The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (19 page)

And so, one night, while he happily supervised my consumption of too much whiskey and slowly placed his fingers on my back, I did not stiffen. And when he began kneading, it seemed, every single disk of my back into a singular and celebrated entity, I was grateful. And when he began to separate not just the muscles of my back but also my legs, I did not stop him. And when I couldn’t hear the sounds of the film we’d been watching over his desperate grunting, I didn’t complain, just kept staring and made up
the characters’ words, wrapped my legs around the small of his back halfheartedly, and observed as the two people on the screen exchanged proclamations of love and humor I wanted to understand but couldn’t.

I am ashamed of the extravagant things I said and did in the weeks and months afterward, although I don’t feel I had much choice given the way he grinned after we had sex, how he told me he loved me during. We took a vacation to Mexico that was in all regards perfect besides it being a lie, but he must have known on some level the fallacy of the sparkling lemonade we drank on those beaches, must have suspected the real reason I wanted him only on top with his head buried between my neck and shoulders. I loved Paul and still do, but could only stand it if I was able to memorize the ceiling above us. Our whole relationship, in retrospect, seems an exercise in ceilings; I praised him and lavished him in words of adoration and felt shocked at the levels of devotion he was willing to believe I felt sincerely.

In the Mexico photographs we look happy. There are several of him gesturing excitedly next to an eight-year-old who was drawing portraits on the street at the cost of one American dollar; Paul of course took a liking to him and bought six, one of me and one of him and one of us together, and three more of strangers who had decided against it after seeing the finished product. There’s another in which I am holding up a margarita as large as my head and smiling so large my eyes and nose are overshadowed; another of me sleeping in the early morning, still wearing
a cocktail dress from the night before, my hair falling off one side of the bed, nose perky, looking like someone you might like to cook breakfast for.

When we went to stay with my father, who needed supervision as Julia was visiting Jackson that weekend, I introduced Paul with no title. Paul assumed this was because I had already provided one in my biweekly telephone correspondence with my father, but in the living room he strained for recognition apologetically until finally he arrived at a beam and Paul returned it.

“Ah. Paul. I am
so
sorry. Our art dealer! Mr. Gallery. I’ve heard much about you, it’s just, I’m afraid, with so much going in this ailing body of mine, I’ve gotten bad with details. It’s such a relief to me, you being Ida’s friend through all this heartache. It’s hard for me and Julia, you know, being pretty much
both
of their parents …” and he trailed on, the sly smile of aging on his face.

“Friend?” Paul said to me on the drive home later, incredulously. “Friend?”

In the final ceiling Paul proposed in some sort of final threat, and I of course wept and told him I loved him but that I couldn’t, and of course he begged, and of course I ran out of weeping probably too soon and it got too quiet, and of course he left, and of course we don’t speak anymore.

W
hile my magnetism to Jackson grew from an early age, it would be inaccurate to state he was the only magic. I loved James too—for being slightly younger and keeping me that way, for asking questions Jackson preferred not to, and later, for indulging in and nearly celebrating those unkempt aspects of his interior life.

Jackson considered; James evacuated then evaluated. As children, it was James who more actively encouraged that nonsensical landscape I remember and value. James who once fainted after individually bringing to life the eighty-five balloons he placed in his living room for no reason whatsoever except to surprise, then frustrate, then amuse his tired mother: it was hard to be actually mad at the playful air-filled globes, even if it made navigating through the space, after a twelve-hour day at a work, almost impossible. It was James who decided he would learn to juggle, and did, and insisted on teaching me though I was impatient and kept trying to give up,
who clapped his hands and hollered in delight when I finally gave three oranges a place in the air. James who collected jokes and always had a new one to spare. Who remembered my mother’s birthday and insisted we celebrate it every year. Who constructed the most elaborate forts that even Julia and my father would sneak in and wonder at: sometimes our respective living rooms remained in disarray for a full week, the couch cushions and tables all sacrificed for the sake of a home within a home, the specific and comforting brand of light that comes through a flannel sheet. James who enjoyed, once he was old enough for that kind of control, spelling my name or Jackson’s in his urine, in immaculate cursive, all over town—who never stopped finding that hilarious. Eventually, I couldn’t either. James who once taught a particularly malicious and buff foreign exchange student—who enjoyed calling certain vulnerable boys faggot and whispering terrible threats in their ears—a string of made-up words that the kid began using so frequently that he didn’t make enough sense to be scared of anymore. On our own, James and I had a language, too. As children, we were best at concocting nonsense urgencies with mock terror, enjoyed breaking down the door of whichever available parent and crying:
It’s Danny! Down at the old hotel with the hose again!
never maintaining our composure for very long. And later, once words had grown from toys to tools to toys again, inventing idioms without breaking stride.
You know what they say
, James would begin,
You don’t go crying into your soup and expect a steak. True
, I would say.
And likewise, there’s a good reason not to trust a sparrow in a gold mine
.

