Doors painted bright,
the tapestries stitched brilliantly,
the singing hall, the dance pavilion —
all ashes now, their incense gone,
their light engulfed in night,
their echoes muffled, silent.
Bring the lute, I will sing
—Pao Chao, c. 465 CE.
Am I the only one
who sees it? Up there. That third floor loft, all dark, the one whose windows
gape wide through every season, the one whose ghost-white curtains, now grayed
by soot and tattered by wind-flap, flutter like flags of abandonment, a place like
a village deserted before a certain onslaught, bereft even of spider webs or
sunning cats or plants. I wonder why owls or bats or pigeons haven’t gone into
penetrate the darkened space inside, for that at least would tell me something.
Dark panes tipped in to a darker space give only one answer: a nullity, that no
one lives here.
Is that a light?
One glow — a distant yellow bulb somewhere way back, relentlessly dim and dull,
night and day burning. No matter how long I linger, I’ve never seen shadow or
any illumined thing beam back or obscure its glow. If only some hand, with a
wrist and an arm below it would show itself, reach out to pull the window shut
at last! But it goes on and on, like some tortured modernist art (blank canvas,
untouched piano keys, actors not acting) the flutter-flash of curtain at wind’s
beck, the solitary beam of a single bulb on a tall and shadeless pole lamp.
Am I the only one
who knows him? That man. It is his loft. We met in Central Park — yes, in the
shrubbery! — we met the day he first arrived in America. I was the first to
touch and welcome him, new-found from far-off China. He spent his first
American night on the floor with me. Our bohemian mattress was next to the
printing press. I helped him read the street signs, pronounce the words he needed
to navigate the days until his funds caught up with him. We made love until
dawn; he slept against me as light shafts broke day into the concrete canyons
and made palaces of derelict old cast-iron dry-good stores, the dust-mite sun the
same everywhere, bringing a special urgent magic.
We have mere
dozens of words between us. His “How you are?” would never cease to be his
American-English greeting. His raven hair intoxicated me, his eyes caught me with
a sense of unpredictable intelligence. As the months passed, our friendship
blossomed. He was my gateway to the best of a world that is all but hidden to
most. What feasts we savored in Chinatown! Tai Tai Chen ma po tofu! Sea slugs
in casserole! Beijing Duck! Dragon and Phoenix! The pi-pa, the er-hu, the
bright world of Chinese music, mad whirl of the Monkey King, the death and
return to life of the Butterfly Lovers; the long dark conspiracies of eunuchs
and emperors, flute girls and fierce concubines, of Empress Wu, and Ci Xi, the
last dread Dowager, seen on the dim screens of Chinatown movie theaters, even
the awful kitsch of The Red Detachment of Women.
One day I played, to
his astonishment, “The East Is Red,” mock-improvised on my harpsichord. His
Middle Kingdom he gifted me, as I brought him to Beethoven, Mahler, Handel and
harpsichords, his East, my West in harmony.
(But we were never
one, despite my always wishing it.) Manhattan’s day-long man-show and its
nocturnal orgies drew him into the world of “always-chasing, never-caught.”
I moved to
Providence, a secretive city, a place where none of the newly-dead were my
dead, a place where Poe romanced forlorn, where gambrel or mansard concealed genetic
errors, the deeds of avarice, locked attics whose cedar trunks had seen Canton
and Goa and Senegal. His phone calls stopped; he never visited. That distance
rose like an angry dragon between us. I had ceased to be, a faraway Zip-code
denizen, a toll-call outlaw. I heard that his mother had visited, furious with
him for his myriad boyfriends. “I want you married!” she shrieked. “You pick
one. Stay with someone. I don’t care if it’s a man!”
Alone, I continued
along my own Chinese journey. Weekends I drifted through Chinatowns — tea
houses, the cry and clamor of the opera house enthralling me again —White Snake,
The Golden Brick, The Peony Pavilion! —museums and galleries and auction houses
teaching me the glory of Chinese painting, the breathless awe I felt regarding
a single porcelain bowl emblazoned with five peaches in full blush bloom over
which, in perfect arcs, five bats fluttered — perfect long life in perfect
happiness. The Monkey King, the lord of Chaos, now graced my mantel. Kuan-Ti,
the lordly general with his golden halberd guarded my doorway; my wall aflame
as Yuan pagodas perched in impossible perspectives on dream-shrouded hills, and
one great Taoist dragon emerged from a yellow scroll. This, my house,
compounded of so many things he showed me. I thought of him often. The gulf of
not speaking became an ocean. There would be no story to this, if this were
all.
2
Those I have known
and loved my lifetime through —
How many can I count?
