Spencer Reece

For Nathan Gebert I The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew. I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan. In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House, right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida, I began my story— it was an interview, much of life is an interview. She said I did not need to pay her, but donations, yes, donations were appreciated: they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope that she could take back to the cloister. She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper. She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife. My meetings with her went on for a few years. I had come to speak about Durell. I did not know how to end sentences about Durell. He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror? What? There were so many ways to end my sentence. He was an unlikely candidate for so many things. Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer. I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact, but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own, which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly. Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things. Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile— parts were chipped like on a recovered fresco. Above her gray head, a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene, the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading— the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity. There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame. It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples, one named Cleopas, the other anonymous, forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them, the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger. They were on their way to that town, Emmaus, seven miles out from Jerusalem, gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing— they argued about whether to believe what they had seen; they were restless, back and forth the debate went— when there is estrangement there is little peace. ii

“Fly at once!” he said. “All is discovered.” — Edward Gorey In Miami, this May afternoon, I look up, the sky hot, so hot, always, and heating up hotter — how long I have loved this scene. The clouds are white optimistic churches; I cannot number them. Herons, pelicans, and gulls glide like dreams through cloud-portals, cloud-porticos, and cloud-porte-cochères Giotto could have done with his passion for blues and dimensions. Hard not to love a place always called by possibility. Nearby, Cuba is singing and somewhere here Richard Blanco is writing his poems. As I enter the city, my bishop walks with a cane towards our cathedral. The sun shines on the people and unites us in a delirium of light. High above this bleached, scorched, fragile, groin-scented peninsula, the birds track their insects and remain loyal to their nests. I look up and I feel bliss building as I did when my father read another book to me, and another, the pages like wings. There are moments of memorable patience in this world. Airplanes advance towards Miami International, booked with Jewish retirees and Cuban émigrés— their descending engines disrupt the white-gloved illegal waiters at the country clubs in Coral Gables, who deliver flan to the ladies who have pulled their skin behind their ears like gum. This is a place where few decisions are doubted. On South Beach, where everyone rearranges or expands their sexual parts, there seems to be no life outside the physical and time becomes a tricky thing here, spring looks like winter, winter like spring, the scenes dense, shifting, shut — and before you know it the rats have preached from the mangoes and then chewed them to corpses. And look, how the interior decorators unroll their fresh bolts and wink-wink to new clients — what would be considered frivolous anywhere else is here pondered and coerced at great length. The feminine gains strength. Moving closer to the cathedral, the sea presses the harbor, wanting to be loved, pushing up the cruise ships with its muscles. The sea says: “I am the sea.” We have seen Cubans come atop dolphins’ backs here. Mothers have drowned for their sons, but the cool gray backs of the dolphins have buoyed their children to us, numbed by the lullaby of sonar clicks. The sea blesses the city the way mothers do — forceful, pushy, ungraspable, persistent. The black mangrove shoots take root on the porous, chalky rock, building themselves up like steeples. Listen. How the waves love what does not love them back. Pedicurists buff the toenails of the sugar daddies in the Delano. Lincoln Road refines its scarlet seductions. Bees are sticky with tourism inside the motel rooms of the rose. Red-orange petals from the Royal Poincianas tint the minutes with flamboyance. The pink and white bottlebrush trees explode with seeds. I will always love my time in this city, you might say craziest of cities, delivering its youth in short-shorts and Rollerblades with rainbow sweatbands. City smelling of unzipped things.Cha cha cha! Cha cha cha! I do not think the city will ever be mine. Beautiful Spanish and broken English spoken everywhere. How I love that sound, for it is the sound of people making their way where they were not born. Maids from Honduras push their carts, stacking their wrapped soaps, counting them like children, their cuticles sting with disinfectant, perspiration staining their uniforms as they pray over the toilet seats they clean. O Miami! For a decade I did not speak to my parents. Are you listening to me? I will not bore you with details. Instead, I will tell you something new. Listen to me. I was angry. But the reasons no longer interest me. I take the liberty of assuming you approve of forgiveness, stressing hardening gentleness as you do. I speak to the bishop about my call and the sacraments, we discuss blessings, absolutions, consecrations— our