Attraction

You, yes.

Gardner Leaver in the first chair he designed.

The other night we went to a party in Chatham. To arrive at the house, you drive along what looks like a rickety foot bridge over a churning river. It’s really a narrow road with handmade wooden railings, and underneath there is no river.

We arrived three hours after the gathering had started. It was the time we had said we could get there, and by then there was a woozy, dying balloon energy among the guests still around. You have to regulate your vibe to the lower amount of helium. People were talked out. There are only so many smiles in a day people can turn on.

I wandered out to the deck, where the host was sitting with a friend. Their heads were leaning toward each other. I sat down. The host asked if I’d seen Dying for Sex. I said I’d loved it, and she said, “Of course you did,” mentioning to her friend she thought of me as her TV guru. Then she drifted off.

The friend was a tall, attractive woman, with a serious face and glittering eyes. I wanted to talk to her. You never know why, not really. You think you do, but you don’t. There were all kinds of affinities that might have attracted me. She was an architect. She’d designed a rock art visitors’ center I’d once seen in New Mexico. That wasn’t the thing. Not really. You are an animal let out the back door, and you run to find another animal to sniff around with. You come with half a chess board, and so do they, and you look for a face that wants to play.

Light had drained from the sky. The deck was high above the ground. The woman’s name was Jill. I don’t know who she thought she was looking at, and I realize now that in meetings with strangers, I forget to think about who they think they are looking at. I mean, I forget that I look older than most of the people in any room because, often, I am older than most other people around.

Was I the oldest person there? Maybe. Certainly there were people close to my age. I think I’m reporting a common trait, the thing about forgetting you are understood as old or older before anything else has a chance to register. Jill said, “What TV shows would you recommend?”

Nothing came to mind. Nothing came to mind, maybe, because I didn’t want to recommend TV shows to her. I liked that I didn’t want to answer. I liked it in the moment, and I like it now, even though by not answering I was showing her who I was.

This rushing thing I do I’m not fond of. I would like to be a person who takes her time and watches a little before needing to act in character. I would like to be the kind of person who gets the lay of the land before that. I said to Jill, “I can’t think of any shows to recommend to you, and what would it matter? How would I know if what I like would appeal to you? Let’s get to know each other a little?”

I could see Jill was tired and polite, and both things worked for me in not chasing her away. I asked why our host had mentioned Dying for Sex. Jill said she was in a state of grief, and the host had thought the show’s take on death was brilliant. I said it was. The show was about a woman in her forties facing her own death and also it was about her best friend, joining her sessions with doctors and treatments, living with her, even in her hospice room, until it was impossible.

Jill said she was the one surrounded by people who were dying or had died. She felt the experience had changed her radically and she wasn’t sure in what ways. As she spoke, her eyes filled with tears, and I felt guilty I might have prompted them.

It would not have been the first time my eagerness to speak directly had elbowed a stranger over a handmade railing. It’s the intimacy of strangers on a train, where you decide you can say anything or ask any questions because the rules of a moving train change culture and society—no one is where they live. You are operating in the culture of the train, which is the culture of the milk bar on the unnamed planet in Star Wars, where every kind of sentient creatures mingles.

When it was my turn to speak, I told her I had watched a man I loved die of bone marrow caner. I had watched him die over the course of six months. I told her his name was Gardner. I told her something you can only know in the course of living a long time, which is that it turned out I would never forget those months that took place 35 years ago. I would think about Gardner every day thereafter. Richard and I live with his paintings and the furniture he designed. I would think of him every day, even if we didn’t.

Gardner’s art on the walls and some of the furniture he designed.

At the time he was dying, I would sometimes imagine he wasn’t going to die because I didn’t want him to die, and there are passages in a death that can seem like reversals or show-downs, at least. You enter the mindset of postponement because it’s the only stable place you can locate, and during such a period you don’t cry. You aren’t sad. Crying and sadness are for the period of memory, maybe.

I told Jill that because I was so present in the experience as it was unfolding, I didn’t imagine how it would live inside me in the future. I’d had no idea the images I’d be left with would make the earlier times with Gardner harder to see. I can still see him with his hair flying as he’s slicing a serve on the tennis court, but this man is not as vivid as the last images of him in the hospital with his burning blue eyes. I told Jill that’s how it is with some deaths. You live with them. You carry them around. You are always carrying around another body. Probably, you wouldn’t want to let them go, even if you could.

She said what I was describing matched the experience she was having. She smiled. We were easy with each other, as if being easy was breathing. Maybe she felt a little less alone in a corridor you can suddenly find yourself walking in. Did I feel less alone? I am always looking for that feeling.

I was saying there was no way out. Some experiences changed you forever and at the time you were experiencing them you couldn’t know they would. I didn’t say this when we were together, and I didn’t think it at the time, but right now, in telling you about our conversation, I like the surprise element in life, even if it contains grief, where we can’t know where the garden of forking paths is going to lead us.

A painting Gardner made fooling around with a dye gun in a leather factory. To Gardner, art was improv combined with steady practice. He thought, too, art was in the mistakes.

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Author Steven Dunn

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Lynx

Here is a link to a piece of mine in the brilliant publication

Evergreen Review

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Father’s Day

My dad Murray Stone on a cruise god knows when. There was a party on the ship, and the women my parents were hanging out with dressed them both in drag. My father was a game guy and loving. You came into a room, you kissed him. He liked to play the ponies on weekends. He was a garmento, left school after the 9th grade to go on the road as a traveling salesman, selling ladies' dresses. He was too young to drive, so he hired a man to drive him around. In body energy, I take after my father. We are the ones who don't get tired. I miss you every day, my darling dad.

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