What does it mean if a lightbulb burns out, I wondered? Is this a self-portrait? In 1996, Gonzalez-Torres died from AIDS-related complications. Is this a picture of his solitude? Was he égoïste, like me? In another minimalist work—“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers)—identical clocks are displayed, barely touching each other, on a light blue wall. A letter Gonzalez-Torres wrote to his partner, who died before him, explains one potential meaning for this work: “Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. . . . We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time. We are synchronized, now and forever. I love you.”
LAST NIGHT I met James Lord again at his apartment and brought a bouquet of violet tulips, which he immediately placed in a vase on a side table in the living room. As I poured myself a scotch, he said that scotch and soda—or “fifty-fifty,” as it had been called—was his preferred drink for many years, but now it is Diet Coke. At Le Voltaire, on the quai Voltaire, we sat at the same table where we’d sat during our first meeting, and James pointed out something called oeuf mayonnaise “James” on the menu. Long ago, boiled eggs in mayonnaise had been one of his favorite things to order, and when it was removed from the menu he complained, so the owner resurrected it at the original price and named it in his honor. James encouraged me to order filet mignon, though it was expensive, insisting that “the poet of iron needs red meat now and then.” During our meal, he told me he’d gotten what he wanted from his life, and that he was content. He told me that meeting his partner, Gilles, had been the best thing to happen to him.
Again, we discussed Brokeback Mountain, the heartbreaking film about two ranch hands who carry on a sporadic affair, and whether it was a “universal love story,” as Hollywood wanted us to believe, or a gay tragedy recording the effects of homophobia. We agreed that it was not about love but instead about the damaging effects of the closet. Neither of us could bear to see it again.
In Annie Proulx’s story, she writes, “What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.”
TODAY I VISITED Deyrolle, the taxidermy shop in the seventh arrondissement on the rue du Bac, where one can buy a butterfly, beetle, baby lamb, or black bear. I came home with an Australian finch whose forehead, nape, and cap are pearl gray. He has black around the eyes, and his rump and underside are white, with pink flesh legs, and he wears a black bib.
Like me, he avoids populated areas and prefers the woodlands. His song is a soft hoarse whistling, and his cry of alarm is strangely sweet. He eats mostly seeds, but also flying insects, ants, and spiders. He is a gregarious drinker, taking long sips. In order to preserve him, I must twice a year “gently and softly clean him with a napkin moistened with white gasoline.” I’ve named him Keats, because he reminds me of the sonnet:
O Solitude! . . . it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
Part IV
THOUGH I HAVE a fear of heights, last night I rode La Grande Roue, the big wheel, in the Place de la Concorde, and afterward drank a glass of champagne to calm down. During the French Revolution the government erected a guillotine in the square and many important figures lost their heads there in front of cheering crowds. So it was given the name Concorde (meaning harmony, consensus, solidarity) after the convulsions of war. The wheel is situated at the entrance to the Tuileries Garden beside the giant Egyptian obelisk, where together they look like man and wife. The original wheel was built in 1900 and the cars were so large that they were used as homes for French families during World War I, when the region was devastated. With forty-two cars, it’s now the biggest wheel in France, and “green,” they say, with bright white LED lights and low CO2 emissions. Around and around and around I went, like a piece of chewing gum on a bicycle tire. But now and then, when my car rocked to and fro in the wind, it also felt like a cradle, and I could almost hear a voice singing, “There is no one, no one, but thee.”
ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES (was I three?) is of sitting at a kitchen table in Marseille while eating a warm, buttery croissant dunked in my grandmother’s bowl of café au lait. It was adulthood I was tasting, and love. Every morning, in every French city and town, there is the endless shriek of steam whistling, as if from another century, through shiny stainless-steel espresso machines. This morning, standing at a nearby café bar, I listened across time as the boiling water, under pressure, was forced through finely ground beans, and my shot was poured into a little bowl with piping hot milk and served with a pyramid of sugar cubes on a tin plate, each square as flawlessly cut as a stone block made by a mason for an aqueduct or a temple.
RÉVEILLONNER means to eat a dinner of saturnalian splendor on Christmas Eve, and I had my first réveillon many years ago with my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Gabriel, and his family in Marseille. Gabriel was