work of the soul. The soul has no sex and I am relieved to speak of a thing alive in the world that has no sex. The bishop places a paperweight atop my reports on his desk, our professional talk is measured by the silence of the dead who are always flinging open their shutters, religion being the work of the living and the dead, the hope and release in the hearts of parents turning to their children and the hearts of children turning to their parents — all that business in life that remains unrehearsed. Superior to obedient, we pray. The laughter of the bathers through the grillwork of the office window pleases me, their movements rinsed in the baptism of the sea, the languorous sea. The sky at the end of the city trembles. Light and dust warm to cream to pink to lavender. Miami, it has been a gorgeous day, indeed. Thank you. How I love your decks, bridges, promenades, and balconies — the paraphernalia of connection. How fast the pastels encroach upon the edges. I have a dinner engagement in Coral Gables at Books & Books where I will see the poet Richard Blanco. I hope he will tell me stories of his beloved, broken Cuba. Nearly five o’clock now, and I am late. When I arrive, Richard Blanco speaks of Cuba as I had wished, and the city quiets all around him. “If our bodies house our souls,” I think to myself, “Then, Richard, poets are the interior decorators of the mind.” Richard Blanco is saying something about going back, his relatives singing poems in the fields. I listen. Behind us, in the palmetum, at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens, the Elephant, Date, Malaysian, Kiwi, Coconut, and Royal palms ask the city to remember their names with the insistence of priests. Good-bye, Miami, good-bye. Good-bye to the workers laying down the grids of the concrete embeds on the high-rises, reinforcing their masculine nests, gluing glass with their spermy compounds to stone and steel. Good-bye to you, South Beach. Let your rapturous sands darken to a deep grape color. Let the polished feet of youth launch into their surprises and swaps. Let the elements cool. Good-bye, Richard Blanco, good-bye. Today my candidacy for Holy Orders was affirmed. I listen to the sea flatten. Cuba pleads in the distance one more night. Honduras waits on too many things to count. No longer can I stand still. Stars smooth the sea with their immaculate highways of long lights. Mother and father, forgive me my absence. I will always be moving quietly toward you.

For Michael Williams Monaco was clean, with small clean streets. There was not much in the way of  a shore. There was hardly any place to go. One clipped, well-behaved London plane tree, not welcoming like most ordinary trees, was kept apart by a white spear-tipped fence, and had a somewhat diffident sense of  noblesse oblige. Through the cream silk brocade window treatments, you could see it; it did not contain birds, repelled the idea of  nests, its roots trained and snipped. At night, it was lit. Spritzed, its leaves shimmered like the sequins of a whore. In the palace hung a portrait of   Princess Grace’s family, an extravaganza of pastel sfumato by R.W. Cowan, blurring every uncertain, authentic thing. The air inside the cliffs thickened as in the closet of a grandmother. Perfumed Germans winced, smooching with strong lips on the embankment. When the man and woman arrived at the Hôtel de Paris, the staff assumed they  were married. The German  jet ski instructor was unsure and asked: “Are you brother and sister?” They paused, demurely, and smiled. The mystery of  their bond made it more intense. The man and the woman were in their late thirties or early forties; they were not young, nor were they old. The woman was French and wore a white linen shirt, starched and pressed. She made her money in the drug trade, but all the man knew was that she sold works of art: a Matisse here, a Picasso there — each transaction taking place in the Bahamas. She was what she said she was, but we are rarely what we say we are. The man, a poor American, meant to say no, but instead said yes. He was tall, athletic and effeminate with a mincing gate — as if  he were being chased by something no one could see. Dressed in cashmere and shantung, he wore needle-pointed shoes by Stubbs & Wootton. Broad-shouldered, practical, the Frenchwoman grimaced, was referred to as “handsome.” Ample were her gestures, ample her need to please; her tone, although not sexual, came close. Her preferences were dubious; maybe everyone’s are. Nevertheless, the couple exhibited variations the world never embraced, but presented as a couple the world embraced them promptly, for the world trusted what was coupled. He was he; she was she; both were naive, but naivety has a way of  hiding its intentions. Whatever their motives happened to be, it pleased them to make a myth for everyone to see. Promises were skirted at a little cafe — “What shall we name our children,mon petit chéri?” she asked. How controlled their wonder was. The couple was received for cakes and tea by the Baroness von Lindenhoffer. The Baroness was lesbian, but of this she never spoke, and so she believed herself a conundrum — for her, muteness banished the undoable. She often began her conversations by mentioning her brief marriage to a hairy Russian acrobat. Her makeup was heavy, clown-like, and over her large, ill-defined body, red polka dots sheeted her parts. Despite this, people mistook her for a man. On a chintz loveseat, each hip bookended by a pug, she sat and said: “You seem like a lovely couple!” She meant what she said but she didn’t say what she meant. Then there was talk of  places they had traveled and feelings of superiority at having seen what others had not: “Oh, you haven’t been there?” and “Oh, you must go!” Through the large picture window, beyond the Baroness’s head, piled high with hair dyed red, slowly processed gargantuan cruise ships like wedding cakes with glittering tiers