The Narrow Door (3 page)

I place my hand on the small of his back just as a hotel bartender hurries through the hall, smelling of fireplace.

Maybe now that Denise is gone, I’ll have a better sense of what it is to be M. Maybe that will make us closer.

1983 | 
“Paul?”

I sit up in my desk chair as if I’ve been shocked awake. I’m in my little office on campus, where I’ve been reading and marking up five-page process analysis essays. This particular essay—thirty-eight of fifty—details the steps involved in blow-drying your hair, and though the writer thinks the sound of her voice is funny, it isn’t funny at all. I’ve been circling on the second paragraph for the past twenty minutes. I’m not so far off from drooling, with one eye crossed.

Denise waves some papers in the air. Her earrings quiver. Her face gleams as if she’s just coming down from teaching a wonderful class. She is a second-year teaching assistant at Rutgers; I’m just starting out. Unlike me, she’s able to hold the attention of an entire group of freshmen. They listen to her, rapt, as she tells funny stories about the comma splice and fused sentence, while I must work very hard to control my stage fright in order not to throw up all over some girl in the front row.

“Let us make love like a couple of crazy angels,” she says. And breaks out in a deep laugh as if that line were the funniest line ever written.

The line is from the story in her hands. The story in her hands is mine, one she’d asked to see last week.

She says the line loud enough for everyone in the English department to hear. Dr. S, the Shakespeare professor, with the natty blazer and the lockjawed vowels, hears it; Phyllis, the department secretary, part my aunt Vicki, part Chita Rivera, hears it, too. They go on typing whatever it is they’re typing, but there’s no way they’re not leaning in, listening, because these halls are small, and let’s face it, we all need distraction from the wonders of process analysis.

Denise pulls up a chair beside me. If only I could be present enough to take in that gaze, to stop sensing obligation in it, my life would change in an instant. I’d no longer be a lowly graduate student, but be like her, a writer whose first novel is poised to make a splash. I’m still mired in my past, a past that says, she likes this story more than it deserves to be liked. Yes, I’ve worked on every word, chosen every description with the greatest care, but the story still sounds like imitation Jane Bowles—which is exactly what it is. Yes, the characters might have some life in them, but the best of them fall out of the story, never to be heard from again. Things happen without foreshadowing. I’m pretending to mock and shatter narrative, to make fun of story convention, but the truth is that I have no control over what the hell I’m doing. I should tell her the story is meant to be nothing more than a cartoon. And as far as the seriousness that’s expected of literature? I don’t yet know how to be serious. The only thing I know how to be is silly, to make people laugh, which is why I’ve written a story about a fifty-five-year-old spinster who meets a thug on the street who fucks her silly until she wakes up parched, cross-eyed, and wigless, with her head at the foot of the bed.

Denise sits so close, I can feel the heat off her. There’s a scent about her, the faintest perfume, a little cigarette, black coffee—sex? She must be surprised that I don’t lean back into her. She’s probably used to people pushing back into her, as if they’re playing games with their bodies. I’m all packed up inside myself like a house that hasn’t been opened in years. And when she does touch me to underscore a point, I tense. I wonder if she feels me springing shut. When anyone touches me, it feels like it’s an electric shock, and I won’t find my body again.

Her voice shifts, her shoulders draw back, her voice gets quieter, more neutral. She’s reached into a different room in herself. She’s restrained now, teacherly. She is drawing from the place that makes her students listen. “Now here she wouldn’t say that,” she says, pointing to some dialogue on page three. She’s not talking about me, or herself, but she’s talking about writing now. She herself is part of writing now, as I am part of writing; she’s teaching me how to detach, to respect the story’s wishes as distinct from my own. She is teaching me not to be bewildered, defensive.

But soon enough she’s back to laughing about the things she likes about the story. Control, though necessary to our project, is only bearable for so long. We’re back to silliness and the real reason I wrote the story: to make somebody laugh. We’re laughing harder; I’m letting go of my wariness, and we’re probably on our way to flooding the English department with disruption and delight, all the feelings that aren’t usually expressed here. Phyllis shifts in her rolling chair; Dr. S clears his throat with a gruff, exaggerated sound that expects us to make use of its command to shut up. His throat clearing suggests that we’re not worthy of the task at hand—we don’t know the least of it when it comes to the discipline required of literary study. If only he knew that control was already written in our blood. People like us—Catholic school kids, children of social aspirants, grandchildren of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—have already been spanked and shushed into submission. The real work-though we’re not able to see it yet—requires us to throw off those old coats of obedience. The coats have been on us so long we don’t even know we’re wearing them. We’ve been tricked into thinking they’re light and beautiful when there’s only lead in their threads.

