Chapter 4
4
You remember meeting my family. You remember feeling, because of them, that it was as if I’d been taking a vitamin since birth that you never knew existed. As if you were deficient in something that I got.
You remember our first Hanukkah—challah, kugel, brisket, sufganiyot. You remember my brother, David. How the good thing about being an outsider is you can spot another outsider from a mile away. You sat together at every brunch, every dinner, every nosh from then until now. We used to call you two Javid Dane.
You remember my father, showing up late, kind but kind of evacuated, reading in the living room as everyone gathered in the kitchen and helped. You remember making eyes at me: that that wouldn’t be me. Until then, I hadn’t ever placed fault. It wouldn’t, I said with my eyes. You were a beacon, a gut check, a litmus test, even then.
You remember how my mother always kept a hand on yours. You remember the first gift she gave you: a blue cashmere shawl. It was so delicate, so mighty. Every woman needs one, she’d said. How could you be anything but grateful? You wore it thin.
And though fussing isn’t the same as mothering and no mother could make you miss your own mother less…
You remember sandwiches on stoops with David. He was living downtown then too. You went on walks when everyone else was sleeping, played pranks on each other, exchanged rare art books you’d found used.
When was it exactly that he told you he was gay? It was well before he told any of us, certainly. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense.
You close your eyes. You ask me for your rose water. It reminds you of your mother, whose own mother used it on her. I mist your face. Some days, you sweat only on your upper lip, cold everywhere else. They say it’s normal. I’ve stopped asking what’s normal, what’s not.
I look around. There is a series of your petite watercolors, six, on the wall, gray, blue, violet. Maybe sea, maybe sky. On the shelves: my books, translated into dozens of languages.
Art built this house, I think. Art and your vim.
You remember we were walking by the Ladies Pavilion in the Park when you said that you could not be with someone who would not put their art first.
And I knew then: I would do it—not for you but because of you. Because you, despite everything you’d been through, were the wisest person I’d ever met.
You gave me one year.
For you, art was simple. A one-to-one. For me, there were more variables. I’m not equating loss to freedom, believe me. I know what you’d been through. I am not making excuses either. What I am trying to say is that it was a different time. Is it inane to say that I wanted to please my parents? Is it macho to say that I wanted to take care of you? I’d always felt: I’d write when I could.
You shiver. I cover your legs with a blanket. You made it. You made them all. I sometimes wonder how you knew so much even then. You learned everything from your mother in such a short time. She was one of eleven. Her name, Lulu, meant pearl in Arabic.
I long to meet her even now. But it’s more than that: I long to give her to you.
You close your eyes. Soon, the room pulls taut with quiet. I put my hand on your chest. I’m not checking so much as reminding myself. How many times have we done this over the years? I begin to do the math. At first, it’s comforting. Soon, the numbers fall down the well.
Go on, you say. Go on, Abe.
I remember when I wasn’t with you, I felt it in my jaw. I remember everything I wrote made me think of you and the other way around.
I remember that—for me—that, as they say, was that. And if life is a series of befores and afters…
I want to ask you then—forgive me—what it was about me that you loved. For some time, I wasn’t the artist you wanted me to be. I was predictable, neither dark nor stormy. Perhaps it was my mother and brother?
Jane? You do not answer.
Then I remember a sound you only ever made—and you made it since the beginning—when I gathered you to my chest. A singy exhale, as if you were laughing but also crying but also writing a poem with your breath. Whewoooooooo. And then we were still, you and me, me and you, cloaked and kept, heart to heart, cheek to chest, belly to belly. Maybe for you, I think, joy in security, security in consistency, consistency in love.
That’s something.
Some nights, I sleep beside you in a chair or on a stack of pillows or I rest my head on the wall and sleep like that. I like to count the number of times you shift in your sleep, as if that could do it. Or as if sudden dancing could stop the illness in your bones. As if you could break it, shatter it, with unbridled movement, like a horse, like the wind.
Some nights, I like to count the beautiful things you’ve made around us—delicate vases, a drawing of us scrawled in wild inky strokes, a string-and-wax sculpture that sparkles in sun, more. It is not just how talented you are. It is that you make things that feel personal—olive branches, love letters, life rafts tossed in. Some nights, I like to remember deep into the darkness. I write it down or don’t. Some nights, I can’t.
A doe walks by the window. Who would believe that she stops and sniffs your pansies, stuffs her head under a thicket of gold ones so it sits like a crown between her ears?