WHEN THE TELEPHONE RINGS, I snatch it up, thinking it will be Octave calling. Is he the being I’ve been waiting for?When he visited last week, he brought The New Yorker, and together we sat on the steps of the Panthéon, from which one can see out over all of Paris, and slowly we translated some paragraphs, laughing at each other’s errors. Earlier in the week, I’d left a message saying I missed him. He is sweet, intelligent, and shy. I hope we can be friends. Why is it that after he leaves I feel like an object again—without any soul?
I have only twenty pages left to read in James Lord’s Picasso and Dora, and I will be sad to finish it. It’s the memoir of a young American falling under the strange, potent spell of Picasso and his friends. I admire James for writing such an unflattering self-portrait, in which he appears conceited, wounded, and occasionally mean. There is a special poignancy to the tale of a gay man who loves a woman but cannot offer her the intimacy she craves and deserves.
YESTERDAY, after Octave left, I could still smell him everywhere in the apartment. On the sofa pillows, in the tea towel, on the telephone receiver, and in the gorgeous red-black dahlias he brought.
Was this the odor of friendship asserting itself mysteriously in the absence of the man and calling attention to my solitude? I remembered Emily Dickinson’s letter to her dear friend Elizabeth Holland:
Dear Sister,
After you went, a low wind warbled through the house like a spacious bird, making it high but lonely. When you had gone the love came. I supposed it would. The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone.
Shame is so intrinsic in a strong affection we must all experience Adam’s reticence.
But what shame is this exactly? Shame of the hunger for friendship? Of taking pleasure in the divineness of another?
To console myself, I set off on foot for the Louvre and wandered about the museum’s long salons until I came upon Théodore Géricault’s Dead Cat.
Was this young, slim cat Géricault’s? How deeply affected he must have been by the death of this dappled friend—so affected as to commemorate him or her for all eternity, with its exhausted head hanging over the bench’s edge (Where am I? Find out where I am!). I hope that making the painting assisted the artist—engaging with a beloved animal’s corpse, the light illuminating its soft fur, casting shadows from its legs—Géricault’s art hopelessly confused with his life. I hope that, after he completed the painting, the love came.
Part VII
RETURNING TO the Montparnasse Cemetery, I found the polished black-granite sepulcher of Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, at the age of seventy-one, from a rare blood malignancy. “Cancer = death,” she wrote in her journal thirty years earlier, after being diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, which required a radical mastectomy. Though Sontag lived with cancer for many years, she never admitted that it was possible she might not survive, except in her private journal, where she was less victorious, writing, “People speak of illness as deepening, I don’t feel deepened. I feel flattened. I’ve become opaque to myself.”
Because death was not a subject she discussed with her son, the writer David Rieff, he was forced to improvise after she succumbed, so he shipped her body on the same Air France flight that she’d taken many times from New York to Paris, a city she found rapturous. A decade later, I am a literary tourist at Montparnasse. Cemeteries, after all, are for the living. The leaves were turning in the wind, and grit from the narrow walkways blew in my eyes as I searched for Sontag’s grave. Those buried near her are named Flamery (as in flamme, meaning flame, ardor, or passion) and Testu (perhaps pronounced like têtu, which means obstinate or stubborn). A stubborn passion or an obstinate flame is a good thing to accompany a writer for all eternity.
In the 1980s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when I was a young man living in Manhattan, Sontag published her important story “The Way We Live Now,” which depicts the responses of a group of New Yorkers when they learn that their friend has AIDS. Like Sontag, the story’s protagonist believes that his will to live counts more than anything else, and if he really wants to live, and trusts life, he will live. But he is mistaken—all the determination in the world and a “utopia” of friends cannot suppress the terrible HIV. When one of the protagonist’s friends brings him a little Guatemalan wooden sculpture of Saint Sebastian, he explains that, where he comes from, Sebastian is venerated as a protector against pestilence,symbolized by the arrows lodged in his body. All we usually are told about the early Christian martyr is that he was handsome, with eyes searching upward, bound to a post, and shot with arrows—but there is more to his story. In fact, when Christian women came to bury him, they discovered he was still alive and nursed him back to health. For this reason, Saint Sebastian remains a protector against plagues.
At the Louvre, there is an excellent depiction of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), who lived during a time of incurable diseases. The saint is observed from an unusually low perspective, and two archers represent the profane pleasures, in contrast to the faithful Sebastian. A small fig tree grows at his feet, a sign of his sweetness and of the salvation to come.
At the end of Sontag’s short story, she observes that “the difference between a story and
