Michael Nava - The Little Death

“Poetry, mostly.”

“I didn’t notice any of her books on your shelves.”

“I don’t have any.”

“You’re not close to her?”

“I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Does she live in San Francisco?”

“No, in the east. Boston, I think.”

“With your father?”

He hesitated a second before saying, “He’s dead.”

I heard his hesitation with a lawyer’s ear and something about it was not quite right, so I asked, “Are you sure?”

“Don’t cross-examine me.” He shivered and reached to the table for the brandy, swigging it directly from the bottle. Then he put it down and ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. He looked fragile and unhappy.

“I’ll make you some coffee,” I said, still standing by the books, “if you’ll tell me where it is.”

“Blue canister in the refrigerator,” he said, shivering again.

When I returned to the living room he was standing at the window, which was now black with night, facing himself — a ghostly reflection. I set the mugs of coffee down and went over.

“Something out there?” “A car passed by, slowly, without its lights on.”

“Has that happened before?”

“No,” he said, “and maybe it wasn’t meant for me.” I made a noise in the back of my throat. “You still don’t believe that I’m in danger of being killed.”

“You’re doing a pretty effective job of killing yourself.” He turned away, abruptly, went to the table and picked up a cup of coffee.

“I’m sorry about today.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I was bored and lonely.”

“Some would call that the human condition.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “My coping mechanism is easily overwhelmed.”

“That sounds like a diagnosis.”

“My last analyst,” he replied, carelessly, “who also told me that intimacy is difficult for me.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Sex is not the same thing.”

“I see. Thank you for setting me straight.”

“Wait,” he said. “Let’s start over. I asked you to come up because I wanted to see you again, not to score points against you.”

“All right,” I said, crossing over to the couch and sitting down beside him. I lay my hand, tentatively, on his. “Tell me what happened between last weekend and today.”

He looked at me intently through cloudy blue eyes, then said, “Have you ever heard of a poet named Cavafy?” I told him no. “A Greek poet. Gay, in fact. He wrote a poem about a young dissolute man who tires of his life and resolves to move to a new city and mend his ways. The poet’s comment is that moving away is futile because, having ruined his life in one place, he has ruined it everywhere.”

“And?”

“I had so many good reasons for leaving New York and coming home, but when I got here they — evaporated. I was the same person, it was the same life.”

“People overcome addictions.”

“But not self-contempt.” He poured brandy into his coffee cup and leaned back as if to tell a bedtime story. “My grandfather, who raised me after my father died, had very primitive and set notions about what a man is. He never missed an opportunity to let me know that I didn’t measure up.”

“Let it go,” I said, thinking back to my own father. “You’ll live to bury him. That changes everything.”

“He poisoned my childhood,” Hugh said, ignoring me, “and I looked for causes, not knowing they didn’t exist, believing that I deserved his abuse.”

Something in his tone made me ask, “What kind of abuse, Hugh?”

“He said I was too pretty to be a boy,” Hugh replied, his eyes bright with defiance and shame. Slowly, I understood.

“He assaulted you — sexually?”

“The joke is that I already knew I was gay. Knew I was different, anyway. What took me years to learn is that it didn’t have — “ he paused, searching for words — “to be so demeaning.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That I led him on, that I wanted it.” He smiled, bitterly. “I was the seductive twelve year old. A few weeks after it happened he sent me to a prep school in the east. Eighteen years ago. I can count on my fingers the times I’ve seen him since.”

“Why have you come back?”

“I’m living on my anger, Henry. It’s the only life I’ve got left in me, and I’ve come back to confront him. But I need to be strong when I see him, and I’m not strong yet.”

“In the meantime, you brood and destroy yourself.”

“I thought, in the meantime, you and I could become friends.” I heard the ghost of seduction in his voice, yet it was not meant seductively. It was a plea for help. “If only I had met you — even five years ago.”

“What’s wrong with now?” I asked and drew him close.

The next morning I woke to find Hugh standing perfectly still in a wide sunny space near the window, facing the wall above my head, wearing only a pair of faded red sweatpants. He held his hands at his side, fingers splayed, but not stiffly. He breathed, slowly, deeply. His breath filled his entire torso with quivery tension as he inhaled, bringing his chest and abdominal muscles into sharp relief. As he exhaled, his chest fell with delicate control. The color of his skin darkened as the blood rushed in a torrent beneath the skin. Each muscle of his body was elegantly delineated, like an ancient statue that time had rendered human.

He lifted his chin a little, drew his shoulders even straighter and parted his legs, one forward and one back. I watched as he sank to the floor, raising his arms at his side until he was fully extended in a split. There was the slightest tremor in his fingertips giving away the effort but no other part of his body moved. He pulled his back straighter, closed his eyes and held the position until the tremor in his fingers died. Then, he carefully brought his back leg forward in a wide arc, lowering his arms at the same time, until he was sitting. He opened his eyes.

“That was amazing,” I said.

“I was so much better once,” he replied, shaking his head vigorously, scattering drops of sweat from his hair. “I studied dance in college.”

“Where?”

“Where?” he repeated, smiling. “I was at Yale for a couple of years, and N.Y.U. for a semester or two and Vanderbilt for a few months. I moved around.”

“Without ever graduating?”

“I never did, no.” He stood up, crossed over to the bed, a mattress laid against a corner, and extended his hand. “Get up and I’ll take you to breakfast.”

I let him pull me out of bed and our bodies tangled. He was flushed and a little sweaty and his hair brushed against the side of my face like a warm wind as we drew each other close.

An hour later we were sitting at a table in a dark, smoky corner of a coffeehouse on Castro. The waiter cleared our breakfast plates and poured more coffee.

“So you still consider yourself a hype?” I asked, pursuing our conversation.

“Of course. I’m addicted whether I use or not because being high is normal for me and how I function best. When I’m not using, I’m anxious.”

“I’m pretty anxious myself, sometimes, but I’ve never felt the desire to obliterate myself.”

“It’s not just the sedative effect a hype craves. It’s also the rush, and the rush is so intense, like coming without sex.”

“I’ve heard that before from my clients. One of them said it was like a little death.”

Hugh looked at me curiously and asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“I imagine he meant you lose yourself.”

“Exactly. La petite mort — that’s what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his life a little by spilling blood that couldn’t be replenished.”