In Case We're Separated (16 page)

He looked at her. “Do you mind if I smoke in the van?” he said.

She did mind. “Do you mind if I mind?”

“Yes, but all right. I'll do it here.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, turned out of the breeze to strike a match, and inserted a cigarette between his lips. He had a dark mustache, but it was cut short, so she could see that his mouth was wide, his lips pleasantly full. It would take time, as well, to get him to quit smoking. Bob stamped out his cigarette in the littered driveway. “I drink, too,” he said.

“So do I. A lot?”

“You'll decide.” They climbed into the van and she fastened her seat belt. So did he. He twisted his body to look behind him as he backed out of the driveway. They drove to an old luncheonette. She had iced coffee, he had hot. Tired, they spoke little. He called Binnie, who was on her way home, and they returned to the van. He knew half a dozen shortcuts on the way to his daughter's place, and knew where to park. Leaving the furniture for now, they walked with long matched strides in the cool air, arms and legs light, legs fully extended, as if they imitated horses. Their left legs stepped forward in the same plane, then their right, as if horses paced as one—gaily painted carousel horses, or even live horses.

Boy in Winter

M
y first lover, James, died of AIDS many years ago, before
The New York Times
had noticed the epidemic. Gay men were dying, some had Kaposi's syndrome—that was all anyone could say so far. My cousin Richard worked for the city, and I knew from him that people in the health department were beginning to be alarmed. Richard was in love with James, we all knew that, but he was
Richard,
who took my hand to cross me when I was a little boy, who once—he was eleven, I was six—flung himself upon me, so we both fell to a subway floor, to keep me from running off a train in confused panic at the wrong stop.

Richard came often to visit James and me. He'd grasp one of us by the arm. “Brad,” he'd say. “James, Brad, James . . .” James and I weren't a happy, stable couple except in Richard's mind. He was mourning
us,
reminding himself we
were
a couple, firming his determination to keep his nonsecret a secret. I don't think he acknowledged to himself that he was gay until he fell in love with James. For me, caring for James was something like caring for my mother, who had died not long before of cancer. I gave the intimate help that sick people require, and in both instances, as I did so I often caught myself murmuring the same unplanned words, not to my mother or to James but to myself: “Soon over, no matter, soon over, no matter.” I couldn't have said what I thought would soon be over, or what didn't matter.

Two years after James died, I met Warren Beckwirth, who designed the cover of my first book, about changes in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up. Change became my subject, and later I wrote two more books about how communities had become different, but what drew me to Warren might have been a look of permanence. The day we met, as he rummaged in the confusion of his office, I stood behind him and noticed his big feet in heavy shoes, his thick legs, held slightly apart, as if Warren expected gusts of wind to pass through my publisher's art department, wind that would not topple him.

The year Warren and I began living together, he brought me home for Christmas. The trip was a novelty for me, a New York Jew. His parents, Beverly and Warren Sr., lived in Wanda, Wisconsin, where they shrewdly ran a small business, making canvas bags of ingenious design that sold mostly through ads in the back pages of
Yankee
and
The New Yorker
. They were parents so clear-eyed they'd accepted their son's homosexuality without protest, only attentive head shakings. Once something made sense to the Beckwirths, they couldn't oppose it. I was enthralled by them and by Wanda, where people smiled at me in what seemed like a sad and quiet way, and within days the Beckwirths and I were persuading Warren to move to Wanda with me and run the business, so his parents could retire to a one-story condo in North Carolina. Beverly's sweet logic made me weep, and Warren Sr. called me “son.” My own father had left my mother and me when I was a baby. Eventually Warren agreed that he might be happier running Bags of Wisconsin than working in the art department of a publisher that, rumor had it, was about to be sold to a larger one, which would have its own art department and might well dump Warren. So we moved.

