Edinburgh Page 20

  Do you want to see something, I say to Bridey, one day when he has made the trip with me, after we leave Freddy. In the blank white of the hospital corridors, anything seems possible.

  What, he says.

  It’ll be a surprise, I say.

  I drive back out to Cape Elizabeth. I haven’t been in years. Over a decade. I don’t know what to expect. There at the top of the hill is the door, still strangely new. I swing it open. Benign neglect, we call it in Maine. No money to change anything, so everything stays the way you left it.

  As we are getting out of the car, Bridey turns to me and says, about Freddy’s apartment, Why blue?

  Because it’s the color everyone turns in the dark, I say. I push through the broken greenhouse and he follows, slowly.

  A nice view, he says. He takes in the marsh. He thinks he knows what this is.

  Oh no.

  Down in the center of the tunnels, I don’t understand them anymore. Or, rather, I do. But all of it feels small. There’s the clay cold of it, there’s the unbelievable earth smell. He turns to face me after taking it all in. You built this, he says.

  I nod.

  I decide I should fill it in. I tell him that. It’s not right, I say. What I felt, about wanting to die, that’s not right. Look at Freddy. He wants to live.

  You’re guessing about that one, Bridey says. But you are right, you shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t want to die. But you can’t fill this in.

  Upstairs, in the car, Bridey lights one of his occasional cigarettes. And that’s when he says, Build something else.

  What do you mean?

  He slumps across the seat, his head falling into my lap. I see his beautiful eyes. Want to be in them, jealous of my reflection, for being there. Build something else, he says. At the school, maybe. Make it a project.

  Along the edge of the field here is a wall from the Revolutionary War. Unmortared stones. I see it as he’s talking. It stays in my head, the image of it, for months, before I get curious about it. My thoughts return to it like a tongue to teeth. Build something else.

  And so one day, Bridey comes to meet me for lunch at the campus. You know, he says. I went to prep.

  I know, I say.

  It’s weird, he says. There’s no chapel here.

  Blue. Blue because it’s the color people turn in the dark. Because it’s the color of the sky, of the center of the flame, of a diamond hit by an X ray. Blue is the knife edge of lightning. Blue is the color, a rose grower tells you, that a rose never quite reaches.

  Because when you feel threatened by a demon you are supposed to imagine around you a circle of blue light. You do this because the demon cannot cross the blue light.

  Freddy dies on an afternoon after my regular visit. A few weeks before, I had gone with his mother to his old apartment. Together Bridey and I had moved all the furniture to the middles of the rooms and replastered the whole apartment white. When I hear from her that he is dead, I remember sitting in the middle of the apartment and feeling something huge and invisible swing through the colorless room. White is a death color, I thought then. It is the absence of all color.

  Fee, she says. Thank you for being there for him at the end. I know he knew. I just know it.

  How, I think afterward, sitting on my roof. How can I set this world on fire. How can I get the whole thing to burn.

  Back in San Francisco, I remember how a friend of mine once went out and broke every window he could find when his boyfriend died. He walked street to street through the empty shopping district and left behind blocks of broken glass. He wasn’t caught. And the next day the papers couldn’t explain it. And it never happened again.

  Bridey gets home and sees me up there as he pulls the car in. He stands in the driveway. Hey.

  Hey.

  I’ll start dinner, he says.

  Okay.

  8

  THE PLANNING OF the chapel takes a few months. The building of the chapel takes a week. My students are enthusiastic, as is the faculty. I seem to be moving to some sort of permanent position here. I wonder about Penny, how she’ll feel about it, if they don’t want her back. I have no sense of her carrying our child. I think of it as hers. Entirely. Every now and then she cracks a smile, pats her tummy and says, Hey, Daddy. But I don’t know what to make of it.

  I know how to make the chapel, though: I base the constuction on designs I see of Roman bridges and also of things made in South America, by the Incas. I find a man from Vermont who specializes in this particular method of construction through an article about him in a garden magazine, and now, the chapel sits in the corner of the school grounds, overlooking the water and the beach.

  During the construction I would be doing whatever I was doing, and then Wardens hair would fire in the spring sun. I was reminded of how hunters aim for the white tail of a deer. His girlfriend, Alyssa, worked beside him. They’re good kids, I told myself. You are their good teacher.

  I sit in the chapel now in the middle of a cold night. With me I have the picture of Peter, and his letter. I don’t want them anymore.

  I light a candle, like I used to do in the cave. The chapel is warm somehow inside. We built it better than we thought, I tell myself. I read the letter a last time. There’s the stuff about how much he tried to die before. And then there’s this, which I had forgotten about.

  You ought to know, you were my best friend. You were. I know you loved me. I loved you.

  No one should have gone through what we went through, but we did. And it kills me to think of it.

  But I didn’t love you like you loved me. I don’t hate you for that. It just makes me sorry, that there isn’t someone else who could love you better.

  I know when you think about how I went, you’ll get it. I was always uneasy about being alive. The idea of being dead makes me feel clear. When I think of it. It makes me think peace, peace, peace. It makes me happy. I am looking forward to it, to the absence of everything. And so I want you to be happy for me, that this is better for me. That I found what I needed. I know you won’t be. But it’s the last thing I want. You happy.

