All Ruinous Disorders

The summer I met Lucas, my last in Boston, I volunteered as prop runner for a new comedy at the Footlight Club. On trash days I combed the rolling sidewalks of Forest Hills, in the valley of the triple-deckers. Boston was a lovely town for garbage-picking. The century-old buildings had the façade of permanence, with all the accumulated multigenerational junk of families who had settled there before the Wars. But what did I know about permanence? I’d returned from London to an expiring lease and a summer full of funerals.

It was 1984, a year of death: three ancillary friends in March, a fellow actor in April, and later, in December, from unrelated causes, my mother. That May, I’d escaped my stateside sorrows by blending in with the rouge-cheeked New Romantics who used Piccadilly for a catwalk. My acting troupe had been invited to stage a joint production of King Lear—in drag, like the original. I played Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, one of the few who survive to the curtain. What that said about my resiliency I don’t know.

The Footlight comedy required an old-fashioned icebox that was, for some reason I now forget, crucial to the third act. I never buckled under a challenge, and anyway I liked being seen back home in my dolman jacket and tricornered hat. If strangers mistook me for a colonial reenactor, so be it. By chance or fate, one afternoon I stumbled upon my prize: a chest-high icebox with claw-footed legs. I walked it home eight blocks up Washington Street, in the shade of the elevated tracks, tilting the icebox forward on one leg then repeating with the opposite.

My building was serviced by one of those narrow elevators with a maximum capacity of two malnourished children. If you came home with too many groceries, you had to send up the bags unaccompanied and take the stairs to meet them on your floor. Naturally the icebox wouldn’t fit. For several impotent minutes I perspired at the foot of the stairwell, envisioning each tight bend of the four flights ahead. It was in this glamorous pose that Lucas, exiting his ground-floor apartment in acid-washed jeans and a yellow T-shirt, found me. I was so struck by his biceps that I hardly noticed how short he was—under five and a half feet. He looked like he’d labored his whole life at a loading dock. Briefly I fantasized about inviting him upstairs to rip my phone book in half. But I didn’t need a ruse: together we hoisted the icebox up all fifty-two steps and lugged it through my studio door.

I never had men over in the daytime—due to my awful luck or taste, or both, they only wanted my company at night. Lucas was clean-shaven, unlike the men I dallied with. He’d moved into the building while I was abroad. When he wiped his brow, I observed his ink-stained fingers and, not without jealousy, a gold wedding band. His gaze flitted from my modern fridge to the icebox and back, then he asked why the hell I needed two refrigerators. I explained that it was a prop and he was excited by the idea that I worked in the movies. Wrong coast for that, I told him. But the truth did not disappoint him. During the few months I knew him, he seemed unabatedly cheerful, a man incapable of disappointment, a man nothing like me—a notion I am only disabused of today. As a token of my gratitude I offered him free tickets to the play, where he could see the icebox in its starring role. Later that week I slipped an envelope under his door with two tickets (and, in a puckish moment, a dab of Kouros). He never showed.

That summer I kept odd hours: mornings cashiering at a thrift shop, evenings at the J.P. Licks ice cream parlor. I’d also renewed my affair with Max, a Northeastern undergrad with an immoderate taste for gin and Jeeves novels. He roomed with three finance majors in Mission Hill. Our relationship was nonexclusive and contentious, partly due to Max’s drinking and partly because I was leaving in August. Back then I rarely drank to excess. I had yet to discover sherry, and besides, there were more popular forms of recreation. Those were marvelous days for dancing. Music had a new sound that seemed beamed in from outer space, and everybody flashed like comets, swinging through my orbit and exiting with a trail of stardust. I never saw my own clock at midnight. If I returned at all, I slunk back at dawn, bleary-eyed, saluting Lucas as we crossed paths in the foyer, he the bright living and I the undead.

From our brief encounters, I pieced together a composite of my new neighbor: industrious and wholesome, he ran a silkscreen T-shirt business from his one-bed apartment. At twenty-four, he already had a family to support: a pretty but reticent Vietnamese wife, several years older; and two children, a chirpy boy of nearly four and a newborn daughter. Sometimes I would spot them on their way to picnic at Jamaica Pond or stroll the Arboretum. It was nice to have an acquaintance in the building, someone I knew beyond a name on a mailbox. Lucas would ask me about acting and showed particular interest in my recent London trip. He had never been overseas and was impressed I had gone there for work and not as a tourist. Though our conversations did not become intimate, I began to consider him a friend. My actual friends were all like me—city-hoppers and people-hoppers and itinerants. Despite myself, I began to admire Lucas for his steadiness. It cast doubt over the way I’d spent so many years.

Too many of my friends were dying; that I survived was pure chance. I’d lived just as riskily and never caught anything, though I wouldn’t be certain of that until much later. A blood test wouldn’t exist for another year, and they’d only just given it a name. In those early days I survived through denial, and perhaps I deny things better than most. But I don’t cast any importance on my longevity. Often I think the people who matter are taken away first, and those who stick around live in the service of memory. There are a thousand counterexamples, but as a consequence of outliving everyone, most afternoons I’ve only myself to debate, over a glass of Emilio Lustau in a low-light café on Polk Street. I’ve never been able to bear the idea of being forgotten, and time has taken care of that for me.