I was writing about change in Healdsburg, California, once a dusty town of migrant farmworkers, now a chic setting for wineries and tourists. I flew there occasionally, and wrote up my notes in the old green frame house we bought from Warren's parents. Warren had entered my life encumbered with an antique oak desk and swivel chair, acquired in an adventure involving a former lover and a country auction. The desk had scarcely fit in our New York apartment and Warren never wrote at it, but I loved it, and sometimes spread my note cards on it, taking pleasure in its solidity and proportions. Now the desk was a grand presence in our Wisconsin dining room, glowing in afternoon sunlight. We bought a German shepherd puppy named Gloria, and every morning we'd run a few miles with Glory. When we reached the turnoff to Bags of Wisconsin's small cinder-block headquarters, in which Warren had installed a shower, he'd leave Glory and me and run down a hill to greet his employees, who were led by two geniuses, both named Betty. Home in our airy house, with squeaky varnished floorboards and maple trees outside, I'd pace and mumble my sentences into existence while Glory slept. At my computer was an office chair with lumbar support, but I spent hours in Warren's oak armchair, my feet on a windowsill, shuffling note cards. When my book was published I began one about Wanda, which used to be a market town and was now vaguely suburban, vaguely industrial. I got a part-time teaching job at a college an hour away, and commuted there twice a week.

Warren designed a line of ripstop nylon bags in vivid colors, and continued to offer the old canvas ones, which seemed to look forward to grime and mud stains. He undertook a catalog and, a few years after that, began to sell on the Internet. As the years passed, he became the first openly gay man in the Rotary Club, then a member of the city council. He grew bald and his smile became creased like his father's. “I might run for Congress,” Warren said one morning.

“You don't mean that.”

“I suppose not.” Two years later he did mean it. The incumbent, a charming homophobic conservative, was unbeatable, and nobody but Warren wanted to be the sacrificial Democrat. The business was doing well enough that we could put a little money into a campaign managed by the husband of one of the Bettys. We received donations from distant gay organizations, and
All Things Considered
did a two-minute segment on Warren as part of a piece on small-town gay candidates. Our big event was The Run for Congress, a ten-mile race that ended in front of Wanda's town hall. Warren, Glory, and I ran with a few supporters on a chilly fall day, and to our chagrin, Warren's opponent entered the race and reached the finish line before either of us. Warren lost the election more decisively than we expected. A few weeks later he began to talk about leaving Wanda to study at Harvard for a year. “You're portable,” he said to me, as if I were my own laptop. “It's only a year.”

“But we're happy here,” I said, shocked. As we argued during the next months, he applied to a one-year “midcareer” master's program in government. “But why?” I kept asking.

“To meet people who aren't benighted. To see what comes next.”

“Doesn't Bags of Wisconsin come next?”

“Maybe so, maybe not.”

Many of my interviews had been with the benighted—that is, I'd noted homophobia, racism, or anti-Semitism—but each person I'd talked to, in conversations lasting so long that twilight fell, makeshift suppers intervened, or bars closed, was gradually revealed—somehow—to be decent and caring. My resistance to Warren increased; Wanda's very stop signs came to seem delicate with meaning. At first we argued, then we became silent or unpleasant. “Stay here, then,” Warren said several times. One night in my helplessness I got so angry I took a swing at him. I didn't try to connect, but I knocked off his glasses, which snapped as they skittered across the floor. In his new glasses—much smaller lenses, with metal frames—Warren looked like someone else.

A few days later he said, “Don't you have a nephew in Boston? You can look up your nephew.” Find another crazy Jew who bats his arms around, I thought he meant.

“Cousin,” I said. Richard's nephew—his sister's son—lived near Boston. I stayed in touch with Richard, who was still a city planner in New York. Maybe he visited his nephew. Starting with Richard's image, I began to picture Cambridge bookstores and libraries, coffee shops where I could meet Richard or read galleys: the book on Wanda was almost done. I tried to stay civil as we rented out our house and put most of our furniture into storage. There was no way to take the oak desk, but I insisted on bringing the swivel armchair, which separated into a heavy base and a contoured seat with a slatted back. I took a leave from my teaching job. In late June I drove east on Route 90 with middle-aged Glory in the backseat, catching sight now and then of a U-Haul truck driven by Warren.

The only apartment we could afford that would take a dog was in Somerville, the town next to Cambridge. People said Somerville was interesting, with the amenities that accompany graduate students and professional people when they move into a working-class town. But when I took Glory out to our small bare backyard, and waited, shovel in hand, until she squatted, I was aware only of what I didn't like: houses crowded together and covered with aluminum siding, grassless yards, radios playing loud music. We ran on glaring sidewalks from which humid heat rose in visible waves. One day as I ran alone—Warren was in summer school, studying statistics and economics, scared and excited—an SUV hurtled down our steep, narrow street and struck a boy of ten or twelve sauntering across. He didn't fall down, and insisted when the driver jumped out that he was fine, man, fine. The kid and the van departed and I stood still, holding Glory's leash tightly and repelled by a place where everyone expected to inflict or receive pain. “Nonsense,” said Warren that night. He was on his way out and he glanced back at me. “Brad, give it a rest, will you?”

