Read an Excerpt

1.

i don’t know that this will be of very great interest

I don’t know that this will be of very great interest to anyone,
but it seems such a perfect place to begin. I’m on a bouncing bus going back to New York after a weekend on Fire Island,
which was quite pleasant in spite of my misgivings beforehand.
The bus service is the best thing that’s happened in years for going to F.I. It picks you up at various convenient places around New York, gives you a free drink—fifty cents each for seconds and thirds—and a package of toasted almonds,
and takes you right to the ferry. Plus they allow dogs
(sans carriers).
Before, I had to cab it to the station, take a train (with dog in carrier), then another cab to the ferry—and usually had to stand all the way on the train—all of which usually cost well over the bus price besides being a rather unpleasant trip being bustled about by Long Island commuters, feisty conductors,
hot trains (the buses are air conditioned), etc., ad infinitum.
But then some enterprising fellow got the idea of chartering buses, and the Bus-A-Long was born.
At first, so I’m told, it was strictly a gay affair, with orgies all the way back to New York in the back part of the bus. Dick
Cornelia swears that the first time he took the bus a giggling voice was heard to say, “Don’t come in the air conditioner,
Mary—it’ll go all over the bus!” Se non è vero, è ben trovato.
Now, however, it’s quite integrated and proper.
But I was rather sad on the trip out just from looking at all the people—the handsome young men so secure in their youth and beauty, and the old ones looking at them, envying them, desiring them perhaps, remembering probably when they too were young and sure that (if they ever thought about it at all) they always would be.
As they looked at them there seemed also to be a certain pity in their eyes that these kids had such a bitter lesson to learn in front of them—a certain sad tolerance of their arrogant flaunting of their invulnerable youth and good looks.
Fair cheeks and fine bodies, etc.
There is also a great deal of projection in all this on my part,
I’m sure, though I don’t really have those feelings about growing old. Still, to most “active” (as opposed to old tranquil me!)
homosexuals youth is the pinnacle, so I doubt I was too far wrong in my musings. And they all seemed so awfully lonely,
young and old alike—as opposed to being alone (like me).
And as I thought that, it occurred to me that they might be thinking the same thing when they looked at me.
Sad, too, to look at the beautiful young men and have their beauty almost totally canceled out by their theatrically effeminate mannerisms. They were all smoking like Bette Davis,
calling each other “Dahling” like Tallulah, holding their eyelids half-shut like Dietrich—etc., etc., but even that wasn’t consistent. It alternated with limp-wristed slaps and playful shoves and high-pitched squeals of “Oh, Mary, you bitch,
you’re really such a camp!” and the inevitable sidelong glances to make sure it was not lost on the spectators. But they mostly got drunk and/or tired and finally calmed down.
It was nice at last to leave the bus and sit on the open top deck of the little “ferry” (I had to laugh the first time I went to Fire Island, remembering the ferries on the Mississippi, to see these little sixty or so foot boats) with spray hitting you in the face and to forget the bus trip.
Mostly it was a quiet and very nice (therefore) weekend. I
“had” to go to one big loud cocktail party, but only for a half hour or so, and refused both nights to go to the bars. The moon was full so Zagg (my dog) and I took long walks along the beach all by ourselves and it was beautiful enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. Nothing like “nature” to clear the head!
I don’t mean necessarily visible nature, to which I am fairly indifferent, but rather the hiss of cosmic silence, or the natural sounds and smells of air and water and sand squeaking under your bare heels, and the expansion that only solitude in the open produces—preferably the virgin, uninhabited open, but in this case the illusion was made convincing by the moonlit dark and by keeping one’s eyes toward the ocean until one was in a sufficient trance of self-communication to see nothing.
I was amused to be flagrantly flirted with by a most handsome young man for whom everyone was on the make but me. He had come by with several friends the night before
(friends of his) at about midnight to pick up my host and go to the bars. He kept insisting that I come with them, at which knowing looks passed among the others. But I stuck to my guns and went for a walk (and to bed) alone, much, apparently,
to the others’ consternation and amazement. Though I
can’t say that I wasn’t at least a little tempted.
However, it’s good to be going home, as always. Why do I
always weaken and accept these invitations?

2.

back home again

Back home again. It was good to find a letter from Jim waiting for me in the mailbox. Perfect timing, really, as sitting on the bus starting out on the trip, looking at all those people,
suddenly Jim popped into my head (a case of opposites!).
Tears came, and a tiny haiku appeared in my mind:

Thank you, God.
I thought you had forgot me,
And you gave me such a friend.