Only once did I enter Lucas’s apartment: a disastrous episode in late August, right before my lease ended and I jetted back to the Midwest, drawn home by my mother’s illness. After seven years, I’d never felt settled on the East Coast; not only my relationships but my possessions, too, seemed transient. Like props. But this had a way of making exits easier. I thought my farewell to Lucas would be uncomplicated, but when I mentioned, offhand, my imminent departure, he surprised me by inviting me to dinner.

Louse that I was, I showed up drunk. I’d broken up with Max a week earlier—nonetheless, we’d gone dancing the night before at our usual club. That morning I’d buried another friend, and Max, the dear simple fool, had invited me out to blast my grief with synthesizers. After the club we went back to his place, where he embarrassed himself by drinking a half-fifth of Beefeater and punching a grapefruit-sized hole in the kitchen wall. Banished by his roommates, we staggered toward Center Street, trading insults and gin until four in the morning, when I fellated him behind the Woolworth’s. It was the last we saw of each other. I walked home alone in the penumbra of dawn, carrying the remains of the booze. Midafternoon I awoke hung-over and drained the bottle of gin to bring myself back to equilibrium, then took a long shower during which I felt, for the first time in my life, like an old man. I was thirty-seven. In the elevator down to Lucas’s flat a thought blindsided me: I could go up and down a thousand elevators, as hapless as a sack of groceries, and when the doors opened there would never be anyone waiting for me.

Lucas’s apartment was hardly bigger than my studio, but it had a good-sized kitchen that could fit a table. Every cupboard and appliance was finished with tacky woodgrain. I handed him a pint of strawberry ice cream and my last bottle of ’81 Seyval blanc, cheap but exotic—realizing as he thanked me that he surely did not drink. His wife had prepared a vermicelli bun with curried chicken: thin rice noodles and unfamiliar spices that made my nose run. Lucas must have told her of my fondness for the tamer curries I’d tasted in London. Talk was minimal. Even the boy, Phil, conducted himself admirably. At intervals, an Orange Line train rumbling down the elevated tracks shook the glassware in the cabinets. I apologized repeatedly for wiping my nose at the table, and once while sneezing caught Lucas’s wife flash him a worried glance.

After supper we repaired to the living room, which doubled as Lucas’s workshop. Several boxes were stacked on a latch-hook rug, and in one corner sat a tabletop printing press. The room reeked of dyes, which did no favors for my headache. A black trash bag covered the lone window, blocking out the late sun. That helped some. I ensconced myself in a gold-colored loveseat while Lucas sat on one of the boxes. Half, he told me, contained blank T-shirts; the remainder held finished prints. But he never opened one to show me. I should have known then that although he was a man who seemed to reveal everything, like anyone he was a man of secrets.

The sole object of entertainment—they did not own a television—was the front half of a bicycle, upside down on its handlebars so the lone wheel could spin freely. It was the kind of prop I would have salivated over. Now and again Lucas lifted a socked foot to spin the wheel while Phil, to his endless and private amusement, wedged various objects between the spokes: rolled-up issues of Cracked magazine, a plastic spork, the cardboard insert from a toilet paper roll. The boy reminded me, in his purple T-shirt, of a miniature prince. Unrequested, I recited a bit of Lear:

The boy was a budding critic; he ignored my antics. In the kitchen, Lucas’s wife nursed the baby. Her shyness was so pronounced that she never spoke in my presence. I suspected she was embarrassed by her English. The infant never left her breast. On the one or two occasions the girl’s face unbosomed itself, I caught sight of long, lovely eyelashes. To this day they flutter at me in dreams, superimposed on dogs’ faces. All in all it was a happy domestic picture. The absence of conversation bothered me only slightly. I wondered if my presence muzzled them or if they spent every evening as mutes. But I would never know. I was their guest for one evening only, which seems to me now such a strange thing. One night out of all the nights in my life—it is surprising where you find yourself sometimes, and with whom.

I was suddenly weary of everything. I thought I’d come down with a bad case of self-mortification, that this dry and domesticated evening was penance for my tawdry summer. For the next thirty years I would ricochet off lovers and cities and never come to a rest. That night was the closest I’d ever come to peace.

So of course I had to sabotage it. Soon the baby began to fuss, and Lucas’s wife withdrew to the bedroom all four of them shared. I took her seat in the kitchen, by now miserably sober. The Seyval blanc lay untouched on the counter.

“Is there something we could open this with?” I said.

“Maybe up there.” Lucas, following me into the kitchen, pointed to a cupboard above the fridge. It does not escape me now that our relationship began and ended over refrigeration.

“You get it,” I said, knowing the cabinet was too high for him to reach. “I never rifle through people’s cupboards.”

