Sickness, Health and Peonies

Last week, all alone, I had finished my open-air market shopping and was on the way home when I remembered that one of the flower stands I'd passed by had had huge bouquets of what were vaunted as "slow-blooming peonies" for fairly cheap. I turned around and went and bought a bundle.

Today, Thierry came home from the hospital. For a little over two weeks, he's been in what the French call "respiratory isolation" because he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Darrell sent each of us youtube footage from a sexy Australian man who's been quarantined in his hospital room for something crazy like a hundred and sixty three days. The Australian dude has been making videos to pass the time, and they're sorta fun to watch. Thierry was only cooped up for two weeks. I guess you have to take what you can get, or count your blessings where they fall. But it sure was annoying for one of us always to have to wear a mask when we were together. No meals together, no cup of coffee together, and, of course, no bisous. I did however establish the tradition of the nightly illicit kiss on the forehead or in the neck. There are reasons for protocol and there are reasons for breaking it every once in a while.

When I came back home last night after another day of work and one last visit to the hospital, the slow-blooming peonies had popped open. It's nice to have Thierry and their blooms around.

San Francisco Cut-Ups

So I've read some great stuff recently. For now, it all seems to be related to my being in San Francisco. I had stolen Brian's copy of Denny Smith to carry around with me for empty moments ready to be filled. And I am after all trying to get my head around recent good evidence of the short story genre. I have "The Conditions of Song" to write down. The book ended up in my bag all the way to Kentucky. I had to send it back to Brian through the mail, telling him that, as we both concurred, we should all be reading more Bob Glück, but that I didn't really need two copies of the same book. I pulled it out while I was waiting for the bus to take me over the hill from the Castro to Japantown and the Kabuki, where I would eventually eat my cold Mifune noodles and meet Darrell. I just missed the bus, and ended up waiting half an hour for the next one. I was reading passages like maybe this one while schoolkids surrounded me calling other schoolkids on their cell phones saying things like "Where you at?" or "No, he didn't give us no homework."

"It's impossible to make a dent in that world or to be recognized by it, yet the whole endlessly collapses under the weight of its own hokum. It's impossible to separate the anguish of having a mother, father, siblings, mind, and body from the failures of my particular family, mind, and body. I pick up the sperm wad by a dry corner as though it were mine to keep or throw away and drop it into the toilet. I watch it drift, then flush it down. I still live with my family, and though I can't imagine a place for myself in the world, I hope the world imagines it for me." (pp. 36-7)

Towards the end of the beautiful paper she gave at the conference at Berkeley for her retirement, where she read passages of Mallarmé, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Des Forêts, amongst others, my dissertation director referred to a passage in Bataille's Bleu du ciel. As Naomi knows, I probably wouldn't have studied French if it weren't for Le bleu du ciel. When Ann described the passage, I felt like she was doing it for me, or, at least, that she looked at me while she described it. It's true that I was sitting right next to her husband. And she did say afterward that she likes to pretend to improvise, but that she actually sticks very close to her script, and is often so terrorized she'll lose her place on the page that she looks out for friendly faces in the audience to help her find her way. When she told me this, I touched her arm and told her how happy I was to be a friendly face for her.

"We were hurrying back to a hotel room in a town that we hadn't known the day before. In the darkness, it would sometimes happen that we would seek one another out. We looked at each other eye to eye, not without fear. We were linked to one another, but we didn't have the slightest hope. After a turn in the road, a void opened up below us. Strangely enough, this void was, at our feet, no less unlimited than the starry sky over our heads. A host of little lights, moved by the wind, were carrying out a silent, unintelligible celebration through the night. These stars, these candles, were strewn by the hundreds all over the ground: the ground where the crowd of illuminated tombs were lined up. I took Dorothea's arm. We were fascinated by this abyss of funereal stars. Dorothea brought herself closer to me. She kissed me long in my mouth. She embraced me, squeezing me violently. It was the first time in a long time that she let herself go. Hastily, off the beaten path and in the tilled earth, we took the detour that lovers take. We were still above the tombs. Dorothea opened herself up and I stripped her down to her sex. She herself stripped me down. We fell onto the loose earth and I plunged into her wet body like a well-handled plow plunges into the earth. The earth, under this body, was open like a tomb, her naked belly opened up to me like a fresh tomb. We were struck dumb making love above a starry cemetery. Each of the lights signalled a skeleton in a tomb, they made up a shaky sky, as unstable as the movements of our comingled bodies. It was cold, our hands plunged into the earth: I undid Dorothea, I dirtied her clothes and her chest with the fresh earth that had stuck to my fingers. Her breasts out of their clothes were as white as the moon. We abandoned ourselves every once in a while, allowing ourselves to get to the point of trembling with cold: our bodies trembled like two rows of teeths chattering against one another." (pp. 174-5, shaky translation mine)

Aardvark Books is a great used-book store on Church just across Market from Brian's house. I went there twice while I was in San Francisco. The first time was the day I got in. Brian and I were early for our dinner date with his friend Tim. Aardark has a few new books just past their big magazine stand. Mary Gaitskill's new collection of short stories was sitting there. It's called Don't Cry. I went back to buy it. I started reading it in Kentucky, but I didn't get to this passage until once I was back in Paris. I read it out loud to Thierry and royally ignored the instructions of the collection's title.

