Geography of the Heart Read online

A letter to a friend:

  Dear B.,

  I went to an old roommate’s memorial service on Saturday and met two guys—a lawyer whom I’m really attracted to, and a Berkeley High School English teacher named Larry Rose, who’s really attracted to me. So I came home and placed this bet with myself: The phone will ring on Tuesday, and it will be the Berkeley High English teacher.

  The phone rang Monday, and it was Larry.

  We made a weeknight dinner date. I met him at a restaurant—I can’t remember what kind, American or ethnic or continental, and this frustrates me; I remember only that it was small and crowded. Knowing Larry, it was probably good and possibly French. This will have to do.

  Even in my thirties I saw restaurants as foreign territories, where I was an easily intimidated tourist. I’d grown up in rural Kentucky, where I’d seldom ordered from a menu; eating out had been a novelty, restricted to occasional trips to the burger joint in the county seat. My vast family ate meals prepared by my mother and sisters, featuring garden-grown vegetables, and meat that often as not my father had shot on the hoof or fish we’d pulled from the river. When I faced a packed restaurant with a waiting list, my first impulse was always to flee.

  I searched for a corner where Larry and I might wait out the line. I located a couple of chairs and went back to find him.

  He was chatting with the owner. “How is your wife?” Larry was asking. “Of course I remember her, she is so pretty! And your children, how are they?” While they talked, the owner was leading us deeper into the restaurant. I drew up the rear, until we found ourselves at a table for two tucked in a corner. As he shook hands with the owner, Larry proffered a bill.

  “You didn’t tell me you knew the owner,” I said as we sat.

  “I don’t,” Larry said. “How about starting with some oysters?”

  “No, thanks. I cower before any raw creature.”

  Dinner conversation: We spoke of reading, art, and Europe, where he went every summer, from where he’d just returned. “Brittany has the greatest oysters,” he said. “They sell them in big vats, right at the shore.” He offered me a shell.

  “Oh, I’ll try anything once.” It was, after all, a first date, and I didn’t want to lose the possibility of romance over a bite of slimy mollusk. I gulped it down. It tasted like wind off the ocean, clean and pure and with a salty edge.

  He took up another. “Ma vie en rose.”

  I ventured a second oyster. “I speak some French.”

  His face lit up, and he plunged into rapid-fire conversation, until after a minute I held up my hand. “Maybe I should say I used to speak French. I studied it in college, but I’ve lost almost all of it.”

  “You’ll pick it back up fast enough.” He took up his tableware, fork in left hand, knife in right. From some distant conversation I remembered a friend’s comment: exotic as a foreign lover.

  But I remembered my resolve: no attachments; let the heart recuperate. During dinner I took care to speak of my plans for the future, making no mention of a partner. “I might not even be living here in a few years,” I said. “I might be teaching at some junior college in the rural Midwest, I don’t know. All that future stuff is up for grabs now.” He nodded and kept eating. “And what about you?” I asked. “Are you happy teaching English? Could you imagine doing something different, living someplace else a few years from now?”

  He shrugged. “I’m happy teaching. A few years from now I’ll worry about a few years from now.” He lifted his wineglass. “It’s been awfully cool for this time of year.”

  At the end of the main course the waiter approached. “Would you like anything more?”

  Larry commandeered the dessert menu. “That’s what I like about France. In California the waiter asks, ‘Would you like anything more?’ In France they say, ‘What will you have for dessert?’”

  Afterward we squabbled over the check, that lovely ritual. I carefully divided the amount in half and left slightly more than my share before going to the men’s room. When I returned, the check had been paid. Larry stuffed my money in my hip pocket. “You can pay next time.”

  At his door he invited me inside; I declined. “A school night,” I said. “Let’s stay in touch.”

  “Just remember you owe me dinner,” he said.

  Two weeks later I found myself in his bedroom.

