A Place at the Table (20 page)

I think of my family, of what they would do if I brought Sebastian home to meet them, insisting my mother refer to him as my boyfriend. Insisting my father have breakfast with him. It’s inconceivable, really. It would never, ever happen. And yet even knowing that, I feel a sudden nostalgia for Mama and Daddy. For what Mama would serve were she hosting a brunch: sausage, egg, and cheese casserole, coffeecake swirled with cinnamon, pecans, and brown sugar, grits baked with garlic and cheese. There would be the rich smell of coffee in the air, and the subtle scent of fresh-cut flowers from the garden. Daddy would have been there when we arrived, and in every room there would be framed pictures of the family.

It’s been over a year now since I’ve been in New York, absorbing this city. Going to Woody Allen movies. Shopping at Fairway. Watching Balanchine’s toned dancers fly across a stripped-down stage. Walking around the reservoir in Central Park. Listening to Gus Andres reminisce about the late 40s, when everyone was young
and artists mingled with commoners. I’ve been mugged. I’ve learned the difference between the local and the express. I’ve learned not to talk to the neighbors in Sebastian’s building, because God forbid one of them is crazy and then you have to deal with that person for the rest of your life or give up your good rent.

In short, I am learning how to be a New Yorker, and while I might still bring a hostess gift to a brunch and call my boyfriend’s parents sir and ma’am, I am growing further and further away from my Decatur roots. But for the first time this fills me not with satisfaction but with melancholy. Sebastian holds my hand as we head toward Riverside Park, where we will walk off the bagels and the schmear. And though I love this man and though he makes me feel both secure and treasured, I am suddenly so homesick I can hardly stand it. I am thinking of Dahlia’s stark white walls, and I am thinking of my meemaw, of how you couldn’t even tell the color of her living room walls, they were so covered by pictures of our family. I am thinking of her pulling a pound cake out of the oven, how that nutty smell of baked butter filled the air. I am thinking of her soft, doughy skin, how easy it was to hug her, how she smelled always of good things: vanilla, cinnamon, buttered toast. And now my mind is stretching back to when I was a boy, safe and happy with Mama and Daddy: flying through the air on the zip wire, lounging on the Pawleys Island hammock stretched between two tall, skinny trees, catching fireflies at dusk. I am thinking of Daddy’s vegetable garden planted in neat rows and I am thinking of rolling lawns and I am thinking of spring flowers, hydrangeas and peonies and irises. I am thinking of all that is beautiful about where I come from. I am thinking of Mama and I am thinking of Daddy, and I am missing them; I am missing them terribly.

But it’s an impotent nostalgia. Mama and Daddy are in my past. They would not take me as I am now, not really. Yes, they call to check in, but they don’t really want to know me. They only want
superficial details that will allow them to create a tidy narrative of who I am—a footloose bachelor, not quite ready to settle down. They were so excited about the mention in the
Times
, like suddenly they had good news about their son to tell their friends, when so many other good things have happened to me, most importantly that I fell in love.

But that is information they would never want to know or share. That I fell in love with a man.

A sadness like hunger spreads through my chest, and I try to distract myself from it by focusing instead on what I might prepare for Tuesday’s lunch special at the café. If I could find grits somewhere I could make Mama’s casserole with cheese and garlic. Serve shrimp on top. Dress it up with some basil cut in a chiffonade, maybe give it a fancy name—call it corn and
crevettes
—and serve it forth to the New Yorkers who will have no idea what they are eating, who will have no idea they are eating my loneliness transformed.

(New York City, 1985)

S
unday afternoon and we are in bed, my head tucked into Sebastian’s arm, my finger tracing his chest, pushing through the hair that grows there so abundantly.

“What’s this, a third nipple?” I tease, in the half second before reality catches up with me.

“Hmm?” he asks, drowsy and content.

“Oh my God,” I say, circling the bump with my finger. I am no longer drowsy and satisfied but alert, on edge. I pick up his right hand, place it on the spot. “Feel this.”

He is silent for a moment; then wordlessly he stands and walks to the closet, opening the door to look in the full-length mirror on the other side. He parts his chest hair with his fingers and examines the growth. It is purple, about the size of a quarter. He turns to face me, fully naked, his legs slightly bowed, his abdomen ropy, the hair on his chest obscuring his toned pecs. “This looks just like what Michael found.”

