The Marble Quilt (12 page)

With my parents, going to watch the sea elephants became a tradition. Josh and I joined them once. The huge males shimmied along the rocks toward their waiting harems, and the hands of my parents, in spite of all that had passed between them, reached toward each other like flowers reaching toward the sun. My parents' hands were brown; there was dirt under their nails.

Who can claim that our love does not endure, less like flowers than like the little stakes with the photographs of flowers, stubborn beneath the soil?

Perennial.

Mark told me this story:

Years ago, he loved a cellist whom we shall call Gary. Gary loved Mark a lot, but his cello more. This was because Gary's mother had sold her own mother's wedding ring to buy him the cello. Not that she had to; she and her husband were affluent, and could easily have afforded it. No, she wanted the gift to connote sacrifice. She wanted Gary, every time he touched his bow to the strings, to know that for his sake his mother had given up something that she loved.

I understand this woman.

“Fostering dependency,” the therapists call what she did, and according to them it is a real no-no. Yet it is exactly what I, too, have done. And at the heart of the matter is the fear of being alone, which makes Gary's mother the scariest person I know. So, a
reasonable voice inquires, why shouldn't a child want to get away from someone so scary?

I remember another story, about my ex-boyfriend, whose name really was Gary. The ingredients in this story were: a wedding cake in the middle of the road (required by National Public Radio, which had asked a lot of writers to write stories on this theme); some elephant seals; and the little stakes with photographs of flowers on them that turn up each spring when, with shovel or spade, one reopens the soil. In that story, I called Gary Josh.

Here is the coincidence: the real Gary, the cellist, is named Josh.

So this is not a story at all, but a
tableau vivant
: a garden party, a cocktail party, at which the guests are me, Mark, Gary, Josh, the mother, and all of our fictive equivalents. Oh, and the cellist hired to provide the entertainment. Her face is shrouded. We shall call her Need. And the little air she plays, the little phrase, if we could translate music into words, would enter our ears as “Never leave me, never leave me, never leave me.”

In the late 1980s, in New York, if a homosexual man died of anything other than AIDS, people generally reacted with skepticism. Especially if the officially listed cause of death was a disease with which AIDS might have been complicit—cancer, pneumonia, some mysterious infection of the heart—it would be taken for granted that the deceased's loved ones were trying to protect his reputation, or their own.

More troubling still were those occasions when the cause of death was one to which AIDS, even in the most extreme scenario, could not be linked. This was considered bad plotting—as if in a novel a character at whose head a specific piece of ammunition, for pages, had been steadily aimed, were to be killed not by his expected assassin, but by a stray bullet, fired from a direction in which no one would have thought of looking.

Such was the case with Ralph Davenport, the noted interior designer, who had the misfortune of being one of the passengers on that London-bound plane that blew up off the coast of Newfoundland one balmy summer evening in 1988. No one felt the irony of his death more acutely than Bob Bookman, with whom he had lived for the past fifteen years. This was because the afternoon before Ralph had boarded the ill-fated Flight 20, he and Bob had had a fight over his refusal to get an HIV test. Generally speaking, in those years, men like Bob, who could count their sexual partners on two hands, were eager to get tested; Bob had been tested four times. Men like Ralph, on the other hand, whose sexual histories had been more volatile, avoided the test, arguing that it would do them no good whatsoever. As Ralph saw it, to learn that he was definitely HIV-positive (as opposed to merely
probably
HIV-positive) would be to let go the one slender reed of hope on which his sanity depended. Better to live in a cloud of unknowing, he believed,
than submit to the dread of certainty. To which Bob replied, “But what if you're negative? I am.”

“It wouldn't change my life.”

“You could breathe a sigh of relief.”

Ralph shook his head. “The waiting would kill me faster than any virus,” he said, then zipped up his Travelpro, kissed Bob on the cheek, and went off to die. For days, weeks after that, fishing boats trawled the coastline over which his plane—a cursor blinking across the screen of night—had blossomed into a fireball, a parrot tulip, before raining down in pieces. They were looking for bodies. They were looking for the black box.