of candles. She inserted another biscotti behind her lips which were the size of   luggage handles, winked and said: “Here in Monaco our favorite word is more!” Her eyes scanned the clutter of the Côte d’Azur: the sea published its gilded mirrors, the sun accelerated beauty and its loss, no children for miles and Brigitte Bardot, in St. Tropez, locked her house, cats licking her purple-veined ankles. The Baroness was thinking, pausing like an old steamer. Her mascara-clotted eyelids closed and for a moment, she erased what she could. With mounting unease, she realized she might be what was missing. The thought vanished. Should she warn the couple? Although not feminine, she was maternal. Then that thought passed. She shrugged and comforted herself. Difficult, celibate, implacable, a final time she assessed the couple of compromised want, aware that nothing blackens the heart like a mariage blanc, and stamped them —Mwah! Mwah!— with the imprimatur of  two kisses each. The relationship lasted three months. They had chosen wrongly, and plausibly they fell apart, like the couple in Godard’s Le Mépris. Had she wanted more than a cover? Had he covered more than he wanted? The heart, behind its casements, is faceted, pronged, coveted, intricate and known by few. He could not be kept. She withdrew her money. Reconciliation occurred after they ceased speaking. On their last night in Monaco, she turned to him and wondered if  her life had meant anything. He did not answer: he had developed a grace for offering himself  to those who found truth difficult. When they left the restaurant, she paid using a heavy, black American Express card. Each took a doggy bag and smelled of cooked meat. This alignment of opposite sexes had provided solace, and for a time, each had assumed a place, discerned a way to live. Indeed, they lived on, never to see each other again, both aware the one had harmed the other: whether intended or not, the act could not be undone. What they recalled, when they recalled, was often wrong, or was it that so much went wrong and that was why they kept recalling? At the mention of   Monaco, they recounted certain adornments — agapanthus purpling, old men playing boules, and blue yachts tilting on a malachite sea, or were they malachite yachts tilting on a blue sea? Wherever they went henceforth — the Hôtel du Cap, the Boboli Gardens, or even simple, small places in America — their minds would inexorably turn, and then return, to that interval in Monaco, where they saw the truth and the truth was . . . Monaco, Monaco — frivolous, ridiculous, miniscule principality. It was there they came to know how dangerous beauty could be, how one could disappear into it, and with that dark knowledge they traveled on. Each, in their separate lives, always mentioned Monaco with deference, out of shyness, yes, but also shame, and that need to abridge the past. Do you recognize them? They were not a couple, but they were a pair. Tonight the sea pushes against Monaco. Jewelry store owners don white gloves, lock their doors. The principality has long forgotten the pair. Baronesses, marchionesses, and princesses have had their portraits painted and affixed to walls. The narrow, dead-end streets embed themselves into the escarpments like bobby pins. The moon spreads her cape of   baubles across the sea with glamorous transience, enlarging behind the dollhouse casino, banks, hotels, feeling into the rooms, fingering the miniatures.

I remember she rented a room on the second floor from Jenny Holtzerman, an Austrian widow. The two women lived on Girard Avenue South, in Kenwood, an elegant suburb of Minneapolis. Any promise of husbands had disappeared long ago. From the kitchen I often remember the jelly smell of a linzer torte. I was in high school and often I eavesdropped. Once, quietly, she said to my mother, “I never knew the love of a man.” She had mentioned having a husband, but during the war they were separated in the chaos of Budapest, and later she lost track of him. Once she showed me her room: the walls were bare with cracks. Her daybed was narrow, barely slept-in. Her room resembled hundreds of scant little rooms around the world, the way it accepted blue and purple-violet detail—on her bureau, no family photographs, instead, playbills autographed by cast members, a calendar tattered, crossed, marked, no jewelry, some coins. Her window sashes warped, her wires shorted and the paint around her doorframe kept chipping off—“like in The Cherry Orchard,” she said, “by Chekhov.” She told a joke in Hungarian to Hannah Tamasek and even I, not knowing a word, laughed. She bowed gently in a mannerism distinctly Viennese and spoke on occasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She loved the Guthrie Theater, where curtains rose on miniature worlds, preferring memorized dialogue and costumes to something truer. Five feet tall in orthopedic shoes, she limped. Time has a way of rearranging things and I could have most details wrong now, but there was this: during the war, she met a man, whom she gave money to, she did not know the man well, but had trusted him to smuggle her father across the border, the man pocketed the money, bought chocolates for his mistress from Belgium, and placed Margaret’s father on a train to Auschwitz. So it makes sense to me now that simple decisions baffled Margaret. It makes sense to me now that when news reached us of Primo Levi’s suicide, Margaret did not blink. It makes sense to me now that when Dr. Sikorski spoke of fighting in the Warsaw sewers, Margaret said, “I do not believe in God.” Those who saw what they saw grow fewer. Margaret has been dead a long time now. But perhaps you will understand why I chose her, why I have smudged the slow waltz of her smile and added only a few modest blue strokes—here and here. As you leave Margaret behind and turn the page, listen as the page falls back and your hand gently buries her. This is what the past sounds like.

First, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote his paper on dwarf stars—“What happens to a massive star that burns out?” he asked. His calculations suggested that instead of collapsing it would contract indefinitely, under the force of its own gravity. The bright star would disappear but it would still be there, where there had been brilliance there would be a blank. Soon after, workers built Oak Ridge, the accumulation of Cemesto hutments not placed on any map. They built a church, a school, a bowling alley. From all over, families drove through the muddy ruts. The ground swelled about the ruts like flesh stitched by sutures. My father, a child, watched the loads on the tops of their cars tip. Gates let everyone in and out with a pass. Forbidden to tell anyone they were there, my father’s family moved in, quietly, behind the chain-link fence. Niels Bohr said, “This bomb might be our great hope.” My father watched his parents eat breakfast: his father opened his newspaper across the plate of bacon and eggs, his mother smoked Camel straights, the ash from her cigarette cometing across the back of the obituaries. They spoke little. Increasingly the mother drank Wild Turkey with her women friends from the bowling league. Generators from the y -12 plant droned their ambition. There were no birds. General Leslie Groves marched the boardwalks, yelled, his boots pressed the slates and the mud bubbled up like viscera. My father watched his father enter the plant. My shy father went to the library, which was a trailer with a circus tent painted on the side. There he read the definition of “uranium” which was worn to a blur. My father read one Hardy Boys mystery after another. It was August 1945. The librarian smiled sympathetically at the 12-year-old boy. “Time to go home,” the librarian said. They named the bomb Little Boy. It weighed 9,700 pounds. It was the size of a go-kart. On the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, “This is the greatest thing in history.” That evening, my father’s parents mentioned Japanese cities. Everyone was quiet. It was the quiet of the exhausted and the innocent. The quietness inside my father was building and would come to define him. I was wrong to judge it. Speak, Father, and I will listen. And if you do not wish to speak, then I will listen to that.

For A.J. Verdelle Those mornings I traveled north on I 91, passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock where the elms discussed their genealogies. I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital, took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret, learned I was an I drawn to E s. In small group I said, “I do not like it— the way so many young black men die here unrecognized, their gurneys stripped, their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.” On the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed, blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes. A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled, their eyelids the film on old water in a well, their faces resigned in their see-through attics, their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper. It is correct to love even at the wrong time. On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying: I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

i We lived on a lake with Muscovy ducks. Interior decorators flush with furniture plans, the ducks thrust with the thrust of youth. ii We met at the gay community center, called Compass, in Lake Worth, where they sponsored “The Coming Out Group,” with Forest, our skilled leader. Transsexuals met before. You were fifty, I thirty-nine— somewhat late to begin a life together for the first time; we had begun to see announcements in the New York Times, so we knew it was possible to print: “Paul O’Shaughnessy and Spencer Reece were joined on a celery green love-seat . . .” Five years we had, not forever, but something still. iii Our consent took a long time. There were lulls. We played Scrabble: I arranged the tiles and you kept score. Sometimes we rolled the dice and read the I Ching. We went about our days unseen and we loved that. I placed too many books against the walls— Capote,Madame Bovary, a biography of Anne Boleyn. You complained about the clutter. “Where will guests put their suitcases?” you asked. Sometimes, we squabbled about money. Often, you stretched out upon the double bed, your skin no longer young, pebbled, freckled, known by me. iv The city was jammed under your nails from construction work, callused hands that knew bar-joists. Yours was an Irish body formed and punished by the tin-colored rains around Croagh Patrick. Beyond you, manatees, scarred by propellers, huddled in the power plant’s warm waters. Palm fronds and their shadows shook wildly