Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(24)

I say it sounds like Shakespeare.

“Close—sort of.” It’s Sir Thomas Browne, he tells me. “Help me find it, please,” he says, and I follow him into the small room in the back, where he has novels, plays, and poetry shelved—literature, not neurology or science books. He is at the B’s, studying titles, and immediately becomes agitated. “Now, where is it? Religio Medici, I know I have it.” He gets impatient when he’s excited; I half expect him to stomp his feet.

I am hugging him from behind and scanning the shelves: Borges, Burgess…

“I used to have all of Thomas Browne. All my books …” His voice trails off wistfully. “Oh, what has happened …?”

“Are you sure it’s in here?” I go into the living room and find the B’s. There: four or five volumes of Sir Thomas Browne.

“Excellent!” O exclaims. “Aren’t you clever! What would I do without you?”

“You’d go days without your keys or glasses—or your Thomas Browne.”

He settles back down at his desk. “Let’s have some wine,” he says.

I return with two glasses. He is paging through the fragile book, reading aloud his own annotations and underlined passages from fifty or sixty years ago. At last, he finds what he was looking for—“Not in Religio Medici, but in Christian Morals. I had forgotten. And on the very last page …”

He reads it to himself first, savoring the words, and then aloud to me: “‘Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—’”

“—So gorgeous,” I murmur.

O skips ahead a bit: “‘And if, as we have elsewhere declared, any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian Annihilation, Extasy, Exolution, Transformation, the Kiss of the Spouse, and Ingression into the Divine Shadow, according to Mystical Theology, they have already had—’”

He looks up, beaming.

“—Ah, and here we have it: ‘an handsome Anticipation of Heaven.’”

_____________________

10-30-12:

The day after Hurricane Sandy, and the blackout that hit last night hasn’t lifted. How eerie it is, seeing Eighth Avenue without its daubs of red, green, and yellow lights; the street empty but for one or two people; fire trucks and ambulances and police cars converging at Fourteenth. The rumbling of the wind. Sirens.

O is lying on the couch, I am in the easy chair. We crack the windows; strong puffs of air cool our feet. We have opened the bottle of Veuve Clicquot left over from his birthday; we figure it will get warm otherwise. We listen to the transistor radio; people calling in with reports and sightings, fear in their voices. O recalls the blackouts during the war, during his childhood, and the first major blackout in New York—November of 1965—when he had to walk from Bronx State back to Christopher Street; it took him six or seven hours.

Here we are, how many years later? Oliver is seventy-nine, I am fifty-one. We have no power, no running water, no phone service, no gas, no heat.

We drink champagne. We say a toast. We count our blessings.





Freddy and Hollywood





ON BEING NOT DEAD


One night I called Oliver and told him to meet me on the roof of our apartment building. I had pulled together a simple dinner—roast chicken, good bread, olives, cherries, wine. We ate at a picnic table. I’d forgotten wineglasses, so we traded swigs out of the bottle. It was summer. The sun was setting on the Hudson. Neighbors were enjoying themselves at nearby tables. The breeze was nice. The surrounding cityscape looked like a stage set for a musical.

What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty. Oliver said it well as we took up our plates and began heading back downstairs: “I’m glad I’m not dead.” This came out rather loudly, as he is a bit deaf. Even so, he looked surprised by his own utterance, as if it were something he was feeling but didn’t really mean to say aloud—a thought turned into an exclamation.

“I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” said a neighbor gaily, taking up the refrain. “I’m glad we’re all not dead,” said another. There followed a spontaneous raising of glasses on the rooftop, a toast to the setting sun, a toast to us.

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t.

The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.