"It was a sad situation and might've been a disastrous one, except for one thing: It had caused the girl's heart to come open. This had never happened before. Because of the way her soul was hooked into her brain, whenever it had been touched by love, her brain had taken control and overruled her heart. But because of the missing place in her soul, her brain was in too much chaos to control her heart. And so it had come open for the first time. It was as if she had just discovered a hidden door leading to a place inside herself she'd never known to exist. This was a marvellous thing. Of course, she did not experience it that way; because her openness had come for someone who did not want her, she felt it as painful. And yet she made no attempt to close it. Her mind was still strong enough that she could've tried, but she didn't. The stolen piece of her soul silently compelled her to let it stay open. Her soul did this so that if it got loose, it would have a way back in. And so, without knowing what she was doing or why, the girl obeyed. She was steadfast and loyal, and she did not know it. She thought she was just a lovesick bitch. Because of what she thought, it shamed her to keep her heart open. But she did." (87-88)

I know this openness. And can be a real lovesick bitch. And count myself as very lucky to have such good company to bear the shame that sometimes comes with an open heart.

Paris - San Francisco - Kentucky

I was standing in line to drop off my bags for a flight from Paris to San Francisco. Bonnie "Prince" Billy's new album was singing through my headphones. I was calm even though most of the time I'm a wreck when I travel. I don't know why I was so calm: that Icelandic volcanic ash had just blown over the day before, and I was going to San Francisco to meet the body of Darrell, a man I've chatted with on-line for over a year now, to celebrate my dear dissertation director's retirement, and to see Brian, a dear old friend. After that, I was destined to Kentucky for family duty. Two things happened already while I was in line to assure my departure. Listening to B"P"B, I said to myself that his songs show him skirting along the edge of asshole, and I smiled, realizing that wasn't such a bad place to be. I like to be around an asshole, in a less figurative sense, of course, but still. Then a title came to me: Extravagant Gestures. I thought maybe it would be a good title for a short story collection. I wrote it down in my little notebook. Now that I'm back in Paris, I realize it's the title of this blog.

The day I got in to San Francisco, I settled fairly quickly onto the stoop in front of Brian's Duboce-Triangle house for a cigarette and coffee. Brian, like a lot of gay men, has had some health concerns and questions recently, and he had told me on the phone before I came that he had managed to quit smoking. "Give me a cigarette," he said as he made his way down the stairs with the scones we'd bought at Thorough Bread, a nifty new-to-me café on Church. When I protested, saying that I didn't want my smoking to necessarily encourage his, he said, "Yeah, but it smelled so good, and I've been smoking on and off anyway. Plus, I kind of knew this would happen while you were here." It is true that it is one of our habits when I come to San Francisco: to sit on the stoop and smoke while the buzz of something I think of with pride as a general human whoredom particularly rampant in that fair city by the bay rattles its way through our lives. Brian likes to feed my participation in that beautiful whoredom. He often knows my tricks personally, tells me details about old tricks of mine that he sees around, or about the lives and habits and loves of the new ones. He also tells me about his own. He told me that last summer, he had managed to forge a perfect rhythm of regular fuck-buddy visits. A venerable homo-tradition that he's had trouble settling into, since he's not so much a bar fixture as a writer and teacher who needs nine hours of sleep per night. It was nice to hear about that settling into place for him because God knows he deserves it. I told him several of my recent adventures in Berlin. They made him miss my blog and want to come and see for himself. He told me things about Darrell, because they moved in the same circles years ago, something I had suspected before this trip but was delighted to discover with a certain amount of precision. He told me that when I told him I'd been chatting with Darrell, it made a kind of instant sense to him. This turned out to be a good thing, because it helped him be understanding when so much of my San Francisco attention was devoted to him. Brian and Darrell both knew Philip well. Brian and I racked our memories. How many times had I met Philip? In 2000/2001, Thierry and I had come to see Brian's New York début as a playwright. It sealed our already very strong friendship. Did we really see Philip only that once for the drink we had at the Starlight Bar? That New Year's I stumbled home so drunk from the party we'd gone to. When was the last time we saw each other? Brian consulted his archives while I looked at the picture of the three of us from that year (when Thierry had so much hair!) taken by our friend Judy and now sitting on the table by Brian's reading chair.

I had been in recent touch with my good friend Naomi on facebook, so when I got to Kentucky, the only priority besides family duty and stumbling my way through the aftermath of the affair that had rocked me in San Francisco was to see her again. (I say it was an affair, but we're working on another name for it). When we met for a late-morning coffee, Naomi told me she figured the last time we saw each other was in 1998 in New York. This meant we had a lot to catch up on, so we only touched on the important things. Things like our husbands and her dogs. My desire for a dog and the sketchbook Darrell showed me that was full of them. Things like my previously smoldering disappointment at how hard it would be in France for Thierry and me to have access to raising a child and how much I'd let that disappointment work its way through me in analysis. How I've gotten to a point where I realized that what was important was less the child itself than that I be out there in the world, accompanying newness, where who knows what child might pop into my life. Her MFA and our writing. How nice it will be to see each other next time I'm in town. How I had two titles I was working with, one for a short story collection and the other for a blog. One is "The Conditions of Song." The other is "Extravagant Gestures." Which I'm writing right now.