Bob was a literary man. With his name, what choice did he have? Small-boned and bespectacled, he looked good in the sort of interiors that were Ralph's specialty: cluttered, English-y spaces, enlivened by mad fabric mixes, chintz with checks, brocade with hot pink Indian sari silk. Not to mention, of course, the books. Books—in corners, on the staircase, piled next to sofas as an alternative to side tables (sometimes he even put lamps on them)—were Ralph's decorative calling card. He used to joke that he had chosen Bob only because Bob, with his argyle sweaters and bow ties, left just the right authenticating imprint on the pair of leather library chairs in their living room. No one accessorized these interiors more perfectly than Bob.

It was a look to which Ralph's clients, few of whom were readers, took avidly. Under his aegis, they bought old books from a dealer who sold them by the yard, and told their maids to leave the chair cushions attractively rumpled: the idea was to create the illusion of a space where people
thought
. Ralph, who read only design magazines, profited from his vision, which had gotten him twice onto the cover of
Architectural Digest
. Toward
the end he was just starting to win the corporate commissions that are the bread and butter of any serious design firm; the night he died he was on his way to England to buy furniture for a downtown advertising agency that wanted to “soften its image.” Then the plane went down. That was how Ralph's sister, Kitty, put it when she called. “A plane went down near Newfoundland,” she said. “I'm only a little worried because I know Ralphie was planning a trip to London sometime soon. Make me feel better and tell me he didn't go today.”

But of course he had. “I wouldn't be too concerned,” Bob said. “Dozens of flights leave every day for London. What's the chance he was on that one?”

Still, to play it safe, he called Ralph's assistant, Brenda, to find out which airline he'd taken: Ralph traveled so much that Bob no longer bothered to keep track of the arrangements. She was crying when she picked up the phone. “The thing is, he usually flew American,” she said, “because that's where he had his frequent flyer miles. But then the last time they wouldn't give him an upgrade to business class, and he got furious. He swore he'd never fly American again, and you know how Ralph is. Once he makes up his mind, he'll never change it.”

Bob hung up immediately. He lowered himself into one of the library chairs and switched on the television, which was hidden inside an eighteenth-century Tuscan bread chest. News of the crash filled every channel. On CNN, a pale boy stood in front of his mother, who was stroking his hair. “We were having a clambake,” the boy said, “and I was watching the stars, when suddenly there was this explosion. The plane broke up and fell into the water.”

On another channel, a second witness—a woman with sunken cheeks, her glasses
taped at the right temple—insisted that before the plane had blown up, something was heading for it. “I can't be sure,” she told the reporter, “but I'd swear it was a missile.”

“Do you think it's likely there were survivors?” the reporter asked.

“An explosion like that? Let's put it this way, if there were survivors, I'd feel more sorry for them than the ones that died.”

At that moment, just as Bob expected, the telephone rang.

The next morning Kitty, who had a therapeutic personality, flew with her husband to Newfoundland. Because Ralph's parents were both dead, she qualified as next of kin. “You should come, Bob,” she told him over the phone. “At first I was dreading it, but now that we're here, with all the other families … I don't know, it helps, somehow.”

“I'd really rather not,” said Bob, who could not, in any case, envision quite how he'd explain his relationship with Ralph to the airline. After all, it had no official designation. It did not matter that they had shared an apartment for fifteen years, or that Ralph had put up the money with which Bob opened his bookstore. That was business. He wasn't in any legal sense “kin.”

“But it's healing!” Kitty said. “For instance, just this morning, when I woke up, I looked out at the water—our rooms all overlook the water, the counselors insisted on that—and it seemed so placid. Such a lovely, soothing scene.”

“How long are you planning to stay?”

“Until they find Ralph. Or the black box.”

“Ah, the black box,” Bob repeated. For once that was pulled up from the bottom of the ocean, the television assured him, all speculation about the cause of the crash—bomb,
missile, pilot error—could be put to rest. Much hung in the balance, including lawsuits. In that black box, Kitty told him, were stored the voices of the pilots in the moments just before the plane blew up. “Although it's not really black,” she added. “It's orange.”

“How long will it take to find it?”

