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let's face it soon i will be dead / and i just want to / i want to see the boy happy / with some hope in his pale eyes / is that too much to ask?
*
At first you do not understand why you want to curl into the blank spaces left by his body. It's only when he is quiet with you, when there are spaces in the conversation that are heavy with some expectation that you do not at first understand, that it becomes clearer.
He sits with one arm wrapped around you. Your thigh is pressed up against his. And later, in the bed that makes stories in your head, where you have lain down and dreamt things that made your heart sing with loneliness, he kisses you with his mouth open -- frightened, exhausted: save me, please, make it make sense. You can't help him, but you kiss him back anyway.
He tells you that you look like your father, even though you know that it is only partially true; it is true for him. And under the shadow of that shadow, standing in darkness trying to make yourself blacker, it is possible to forget how much you miss your father.
You don't remember the missing year. All you remember is the before, and the after. The night before the day when he wasn't there anymore you lay in this bed with him. You were only six years old, so you didn't really grasp why you were crying, only that it seemed appropriate. You cried against his shirt and now, fifteen years later, you still wonder if that was the night that you learnt how to fall in love with things that make you unhappy -- the slow flowering of that ache that is never assuaged or quite over-taken by a corresponding flowering of joy. You like to be happy -- you don't think anybody wants to be miserable all the time -- but you don't have love affairs with happiness.
Anyway you lay here in his arms, at first buried -- your face smushed up against his shirt buttons and the smell of his skin, nothing but snot and tears and little bursts of pain in your head and in your chest where you forgot to breathe -- and then, later, sleeping, or drifting. You lay quietly with your back flush against his chest and tried to breathe through your mouth because your nose just wasn't working. He was gentle, arms like pillows, and the beats of his heart were a slow lullaby. It took you a long time to go to sleep that night and so, in the morning, when it was really goodbye, you weren't really awake at all and you couldn't think of any words to say.
You think maybe Sam had a night like that sometime. Probably with less all-out crying (though perhaps not) but maybe with the same understanding of goodbye, the same knowledge of everything about to be taken away, never to be given back.
You don't think your father and your lover were ever together here; they were close, professionally anyway, but you don't think they were intimate. But one thing that seems clear enough is that at least one of them didn't want to settle for professional intimacy. As you think this -- in the dark, in the warmth of the bed and his body and the unpolished sadness lying like lost coins in the hollows between you both -- Sam begins to stroke your hair.
He does it like someone still grieving; someone marvelling at how unable he is to find joy in things. It sits oddly on him, the sweetest, and until recently the flat-out nicest man you have ever known.
You would like to ask him: did you ever fuck my father? A small part of you, that does not come out in sunlight, wants to ask him, if he did, what it was like.
He carries on stroking; you carry on trying to be stoic, silent. You try to project darkness, impassively. You try to let him take the comfort he needs all while that same part of you wonders what Sam would have done if you had never been born -- what strangeness would he have fallen into in his grief, what substitutes would he have found. Would they have worked?
He hasn't fucked you yet. You have kissed. He has touched you and you have acted for him, and for yourself. But nothing has been signed or sealed. You know that he wants to, now, while he is still blind and mad and losing himself. You wonder what difference a month will make. You wonder if you will still be able to look at each other in a year's time.
He was a friend of the family, naturally. Your mom thought he was cute and earnest and faintly ridiculous but she loved him for being such an exemplary foil for your father. You sister still adored him. You graded him more or less a B+, because everyone came second to your father, but you were kind-hearted. He lived in California then, so you didn't see him often and because you weren't particularly interested you did not notice, at the time, the grade he had given your father. A+. Nothing better. Top of the class.
It was your sister who told you. She laughed. Sam's so crushy on Dad! she said. It's so cute. You frowned; you didn't understand even though by then -- by thirteen -- you knew you were, in a lot of ways, just the same: gay, in love with Toby, chasing after something that could never be. Molly had laughed again and punched your arm. Doofus. It's so obvious. Sam and Daddy in a tree. Honestly, Huck. Buy a clue.
She thought that they had had a thing, a long time ago, back at the White House or maybe before, with the campaign. You weren't so sure. You were thinking about sadness, about your mom, about how people who already want us are less attractive than those who do not. But you never looked at Sam the same way again.