Every few weeks there is another funeral to attend. Michael was Sebastian’s best friend from Princeton. They were in an a cappella group together. “All of us trying to be somebody we weren’t,” Sebastian would say, “And me double. I wanted to be straight
and
a WASP.”

They sang in archways, wearing tuxedos on football weekends. The harmony of their clear, young voices lulled the visiting mothers and fathers into believing that the universe was a good and orderly place, that all was as it should be.

•  •  •

It is a rush to get our clothes on, to find our physician’s number—a personal friend, he has come to our home for dinner before—to call and beg for him to see Sebastian right away. As it is Sunday, Dr. Wilson’s offices are closed, but he is a compassionate man and he tells us to come to his apartment. He lives nearby, at Central Park West and 78th. It is November, cold, and we wear long black coats as we rush to see him. The coats you might wear to a funeral. It starts to snow during the walk over, the first snowfall of the year. Each winter Sebastian welcomes the first snow with boyish excitement. But today he makes no comment, just grabs my arm tighter so neither of us will slip. The white flakes land on his black coat, and I think of the lesions that might overtake his body. The first lesion Michael found was on his ankle, noticeable only if he pulled down his sock and showed it to you. Two months later, his body was covered with them.

Michael was dead within four months; the last month of his life he had stopped making sense, could only speak in gibberish, sometimes had to be tied to the bed to stop him from pulling out the hair on his brows, which he thought were baby snakes, come to eat his brain. This the fate of a renowned painter whose impressionistic “splash” portraits hang in museums. In one of his lucid moments, Michael told us that he wished to paint a self-portrait with all of his
lesions, to paint it against the side of a building, to say to New York, to the country, to the president, to the world:
This is really happening.

It is happening. But all around us, life bustles on. As if the deaths of gay men are irrelevant.

I try to imagine what else Sebastian’s mark might be. Poison ivy, a wart, a rash, something, anything besides Kaposi’s sarcoma. We are monogamous. And I had such little experience before Sebastian. A hand job in a bathhouse, a kiss on a dance floor. I was such a good Baptist boy when I first landed in the city. What I thought was sinning was nothing more than licking a vanilla ice cream cone.

But think, Bobby. Think.
Sebastian has been around so much longer. He and his friends speak of how wild the 70s were, the Wild West of gay sex, of any sex. Back then contracting an STD meant popping an antibiotic or shaving off your pubic hair.
Think, Bobby.
Of how he speaks of those carefree days before he met you, when his favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon was going to the baths and coming home afterward to listen to the opera.

And then it occurs to me: If Sebastian has AIDS, do I have it, too?

•  •  •

We enter the lobby of Dr. Wilson’s building, checking in with the doorman, who calls up to make sure we are expected. I wonder how many other panicked men have visited Dr. Wilson at home, have made this inverse house call to find out, as soon as possible, whether or not they have received a death sentence.

When the elevator stops on the eleventh floor, the color drains from Sebastian’s face and his knees buckle. He grabs my arm.

“Oh my God, Bobby. Oh my God. I can’t breathe.”

We stand in the elevator for so long that the door starts to close, but I push the button to keep it open. “Come on, sweetheart, one step at a time. One step at a time. We don’t know yet. Just take one
step, good, now another. We’re just going to walk down this hall. That’s all we’re doing right now.”

He lets me guide him, step by step, down the hall and to the door where Dr. Wilson is waiting.

“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. It’s going to be okay,” I murmur, having no idea if I am speaking the truth.

“Let’s do the examination in the back bedroom,” says Dr. Wilson, leading us through his apartment. “It’s more private.”

I walk with them to the back room, but at the door Sebastian turns and asks me to wait outside.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to do this alone.”

Stung, I make my way to the leather sofa in Dr. Wilson’s graciously appointed living room, slide into it. Soon I hear a keening, followed by the low murmurs of Dr. Wilson. I hear Sebastian gasp, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” And I realize why Sebastian left me here: so he does not have to face my dismay at the same time that he faces his own. For a moment I am frozen. As long as I remain here, on the other side of the closed door, I can still live in the time before. To go to Sebastian, to push open the closed door, to offer comfort, is to make it real. Yes, Sebastian is keening, but as long as I stay here, life has not permanently changed.