  I burn the letter in the candle and stick the photo in between some stones. I rub the ashes to spread them. Good-bye to all that, I tell myself as I walk to my car. When I get home, Bridey says, Fee. What the hell is on your face?

  In the mirror my face is gray from the ash, like I’d been doing a raku fire. And where the tears ran through there are branches. I go to the bathroom and the ash turns the water blue like smoke.

  Bridey comes in to check on me. I grab him and pick him up in my arms, taking him to the bed. Our bed. Holy shit, he says. Call me princess.

  Take me apart. Put me back together again. I take him all night, as much as we can stand and then a little more. And it does feel like taking. As if I am sending something of myself through him again each time that enters him and comes out through his throat, where I catch it back into myself, in a kiss. To send it through him again. I land on him afterward when finally we lie still.

  I love you, Bridey says.

  Blue light of the night around us. Blue light has half the wavelength of red, it rushes to get there. Blue us, violet, blue where the light comes off us, violet where it doesn’t reach. I take his blue hair in my blue hand, open him with my blue tongue, blue again.

  9

  CHRONOTOPE: AN INTERSECTION of time and place. Here is time, here are the places of your life, a connect-the-dots; here are the people, made from time into radiant, concatenated glowworms, all the forms they’ve been from first glance to good-byes run together in a sine-cosine curve of color-lights, as if they had walked through a camera frame with the shutter stuck open, one age at the beginning, another at the end. You decide, I want to remember this or that, and so the part of you that faces the future is now like a dragon flying over the sea, moves in on a flash of color here or there that looks familiar, bites down and spits the bite to its glance, which catches fire. Here is the flaming pearl, famous from every Chinese
calendar. Imaginary appendages attaching it to past and future-past fly to the pearls side. Imaginary eyes to see past conditional, the “if this then that,” blink open. An angel, it seems, but, really, what you make is a golem out of your own life, and then you ask it a question, you say, Speak to me. Tell me what I did. How did I get here?

  Like lightning, there is light suddenly everywhere, the light of your life speaking to you. What it tells you is almost the same as what happened. Never mind that almost isn’t good enough; it’s all you have.

  Warden had come to your house, butterfly net in hand, dressed in shorts and a rain slicker. He looks young this day (some days he looks old). He smiles as he comes down the long hill of the back field. You live here, he asks. You say yes.

  Invite him in for coffee. Watch through the window behind him where he sits in your kitchen as the sun runs down the sky in spills from holes in the rain clouds, watch the fields go dark then light, watch grass and wild lupine rise in cones of blue to twirl there in the April air. Listen to him run the water in the sink to wash his hands. You ask him if he will sit for a sketch. You haven’t sketched in years. You bring out your book, grab the easel from where it has sat since you moved in. Like this, he asks.

  Yes, you say. In that coat. It’s your intention somewhere in what you call a head that you are sketching the outdoors by sketching him this way, as if he were a piece with the field and sky and storm outside. You remember something a drawing teacher told you about drawing with two hands and you take a pencil in each hand and you draw.

  Why are you using both hands, he asks.

  Because otherwise you draw only the same line, you say. Drawing this way destroys the line. You are free. He smiles at this and you draw the smile, as close to it as you can, which it turns out is pretty close.

  Lovely, he says, when you show him later.

  What were you thinking of, you ask.

  He says, I was thinking of you telling me I was free.

  This is when Bridey opens the door. Oh hello, Edward, he says. To you he says, I see you met the butterfly catcher.

  You look at Warden. He is looking strange, smiling again. I’m sorry, he says. I’ll go now.

  Warden, you say. Edward?

  Arden is my middle name, he says. My grandparents gave it to me. I didn’t like Edwards, so I didn’t really want to be one. But it is my given name, and when I meet a stranger, that’s the name I give.

  He leaves shortly thereafter. He heads out the way he came, up the hill, a cloud tuft barely visible there, sunlit, like a white shout from the top. He heads for it, the net a pennant. Bridey leans against you. What the hell is that about, he says. Stalker?

  There is a part of you, you see now, that is reckless. A part of you that still always wants to die but never wants to really go after it. So it makes mistakes instead. Or it says, when trouble comes in and has lemonade, I wonder what this will look like. If I sit still. If I do nothing. So you say, Oh, I don’t think so. I think there’s nothing more to it than that he’s a very strange boy. Father’s in prison, apparently. The school has basically raised him.

  Bridey is now looking over the drawing you did of Warden. I love it, he says. I’ll have it framed. Sign it. And you do. As you do you realize how clever Bridey is, how much of you he can take. You forget, you realize, all the trouble he was up to before he met you, before he decided you were all the trouble he wanted. He knows how to handle himself, you think. Which is why you are sure of him. You, apparently, are the one you have to worry about. That day, as your pencil inscribes your tiny name at the drawing’s foot, you know what is ahead, he knows, Warden knows. The drawing was like an invitation you wrote.

  The next time Warden is at the house it is the party.