In the bed, you turn and kiss him. He says your name, just Huck into the air, surprised and surprisingly anxious, like suddenly it's occurred to him that they shouldn't be here doing this. He pats the air with his hands but then something shifts, some cloud passes over the half-moon that is bring in the curtainless window, and his hand drifts down to your face. His fingers light on your mouth and remain there, autumnal. Spring is over, summer has failed. It is the season of melancholy now, and you are both celebrating it.
When he is fucking you, when the wrestle of your bodies is so close to incomprehensible that you do not remember why this should ever stop, there is a part of your mind that is still watching. That part thinks that the sex should do more to change you both, some kind of metamorphosis; that you should not be able to think and breathe and worry and know your own name while he is fucking you -- that all that should disappear, or that everything should make a mark, that you should be able to see all the places that he has touched your skin, little scars that become, time on time, the stuff your self is made of.
Your body is his consolation. You suppose it should worry you that you are allowing him that, but it does not. It does not.
Your sister says it first. Are you sleeping with him? She is the only one left to answer to. Your father died second, so now you are orphans. But she asks, she knows. You wonders if it's a twin thing, even though neither of you believe in that bullshit; if maybe she woke up one night this week thinking she was in bed with Sam Seaborn.
I wanted to see him happy, is what you come up with. She laughs. No you don't. You wanted to be miserable and miss him and wallow in it all and play dress-up in Dad's clothes. She punches your arm, then pushes you away, off the bed you were both sitting on. You're so sad sometimes I feel like I don't even know you, Huck. I don't know how to even start being that destructive.
I wanted to make him happy. You say it again, later, to yourself, testing out the words to see if they feel heavy or light, sweet or bitter. But there is a strange emptiness there; the taste of water, the weight of air.
You had an old boyfriend, your first. A boy you met, incongruously, at temple. Avi. Unsweet, thick glasses, the kind of stubble that grows in thick ten minutes after a shave. You used to love to stand behind him at the wash basin and loop your arms around his waist and test your lips against the prickle of that beard, before the shave and then again afterwards. He would use you to test the efficacy of the shave. There was something in him that you could never pick just one adjective for. Sad sometimes, and others watchful, and others wry and half-full of light. You kissed him first behind the synagogue walls and he held you tightly with his hand inside your shirt.
You father liked him. You knew that he did because he never stopped insulting Avi while you were going out, that and making comments about the joys of loving women until Molly told him to knock it off. It was quiet when he told you, in your kitchen in the family house, while you poured him some coffee. I like that you're happy. That's down to him, right? You smiled. You probably grinned, then nodded. Yes, dad. He matched your nod, and in his eyes there was something that lessened your ache, even as it reminded you that the ache was still there, in that little place tucked behind your ribs. That's good, kid, he said.
One night Sam tells you everything, all of everything. He's a little drunk and you are in that kind of mood where you keep on drinking up painful things, like hemlock, until the numbness rises up to your heart. He tells you about how he fell in love with Toby Ziegler, as though it's a bedtime story, as though it all worked out and now he's your stepfather and you want -- the young, gay son, searching desperately for paradigms -- to know how it all turned out so right.
He tells you secrets, and the things you'd thought were lies. He tells you about three nights, because that's all it was. He tells you like a cataloguer, like a card index, like a search engine stuck on 'image' until you can see everything that happened and do not want to anymore. You feel sick, suddenly, and ask him to stop. He is quiet, for a while, with his hand holding yours. And then he says, You go. Tell me a story. Maybe it'd help.
So you do. You tell him the story, and it makes him quiet, like he's just remembered who you are.
Sam never really gets together with anyone else. There are a few women who never get past a few dates and you suspect that there are a few men who maybe get a little further but fail well before the final test. Once the grief has waned a little he becomes lighter again; the sun comes back out. But you never see bright noon in his face again. You never see the happy boy who used to be there. You never have, since your father died.
You told him another story once, the one you don't tell anybody anymore. The story about what happened when you were nine years old.
The sea has always been something that drew you, like loose sand under a wind. As a child you would feel yourself thinning, fingers outstretched towards the water and elongated, your nails as transparent as the sea itself. A child in Maryland and in New York, you spent time around water; you learnt rivers and bays; at your mom's place you could go find streams and stand around watching boats and sticking your fingers in the places where there were small creatures and wet things, and with your father you walked the course of the Hudson and East rivers in every season and tried to remember what those rivers, that were to you as good as living things, like family now, looked like in each season, with snow and leaves and sunlight lying on them. And the first time in California, when you are nine years old, you fall in love with the culmination of all of these piled up things that you have learned: you fall in love with the sea.