as pornography. v On the edges of our dreams was the sea, which the moon walked across with soft footsteps. vi Our dog, a Lab-mix named Butch, chewed a bone at your bare feet. Butch moved like a shadow on the sea’s floor. Big and black, he came to us abused— who does such a thing and why is it permanent? We fed him a daily Xanax tablet before he pulled us on his manic journeys that had no arrivals. vii When we visited your Aunt Annie in the nursing home, her walker dominated the room like an empty kennel. She did not know who I was, her senility rendering me oblique. Long ago, when your mother died, your father sent a letter and a photograph of the four children to Killeen, asking Aunt Annie to come. As she strove across the sea, she watched the Connemara ponies disappear, then Knock, Letterfrack, Roundstone, and Cashel Bay blurred, blurred and blurred until they were nothing but green. She left Ireland for good and raised you and your three sisters—Joan, Ann, and Maureen. In America, she went about her days unseen. On her day off, she lit four candles for each one of you at the Shrine of St. Anthony on Arch Street, in Boston. She never married. She adored you. When we visited, she kept saying: “Paul, Paul, I have to get the cows across the stream.” viii We overlooked Pelican Lake in Juno Beach where caregivers and patients from the Alzheimer’s Support Group awkwardly commenced their semi-detached dates, eating potato chips off paper plates and feeding their broken bits to the ducks. Eyes vacantly connected in Florida, where born-agains with failed marriages sent pamphlets to Jews so they could be saved by Christ: to conquer and subdue was what Florida was for. There, we napped while the ducks strutted and preened with greasy black-green plumes and speckled red pates; it looked like they had mashed crayons on their heads— a sort of evolutionary mishap. Developers demanding more room, the ducks were sated, companioned, unbundling with poop. ix A retired couple volunteered, instructing residents in the tango— the lady had white stained tights, the man a tambourine. The tango emoted from a boom box as the residents gathered in a crescent moon of wheelchairs. Aunt Annie watched and talked about her cows, the stream. We stood behind her like groomsmen. Out the windows, Boston pontificated. x You were distracted, distracted until one day you said, “I do not desire you.” You had always been honest. You wanted a younger man, between twenty and twenty-five. The day blued around us— our book of changes came to a close. Your Christ-kiss issued no more. You were what you had always been, only more so— Irish and unavailable, darling. xi The horizon became a handsaw. When I could not reach what I loved the world was rent. xii A friend had a stillborn, and her marriage ended. She did not name the infant. I had coffee with her at the Greek restaurant we liked. She talked about going back to teach at Dreyfoos, the arts high school, and one student, in particular, an effeminate male with acne who dreamt of Juilliard, a way out. Florida luxuriated out the window— the fire bush, the cornflower blue plumbago, the Mexican petunia. I sold my library, my piano. I boarded a train. Seagulls diminished, gray specks, gray motes. The therapist in Fort Lauderdale made no more appointments for us. The migrant day laborers out in Pahokee and Canal Point on Lake Okeechobee gleaned and went about their days unseen. The orange groves’ fragile hemispheres wobbled on their stems. Sugar cane fields burned. Electrical poles gleamed. Buck hoists and bucket trucks broke through the possum’s sedge. The Everglades sighed its nervous extinction. xiii Aunt Annie had lost her index finger in Coventry, during the Blitz. Repeatedly, she rubbed the stump. xiv Perhaps you walk now there with your young men, meaty St. Augustine grass under your feet, moving discreetly, undetected, perhaps you speak of dissatisfactions, of politics. The Atlantic narrowing to a flushed, sanguine strip, the fishing boats alone in the dark, murmuring, hooking, perhaps the young men love you at first sight and plead with you to stay. I95 and a1a pulsing down Palm Beach County’s spits like blood, perhaps your face tightens tenderly in response to what you see.

We can never be with loss too long. Behind the warped door that sticks, the wood thrush calls to the monks, pausing upon the stone crucifix, singing: “I am marvelous alone!” Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield: rows of marrow and bone undone. The horizon’s flashing fastens tight, sealing the blue hills with vermilion. Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green. The cemetery expands its borders— little milky crosses grow like teeth. How kind time is, altering space so nothing stays wrong; and light, more new light, always arrives.