One hand’s fingers suffice! — Po Chü-I, circa 820 CE
Even though I am
now an “older man,” I’m never drawn to older men. But here, a cultured
gentleman, Chinese and kindly, a devotee of the arts and the opera, invited me
for dinner and mischief (in one of those vast beds no doubt constructed for the
Forbidden City.) Some instinct told me, Go with this. Some things are meant to
be.
As I had only just
resumed my old Manhattan haunts, I thought much about old friends, the
lightning jabs I’d suffered while reading so many obits and epitaphs, too soon,
too young, too many, my whole vast web of acquaintances shattered; thought,
too, of the disconnects that the years impose on early friendships. Each one of
them seemed more precious now as I began to make, and receive, what I came to
call “the annual endangered species phone call.” Always I thought, there’s one
I’ll see again, that fickle, spoiled, bad, obsessive and art-loving,
music-besotted fellow. We were not done with each other, and I had come ten
times more into his world since we had spoken last. Where was he?
He was there in
the phone book, yet no one answered, ever. His neatly-typed name was glued
above the lobby mailbox. Each time I passed there now, I entered and rang the
doorbell. Always that window was open, always that one dim light in the far
darkness, the curtains like a warlord’s banner. Where was his face, that glance
of recognition, “How you are?”
The dinner was
past, the rosewood bed explored in the dark in various positions. My host and I
sat talking, and he asked me how I came to know so much of China, its culture
and literature, its ways and its secrets. And so I spoke of my friend, of our seeing
Liang Shan Po and Chiu Ying-Tai, the gender-bending Butterfly Lovers, of
our long but often interrupted friendship, of how I had been trying in vain to
reach him for months. “Perhaps his mother has died and he’s gone off to Taipei.
Perhaps he’s made the often-dreamt-of journey to the mainland —”
“What is his
name?” my host asked, interrupting me.
I spoke his names
— the English one he’d taken, and the Chinese one.
His face fell, “I
knew him. He came here often. His friends, too. Mad for music. Big stereo. He painted
— or tried to.” He paused, lifted his cup of pale oolong. “Six months ago
—about six months ago, he died of AIDS.”
The breath was
ripped from me. My heart sank; I felt I’d hurtle downward to the earth’s core
if someone didn’t catch me.
“I’m sorry —”he
started, and then our eyes met and we realized it —that we had met so he could
tell me this — of all the men, the myriad lonely American men he might have
invited home. The message had passed between us as a death-white cloud —a
thunder-blasted peach tree in a sky devoid of bats.
Later that night —
how could I not? — I walked on
Fourteenth Street. The curtains still
billowed, the panther eye-beam yellow light still glowed. His name was still there
— the rent still paid from afar by
his mother? — his things still up there uncollected? the paints, those
sketched-and-then-abandoned canvases piled up in a heap —a great, dusty horde
of art books and classical music —or — nothing? a vast, dead space of which
that shorn drapery was but the fringe, a Mongolian waste of unslaked hunger, a
never-relenting sandstorm — and far, far off, a tomb lined with the terra-cotta
likenesses of his lovers?(Which one was his death? To which of them was he Death?)
No more!
3
Oh, that I could
make the world-globe shrink,
so that suddenly I’d find you back at my side. — Wang Chien (830 CE.)
Art is the great
denier when the artist is silent. I waited all these years to write this, as though
my silence would cancel his passing, and the maelstrom that took him, too.
Perversely,
I’d open a phone book and find his name there. Why? I’d pass those windows,
open, the curtains billowing. Why? A whole year passed.
One day the panes
were pulled shut tightly. There! A new name, neatly writ and pasted on the
mailbox. You see! He is dead! It is as final as a tombstone, as final as the
phone book, which no longer lists him now.
And more — it is
as though he never existed. To me alone was bountied that first night’s
touching, mine the laughter of all
the days we shared (that never a fraction of all I was willing to give!) But
still I had no tears for him.
Art is the great
denier when the artist is silent. Can world and time erase their errors?
Another year passed. I found myself on that block again. Windows were open! Perhaps
if I rang the doorbell, the new tenant would share some shred of knowledge
about the eccentric prior tenant —
I froze as I stood
before the mailbox. The tenant’s name, that new, hand-lettered name had come
unglued, it was gone, fallen off, ripped off, or it had gone pentimento (just
as old paintings reveal some older art beneath them),his name asserting itself,
just as his absence ruled here. I turned and fled, and I did not look up at
those windows.
Imagine a
tentative life, so lightly lived, a dragonfly, an iridescent blur of wing, so
light that all that remains of him is his name, a mere undercoat, a line on a
page in a discarded old year’s phone book, a scratched-out entry in a hundred
men’s pleasure journals.
Three breaths, his
real name on the wind (his name unspoken except in my heart, and in the dream
of autumn thunder) —not in a tomb with white flags fluttering — not burning
joss at his ancestral shrine — but only, this moment, remembered.
