\u201cWhat age?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, without even an instant\u2019s pause or deliberation, she turned to me.<\/p>\n
\u201cThirty-one,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat? You know, like, for sure?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTotally. Thirty-one. I\u2019ve got pictures!\u201d<\/p>\n
And she did, right there on her phone. \u201cLook at that face,\u201d she said. \u201cIt says, This will be messy but you\u2019ll enjoy it<\/em>.\u201d She sighed. \u201cHonestly, that\u2019s about all I knew how to say at thirty-one. God, though, would you look at her?\u201d<\/p>\n And there she was: big black eyes, unmistakably youthful brightness of complexion, a glint of flirty mischief gathering at the corners of her mouth, her arched brow. Totally her. Totally hot.<\/p>\n I wish I could tell you in simple terms what it is we make together, she and I. The names there are tend to be a bit off-key. We\u2019ve cared for each other, durably and devotedly, for decades, but we are not \u201cfamily\u201d in the eyes of any relevant authorities, and certainly not a couple. (She\u2019s a lesbian; I\u2019m a straight man.) We\u2019re not roommates or lovers or coparents. We are not co-owners of a condo, a couch, a dog. It\u2019s true that we\u2019re both professors and so maybe, on somebody\u2019s HR spreadsheet, we go down as \u201ccolleagues.\u201d<\/p>\n What we are is friends\u2014\u201cjust friends,\u201d as I said to dozens of inquiring hospital personnel over the last years\u2014but that\u2019s right only to the degree that you can infuse that pale and minimizing term with something considerably more full-spectrum and radiant, something that transpires nearer to the scale of, say, the known world.<\/p>\n Not that this untitled status has much mattered to us. If anything, it\u2019s been our element. Years ago, when I became an ex-stepparent, of all unheard-of things, to two little girls I loved very much, but to whom I was suddenly no longer attached by any legal relation or binding title, she held me together through the frantic and devastated worst of it. Whatever the altered circumstances, she insisted, the girls and I would NOT lose one another. And then, with cajoling gentleness and an entirely characteristic ferocity of mind, she made me believe it. Who could be more convincing? A grown-up queer person out in the unpropitious world, she\u2019d had long and galvanizing experience in nurturing loves that were ardent, life-defining, and did not rest easily in conventional names. Did she lie to me about such things? She did not. And anyway, what else had we been writing about and living through all these accumulating years?<\/p>\n What she meant, I should say, is that we\u2019re both scholars of something called \u201cqueer theory\u201d\u2014she is, in fact, one of the best ever to do it<\/a>\u2014which is an academic discipline that, among its other graces, fortifies you with ways to think expansively about all the uncharted, errant, underheralded kinds of attachment that knit together our lives. The whole swirling world of fractious and sustaining intimacies that travel under no dignifying title, go by no official name: this, precisely, is the terrain of so much queer theoretical inquiry and imagination. And it\u2019s also exactly where my friend and I had lived, along with most all our dearest compatriots, for a long, long time. Who the fuck needed names?<\/p>\n When that handful of us gathered around her last spring in the hospital\u2014coparents, partners, siblings, children, friends\u2014names and titles were, I can tell you, not much on anybody\u2019s mind. Other tasks predominated. We adjusted her blankets. We helped her with her phone. Her feet were cold, so we took turns warming them with our hands. We read out passages from her favorite children\u2019s books, told sex jokes, recollected about trips, breakups, dresses, parties, bars.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what our togetherness looked like at the end. We were there, all of us, just to help her\u2014our funny, our famously generous, once-upon-a-time messy, deliriously brilliant, and all of 57-goddamn-years-old friend\u2014in the mystifying labor she had before her. This was the labor of somehow leaving us, leaving everything, as gently as was possible.<\/p>\n I stood in the glare of the overlit hallway, shell-shocked and ashen, and ran into a friend heading out. \u201cOh, Pete,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s awful. But \u2026\u201d She put her hands on my shoulders. \u201cTo be surrounded by so much laughter? All that love? Sweetie, we should all be so lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Maybe. I was in any case not prepared for it\u2014let\u2019s draw a curtain of decorum over how<\/em> not prepared for it I was\u2014though perhaps I should have been.