  In one corner a pile of dirty laundry crept up the wall. An ancient, dusty turntable sat atop the bureau. On the floor next to the bureau was stacked a waist-high pile of LPs (Bluebird-label jazz from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Donna Summer, Edith Piaf, Beethoven’s Ninth, The Magic Flute, Aretha Franklin, Jim Morrison and the Doors). Some of the LPs had fallen into the piled laundry. Several of the bureau drawers protruded, revealing their innards: dozens of bars of soap; dozens of pairs of underwear; hundreds of batteries, most still shrink-wrapped and long past their expiration dates. Candles. All varieties of deodorants. Shaving creams. Condoms. Toothbrushes. Sunscreen. Hand lotion. Several traveling clocks—some ticking, some dead. HIV-awareness pamphlets. A slim volume of selected Shakespeare sonnets. All-male porn paperbacks in French, whose covers promised a cross between Barbara Cartland and Jean Genet. A large grocery bag filled with coins of various European currencies. London theater programs from the early 1980s. Dozens of unmatched socks.

  What a slob, I thought.

  An ebony black cat walked in, stepping familiarly around the piles of LPs and scattered cassettes, stirring a few lemon-sized dustballs from under the bed. He curled into a hollow he’d made for himself (a week ago? a month ago?) in the dirty laundry. “Allow me to present Willy,” Larry said, bowing. “The little beast.”

  Sex for the first time: It was okay, not great; as safe as it’s possible to be and still dignify the act with a name. As Larry turned to remove his shirt, I studied his back and wondered, Will I ever do this again with this man? Some visceral part of me complained: He has too many moles. He has love handles. He wears cologne.

  I hate cologne.

  He turned around to survey me, lying on his bed. He made a frame with the fingers of both hands and caught me in it. “Boy, am I lucky,” he said.

  Careful, I thought. This man wants to fall in love.

  He excused himself to the bathroom. I seized the chance to snoop in his life.

  I was impressed by his bookshelves—packed to overflowing with English and American literature, as well as major works in the original language by German and French writers. I was put off by the clutter of his closet, the piebald mountain of dirty laundry. I crossed the room and checked out his bureau. Next to the dusty turntable sat at least ten bottles of expensive French colognes.

  He returned sooner than I expected, to catch me inspecting the colognes. “Oh, I got those in France. You want to try some?”

  “I’m not much on cologne,” I said, but already he’d picked up a bottle and dabbed some on the inside of my wrist. “My favorite,” he said. “Vetiver.”

  On our next date we sat outdoors, on the deck of a friend’s place where I was house-sitting. We looked over the city, on one of those twice-a-year San Francisco nights when the night is something close to warm. We sat in shorts and watched the city’s lights come on, with all the life and hope they imply.

  He told me the bare outlines of his parents’ stories—German Jews, they’d fled separately to Holland in the 1930s. There they met through friends, but shortly later were trapped by the Nazi invasion. As Jews in occupied Holland, they were unable to marry; eventually Larry’s father was imprisoned, then released, then imprisoned and beaten, then released again, this time with broken vertebrae. Unable to obtain medical care, he took Kathy and went into hiding. For almost three years they lived in an unheated second-floor room in a small town near the German border; then liberation, back surgery for Larry’s father, marriage, and emigration to Los Angeles. Larry had been born a year after they arrived.

  Listening, I thought, This man has a history. This man has grown from some fertile sorrow.

  But I saw that already he was growing attached. I placed my hand on his bare knee and gave that famous speech, impossible to make new or original. I like you a lot but, I said. I’m not ready to get involved. I’ve decided to be alone for a while. We can keep dating if you want. If not, let’s be friends.

  He considered this. “There’s something you ought to know,” he said. In the mid-1980s, in San Francisco, among gay men there could be only one thing I ought to know, and I’d sensed it already. A delicate vacancy around the edges of words; his careful and limited use of the future tense; my intuition that my particular life script called for me to be taught some lesson by love, and my knowledge that such learning often comes hard.

  He spoke the terrible facts aloud—HIV-positive, still healthy, no symptoms, T-cell count still high, above 800, almost normal. He had yet to tell his parents because, after all, they were aged, who could know what might come to pass. In the silence that followed I thought, At least I spoke first; at least I can’t be accused, I can’t accuse myself of leaving him because he is infected.

