Sojourner, Susan & Elizabeth are a stone's throw from poet's corner, occupied exclusively by men.
Bow Bridge reflected in black and white.
The Swedish Cottage offered shelter from a sudden downpour.
Running along the bridle path after the downpour.
En route to Jacob Riis Park, Thom and I stopped at his childhood home in Glendale. His family has it up for sale. You, too, can enjoy an English Tudor lifestyle on Rutledge Avenue for $889,000!
When I took the ferry to Rockaway Beach several years ago, I explored Riis Park on my bike. Thom met one of his closest friends there 30 years ago, but it was my first time enjoying the very lively scene which grew more crowded as time passed.
While reading this novel, in a doctor's waiting room with several other people wearing masks, sleeping, reading, idly scrolling their phones, I was reminded of the NSFW acronym which, early in its usage on gay websites, I thought meant "Not Suitable For Women." Garth Greenwell's descriptions of sadomasochistic sex are as specific as those of Bulgaria, a country he literally has put on the map of contemporary literature. Excerpted, the former read almost like lyrical pornography but perhaps with the deepest understanding of the gay psyche I've ever encountered.
But there's no fathoming pleasure, the forms it takes or their sores, nothing we can imagine is beyond it; however far beyond the pale of our own desires, for someone it is the intensest desire, the key to the latch of the self, or the promised key, a key that perhaps never turns. It's what I love most about the websites I visit, that you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer; it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented , what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.
* * *
For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn't been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had though precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love edno i sushto, one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here.
* * *
I lined myself up and then hesitated, remembering my earlier worries about disease, the men who had fucked him and me, it was a stupid risk; but then he leaned back until he touched my cock, his hole tightening like a mouth again, and I didn't care about disease or anything else, if there was a risk we would share that too, and in a single motion I made him take it all.
Is there anything left to say about desire?
The New Yorker introduced me to Tessa Hadley, a late blooming author who populates her stories with men and women far removed from my experience. Yet her writing always manages to strike a chord more resonant than most. People don't differ from one another all that much, no matter where or how they live.
They were domesticated in that cautious way of heterosexual men living together, hedging their housework about with mockery, as if it were a performance they could leave off at any moment: they painted the walls of the flat, made innumerable pots of tea, washed up when the sink was full. Zachary cooked pans of curry and chili, Alex baked fish in foil in the oven with herbs and olive oil. When they smoked they found they couldn’t remember in the morning what they’d laughed at. They were carefully tactful: neither asked after the other’s well-being, even when they were stoned—least of all then. Male tact was an iron law; without the tactless interventions of women, Alex thought, men would never tell each other anything. Grown men ought to live with women, he believed that. That was what his maleness was for, to be balanced against women’s unlikeness, their opposition.
Hadley's story of two heterosexual couples vanquishes any speculation that gay men of a certain age may have a harder time sustaining long-term relationships because we've been conditioned by traditional gender dynamics to think we're intellectually superior to our partners, that the needs of the dominant partner come first.
Long ago, when Isobel was a baby, Christine had fought Alex for her life, so that he would acknowledge that in the domain of the mind they were equals, separate as equals. She couldn’t remember now why this had mattered so much, or where her appetite had come from for those long late-night sessions, pricing away layer upon layer of resistance and falsity, confession matched with counter-confession. The lovemaking that usually ended things had sometimes amazed and reconciled them, sometimes seemed the continuation of their fight by other means . . . She had been so keenly interested, then, in what Alex thought. But after a while things weren’t so difficult after all, and she never really knew how much that had to do with all those sessions of interrogation. Anyway, she didn’t think any longer about the truth in the same way: as a core underneath a series of obfuscations and disguises. In the long run, weren’t the disguises just as interesting, weren’t they real too? She and Alex were so unlike, really; associated through some accident in their youth—the accident of his choosing her, because of what he thought she was. Since that beginning, they both changed their skins so often. Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.
I also love the way she acknowledges that the biological imperative of male sexual desire is more than procreative and how it refuses to diminish with age.
It was both a thirst and a blessing, the late renewal of his erotic life. When he was young he’d been too absorbed in the problem of himself to appreciate possibilities blooming around him everywhere. Now how long before the women only looked at him with distaste, or pity? He thought that he understood his father at last, how he accepted this pursuit of women as if it were in lieu of every kind of outward honour. Sex looked like a cheap trick from the outside, but in its moment it burned up the world. You could not have everything: the whole wisdom of life amounted to that. Whatever you had, was instead of something else.
Has Hadley watched drone footage of me eating appetizers in the Pines?
Balding, Nathan still wore long what hair he had left, tucked it behind his ears. He had grown bulky over the years, across the shoulders and in the thighs, and now was scoffing more than his share of the potato crisps, dabbing greasy-fingered in the bowl with the oblivious appetite of one who mostly eats alone.
Or seen pictures on my blog of my refreshed apartment?
Christine joked that she was depressed by how lovely the flat looked. Didn’t everyone do this as they got older, the ones anyway that didn’t just go to see? Compensating for their own decaying looks, they spruced up the outer spaces of their lives to perfection—then knocked around inside these mini-palaces like wizened nuts in a shell.
Best of all, Late in the Day reads like a marriage manual disguised as an emotional thriller. Choose the partner who sees and believes in you.
The Belvedere lions took their cue from Patience & Fortitude who, by the way, seem to have lost their blue masks.
A beach still life for my bicycle collection.
Caitlin Moran leaves no doubt that girls like to spank the monkey as much boys which I found a little shocking until I started laughing. Loudly.
Thankfully, around that time I decided to combat my burgeoning underarm odor issues by shoplifting a bottle of Mum roll-on deodorant, and realize on the bus on the way home that it was shaped--astonishingly, usefully, blatantly--like a cheerful, chunky cock. With its pink domed lid and carefully contoured bottle, the thinking behind British teenage girls' most popular deodorant of the late 1980s was a truth hidden in plain views: Proctor & Gamble were selling adolescent girls Starter Dildos for 79p.
Did they know? Of course they knew. The knew--and they were playing mind games with us. For what reason--other than a knowing sadistic streak--would they have named something millions of teenage girls were rapping themselves with "Mum"? It was their way of fucking with our minds. The real test of how horny we were. Are you so desperate that you'd have sex with your Mum? To which my simple answer was--locking the bedroom door and lying on the floor--"Yes."
But optimism is equally critical in building Dolly, a smart, insecure woman who chooses her fake first name with as much panache as she wears a top hat. Moran somehow manages to integrate the kind of self-help shit that usually has me rolling my eyes into a feel-good coming of age story.
We're just, simply, in the world. It never occurred to me what a wonderful thing this was. Or perhaps it did, a long time ago--but I had forgotten. I am so happy to be alive. That the point of life is joy--to make it, to receive it. That the earth is a treasure box of people and places and song, and that every day you can plunge your arms in and find a new, ridiculous, perfect delight.
***
Until--slowly, slowly--you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nurture began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely--as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing.
***
But one day you'll find a version of you that will get kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.
On occasion, she's even profound. Like when Dolly discovers what family support of her self-fulfilling choices has cost them.
I'm learning a whole new thing: that sometimes, love isn't observable or noisy or tangible. That sometimes, love is anonymous. Sometimes, love is silent. Sometimes, love just stands there when you're calling it a cunt, biting its tongue and waiting.
Nick Hornby, watch out.
