Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the lines:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Ted heard the artist whisper it to himself at the funeral that summer, over and over again. They were fourteen years old then. It was the first time Ted had lost someone he loved, when you grow up you realize that fourteen is actually quite late, that not losing anyone in all the years before then was really just luck. Ted remembers how he cried sitting in the pew afterward, inconsolably and violently, until his throat stung and his chest ached. Until then he hadn’t known that grief is physical, an abuse of the living.
Twenty-five years later he’s sitting on a train with a box containing the artist’s ashes, in a larger box on the floor is an absurdly valuable painting, and beside him sits a completely strange and wildly annoying teenager. Bad ideas? Ted grew up with Joar, a boy who had once tried to dry his wet socks in a toaster, and on another occasion, when a carton of ice cream was too frozen to scoop, had thought: “I’ll just warm the spoon in the microwave!” So Ted has seen some really bad ideas, but none worse than this.
He feels like yelling at the box of ashes that he isn’t ready for this sort of responsibility. He wants to remind the artist of the time Ted didn’t buy a pair of suede boots because they would require too much maintenance. I can’t even look after shoes , and you’ve left me with a person , he thinks angrily. Angry at himself, angry at the artist, and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.
Just a few weeks ago, Ted had been sitting in the artist’s big, beautiful apartment. They had eaten breakfast on the balcony, watching the seasons change, spring was slow but relentless, winter dying an inch at a time. On the other side of the artist’s stupid little jokes and sparkling laughter, the illness was gaining ground in much the same way. His hands shook, making him spill his tea, but he didn’t care. Ted was so envious, he wished he were able to confront death so nonchalantly.
“How much do you think it costs?” the artist had asked, as if they were talking about something no more important than a bag of potatoes.
They had seen the article in the paper, saying that the artist’s first painting was going to be sold at auction. At first Ted had thought he was joking, then he had sputtered:
“You’re serious ? It would cost everything you own!”
“Good. Artists are supposed to die poor,” the artist had grinned.
“Stop saying that.”
“That I’m going to be poor?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean.”
The artist’s shoulders had bounced merrily.
“I tried to give you the money. You didn’t want it.”
“I can’t take responsibility for that much money,” Ted had whispered.
“Well, then. In that case, I’m going to buy the only thing I want,” the artist had laughed.
Then he had started to cough so badly that Ted leapt up to help.
“Are you okay? Should I call the doctor?”
“No, no, stop worrying that I’m going to die every time I cough.”
Ted had replied, hurt:
“I’m not worried you’re going to die. I’m worried about you being dead. I’m worried about being alive without you.”
The artist’s smile had been like sunlight between heavy curtains.
“Tell me, Ted, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
“Stop it,” Ted had muttered.
“Stooop it,” the artist had teased affectionately.
“Can you try to behave like an adult, just for once?”
“Definitely not! Under no circumstances are we allowed to be adults, Ted, that’s fatal! All adults die, sooner or later, haven’t you noticed?”
“Sit still and I’ll mop up your tea…”
The artist’s voice was hoarse from coughing as he asked again:
“Please, Ted, tell me. What is it that you plan to do? You’ve been hiding away in my apartment for two years now. You’ve been playing hooky from life.”
“I’ve been taking care of you!”
“I know. And for that, I love you. But when I’m gone, you need to live.”
Ted had no answer to that. After breakfast the artist felt sick, and when he threw up Ted sat beside him, holding his frail body and stroking what little hair he had left.
“Don’t try to talk…,” Ted pleaded in vain when his stubborn friend tried to say something anyway.
“Don’t tell me what to do, I’m actually dying here!” the artist smiled tiredly with his cheek against the cold porcelain.
Ted sighed:
“You know what? It’s actually going to be nice to have some peace and quiet!”
The artist’s roar of laughter echoed around the whole apartment. Not many people are blessed like that, with as many giggles and chuckles as he was in his final weeks, with the chance to feel that he stole more moments from death than death had from him. Breakfast on the balcony every morning, popcorn and old films every evening, his best person to hold his hand. Who gets all that? Hardly anyone. That was why he decided to buy back his first painting, no matter what it cost. People always said he was extraordinary, but he was just like everyone else, at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.