He dragged a chair to the fridge and stood on it. The cabinet was filled with loose metal gadgets. As he dug through them, his jeans were tight against his ass. Eventually he found something: a keychain bottle opener shaped like a lobster, one of those knickknacks sold at Quincy Market. He held it down toward me, but his feet slipped—he was still in socks—and he tottered on the chair. What I did next can’t be explained as simple desire, though I might have thought so at the time. Perhaps I wanted to prove that no man could be so at peace with his life. Now, reflecting on our odd and improbable friendship, I see that I was afraid Lucas would forget me, and it was in my power to make a memorable exit.

“Let me help you down.”

I clutched his hips. His body felt firm and compact, like I’d always imagined it, like a thousand springs primed for release. At that moment another trolley rumbled overhead, and as he dropped to the floor, I slid my right hand across the front of his jeans. The touch was thrilling, dangerous—too drawn out to have been an accident, but brief enough to pass off as a joke. The bottle opener clattered on the tile, and Lucas landed in a half-crouch, flexing his magnificent biceps. I used to make passes at straight men all the time, and I feared—perhaps even hoped—he would strike me. I laughed, thinking he might follow suit. Instead he backed away, staring at my right hand.

A thin line of blood glistened on my knuckle. The bottle opener had nicked me. Lucas inched backward, his face crimped with fear. It was the smallest wound the world had ever seen. I was clean, I was sure of it, though I had no proof and no reason for my certainty. None of that mattered. He spoke softly but firmly.

“I think you should go.”

“Lucas, it’s just a scratch.” Although the blood didn’t drip, I wrapped a napkin around my finger for show. In the bedroom, the baby wauled.

“Please go.”

“I’m not—I don’t—I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”

Under his gaze I felt all the lines of my figure dissolve. I was no longer a man standing before him: I was a threat. I’d felt no shame in the kitchen but it touches me now, thirty years on—shame not like a slap to the face, but like unwelcome, groping fingers. What choice did he have? I retreated into the living room, Lucas two steps behind, herding me through the stacks of boxes toward the door while I hunted for an excuse to linger. Phil was still playing with the bicycle wheel. As I put on my shoes, I asked the boy, idiotically, where the other wheel was.

“Here,” he said, puzzled.

“Why is there only one wheel?”

“Because,” Phil said, and faltered. He was at the age when boys begin to explain things, interjecting because, because, because as often as they ask why.

“Please go,” Lucas repeated. He crossed calmly between me and his son like a squat tank defending some unseen border. At the time, I thought: here is a common life carried out with uncommon strength. I reached for the doorknob with my injured hand—an instinct—which was when Lucas finally panicked. He wouldn’t let me touch anything. Not his family, not the careful arrangement of his life. The border had no end. He kicked the door open and said, “Now.”

I was two steps into the dim foyer when I heard the boy’s answer.

“Because there’s only one,” Phil said, spinning the wheel. “Because daddy found it like this.”

Lucas, seeking some protection to close the door with, settled on a blank t-shirt, which he wrapped thickly around his right hand. He seized the knob, shut the door, and threw the deadbolt.

I suppose it was naiveté that fixed one image from that night in my mind: the father spinning a bicycle wheel, the son resisting its motion with a strip of cardboard. When I left Boston, whatever I thought I was leaving behind had already vanished. My friends were dying in shame and secrecy. My mother was dying of loneliness or some other curable disease. But all these years I believed Lucas was holding on to something, or someone, permanent.

After my mother died, I jumped from city to city, though never again to Europe. I gave up the theatre. Who was left for me to play? Not Lear. Though in my private life I’ve often acted the naked old fool, bestowing my favors on flatterers, I’ve never demanded loyalty from anyone. I ended up in San Francisco, and whatever course his life took over the next thirty years brought Lucas to California as well. Like me, he came alone.

At my age one forms a daily habit of checking the obituaries. I almost didn’t recognize his photograph. It was shot from below, giving him the illusion of a stature he’d never possessed. Obituary photos are the last fib anyone can tell; I’ve already chosen mine. But the dry facts of a life look the same in any typeface: Lucas had been survived by three former wives, scattered across the country, and a daughter of Boston, Massachusetts. The ex-wives were shocking enough, but what of the boy? I kept reading: He was predeceased by his son, Phillip. The services were private.

Perhaps at my age, entering that second childishness, I’ve stopped asking questions of everything and begun, when I should know better, to try to answer them. So Lucas had abandoned his family, forged a new life for himself, perhaps in the aftermath of a sudden tragedy that unraveled the dream he’d woven when one imagines so much time ahead. Did it matter how or why? My mother, ten years into her marriage, had been tossed to the curb like an old appliance. She and my father had fallen into the eternal pattern of remarriage and divorce, and Lucas was no better off. And I think to myself, how stupid. How very stupid. This common hope of constructing a life out of things and people that won’t change—this wishful thinking—is the most damning and painful kind of foolishness. I’ve renounced such pain my whole life. I’ve pursued life and people in stints, cameos, disposable weekends. Because to do otherwise would be to build a stage set from stone and steel. And if I am now forgotten? Lucas, you stupid beautiful man, you dreamer—how very fair we’ll end up in the same place.