James whose sweetness, if frantic, was almost always evident. Who always asked me, in the morning, what my dreams were like. Who gently prodded at my quiet, when it constructed in a dark way, suggested that we explore it.

J
ust after the deterioration of Paul and me, and just before James’s terrifying walks, he appeared in my doorway and we began sleeping together. It should be said that we remained fully clothed and never returned to the naked state we’d so many times shared in the bathtub as children, although I can’t assert that the level of intimacy did not reach levels that felt like betrayal to Jackson, whom I still felt I belonged to.

We were comparable to magnets. No choice but to join. Both with minds whirring darkly and constantly, both hoping the noise of the other might drown out our interiors. Mostly we slept. Sometimes I sobbed and James looked at me with a curiosity that was uncomfortably reminiscent of Jackson. Once we bought two boxes of the most expensive donuts our city had to offer and egged each other on to keep eating until we ran to the bathroom and vomited, our cheeks pressed against the other’s and our bile merging. I took up residence at his
house, returning once a week or less if I could help it to the apartment that smelled less like Jackson and more like abandonment every day; I hurried in holding my breath and exchanged clothing for other clothing, as if I had anyone to impress who might notice I’d been wearing the same oversized sweater. Once, in a gesture I felt proud of for days on end, I opened all the windows and left them like that, as if to say:
Let something fly in. Anything
.

We ordered in and bought microwave dinners by the dozen. We let the garbage overflow onto the floor, a magnificent display of color and texture and smell, and took pride in how little we interacted with the outside world. We bought a sixty-pack of crayons and a two hundred-pack of paper and felt proud for coating the leaflets with such thick layers of wax.

Despite having enough money to completely retreat into his troubled brain, James kept his job at the hotel, though complaints from customers grew more frequent and his manager gently suggested he think about taking a serious vacation. While he was at work I stayed in his apartment, watching a million of channels of cable. I cried when Thelma and Louise went off that cliff and thought about what I’d heard once at a party, that the filmmakers had nearly released the film with an alternate ending in which the car hits the ground and keeps going. I watched reality television shows about people with drug problems and felt envious of their families and friends who crowded around them in a gaggle of support and love and forgiveness. I drooled and breathed deeply while on
the stand-up comedy channel black people talked about white people and white people talked about how it wasn’t okay to talk about black people. More often than not I fell asleep to lugubrious documentaries about the forgotten industrial wasteland of Middle America or black-and-white Hitchcocks; in my dreams I wandered through abandoned sewing factories or sat in the lush train cars of the 1940s, trying to remember my destination or realizing, when the conductor came by to collect tickets, that I had released mine out the window and watched it skirt the Midwestern winds. On good nights James would come back from the graveyard shift, turn the television off, and crawl into bed, adjusting his body to fit with mine; if I woke he would kiss the tip of my nose and whisper “How many?” as in “How many brain cells did you kill watching all that television?” and I would reply “So many I have lost the ability to count,” and draw him closer. On bad nights he didn’t get into bed at all. I would wake and find him on the tiny back patio, relating to a full ashtray, shivering and not wanting to talk or talking about things I couldn’t understand. I would coax him inside, take off his shoes, move his stiff joints so that I could remove his jacket, hand him the remote. The images from the still-on television reflected in his eyes, and he let them play there.

I left after three weeks, feeling, for the first time in so long, awake, and conscious of the fact I had done what Jackson had always wanted: I had slept and slept and slept. On my way to the door I stopped at the kitchen table, where
James sat coloring, his beard overgrown and unkempt. I offered to take out the garbage but he shrugged and didn’t look up, and I understood that this was what James’s life was like, that my being there had prompted nothing. As much as I didn’t want it to be the case, what I had was different from what he did.

J
ames has always been, by definition and religion, a walker; he has always used it as a freedom, an essential mental space to visit frequently. So when he began dissociating—the term we were taught later to use that referred to a tendency to lose all sense of his surroundings—it was initially difficult to recognize it as such. He had showed up at my apartment just before I followed him back to his and ended up staying. While he had the address but had never visited, while he told me he didn’t quite know how he had gotten there, it didn’t strike me as strange. I didn’t realize that he’d literally begun floating in and out of awareness, that he would look up and find he’d traveled miles without any memory of the trip. I told him I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here either and invited him in without a second thought.