“I want you to be happy when I’m gone,” he had whispered to Ted one evening, just before he fell asleep.
It was a lot to ask, of course. Having a heart is heavy, far too heavy for some of us. But Ted had promised to try.
“Joar? Joar… is that you?” the artist had mumbled hopefully when he woke up.
“No. It’s Ted. Joar isn’t here,” Ted had whispered back from his chair, trying to accept the disappointment in his friend’s eyes.
It’s all too heavy, far too heavy for some of us, but we carry on anyway. The days had passed between the two men in that big apartment, breakfasts and old films, fingertips held in palms. And laughter, laughter, laughter. Stupid little jokes, silliness between soulmates, everything else is just meaningless gaps in a life. Sometimes the artist managed to persuade Ted not to be adult, once he threw water balloons indoors and Ted got so angry that he actually caught one and threw it back. Unfortunately the artist ducked and the water balloon flew through the open balcony door and down into the street, they heard a splash and someone shouting angrily in a foreign language. After that they ate breakfast indoors for three days. At least once every morning the artist giggled so hard at the memory that egg flew out of his mouth and spattered the wallpaper, and when the men’s eyes met then, it felt like summer to Ted.
Very few people knew the artist was ill, and only Ted and the doctors knew how bad it really was. “Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,” the artist had said, and there had been no fear in his voice, no bitterness. It had been a long life. Wild and precious.
He had painted that picture of his friends on the pier the summer they turned fifteen, when he and Ted had known each other for two years. That autumn, after the funerals, they went their separate ways but without ever losing each other. Everything Joar had dreamed of for the artist really did happen: he was discovered by influential people, got into a prestigious art school, and moved to a big city far away. There he would lie on the floor of a small room, terrified, crying with Ted on the phone all night. No one else understood their grief. The world was so overwhelming, harsh and violent, the boys were too sensitive to have hearts. Sometimes the artist would sit curled up in his window looking at life going on in the street below, and whisper into the phone: “How does everyone else cope, Ted?”
“Maybe we’ll learn?” Ted said, trying to sound hopeful.
Perhaps they did, for a while, unless they just got better at pretending. When the artist turned eighteen he was described as a “prodigy” by his teachers, when he turned twenty they said he would be world-famous, by the time he was twenty-eight he wished they had been wrong.
But in the years in between? That was when something altogether remarkable happened to him: he found his voice. It was Ted who suggested that he ought to go traveling and see the world when he finished art school. The artist’s parents died, the artist came home to bury them, and Ted was terrified that if his friend didn’t leave again at once, he might get stuck there forever.
“You need to see bigger things,” Ted told him.
“Come with me,” the artist asked, knowing of course that Ted would say no.
Ted wanted an ordinary life, to wake up in his ordinary bed, he definitely didn’t want to experience the world. He just wanted to see the look in his friend’s eyes when he came home from seeing it. So the artist set out on his own. When he was twenty-two, he went from country to country, chasing paintings, devouring galleries and museums. He hitchhiked, took slow trains, crossed a mountain range on a ramshackle old motorbike. When he was twenty-four, he worked as a dishwasher and cleaner, falling in love with strangers on pulsating dance floors, dancing in the moonlight on endless beaches. Then he met old women who taught him to paint portraits and get paid for it, then he met young men with cans of spray paint who taught him to paint the walls of buildings and run from the police. When he was twenty-six, he had done this on every continent, so he called Ted and told him he was on his way home. The phone echoed as they drowned in each other’s laughter, but it didn’t turn out the way the artist expected. He sent his new paintings ahead, to his old teachers at art school, and his astonished teachers in turn sent them to important men and women. And everything changed. The artist had seen all the world’s art, now he was creating art the world had never seen, that was how he became famous. He never came home again after that. He never again sat on the pier drawing.