  That summer, Bridey had taken you down to see friends in Ogunquit, and one of them has admitted to being a gay Episcopalian priest. As the five of you sit on the patio having cocktails, you say, Does that mean, you could marry us?

  Jesus, Bridey says. Have another cocktail. And he gets up and goes inside.

  That’s romantic, Bridey, your friend John Mark yells to his back.

  Getting another cocktail is very, very romantic, Bridey yells back.

  Yes, the priest says. Well, I could . . . I can’t give you an Episcopalian wedding. But I have done commitment ceremonies.

  Bridey returns. And deliver us from Evil. Oh, hi. And he sits down, stirring a new cosmopolitan.

  You jump down on your knees. Bridey, you say.

  Don’t make me waste this drink on your head, he says.

  Bridey, you say. Please. Marry me.

  John Mark coughs, behind you.

  Get the hell up, Bridey says. I’ve been married before. You want to be my official husband? Where’s my ring?

  John Mark pulls, from his hand, one of the several rings he has there. This one is a knuckle guard crossed by a pirate skull and crossbones. Use this for now, he says, and hands it to you.

  He stands above you. You can’t read his expression. His eyes meet yours. For that moment you imagine you can enter and walk down them like halls.

  For the ceremony you all stand on the beach at midnight, each of you with a black-eyed Susan in your hair, each holding sea roses you found on your way to the beach. The flowers were Bridey’s idea. The gay priest is nervous, a little drunk, but seems possessed by the occasion now, as if you couldn’t stop him from marrying you even if you wanted to. And the sea’s night is a cold kelp embrace of the invisible, this wedding a way to keep death at bay, surely now, death will leave you alone for the long moment this takes. The cold feels like bravery tonight. Here on the beach, you and Bridey, John Mark by your side, his friend Justin by Bridey, and the gay priest, Darren, in the center. There are no accidents, he begins. We find each other because we need each other. We find each other because Love is the Lord’s command. The one thing God asks of us in our lives, besides loving Him. Bridey and Fee are here because they have followed the Lord’s command to love each other and in doing so to find the Lord, and we are here to witness their love.

  You hadn’t expected him to talk about God, but what did you expect? He is a priest. He takes your hand, takes Bridey’s hand, puts them together. Let what the Lord join, no man put asunder. Do you, Bridey, take Fee, as your husband, before God?

  I do, he says.

  And do you, Fee, take Bridey, as your husband, before God?

  I do, you say. And then you kiss him. Done.

  And so the party. Bridey had strung the tent with his paper rose streamers, which had taken him weeks to make, and you were reminded that day of how for the weddings of Korean royalty, flower garlands were made and hung on the palace. The white tent caught all of the light that day and glowed, the paper roses flashed as they shot up and down in the wind, and you had forgotten, that morning, how you had asked Warden to come by early. Forgotten until he was there, with you in the tent, waiting for you to notice him.

  Hi, he says, when you look up. He’d had his hair cut so it shot up at odd angles across his head, mussed and held there by gel. His shirt reads BETHUNE SWIMMING. Brand-new jeans across his tiny hips, covering his long legs. Speedo slides on his long feet. He is tan, and beautiful with a tan in the way you can only be if you are blond and seventeen and it is summer in Maine. A way you remember, from growing up.

  Let no man put asunder. No mention of a boy. Put your hand here, you tell him, and nod at the corner of the tablecloth you are trying to box-fold around the folding table. I don’t feel this, you tell yourself. This isn’t me feeling this.

  10

  DESTROYING THE LINE.

  In the legend of Narcissus, it wasn’t that he was in love with his reflection, entirely. His reflection, as his love object, had the ability to move him. Who of us can move ourselves? His love is a legend for it.

  Peter is there just past the red of my closed eyelid. Peter at the center of the light that spreads the red, hidden in the center of the flame. Burning hides what it burns there. The letter l
ike a torch. Peter was never mine, I see now, because I was his. I belonged to him as certainly as the dog that always sought out the palm of his hand.

  Big Eric searched us like a pannier looking the creek bed over, searched every flash of gold for the sight of a lost love. Burning hides what it burns there. Somewhere deep in him was a memory of light that pierced him from end to end like a spit. He couldn’t see that he was large and we were not. His body to him felt outsized, a bear costume borrowed for a party, and then it vanished. In the moment he touched us, he was a boy again. And in the moment he touched us we were run through also. The pain reached out, passed, like fire does, from the burned to the burning. Burning hides what burns.

  11

  THE SHADOWS OF the trees this night are like stains someone couldn’t quite clean up and the branches hold themselves up like they’ve just stopped screaming. I’m playing hide and go seek, I tell myself.

  In the distance, a lit window, gold in the blue night. The bitter smell after rain, under the trees, like used tea bags left out. I approach the house with the lit window. What do I expect? I thought it was Bridey who’d left the note. A Christmas surprise. I ring the doorbell, a metallic ping, and wait for a response. There is none, and then I hear someone behind me. I turn.

  Warden. His breath a blue apostrophe in the cold air. He smiles. Hey, he says. He pulls a key from his pocket and opens the door. This way, he says.