After running, I'd shower and work on my copy editor's queries. Yes, the name “Burt”—Carroll Burt, a former mayor of Wanda—was spelled “Burtt” when it belonged to Carroll's uncle, Landon. No, the Garfield family did not have two daughters named Mary Ellen. Warren took the T to Harvard Square, so I had the car, but I hated driving on the narrow streets. On good afternoons, Glory and I walked to Davis Square and I tied her up outside the used bookstore. I'd buy iced coffee and walk back with her, up and down hills, feeling a gingerly, grudging satisfaction.

The phone rang one dark fall afternoon when I'd postponed a walk too long. “Brad—Richard here—there's an incredible pianist performing with the symphony—” Richard said this into the machine because the phone had caught me on the toilet.

“I'm here,” I said, picking up.

“Lucky boy! You escaped from the Midwest!”

“I like the Midwest.” Richard was once a pianist. Wanda had no art, he had pointed out, on his single visit in the years we lived there. He discovered a French restaurant thirty miles away, but no music he'd sit still for. “Debussy,” he was saying now. Richard was coming to Boston.

“I can't wait to see you,” I broke in. “Warren and I are barely speaking.”

“Oh, you and Warren are
fine
.” Richard had never been with anyone long enough to consider living together, and regarded Warren and me as a couple comparable in dramatic potential to his parents. With a flurry of e-mailing and two more phone calls, Richard organized an evening. His nephew, Josh, was included, and so was Josh's girlfriend. “They live together,” said Richard. “Right near you. She's Asian.” Warren was too busy for Richard's concert, but I agreed to attend. Richard said I should pick up Josh and the woman, who had no car, and we'd all meet for dinner. “Can't we take the T?” I said.

“And you claim to resist city life!” said Richard. “No. The restaurant isn't near a station.”

Josh—whom I'd met once or twice—was recognizably my relative: short, with curly hair and a brainy, Jewish look. He gave me directions from the passenger seat, while Jo, his tall girlfriend, asked self-assured questions behind me. She had long black hair and features I thought were Korean. Richard had told them about my books. “They sound intriguing,” Jo said. “The little town in the Midwest—is that the latest one?”

“It's not out yet.”

When I asked what she did, Jo said she worked in a day-care center. “I plan to quit just before I start wringing the necks of three-year-olds,” she said. Then she said, “Maybe my book group will read your new book. We read and knit.”

“My mother knitted,” I said. Jo might be a tough critic, something like Richard's mother, my aunt Sylvia, who read my books and sent me long candid letters.

Richard waited—arms flung wide when he saw us—in one of his finds, an Italian restaurant in back of a deli. He squashed Josh in a hug, kissed me, and shook hands enthusiastically with Jo. “They have ostrich here. Order ostrich.”

I ordered escarole-and-bean soup to start. As I tasted the soup, my mind was made to pay such close attention to my mouth (as escarole of just the right degree of doneness crossed my tongue) that everything became, with utter clarity, itself—as the soup was so precisely itself. My problem, I understood, wasn't Warren or Wanda or even my book, but solitude, because Warren—dear Warren—was all I had. We'd had friends in Wanda—good-hearted liberals who welcomed a gay couple—but I'd quickly forgotten them. The people I'd interviewed were make-believe friends.

When I paid attention again, Richard was quizzing Josh and Jo about Somerville. They'd just discussed movie houses and he was thoughtfully hearing their opinions of movies. Richard had been unhappy, I suspected, since he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, losing the chance for a life in music. He'd never loved anyone as he'd loved James, though he'd had a long line of young, self-absorbed boyfriends. But he could make any gathering festive, and discovered wonders of achievement and personality in those he met over dinner. I knew he delighted in treating his nephew, that he'd insist on paying for all of us—all of us kids. “So it's safe here at night? People walk around?” he asked now.

“Oh, sure,” said Josh. “We walk everywhere.”