<\/p>\n Any even moderately attentive student of the literary of history of sexuality can tell you that the archive of queer deathbed scenes is, dismayingly, replete. Traverse only the smallest corner of that archive and you\u2019ll come away with an extensive dramatis personae. Walt Whitman\u2019s hovering ministrations at the bedsides of the infirm and mortally wounded, Audre Lorde in the cancer ward, the numberless scenes of tenderness, rage, and devotion that came with the AIDS crisis, made indelible by Essex Hemphill, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, Thom Gunn\u2014on and on. Even that slender collection is more than enough if what you want, as a reader, is for your heart to break and break and break.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll say that, for me, nothing in the whole of this mournful canon lands with quite the nuclear-grade power of devastation as that \u00fcber-canonical monument to promise, deception, and ruin, Henry James\u2019s The Portrait of a Lady<\/em>. In seminars, I soft-pedal it to my students. \u201cThis,\u201d I like to say, \u201cis by my count one of the maybe seven or eight most perfect artifacts of human culture in the history of the species.\u201d Teaching: an art of subtle persuasions. But hype it though I might, teach it as often as I do, still I am never sufficiently braced for the handful of chapters near the end, where the novel somehow drops into a new gear, finds still another register for sorrowfulness.<\/p>\n Our battered heroine, Isabel, her bright life blighted by a catastrophically ill-chosen marriage to one of the worst men in Europe, has rushed back to England, and to the bedside of her cherished, her tall, ugly, witty, doting, dying cousin Ralph. It\u2019s the pivot, really, that kills me. In a novel so fixated upon the perils, coercions, and not infrequently the miseries of matrimony\u2014for women especially\u2014you can hardly miss that the great dramatic climax, and indeed the novel\u2019s principal tragedy, arrives precisely here<\/em>, in the death of a person so conspicuously removed from the machinations of the marriage plot.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s more. For at just the moment when the full malignity of Isabel\u2019s marriage has at last revealed itself (\u201cthe truth of things,\u201d we are famously told, \u201ctheir mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness\u201d), James treats us, in almost the next breath, to about the grandest, oddest, sweetest<\/em> convocation of queerer kin you could hope for\u2014a makeshift gathering of intimates brought to poor Ralph\u2019s bedside by nothing more binding than the gregarious generosity of their friendship. There\u2019s awkward and decent-hearted Lord Warburton, Isabel\u2019s failed suitor; Ralph\u2019s mother, starchy Mrs. Touchett, who has spent the better part of her life living a continent apart from her spouse; the venturesome, sometimes vulgar American Henrietta Stackpole, along with her occasional companion, the comic Mr. Bantling, to whom she is evidently now betrothed. (In case we\u2019ve missed any of the contrastive point, we are given Isabel\u2019s first response to the news of engagement: \u201cThere was a want of originality in her marrying him\u2014there was even a kind of stupidity; and for a moment, to Isabel\u2019s sense, the dreariness of the world took on a deeper tinge.\u201d) And of course there\u2019s Isabel herself, wounded and baffled, more or less the whole of whose life has by now been poisoned by sinister duplicities of Continental life.<\/p>\n So the suddenly freer air of this small convening\u2014emerging as it does from out of such confounding cruelty, the wraparound dreariness and stupidity of Isabel\u2019s life as a wife\u2014feels for all the world like something larger, something altogether weightier than a mere respite for Isabel\u2019s afflicted spirit. Call it, if you want, a utopian horizon. Or, if that seems a shade fanciful, a counterplot: a current running crosswise to all the novel\u2019s genteel matrimonial brutalities.<\/p>\n Like a lot of Jamesian ideals, though, it is one whose promise is accessible only through a tremendous ordeal of grief. \u201cTouchett was just the same as usual,\u201d Mr. Bantling informs Isabel, \u201cexcept that he was in bed, and that he looks tremendously ill, and that he can\u2019t speak.