Or perhaps Dr. S is just jealous he isn’t one of us right now. It must be irresistible, if a little lonely, to be so close to the sound of two people fast becoming friends.

1946 | 
Roberta Joan Anderson looks out the window of her house at the train tracks in Alberta. Snow on snow, the layers so deep, no one can even say how much has fallen by January. The snow doesn’t go anywhere; her parents don’t go anywhere. Sometimes the snow doesn’t let them leave the house, and if they do leave for a concert or a movie, it requires wrapping themselves in multiple scarves and layers and gloves. Why would her father, just back from the war, want to go anywhere? Former flight sergeant: he has seen enough brutality, enough of the world. It is definitely before Roberta has polio. It is definitely before she starts smoking, at eleven. It is definitely before she’s known as the singer Joni Mitchell, or given up a baby girl, Kelly Dale, for adoption. She looks and looks out the window, as if by sheer looking she can transform the landscape. The train that she waits for every night—she hears it first, an ominous but satisfying rumbling; then a sweep of light, lunar blue, as if the moon has turned up its wattage—roars by with the transformative power of an explosion. It cuts through the snow like a knife. It says Canada is just a place to be passed through, and for that moment there isn’t just a bed and a window frame, but a
world out there.
And the world inside—her father with his trumpet and his Harry James records, her mother with her school prep and mops—recedes. The train says that the world they’re in is not as big as she thought; these lives are as weightless as the flakes her friend shakes into her goldfish tank.

Thirteen years after those winter nights, Denise stares out the bedroom window of a split-level on a cul-de-sac called Catalina Court, in Somerdale, New Jersey. She can’t take her eyes off the backyard at the house beside hers. Mad Dog is on a tear and nothing in this world is safe. Mad Dog is the name she’s given the woman next door, the mother who’s always fretting, always lashing out at her kids, whose infractions are nothing more than the usual kid kind: talking too loudly, stepping on new grass, leaving handprints on the foyer walls. Today Mad Dog has put her oldest son in a dress and has ordered him to march around in circles while she watches from the back step. The boy marches around the perimeter of the backyard with a calm, neutral face. The boy will not cry. The boy will not let his mother get what she wants. In an hour he’ll get this over with, and he’ll sit down and do his math homework, and maybe she’ll even reach into the freezer and give him a cherry Popsicle, his favorite. She won’t even mind if the red drips down his fingers onto his sleeve, where it will stain the fabric for good.

Does Mad Dog know that a girl is watching her through the second-floor window frame? If so, would she make Denise come down to watch with her? Or would she put her in boy’s clothes? Denise does not feel any urge to call Joey, her brother. She knows if she does, he’ll start laughing, and she’ll probably start laughing with him. Maybe later they’d even bring up the story within earshot of Bobby. Maybe they’d even imitate his march in front of him: a boy putting on a girl’s hat—the teasing kids will do! Soon enough Bobby would be the laughingstock of the cul-de-sac, that paved bulb of a street where the neighborhood kids play kickball and tag. Denise wants to keep him her secret, she wants to live inside his pocket, where it’s warm and sweaty and a little sad. She steps round and round the backyard of her own imagination, engraving a shape that won’t ever let her rest.

2009 | 
No one is walking the halls of the bathhouse tonight. The floors are clean, the ceiling is clean. My sheets, towel, and pillowcases are clean, which should lift my spirit, but I can only think about Denise, with whom I’ve spent the better part of the day. She’s in her last hours. It’s early Friday night. Anyone who would be here is already off to Rehoboth Beach, Fire Island, New Hope, or Asbury Park, any of the gay weekend resorts within driving distance of Philadelphia. But I couldn’t bear the intensity anymore, all those faces turned toward Denise, waiting for her to go. She wouldn’t let go.

