Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(10)

He kept riding. He was going to make it just in time.





At Blue Mountain Center





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

1-11-10:

O: “Every day, a word surprises me.”

_____________________

1-18-10:

O: “It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?”

I: “Love? Are you talking about love?”

O: “Yes.”

_____________________

2-1-10:

A languid Sunday, afternoon turning into evening, evening into night, night to morning.

“I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,” O says.

He puts his ear to my chest and listens to my heart and counts the beats.

“Sixty-two,” he says with a satisfied smile, and I can’t imagine anything more intimate.

_____________________

2-7-10:

O tells me about a white-winged butterfly, made dirty by city soot early in the industrial age in England, which evolved quickly from white to soot-colored. And about a city bird (pigeon?) whose song rose in volume to be heard over the honking of cars, the noise of construction, traffic.

“There are rare instances in nature of accelerated evolution.”

I can’t help thinking of how much O himself has changed over the past year.

“I’ve noticed that,” I tell him.

_____________________

6-9-10:

We are on the roof of O’s building; 7 P.M.; the breeze is wonderfully warm; the sun is setting; and the clouds, against some stiff competition from the Manhattan skyline, are far more striking than anything in sight. But O is not able to look at them because he had surgery to remove a blood clot in his right eye (which he hopes will restore some of the sight lost when he was treated for melanoma on his optic nerve). For the next few days, he has to keep his head tilted down at all times to prevent further clotting or fluid accumulation.

“Tell me what they look like,” O says. “Describe the clouds.”

I pull him in close, so his face is buried in my chest, and I look to the sky. “Well”—I’m not sure where to begin—“they are large. Very large.”

“Yes?”

“And what’s especially remarkable is—yes, I’m not just seeing things—they are not moving, not moving at all. Which is surprising, because the wind is strong. But it’s as if they are holding their pose, so I can study them, so I can describe them to you.”

“Oh, lovely,” O murmurs.

“What I’m noticing, as never before, is not how white they are but how gray—a wonderful bluish-gray—pewter-colored.”

“Like osmium?” O asks, hopeful, delighted.

I chuckle. “Yes, just like osmium—clouds of osmium.”

“Oh, I have to look,” O says and steals a hungry glance at the sky.

We had come to the roof, as is our custom, to have some wine. Normally, we take swigs straight from the bottle. But O, to prevent tilting his head back, has brought a straw. He takes a long sip from the bottle then passes it to me. It’s funny—drinking good cabernet through a straw—and even funnier when I finish my sip and the straw bobs back into the bottle—irretrievably.

I go back downstairs for another straw.

Returning to the roof, I find O hugging the rooftop railing.

“What do you see?”

“Oh, I’ve just been looking at the colors, and shapes, and shadows,” he says.

“Nice—show me.”

“There”—he points down to a pink-colored building. We watch the colors and shadows for a long while without talking. Then, O says what I have been thinking: “This is the perfect thing to do when you’ve had eye surgery and can only look down.”

We watch people walking down sidewalks, across streets, and we anatomize the different ways people walk: “There is striding. And scurrying. And rushing. And loafing. And ambulating …”

That last word sidetracks him, and he goes on: “Ambulating. Ambulate. Ambulation … I wonder if that comes from … ? Let’s go look it up in the OED.”

_____________________

7-10-10:

O, in the car, on a drive back from the Botanical Garden—reclining all the way back in his seat (because of sciatica); two pairs of sunglasses on (because of his eye)—suddenly speaks, startling me (I thought he’d been sleeping): “I’ve suddenly realized what you mean to me: You create the need which you fill, the hunger you sate. Like Jesus. And Kierkegaard. And smoked trout …”

I: “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me—I think.”

O chuckles, then adds: “It’s a kind of teaching, in a strange way …”

Later: I thought he was gazing at me lovingly as I drove, but then realized, no: “I’m watching the odometer and thinking of the elements,” says O.

_____________________

8-17-10: I stop by O’s to bring him an ice cream bar. I mention I saw fireflies in Abingdon Square Park—fireflies!

O: “Did you keep your mouth shut?”

I: “What do you mean keep my mouth shut?”

O: “They say three will kill you—luciferase, dangerous stuff.”

I am laughing, but he is not. I really cannot tell if he is serious.