\u201d \u201cHe was immensely friendly all the same,\u201d he adds, \u201cjust as clever as ever. It\u2019s awfully sad.\u201d Sad it unrelentingly is. But nestled even here, inside the hushed awfulness of Ralph\u2019s death, there is restoration, a final dropping of masks, a communion in loves at last fully avowed. Isabel understands that even in the lowest depths of her misery she \u201cnever lost the sense that they were still together.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t care for anything but you,\u201d she tells him:<\/p>\n Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I am happier than I have been for a long time. And I want you to be happy\u2014not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I am near you and I love you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ralph does die, yes, but not before offering to Isabel his own bedside moral: \u201cif you have been hated,\u201d he tells her finally, \u201cyou have also been loved.\u201d<\/p>\n And there you have it. Marriage may well be a tomb, a species of living extinction. (\u201cWe are as united,\u201d Gilbert Osmond says with ominous precision of his marriage, \u201cas the candlestick and the snuffers.\u201d) In queer friendship, at least\u2014like a lamp in a windless place<\/em>, as James say elsewhere\u2014the inextinguishable flame of devotion burns and burns. I do my best. Like the bereaved everywhere, I keep turning over the pages of our story together.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n <\/p>\n That\u2019s the story, anyway. But you never know, once you\u2019re out in the storm, what\u2019s going to unravel you.<\/p>\n It was in the first months of the pandemic when my friend called to relay the news to me (colon, liver, stage four), which she did in the calmest, steadiest voice you\u2019ve ever heard. A couple of weeks later I found myself striding through the cavernous horror-movie silence of the San Francisco airport. To my right, clustered in the departure gate, a family of four sat in matching zip-up cotton bodysuits, like marooned cosmonauts. A sense of unreality hung over everything.<\/p>\n We met up in a sun-swept park on the top Potrero Hill, out among the other masked-up quarantine walk-takers. I can remember how even then her equanimity about everything\u2014diagnosis, the grind of treatment, the prognosis\u2014astounded me. It\u2019s not that she wasn\u2019t frightened. But she was so poised, so even and unaltered. She was so entirely herself that it was easy, then, for the more frantic parts of myself to ignore the ground shifting beneath us.<\/p>\n And so, imitating her equanimity, I told her I was just the same too: that I would be in it with her, in all phases, no matter what. I told her I knew the story of our togetherness was long and involved and far, far from finished.<\/p>\n I meant it. But an inner alarm starting ringing, and would not stop. I worried that, knowing me as she did, she could tell how scared I was. I worried that, loving me as she did, she might start devoting herself to the labor of trying to protect me from all the things that, all too evidently, I couldn\u2019t bear to let myself know. In this, too, she\u2019d be entirely herself.<\/p>\n I suppose I found another gear, another register for dread: I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.<\/p>\n After she died, this all sat heavy in me. Those subsequent hours and then days and then months were wretched but they were also, more nearly, strange<\/em>. I don\u2019t just mean sorrowful. A great billowing fog of bewilderment enveloped me. I\u2019d cook, but forget to eat. I\u2019d talk, manically and at unregulated length, then descend into prolonged sulks. Anger, at the tiniest provocations, tornadoed through me, then evaporated. I missed appointments, exits.<\/p>\n Strangest of all: by disposition an operatic crier (as my friend could have told you) I did not weep. The weeks piled up and there I was, dry-eyed and baffled. Where a lacerating anguish might have been\u2014like a corrosive drop of acid upon an open wound<\/em>, as James puts it\u2014there was instead only hollowness, a dull ache. I kept thinking of Emerson, numb in the aftermath of his beloved son\u2019s death: I cannot get it nearer to me<\/em>, he says, with leaden despair.<\/p>\n Some unsurrendered part of myself persisted in the fantasy that she was on a trip\u2014Scandinavia, maybe\u2014and when at last she returned we\u2019d talk about it all, the laughter, our marvel-making friends, her wonderful brother, the memorial. I stalked through the long summer days and around every corner of thought a single question sat in wait: What is wrong with me?