I kept saying it over and over to myself, and felt so good that
I couldn’t begin to describe it. And whenever I was by myself,
as on my walks (both nights I was there) along the beach, it stayed the same way—really a kind of exultation—and I’d sit on a log and imagine Jim sitting in California looking at the same moon and thinking of it as a sort of satellite for all our thoughts. Silly in a way, I guess, and rather childishly romantic,
but there it was.
I do often fear that my effusion of friendship for Jim might put him off somehow. I pray it won’t, but from past experience
I know that it can do so. I guess that if it does, then it does, and no amount of worrying or reassurance can help.
Offerings must be true, so that the receiver (if any) knows what he’s getting.
How wonderful it would be if we could develop one of those ideal friendships in which each friend was totally natural and honest so that no word or letter or gesture came from anything but a true, natural impulse, with no feelings of guilt or reproach, but only of gladness and love and respect. In which I could, for instance, with no hesitation, beg him for a letter, and he could, without guilt feelings of any kind, not write one for a year even, if he didn’t feel like it, and I would understand and love him even more for it. I think, naively,
perhaps, that it’s possible.
I wonder sometimes whether loving someone isn’t simply paying attention to him. In friendship, paying attention to his mind and welfare, and in “love,” in its popular sense, to his body as well.
My own friendship with other men, particularly with
“straight” men, such as Jim, gets into complications at times,
and my motives are often suspect, even to me, and whatever
I say, I do feel acutely the difference between us. I accept it,
though, and live quite comfortably with it on the whole.
I was talking with a young friend of mine the other night about various “serious” things, including love. We were concentrating on that, because sort of offhandedly one night a few months ago I had said I thought loving someone was an end in itself. That is, loving someone with—deliberately,
if necessary—no thought of being loved in return. Wishing for it, maybe, but no expectations. I think it’s nourishing and makes one grow.
And this isn’t just idle conjecture, either. I’ve tried it and it works. Tried it not in the way of testing out a theory, but because it once was forced on me. That was with Ilya in
Greece (a three-volume novel in itself!). But when I realized that it was a one-sided affair I thought about it for a couple of nights in a very concentrated way (I couldn’t think about anything else!) and rather than become bitter and vindictive and bitchy as I might have done, I decided (really consciously decided) to love him just the same for as long as I did love him. (Though a question arose as to whether “love” was love,
but anyhow . . .)
That went on for a couple of years and got calmer and calmer and actually almost more and more beautiful, and that one experience—the blossoming (and going to seed, I suppose)
of a lot of experiences in the then past—turned out to have taught me one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned.
Anyway, this friend of mine took it up and apparently has been thinking a great deal about it. He has his doubts, but I
have now passed the point of merely believing it. I know it,
and it’s part of me.
I’ve been accused so often and by so many different people of being a bad influence that it scares me. We can know,
it seems to me, almost anything except how we affect other people. No, that’s not true. We can know nothing. It seems to us that we know certain things, but only because they are so unimportant to us that we never think about them enough to realize that we don’t know them. But important things, like what people think about us, are frustratingly inscrutable. We can learn what are called “facts”—we cannot learn what we want to know.
In my own way, I’m very stubborn, which I can see in my way of dealing (in my own mind) with the world at large. I
have decided how I like it and live in it as though it were that way.

3.

paradoxes spring up on all sides

Paradoxes spring up on all sides, it seems. It becomes both easier and more difficult to write, though the focus becomes finer as I go deeper into things that I am not used to talking about and so don’t know how. For Jim, my response to his friendship, there is of course a lot more to be said. It will take me the rest of my life to say it.
If just one little thing had been different I’d probably never have known Jim. I wouldn’t have known the difference,
naturally. One could go mad thinking of the friends,
the perfect lover still unmet because on a certain evening in
1953 one decided to turn down Fifth Avenue instead of going on to Seventh as originally intended. And I do believe the old adage about suffering being good for the soul—if, as it should, it produces understanding, which it has in his case even though it often does not. I’m sure he knows that—but who could blame him if he’d have preferred somewhat less understanding! The trick is to understand how much everybody
suffers—to understand it and keep from going mad, that is. At the same time I’m saying all this I am blissfully aware it’s all so much meaningless chatter. Saved again!