I sit paralyzed on the sofa, while in the other room my lover weeps. And then I see a vision of my meemaw wearing her pink velour housecoat that zips up the front, looking just as she did the night I ran to her house after being caught with Pete Arnold.
Son
, she says,
go to him. Go to him now. He needs you.
I stand and walk to the closed door. I start to knock, but instead I simply turn the handle, entering the room, crossing to him. Sebastian sits slumped over, shirtless, on the edge of Dr. Wilson’s bed. His eyes are rimmed with red, as if outlined with a crayon. He looks momentarily surprised to see me, and then he looks grateful.

I sit beside him on the bed, and he leans the full weight of his body against me.

“Oh, Bobby,” he says. “When you were little were you scared of the monster under the bed?”

“Yes,” I say, though in truth my kid fear had been that when I flushed the toilet a witch would rise from the bowl, grab me around the waist, and pull me down into the sewer with her. For a while, until Mama caught me, I peed in the sink to avoid having to flush.

“Well, the monster is real and he has come to get me.”

(New York City, Winter 1988)

S
ebastian’s death shows itself on Dahlia’s face. Whereas before she looked remarkably young for her age and was sometimes even mistaken for Sebastian’s sister, the word “crone” now comes to mind whenever I observe the heavy black circles under her weary eyes, the set of three parallel indentations on her forehead, the shallow stream of lines running off from the sad red river of her mouth. Yet, while her son’s death aged her, it also gave her the melancholic beauty of a survivor. The beauty that comes from waking up every day resolved to meet the worst that life has to offer with compassion and grace: bringing fresh flowers to the apartment, massaging her dying son’s feet with peppermint lotion from The Body Shop, singing lullabies to him from his nursery days, her voice pure and clear, like the ringing of a crystal goblet as a wet finger is run round its lip. There was one song she sang again and again, at Sebastian’s insistence, even though it was haunting and sad. “Um umm, I’d like
to linger here, um umm, a little longer here, um umm, a little longer here with you.”

Whereas Sebastian’s father, Mel, turned away. Mel turned away from his dying son, visited only twice during Sebastian’s final months, called only a handful of times. Ate and ate and ate, gaining ten, then twenty, then thirty pounds, his petulant refusal to engage in his son’s death reflected in his swollen face, which kept expanding, until it was as wide and useless as a Mylar balloon, until he was a balloon man with hapless eyes, a man who could not face what life delivered and so allowed himself to drift away from all that mattered. What more can I say of Mel? To rail against him is to complain of the cold in February, to wish a dip in the ocean didn’t leave salt in your hair, to be startled when a two-year-old wants a sugar cookie before eating his broccoli.

He is of little substance. He is little more than a knot and stale air.

•  •  •

As for me, I remain at the Belthorp. It is what Sebastian would have wanted, though not for sentimental reasons, but so that he could retain some sort of hold on his rent-controlled apartment, even after death. Yes, I have become a living punchline to a tired old joke about New York real estate. And Lord knows I need the cheap rent. But that is not why I stay. I stay because at the Belthorp I can remain with Sebastian. I sleep on sheets he picked out; I use his brand of laundry detergent, his brand of dryer sheets, his brand of toothpaste. When the bathroom sink backs up and I pull out the drain, I still find pieces of his hair stuck in it. Not willing to throw them away, I store them in a Ziploc baggie, placing it on a high shelf in the back of the closet, where Sebastian kept his collection of porn videos, which I sometimes watch in an attempt at communion, wanting to link into his specific fantasies and desires so I may be with him again.

Funny: Those videos used to embarrass me; they were low-budget
and hard-core. The fact that Sebastian enjoyed them—relished them—revealed something about him I felt was unpleasant, unsavory. Had I been given the choice to wipe out that proclivity, along with a few of his more abrasive personality traits, I would have. (He drove me crazy by arguing the other side, any side, just for the hell of it, just to be a provocateur, once going so far as to defend Lacy Lovehart by saying her Save Our Sons campaign was well within her First Amendment rights. To which I answered, “Baby, that might be, but I just need you on my side with this one.”) But now that he is gone I miss his edges, his extremes, the more difficult parts of his personality. Those edges made him Sebastian. It occurs to me that I loved Sebastian the way my father preached you should love your spouse: warts and all.