It was your father who took you there, you and your sister, to California. He had a conference, a university thing, at Berkeley, and you came along with him. Your father hated the place -- the sun, the sand, the people who walked around half undressed. Your sister laughed at him while he muttered as they walked through the streets but you stayed close by his arm and walked next to him and saw everything as he saw it, except the sea.
You remember being happy for that week that seemed short. You remember being close to him. You remember turning on the TV in the hotel room and lying on the bed and looking out the window instead of at the TV, and that he came in and sat on the bed beside you, his hand on your shoulder. Then that he lay down beside you, still holding your shoulder, his index finger matching the line of the cuff of your t-shirt. His body held yours still even as it was drifting out to the ocean you could see in the window. You remember dreaming and that you dreamed about drowning, lying here, and drowning too.
And the next day, quite early in the morning when all three of you went out to the beach, his one completely free day when he promised that you would all go together, you waited until they were quiet (your sister inexplicably digging a huge hole, your father behind a book) and walked into the sea.
Why? he says. He doesn't sound as surprised as you expected; you expected to hear in his voice some of the scandal that appears in the voices of sunny people when they hear about dark things, but of course it isn't there. Why did you do that?
I was happy, you tell him. I was with him.
Sam nods. Yeah. He is lying beside you. His mouth is pinched, turned down at the corners. His beard is growing, growing white at each point of his chin and scattered across his cheeks like white chalk dust. He is naked, and to you he seems incongruously broad and well-muscled. His tan seems almost obscene. Only his neck is pale, and the underside of his throat. You kiss him there, where you can see the tenderness.
He holds you, for a little while. And then he gets up and gets dressed and he smiles at you as he stands beside the bed.
No more drowning, Huck. He bends over you and kisses you, on your high, hollow cheekbone. He presses his mouth there for a long time and his cheek is warm against your own. I'll promise if you will.
You look at him for a long time, and you realise that your hand has gripped his forearm and that his hand has glued itself to your cheek in the place he was kissing. It seems important, one of those moments; the quiet climax of a foreign movie, the part that doesn't need to be subtitled, in a story about adultery or secrets or death. Yes, you say. All right. He nods, and then walks out.
He writes to you, once or twice a year. He keeps you breathing by a supreme act of faith: he feeds you on stories. And, postcard by postcard, a book you write only in your head, you feed him too.
Huck --
There was something once, that I forgot I guess. A really quiet night. Just us in the West Wing, around the State of the Union. So it was cold and we'd drunk too much coffee, way too much coffee -- you know that feeling you get when you're working on nothing but caffeine and all you can taste is the coffee but you keep filling yourself up with it anyway, until you feel emptier because of it. Like that.
He was quiet. And still. It was strange, really weird. He was just so frustrated, I think. He just sat there on his couch with the pen just held in the air, not writing. Not really doing much of anything.
I sat beside him and he didn't seem to notice. And, I don't know, I guess I was feeling brave? I took the pad out of his fingers and read it. Wasn't that great, but he already knew that. I remember that he was breathing so quietly I almost couldn't hear it even though it was totally silent in the office. (I wish you could have seen that office, Huck. It seems so strange to me that you and Molly never have. I have to check again for pictures.)
But, anyway, I got closer to him. I put my arm around him. Nothing else, just that. But he let me. It was like he got a little peace from it, somehow. He didn't feel so stiff anymore. He leaned into me, just a little bit, and we sat there like that. And after a while he got up and went to get some more coffee, and we started again.
I always tell people he was my friend, and that's true as far as it goes. But it doesn't feel like the right word, quite; it was both more and less than friendship, for me. I loved him differently than anyone else. I guess you know that. I still can't find the word. I don't even know if there is one.
Tell me what you think.
-- Sam
The postcard you send is just a list of words, as many as will fit on one small piece of card. None of the individual words are quite right but as a whole they come closer. They almost reach, at the edge of their meaning, an understanding of the blank space, of the sea, of the echoes and the mirrors and the need, of love, lost and never lost. You write all the words down and they look good to you. You are smiling as you write them, and as you send them away.
*
i want to see the boy happy / with his arms around his first love / is that too much to ask?