My stare is vacant, deliberately vacant. I am performing it. I am perfecting it. Music thumps the speakers, music that’s working too hard to express transformation and joy. That is okay. I’m too stunned to feel, anyway. My mind is still inside that hospice room, the Joni songs, the nimbus of warmth and confusion surrounding that bed. Maybe that’s why I’m here. I thought I’d wanted to touch someone. I thought I’d wanted to escape myself, but maybe I want just the opposite: a cool dark space, tight walls, low ceiling, where I can be attuned to the sound of my breathing again.

Denise would understand. She’d have asked me all about it, would want to know the details, eyes wide open and in awe. She’d have said “why couldn’t I be a gay man?” with mock exasperation. But she’d have meant it, too, without any of the self-delight or condescension of people who often say such things.

A skinny young guy with burning eyes hurries down the hall. He backs up, stops at the door of my little room, with an affable, devilish smile. He seems interested. I might be interested, too, but he keeps on walking. Not with the aura of rejection, but because it’s better to keep moving than to stake your claims on any one person. I think it’s incredible that such places stay open, what with Grindr or Scruff or any of the other smartphone apps. Why keep them open? There has to be some better reason than simply to extend the last hours of an old tradition, which barely exists anymore.

Then another man, thicker, more muscular, appears at the door. My response is instantaneous, animal. My spine goes straighter. The other face is hard, squarish, a smart head shorn to the scalp. All bone and plane and brow. Salt-and-pepper whiskers. A salt-and-pepper pelt on chest and shoulders. In his eyes, certainty, solidity, gravitas. On the street, in a different neighborhood, he might be thought to be a construction worker who spends more time than usual shaping and trimming his beard. But in here I know better.

Skin against skin, salt and musk and heat of mouth on mouth, on chest, stomach: whose body is whose? I shouldn’t be able to answer that; I should be so immersed in my skin that the remix on the sound system doesn’t matter. The fact is that I do know where I begin and end. I’m looking at myself from myself. A stance is wanted from me—a male presence, a take-chargeness—though I can’t find the part of myself that could give someone else those things. At least not now.

All those faces looking at Denise. The thunderstorm outside, the candles in their cups inside. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” playing in the room. I don’t know why this song, of all songs, made me pause and well up when I first heard Joni’s cover of it. At the time I thought she was only singing about herself, the end of youth, the artist who was identified with
Blue.
But it’s not just that.

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

And joy? Well, whatever it is, joy feels elsewhere tonight. Not in this city, not in this palace of empty rooms.

The man sees questions on my face. Somehow he knows how to sit back and let me say,
my friend is dying.
He asks questions about my friend and I tell him everything I’m able to tell. I’m careful not to use up his patience, as I know how easy it would be to do such a thing. He’s a nurse, he says, and knows a thing or two about burying people he cares about. And it doesn’t matter if we end up screwing each other senseless or not. It doesn’t matter if the chemistry isn’t right for tonight and I can’t stay hard for him. Kindness has happened instead. He puts his arms around me from behind. Then plants a dry kiss on the back of my neck.

And, piece by piece, he hands me back my clothes.

Later, though M will be touched by this story, I’ll wish that he had wanted me to be home with him tonight.

1984 | 
Two in the morning. A twenty-minute walk from Pine Street to the nearest station of the PATCO train, which I must take in order to get back home to my parents’ house across the river in Cherry Hill. The prospect of taking that walk, of waiting for the train, and going through all the rituals that need to be done before I climb into my bed, the twin bed of my childhood, keeps me pinned to the couch. Besides, it’s never easy to tear myself away from Denise. I never want to walk away, even though she talks too much, even though she often doesn’t let me get a word in. I love the slouchy white chair, the Picasso print of a hand clutching flowers, the low humming light of the lamps on the table—how the hell does she ever see? Beyond the bathroom door, I see the impeccable bedroom, where the deep-blue spread is pulled tight across the mattress, the pillows propped up against the white headboard, fresh yellow tulips on the nightstand. It is clearly the most important room in the house, waiting for its next guest. It is far from the safety of my family home, and I like that about it. I’m deep inside the realm of adult drama, of romance and betrayal and fucking: life transpiring in front of me.