Within minutes of meeting M, I knew that I needed him as a friend. He was gay, out, and in his thirties. Over the next few months, in an indirect way, I helped him find a release from his agoraphobia. I figured he owed me one.
Once he'd flown across the Atlantic, twice, and knew he was capable of going anywhere in the world, I opened the conversation with a line I'd been thinking about for a while. I said: The closest I'll ever come to being black is having a gay son.
M.
He's fine-boned, dark-skinned, eager. His mind has wings. His heart sits high in the region of his throat. Heart and mind jam and bounce, race.
I've never seen him calm. His body doesn't tremble but vibrates to keep pace with his brain. It's impossible to be bored in his company.
Neuter
M said that the altar of his father's church was neutered but I wonder if he meant neutral, and is there a difference, anyway?
The altar of a church should be neutral and if it's not, perhaps it should be neutered.
But is that what he meant?
Opera
He's drawn to the church, though of course it's not just any church but his father's church, or the Church of his father.
Jesus provides something, a long-haired dead man, supposedly alive, to think about when nothing else is funny; Jesus makes him laugh. But, too, he takes Jesus seriously, in his own pagan way.
After so many hours of Sunday Mass with his father the priest intoning the words, he can't help but know it by heart. Ancient-ish words that have always been in his nighttime dreams and his erotic bubbles.
The appurtenances of religion are his; feeling has leaked away. He likes nothing more than listening to one of the great divas sing Verdi or Wagner, dressed in satin and feathers, and always alone.
A Hit
No one would call him a rarified, cut-off man. There are few on the street more engaging. Children love him, even if he's slightly terrified of them. Cats brush against him, dogs jump up to lick his face.
He's a friend to women.
A star. A hit song. An immaculate influence. He's never held a gun or a horse's reins.
His Haircut
He keeps his hair long on the sides, short enough on top to make himself laugh when he looks: it could be the start of a mohawk. He's on the warpath, but one of his own choosing. How to get from here to there? Or, more likely in his case, from there to here? He wants respect. Refuses to understand sneers. No curled lips or rolled eyes. He'll keep his hands in gloves with pearl clasps, pull no punches, as long as you look him in the eye when you tell him you hate faggots.
Because he knows you can't do it, not if you're really looking at him, lips naturally cherry, green eyes beneath lashes in no need of thickener urging you to see clearly, perhaps for the very first time.
No Solace
He tells me that shame has lodged itself in his mother. Because she was raised to not have or want a self, her desires are those of an imagined community. She left the old country behind but it won't leave her.
Discussing her, M. and I imagine her taking some small solace from another woman, perhaps even a cousin. A hand on her hand. A finger to her cheek.
Seamstress
She sewed their clothes. A display of thrift, skill, and honor. Imperiousness.
Homespun, her sword?
Rocks
His father sits alone, a rock, but a glorious rock. Always himself. This is how men are.
Some of the sons come loose like torn fabric, threads unravel. They stitch themselves up as they may, with skills learnt of watching their mothers. The fathers may be threadbare but their stitches are always knotted.
It's the mothers who are constantly sewing themselves up and tearing themselves apart.
The father,
a Father. With a bright-toned singing voice, a voice everyone coveted and hired to accompany their children's baptisms, marriages, the congregants' funerals.
I've never heard this particular voice, though I've heard others intone notes on the same scale.
Mothers
She is a woman I'm relieved to be able to distance myself from, to say: she is there and I am here. Nothing overlaps.
But then again, even if I never sewed my children's clothes, even if I still sleep with my husband and am affectionate with him in public, there are parts in any two mothers, any two women, that overlap.
Nostalgia
He covets photographs of his mother from when she was young and lovely and can't abide the disjunction between this loveliness and her subsequent hard-bitten angularity. To abide it would be to accept his loss, not just of his mother but of the young boy he once was, beloved.
Religion's her soup,
her family, her tide. She washes in it and sleeps there, but never anymore beside her husband, the priest.
A Glass of Water
His ties to his siblings are loose, at best. Stabilized by anger.
This is the last thing he says before he asks for one more glass of water, and we hug quickly, and he runs down the stairs, unlocks his bike, then takes off into the night.
God's Garment
The next time we meet, this time at the sushi restaurant on the corner, he begins by telling me that we're all always waiting to become what we aren't, what we hardly dare imagine: the life that comes at us in flickers, the underside of God's robe, the worn part that usually goes unseen.
I don't disagree.
Caretaker
He wants to go back to the years before he turned fifteen, when he wasn't bothered by the growing awareness of certain verities. Before that, he says, the family was perfect, harmonious.
He looks at me across the table and asks: How do I get rid of my nostalgia?
Like a sturdy dumb child, I say, it's something you'll never give away or leave alone.
Elephants
It's a few months later that we finally have the conversation I've been waiting for.
We talk about the elephant in the room that no one will acknowledge. He finds it outrageous, or at least incomprehensible, that my son won't say the word.
I tell him that sometimes the elephant in a room is so obvious and accepted-commenting would be ridiculous.
But I understand his point. Things do need to be said. In the meantime, my son and I will enjoy our energetic ramble through the mirror that says: I know that you know that I know. On and on.
Perhaps it's this bit of infinity, an awful lot like nostalgia, that neither of us wants to desecrate. M. probably wouldn't disagree.