The Lovers
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 41: Do the young still know this, about a kiss? Do they know what it can do to you? How it can remain, fixed in time, proliferating ghosts?
Why am I remembering that apartment on the second floor of a house in North Bennington, Vermont? Why that specific apartment, and why now, when it is not in the usual rotation of things I remember from that time? How have I never thought of it before, never remembered it in this way, barely even remembered that trip? How you picked me up from the airport and how, when we kissed for the first time after a six-week separation, there was an actual, electric shock—static electricity, probably, from the airport carpets.
“Whoa,” you said, pulling back.
I was already lost to you then, but didn’t know it, turned away into the labyrinth of my own fears. Still, the apartment. The deep green of late summer. That sparse set of rooms and the mattress on the floor where you would sit and write to me. All those letters. A sliding glass door. The mattress on the floor where you would sleep and write and the white sheets that covered it—at least I think they were white, I’m not sure I can remember.
I keep thinking, also, about the art installation called Portrait of Ross in L.A by Félix González-Torres. It was at MoMA in San Francisco in 1998 and I’m pretty sure we saw it together. The installation is a recipe to be assembled again and again, across space and over time, as it appears in different museums: a mound of colorful wrapped hard candies, heaped against a wall, or in a corner, or gathered up in a pile in the middle of the room. Sometimes it is lit with a spotlight.
We saw it there together, I am sure of it now, that summer I brought you out to meet my family in California. I can see you there in your sea-green button-up shirt and blue jeans, standing beneath the gray sky of the downtown San Francisco bus terminal. We’d been on that bus for more than three days, all the way from Albany, New York.
Worse than the hours on the bus itself were the endless stopping and transfers. We were so young, still teenagers—both of us—though you would turn twenty in a matter of weeks. We had a shared plastic bag of bread and cheese and a jar of olives so that we could avoid even the minor expense of the fast food restaurants.
Science tells me that every detail of that cross-country bus trip is stored in my mind somewhere, even the ones I can no longer remember. The necessity of selective forgetting means that access has been revoked to most of it, but there is still what remains: the summer evening as we rode through upstate New York. How I tried to sleep against your shoulder. The feel of your lightweight cotton sweater against my cheek, its color, a kind of blue you don’t see so often anymore, its buttoned placket and polo collar. You, standing in the Cleveland bus station at 3 a.m. as we learned that yet another bus transfer was cancelled, and how you said in anger, in your deep voice and soft British accent, aloud and to no one in particular “Well, fuck me!” Cleaning my face and teeth in the bus station bathroom, hours before dawn, all the insects that collected on the big yellow lights outside the station, in that city where my father was born and which I have still never visited in earnest. How we arrived there in darkness and left so early and exhausted that I didn’t notice anything else.
There was a cast of characters that we followed and gave nicknames to, fellow-travelers we kept encountering on different buses, in different cities, different stations, as we rode along, ill-slept, collapsed against one another like the children we still were. There was a woman we called “the Frog Lady,” who did have a somewhat ranine appearance, and sat pleasantly muttering to herself. There was a large man with his tiny son we named “Big Daddy”, and others I can’t remember now. To see them climbing aboard a new transfer or waiting for the restroom in Chicago, in Omaha, always gave us a thrill.
Aside from all the transfers, there were also the meal breaks—twenty minutes at a McDonald’s or a Subway—where you could get something to eat, stretch your legs, use a real bathroom. There was an Asian woman, I think Japanese, who appeared to speak no English. I still think about her, even to this day. We had stopped somewhere outside Buffalo maybe, or Burlington, Iowa—somewhere like that—and the driver told us all that despite being stopped in the parking lot of a Burger King, “this isn’t a meal stop, so don’t go inside, there isn’t time.”
The Asian woman didn’t understand. Why wouldn’t she think that it was just another chance to go buy food and use the bathroom? The driver would not listen to us, would not wait for her, not even when we stood up to shout.
He left her behind at that Burger King. All her belongings were still on the bus—her neat little bag, her discreet floral pillow still there on the seat. Whatever happened to her? Almost thirty years later there is still a ghost of her standing there, I am sure, her shock and dismay marking the ions of the atmosphere, right there on the pavement, with no cell phone and no luggage and no way of knowing how to get back to what she’d lost, to what had left her behind.
I remember staring and staring at her floral pillow on the seat as the bus rumbled on. Maybe there is still a ghost of us there too, gesticulating, desperate, trying and failing to save someone, or something, and not knowing how.
I know we went to MoMA in San Francisco. I don’t have any photos from the museum, but I have a photo of you in the passenger seat of my grandmother’s little blue car, going over the Golden Gate Bridge on our way to it. I remember standing together in front of the colorful Matisse sketch for La Joie de Vivre, and I remember Portrait of Ross in L.A.
There it is now, in the light of the museum, in my memory. The pile of candy that started out each day weighing the same as the artist’s lover Ross, who died from AIDS in 1991. Visitors were encouraged to take a piece and eat it. I remember the candy. There it is in my hand, and then in my mouth, and there I am—eating it.
I’m not sure I thought too much about what it meant at the time, that sacrament; the beloved, lost body. What I remember is the candy in my mouth, and the wrapper in my hand, and the idea that I was eating part of the art in a museum. The thrill of that. A transgression. I remember being there with you, seeing it. Eating the candy. Eating a piece of Portrait of Ross in L.A.
What I want to remember of course is you. If I can remember the shirt, I can remember the jeans, and then the rest; the warmth of you and the architecture of your bones. It makes me think of the Dylan Thomas poem about the dead men who “shall have stars at elbow and foot.” Who shall be one “with the man in the wind and the west moon” and where lovers are lost but love is not, and death shall have no dominion.
Somewhere in a box are all of your letters. Pages and pages of them. The proof. You, sitting under a tree with the fireflies, or on the mattress on the floor, writing to me.
I always thought the smell of lilacs would bring me back to you. One day not long ago on a stylish Paris street, I went into a perfume shop and bought a bar of lilac soap, and didn’t think of you. I didn’t think of that morning in May at the end of the last century when I woke in your room across campus and could not find my shoes and so walked barefoot over a dewy field of grass to my own room, still smelling of your cologne. I did not think of the hours spent lying with you under an enormous bouquet of stolen lilacs, gathered from the century-old bushes by the music building, the twin bed shoved between desk and wall. The whole world smelled of lilacs then. But I did not think of you when I bought the lilac soap. The future came, that moment I’d imagined, and you were not in it.
In Portrait of Ross in L.A., the artist shares with us, the audience, something that cannot be shared. It is the experience of a lover that does not include the gaze. A sensual engagement, some profane communion. Here, it says, Taste this.
We had planned to spend the whole rest of that summer apart, but couldn’t, so I flew out to visit. Then came the airport, the kiss, just one of so many. The deep green of late summer. The fireflies. The mattress. So many years have passed now, and yet every one of those years that tries to present itself as a passage of anything is a lie. Nothing has passed. I am still there in that room, in that apartment. I can feel it, feel the truth of it. My fingers pass effortlessly through the membrane of time and touch your hair.
Is a kiss like a candy? Do the young still know this, about a kiss? Do they know what it can do, and how it can remain, fixed in time, proliferating ghosts? In the museum of my mind, so many exhibits are closed. Ross is gone, and Felix is gone, and you are gone too. But I am here, the ghost of a crinkled wrapper in my hand, smelling phantom lilacs.
This post is adapted from several notebook entries originally written in 2022.
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