<\/p>\n Eventually, my mother back east grew concerned, the way Italian mothers do. \u201cYou don\u2019t seem all right,\u201d she said on the phone, and who could argue?<\/p>\n It turns out, I could. A prickly, peevish childishness took hold of me. \u201cYeah, Mom,\u201d I shot back, \u201cI mean, it\u2019s hard<\/em>, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n But then, from out of some unexplored territory of self, a sentence bubbled out of me\u2014whereupon everything stopped for an instant, held its breath, and changed.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was one of the loves of my life,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n A silence fell between us, and I swear to you it was like a key turning in my chest.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d she finally said. \u201cShe\u2019s one of the loves of your whole life, Peter.\u201d What followed from this\u2014periodic descents into ragged tearfulness, at the coffee shop, on the train, in the lonely expanse of office hours\u2014I would again prefer not to say.<\/p>\n It\u2019s Freud who reminds us, in \u201cMourning and Melancholia,\u201d that grief is especially debilitating when we do not know, and cannot name for ourselves, what it is that has been lost. That incertitude, he says, baffles and paralyzes us, makes us jagged and forgetful. How strange!, I thought. Could it be that our namelessness, our semiattenuated status in the eyes of the world, somehow induced me to mislay the most basic facts of our devotion to each other? To misremember the steady certainty of her love for me, and mine for her?<\/p>\n Maybe. But then, I think, this was perhaps just the next of my accumulating failures\u2014another thing that, even after months and then years of bracing for impact, I could not bear to acknowledge, not really. Sometimes, I think back to the days on Potrero Hill, or to the sparkling toast she gave at my wedding, or to that final week in the hospital, and my mind dissolves into a bright white blank. She was one of my life\u2019s great loves\u2014alongside Julie, and also Mark, Dana, John, Nasser\u2014and now what is there left to say, other than that her absence is a silence, huge and heavy, lying across all the days?<\/p>\n I do my best. Like the bereaved everywhere, I keep turning over the pages of our story together. I go back to those long cozy hours in bed, the jokes and confessions, the meandering chatter. I roll my tongue around another cherished bit of Jamesian effusion, this one from his death-stricken late-life triumph, The<\/em> Wings of the Dove<\/em>, which is by the way also very much about the various ways you might conspire to go to bed with your gorgeous friends. \u201cIt had come to be definite between them at a primary stage,\u201d we are told of two thwarted lovers,<\/p>\n that, if they could have no other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them. They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would\u2014in other words they could say it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So I bring it up a lot now, at parties, dinners: When were you hottest<\/em>?<\/p>\n I was a late bloomer, I\u2019d told her, probably reaching my hotness peak right around 44. \u201cThe moment I met Julie,\u201d I said. \u201cA bad deal for her, really\u2014straight downhill since.\u201d<\/p>\n She laughed again, took my hand. \u201cI don\u2019t know, baby.\u201d She turned to me\u2014weary, wrung out, also totally hot, totally her\u2014and gave me her flirty grin. \u201cYou\u2019re hanging in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I worried that, in obscure but consequential ways, I had already begun to fail her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":59043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[184,511,165,699,20,97,42],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1131],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-59039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-cancer","tag-death","tag-friendship","tag-henry-james","tag-literature","tag-love","tag-queer-theory","section-lives-histories"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n We Must Heal Each Other<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
![\"Liz](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Liz_Bowen-e1581438719404-300x300.jpg\")
<\/a>\n \n Liz Bowen <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n
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