm happy to report. I realized that what Humphrey Bogart said to Claude Reins at the end of Casablanca applied to me too. And the world situation is just as bad now as it was then, and getting worse.
It was a bright and sunny late April morning and I was accepting who I was, walking to what used to be the IND on Sixth Avenue at Eighth Street up to Eighty-first, and then I walked across the park to the Museum, where I was putting together a catalog for the monster Dutch exhibition the Museum was preparing.
He was wearing white shorts, a sky blue t shirt, hiking boots and knee socks of the same sky blue color as his shirt with navy blue bands around his calves just below his knees. He was blond and frisky, tall, wiry, well built, and when I got near, there was no doubt of it, he was handsome.
He was giving out leaflets.
I took one.
Thank you, I said.
Thank you, he grinned.
We locked smiles.
Walter, I said, extending my hand.
David, he said, taking it.
I work in the Museum, I said pointing.
What time is your day finished?
Five, I answered.
Meet me here after work and we can go for a drink and get to know each other?
Sure, I said.
We shook again, and I headed towards the Museum with a high heart.
It was my lunch time stroll through the park. I sat down upon a bench in the sunlight. I emptied my mind of the images I had looked at and written about all morning. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the leaflet David had given me, unfolded it, and read it.
It was copy of a story by Tom Shanker in The New York Times about the world-wide trade in weapons.
When combining totals for arms sales to developed and developing nations^Åthe United States led with $16.9 billion, followed by Russia with $8.7 billion and Britain with $3.1 billion. The 2006 sales figures for all three nations were higher than their totals in 2005.
China plays an interesting role in the arms market, being both a purchaser of advanced air and naval weapons, from Russia, and as a supplier of less-expensive arms to developing nations.
I read the words and understood them. But I could not sink my teeth into them. Instead I kept thinking about him. I wanted to brush his hair off his forehead, touch his chest, press my lips to his, feel our hips pressing into each other.
There is a picture that usually hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in Holland. It has always been special to me. It is a painting by Rembrandt of the prophet Jeremiah sitting on a hillside above the city of Jerusalem.
The city itself is orange with flame as the prophet mourns its destruction, leaning his face on his left palm, seated between the rock upon which his elbow leans and a molten milky mist that runs alongside him. It even surrounds him, this mist, where he sits, like a halo encompassing him body and soul, for it is, after all the holy spirit which always breaks free and reveals itself at times of true mourning and lamentation.
That picture was in my office that morning.
I described it for the catalogue. Parallel to that essay, the idea of the painting as an object took hold of me. I thought of it as it had once been, that canvass I was looking at, I saw it as something not-yet-painted, the canvass beneath the paint, when Rembrandt first put it on his easel in his house in Amsterdam sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century...in the mid-sixteen hundreds! Like a movie screen as you are sitting in the lighted theater waiting for the film to begin. And here it is now an object in the twenty-first century among many other objects in my office. But it, of course...not because it is an old canvass is it preserved. The canvass is now the painting and the painting is also the vehicle for, the conveyancer of, a complex human spirit that is all-encompassing as it beholds things go smash.
I always get sleepy around three thirty. I let my head drop into my folded arms over the pile of books open in front of my computer and I felt the warm waves rolling inside my cranium.
He was kissing me on the back of my neck and I was bristling with excitement and then I felt the numbness of my hands and fingers, and they buzzed as feeling returned to them. I sat up and shivered.
David smiled.
What are you smiling for? I said, smiling myself
He smiled a gentle smile of sad understanding but said nothing.
I stopped as the darkness was beginning to darken the air and we were walking up a gentle incline over a grass-flattened path. There was a large tree with turned leaves tenuously hanging, on its crest. And its umbrageous branches spread greatly enough to encompass now us. I took his head in my hands and pressed his lips to mine.
You are so sweet, I said, melting in the haze of his gentleness, hard with happiness.
He took my hand and we walked through the park and took the subway to Astor Place.
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