Fame was instantaneous and merciless, certainly not something for sensitive boys, the artist had taken the world, but now it took him. When he was twenty-eight, he went traveling again, but differently this time, he was driven in big black cars to crowded airports. Everyone he met told him they loved him, hardly anyone survives that. He was photographed for magazine covers, and lay on the floors of expensive hotel suites all night, breathing through his panic on the phone with Ted. The artist was an observer, he couldn’t bear to be observed, the world always gets those mixed up.
When he was thirty, he was taking pills every day, because no one who loved him was around to look in his backpack anymore. For a while he was deliriously happy and unhappy at the same time, always one or the other, until in the end he couldn’t tell the difference. So many people appeared in his life, telling him what he ought to paint, how he ought to sell his art. At first those people worked for the artist, but soon he was working for them. Soon everyone was disappointed because he painted too slowly, too strangely, too little. When he was thirty-two, he was having panic attacks so often that he forgot how his body had felt before them. He bought an enormous apartment and filled it with beautiful things, but slept on a mattress in the hall, curled up like a cat. He was tricked out of half a fortune, gave the other half away voluntarily, he looked for love in all the wrong places and got his heart crushed in every possible way. He stopped going out, his skin was too thin for fame, his lungs too small for the top of the world. When strangers recognized him in the street, he would run like a terrified animal. When he turned thirty-five, a rich man came to his studio and bought a painting that wasn’t even finished, one week later there was a line of other rich men outside, all hoping to do the same thing. He had become so famous that his unfinished paintings were the most valuable now. He never went to his studio again after that, he lived in his apartment like someone shipwrecked, whispering on the phone to Ted: “Everyone wants me to paint more pictures, but only until they buy one, because then they hope that I never paint again. My art is only an investment now, everyone who owns a piece of me hopes I’ll die, because nothing is more valuable at auction than an unfulfilled life.”
He hit rock bottom when he was thirty-seven. One night he was so drunk that he almost drowned in his own bathtub, alone in his apartment, surrounded by beautiful, silent things. That was when Ted came to live with him, even though Ted hated traveling and was terrified of big cities. He took the train, saying it was too expensive to fly, but the first thing the artist whispered in his ear when Ted stepped into the apartment was: “Coward!”
Ted snapped back: “You know what they say about bumblebees? That they shouldn’t be able to fly? Well, neither should people!”
The artist laughed. So did Ted. Neither of them had done that for a long time. Ted was only planning to stay for a short while, but that turned into the rest of the artist’s life. At first they both pretended that it was for Ted’s sake, that he had needed a vacation. But really it was the artist who needed a home, and home was Ted’s snoring in the darkness, like when they were kids, back in the basement.
From that day until his last, the artist was neither unhappy nor too happy, just everything in between, calm and safe and contented. Everything a person can wish for. They giggled, danced, made food, and read poetry out loud to each other. That lasted several months, a handful of moments, an eternity. Then the artist got sick and Ted stayed. In twenty-five years of friendship, they only lived with each other for four: two years as teenagers, two years at the end. But if you don’t believe that boys’ souls can be connected across a great distance, you know nothing about them.
Toward the end of his illness, the artist slept a lot, and Ted would sit beside his bed and read. The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes.
Ted read Bodil Malmsten: “There is no death, only a lot of dead.” Then he read Joan Didion, about her first memory of coming home from the hospital after her husband died: “I remember putting his cell phone in the charger on his desk.” Then he read Bodil Malmsten again: “That is what death is, that you are never answering again.”
Then he read Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall”:
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Then he read Bodil Malmsten, over and over again: “The heart is always unguarded.” He fell asleep in the chair and when he woke up, the artist was gently holding his fingers.
Just before Easter that last spring, the artist’s doctor said that he definitely must not travel anywhere. The following day, Ted helped him sell all his belongings, then they traveled all the way to the auction and Ted bought the painting, and behind the church the artist met Louisa.
Now Ted is sitting on a train, with a box of ashes and a famous painting and a teenager clearly out of her mind. It really is a remarkably bad idea, all this. Worse than socks in the toaster.