  To many people my guilt seems crazy. We’d known each other barely a month, hardly long enough for substantial commitment. What more sensible reason to reject a lover than the revelation of a terminal, communicable disease?

  I can give a few rational answers to the question. At the time I didn’t know whether I myself was HIV-positive or HIV-negative. I saw no surer way to tempt fate than to reject someone because he was seropositive, when I myself might be carrying the virus. More to the point, I was innocent of death. I did not understand the substance of his words, the death toward which they pointed. I’d sat with my father when he died, but he was an old man, his death had come as the merciful end to a prolonged illness. I felt no co
nnection between that experience and this moment, sitting on this warm night with this man who was beginning to penetrate my defenses—already I was noticing the affection with which he spoke of his parents, his warmth in speaking of his students, the swell of his biceps defined by his short-sleeved shirt. He was getting to me, on this warm night when it was impossible to conceive of him as other than who he was—thick-muscled, barrel-chested, filled with desire for more: more dessert, more life, more me.

  Lesson one of the geography of the heart: how love chooses us, if we will let it, rather than the other way around.

  I continued to see him. No—I let him court me. He brought flowers—not your garden-variety carnations and mums, but fabulous arrangements of tropical flora with unpronounceable names and big hair. He telephoned, often enough that I looked forward to his calls; not so often as to annoy. He went for broke.

  I held out.

  We went to the gym in those days—he to preserve his health, and from vanity; I from vanity. We were princes among men, old enough to have grown into our bodies, young enough to be innocent of our beauty. Like many gay men, we’d been scrawny bookworms well into our twenties, only then to discover our bodies with surprise and pleasure.

  He owned a good camera, and he delighted in taking pictures, mostly of me. In one photo he has posed me sprawled on a couch, bare-chested, wearing partly unbuttoned 501s and around my bare neck a tie, picked up in some secondhand store—silk, Brooks Brothers, knotted in a Windsor but punkish; narrow, black, flecked with white squares. It drapes along the swell of my chest, following the curve of my pectoral, lending an illusion of depth. He has made me hook my right arm up and back and over my head to display that most seductive of male lines, the steep, shallow S formed as the pectoral muscle flows upward, its horizontal curve merging into the biceps’ vertical swell. The basilar vein glows blue through my translucent flesh.

  I am thick with lust. My eyes hold no knowledge of loss or death. I will never grow old. No one, nothing I love will ever die.

  And Larry: What a body. No, not a flawless body. His fondness for all things French (tartes aux framboises, Roquefort, pâté) revealed itself at his waistline. His nails were splotched with white, in what I later learned was an early sign of a compromised immune system. He towered over his parents, but at five feet eight inches he was four inches shorter than I.

  But he had his father’s hair, thick and full and running to rich, luxurious waves when it grew long, and his father’s eyes, the thin blue of sky before clouds. He had the chest of a bodybuilder, though he was no gym fanatic; one glance at barbells and his muscles thickened. (No one under forty will believe, says Kate Vaiden in Reynolds Price’s novel of the same name, how much everything is a matter of what’s in the blood. No one, that is, who’s not tried for the sake of vanity to alter body type.)

  As undershirts he wore sleeveless singlets in the style of basketball players or track stars. I struck up the ritual of ripping them from his chest. In a photograph I took that same evening he stands in his underwear, his undershirt half-torn and dangling by one strap from his shoulder; what remains of the shirt drapes across his chest. In an effort to play butch he’s clenched his jaw and tightened his eyes—the effect is less of ferocity than of profound sadness. Looking at these photos, I wonder how much he ever forgot his illness; how much he concealed it from me—partly to sustain hope, partly to protect me from his worry, partly from fear that if I saw too much of his fear, I’d bail out.

  A few months into this relationship, I could easily have bailed out. We both knew this. I took care to remind him of it, in ways more and less subtle. “We could have a great time on a vacation in France,” he’d say. “I’m not sure what I’m doing this summer,” I’d say. And so on—he testing, I holding back.