“We hope only a few more days, depending on the weather. It's supposed to give off a signal. Please come,” she concluded, her voice almost seductive in its entreaty. “We need you here.”

But he didn't go. Instead he stayed at the bookstore. He liked the bookstore—which Ralph had also designed—far more than the apartment. Here, at least, Ralph's signature made sense, since books were the place's raison d'être, as opposed to merely a decorative device. During the day Bob sat at the cash register, ringing up purchases and giving advice to customers, much to the bewilderment of his employees, two girls from NYU, and to the chagrin of Ralph's friends, who kept dropping by to offer their condolences.

“Are you sure you want to be here?” asked Brenda.

“Why don't you come over for dinner?” suggested Gwyneth, Ralph's lawyer. “You look pale, like you need a home-cooked meal.”

“I'd really rather not,” Bob answered, as he had answered Kitty's pleas that he fly up to Newfoundland. In the end, he even took to sleeping in the bookstore, on a foam rubber pad dragged up from the basement. Soon the dismay of Ralph's friends ripened into a kind of scandalized horror, as if in choosing this particular method of grief Bob was throwing in their faces certain conventions on which their own ability to cope, even to be distracted from death, somehow depended.

Strange people—acquaintances of Ralph's he'd met only briefly, or never at all—started
coming into the store. Four days after the crash a woman with gray hair and owlish glasses approached Bob and asked him if he was himself. When he affirmed that he was, she peered at him almost clinically, as if she were a zoologist and he the only surviving specimen of some rare genus: the disaster widow, a piece of human wreckage.

“Oh, I'm sorry, I imagined you looking quite different,” the woman said, pulling a shapeless, nubbly sweater down over her hips. “I'm Veronica Feinbaum. I'm sure Ralph told you about me.”

Ralph had. Of his regular clients, she was the one he had found the most trying. As Bob recalled from dinner talk, Veronica lived in a vast Park Avenue apartment, and was married to an entertainment lawyer whose wealth had bought her seats on the boards of several charitable organizations. Yet her lot in life did not satisfy her, and so she had recently gone back to school, to Columbia, where she was studying Classics.

“It's a pleasure to meet you,” Bob said.

She clasped his hand in hers. “I'm so sorry,” she said, then, lowering her voice, added: “Still, it must have come as a relief.”

He frowned. Her face, arcaded by columns of ill-brushed hair, was fleshy with health. A curious mixture of solicitude and challenge enlivened her unctuous smile.

“A relief?” he repeated.

“Of course. Otherwise, think of all the suffering you both would have had to endure. Wasting, dementia. At least this way it was quick.”

Bob let go of her hand. “Thank you for your concern,” he said.

“Ralph would have told you, I'm not one to mince words. My husband always says to me, ‘Ronnie, shut your yap, it'll get you into trouble.' But I say, why beat around the
bush when everyone knows it's nonsense? Much better to be frank and open. Fellows like Ralph, they're basically under a death sentence, just because they lived where they did and when they did. I don't know if he mentioned it, but I sit on the board of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. It's taught me to hold with the Greek view of death—you know, that it's better for a man to be taken at his peak.”

“No, he didn't.”

“Well, I'm glad we've had this talk,” she said, and pressed a card into Bob's palm. “I doubt there are many people you can be this open with, so please, if you need to vent, call me
any
time.”

She left, floating out the door in a hazy effulgence of perfume. Bob looked at the card. GEORGE AXELROD, DDS, it read. And on the back: TUESDAY, 3/7, 2:30 P.M.

That afternoon a small man with pale blond hair came into the bookstore. “So I've found you at last,” he said when Lizzie, the taller and shyer of Bob's employees, led him to the front desk. “It's so important that we talk. Could we go somewhere?”

Bob was ruffled, bemused. He almost laughed. When the man spoke, his voice was oddly honeyed, as if he were making an inept attempt at a come-on. He was in his mid-thirties, Bob guessed, with watery blue eyes and the kind of boyish good looks that have a way of cracking as a person gets older. Close up, Bob could see minute lines around his eyes. His hair was thinning. He wore a beige trench coat over his suit, which was black, a white shirt, a red-and-blue-striped tie. In his right hand he carried a briefcase.