A Home at the End of the World

When we were together, memory dragged behind consciousness on a shortened rope and any event more than a day or two old fell away into prenatal darkness. We’d spoken to one another from a continual present, in which profundity, despair, and old romantic aspirations did not exist; in which the ordinary vicissitudes of working life took on Wagnerian dimensions, and the periods between a boss’s insane demands or a cab driver’s hostility were pockets of utter unremarkable calm.

Now we sat in Erich’s apartment with a bottle of Merlot, tallying up. He’d put John Coltrane on the stereo.

“I know this is difficult,” I said. I was to be the apologist, because I was the one who’d insisted on broaching the subject in the first place.

“A little,” Erich said. “It is a little, yes. I’m not very…forthcoming about these things. I saw my therapist for over a year before I got around to telling her I was gay.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you haven’t told your therapist,” I said. “I just want us to have, well, an idea about the scope of one another’s pasts. To put it delicately.”

Erich flushed, and emitted one of the sharp, painful-sounding laughs that social discomfort could produce in him. He was still unformed in some way. The monstrous imitation-leather sofa on which we sat had been a gift from his parents in celebration of his admission into law school in Michigan. His parents had evidently assumed him to be embarking on a twelve-room, wainscoted life, but after less than a year he’d left law school for the hope of an acting career in New York. Now his parents didn’t speak to him and the sofa sat wall-to-wall in his apartment, like a cabin cruiser berthed in a swimming pool.

“Just an idea,” I added. “No humiliating confessions required.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t honestly know why I’m so hesitant about things like this. I don’t know why. I’ve always been more the type to, you know, listen to people. I guess it’s a habit you get into from tending bar.”

“I’ll start,” I said. And for almost an hour we called in all our old stray business, the affairs both good and bad, which we’d thought had receded too far into the past to impinge in any way on what we were now making of ourselves.

We both fell, it seemed, somewhere toward the middle of the risk spectrum. We had not, either of us, ever been rapacious. We had not worked the back rooms. We’d never made love to ten different strangers in a single bathhouse night, or paid by the hour for tough slim-hipped boys in the West Forties. But between us, we’d gone home with a full platoon of strangers. We’d both met men in bars or at parties; we’d slept with the friends of friends visiting from San Francisco or Vancouver or Laguna Beach. We’d hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn’t worried much about it, because we’d thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final, and so dull—love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn’t rush or grab, if we didn’t panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist. And in the meantime, we’d had sex. We’d thought we lived at the beginning of an orgiastic new age, in which men and women could answer without hesitation to harmless inclinations of the flesh. It had been with a sense of my own unlimited choices that I’d made love to a simpleminded flute-playing boy I met in Washington Square Park, to an old Frenchman in a purple cashmere jacket I’d met riding the uptown IRT, and to a pair of kindly doctors who sweetened their union by taking on an occasional third party. In my late teens and early twenties I’d seen myself as a Puckish figure, smart and quick-limbed, incorrigible. I’d imagined the prim houses and barren days of Ohio falling farther away with each new adventure.

Erich and I didn’t go case by case. We were not so clinical as that. We offered the highlights, but dwelt more explicitly—more happily—on the pleasures we’d denied ourselves. Cupping the bell of his wineglass in his long fingers, Erich frowned and said, “I never cared all that much for totally anonymous sex. That was never for me. I’ve met sort of a lot of men working in bars, and I, you know, went home with some of them, but I never really did the whole scene. I tried going to the baths, but it just scared me. I just took a sauna and went home.” After a pause he added, “To masturbate,” and smiled in agony, his forehead turning nearly purple.

Although we sat together on that gargantuan sofa, we did not touch. We occupied different pools of lamplight. This reticence was standard for us, neither more nor less pronounced as we talked about the loves we prayed would not prove fatal. In the conduct of our ordinary affairs, we always maintained a cordial remove. Anyone seeing us in the street together might have assumed we were former college roommates losing our grip on our old intimacy but unwilling to formally declare it dead. Only at home, naked, did we jump out of our separate skins. On the stereo, Coltrane played “A Love Supreme.”

“The funny thing is,” I said, “I used to feel guilty for not being more adventuresome. I’d hear other men talking about how they’d turned four tricks in a night and think, ‘I’m the most repressed gay man who ever lived.’ I mean, most of the guys I went with, I knew I’d probably never see again. But I always had to feel like maybe I’d want to see them again, like in some way it was remotely possible that we might fall in love. Even though we never did.” Erich looked into his wine and said something inaudible.

“Hmm?”

He said, “Well, do you think we’re, you know, falling in love?”

I had never seen anyone so embarrassed. His whole head glowed crimson, and the wine in his glass quivered.

I believed I knew what he wanted. He wanted to collapse into love. Life was too frightening. Renown was withheld despite his constant efforts, and the future we’d all counted on could be revoked with a nagging cough, a violet bloom on a shin.

“No,” I said. “I care about you. But no.”

He nodded. He didn’t speak.

“Are you in love with me?” I asked, though I knew the answer. He wanted desperately to be in love with someone. I fulfilled the fundamental age, height, and weight requirements. But his desire didn’t attach directly to me. It was not quite personal.

He shook his head. We sat for a while in silence, and then I reached over and took his hand. I had to be tender with him because I hated him; because I had it in me to scream at him for being ordinary, for failing to change my life. I was frightened, too; I, too, wanted to fall in love. I stroked Erich’s hand. The turntable, set to repeat, started the Coltrane album again. Erich tried out a laugh, but swallowed it along with a deep draught of wine.

I could have murdered him, though his only crimes were lack of focus and dearth of wit. I could have skewered his heart with a kitchen fork because he was a peripheral character promoted by circumstances to a role he was ill equipped to play. I can’t deny this: I thought I deserved better.

Without speaking, we stood up and went to bed. It was our single incidence of psychic accord—ordinarily we explained our simplest acts in lavish detail. But that night we took our wineglasses and went without speaking to his bed, undressed, and lay down in one another’s arms.

“These are scary times,” I said.

“Yes. Yes, they are.”

We lay for a while without discussing the last remaining event in our sensual histories—the fact that we had not exercised bodily precautions together. Now it was too late to protect ourselves from one another. There was no rational accounting, beyond the fact that even four years ago, when we’d met, the disease had still seemed the province of another kind of man. Of course we’d known about it. Of course we’d been scared. But no one we knew personally had gotten sick. We’d believed—with a certain effort of will—that it befell men whose blood was thinned by too many drugs, who had sex with a dozen people every night. Erich had had a good record collection, and framed photographs of skinny brothers and sisters posing by a lake, in a wallpapered living room, and beside a glossy red Camaro. He talked about going to auditions, and about finding a better job. He had seemed too busy to be available to early death. I couldn’t say how he’d worked out the equation in his own head, because this did not seem to be a conversation we were capable of holding. We let a lengthy, silent embrace stand in for it. Then, with a new gravity, we made love as the Coltrane record played itself over and over and over again.

Several days later, Bobby told me about himself and Clare. I had been to see Arthur in the hospital. His pneumonia was clearing—he’d expressed optimism about the future, and a conviction that the cessation of alcohol and the adoption of a macrobiotic diet would improve his health a hundred percent. Although there was still