  Son of Holocaust survivors, Larry bought French shirts, Italian sweaters, vintage wines for daily suppers; he inherited a passion for the moment that his HIV status only intensified. Son of Depression survivors, I hoarded the last bit of soap, carefully sticking it to its succeeding bar. If I’d considered death at all, it was as a dark cloud on someone else’s horizon; even my father’s death a few years earlier had done little to shake my assumption of my own immortality. I was a white man in America, not rich but with no wolves anywhere near the door. My bent sexuality gave me insight into some way of being other than boundless American optimism, but for many years I’d lived in California and I’d acquired the prevailing denial of darkness and death. There was, of course, the issue of my own, unknown HIV status, but I’d managed to tuck that into some obscure pigeonhole of the mind. Then I met Larry.

  I’d never encountered someone so immediately present. While I was paying attention to next year’s rent, he slipped into my life with the force and immediacy of the here and now. Without my knowing it, our two ways of being engaged each other—my preoccupation with the future; his immersion in this day, this hour, this minute.

  He bought gifts for every occasion and no occasion. Each gift arrived wrapped in designer paper pretty enough to frame. For my birthday, two months after our first meeting, he gave me a large box. He watched with growing impatience as I opened the package, slipping my finger under the Scotch tape, pulling open the end flaps, smoothing the paper over my knees. “Come on,” he said, “open the damn thing, for God’s sake.”

  I folded the paper into a neat square. “You never know when you’ll need a piece of store-bought wrapping paper. Besides, I like to prolong the suspense.”

  Inside was a thick wool sweater, a medium blue with complex geometric patterns woven in cobalt. I understood what it represented. “You can’t give me something so expensive,” I said.

  “Really, it wasn’t that expensive.”

  I looked at him, held the sweater up, displayed its Italian label. “Right.”

  “It was on sale.”

  “Larry.”

  “Look, it’s your birthday.”

  “If I take presents like this from you, if I let you buy me such things, then I feel like I have to give you something like this in return. And to put it bluntly, I can’t afford to.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I know you don’t care. For better or worse, I care.”

  We faced off for a short, silent moment, while I considered what to do. I had resolved to be alone for a while; he was pushing against that resolution.

  Refusing the sweater would be ungracious, of course. (Besides, I wanted it.) But accepting it meant commitment, or at least a more painful breakup from this deepening involvement with an HIV-positive man. Larry, I would discover, was well aware of the implications of his generosity, and more than capable of using it as a means to the end of getting what he wanted.

  I gave him a kiss. “Okay, but no more presents, not for a while, okay?”

  “Okay. A little while.”

  I tried on the sweater and admired it.

  “Oh,” he said. “My doctor called to give me my latest T-cell count. Seven hundred and fifty.”

  “But you can lose a hundred here and there just from a cold. You had a cold last week.”

  “A bad cold.”

  I took the sweater off.

  “He’s mentioned a new drug,” he said. “Something called AZT. It looks promising.”

  “Right.”

  The night after the news of his falling T-cell count, I awoke to his mumbling, an incoherent, stumbling stream of words. I placed a hand on his arm. At my touch he leapt up with a shriek, trembling with fear. He was dreaming, he said, that his parents had not escaped Nazi Germany but were being carted to the ovens.

  In my arms he went back to sleep. I lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling. “I can’t take this,” I finally said aloud. “I can’t go through with it. Anyone would understand. Larry will understand.”

  A few nights later, we were preparing not for lovemaking but for bed, on some ordinary night when we both had to get up early. Lying in bed, I watched him tug his shirt over his head, and some part of me, the writer part of me, noticed what I was noticing: not his moles or his hint of love handles. Now I was seeing his thick biceps and thicker hair and the way in which he folded his shirt and laid it neatly atop the mounded heap of dirty laundry, a gesture that could be only for my benefit. I had never asked this of him. I had never commented on his chaotic apartment.