He looks up, beaming.
“—Ah, and here we have it: ‘an handsome Anticipation of Heaven.’”
_____________________
10-30-12:
The day after Hurricane Sandy, and the blackout that hit last night hasn’t lifted. How eerie it is, seeing Eighth Avenue without its daubs of red, green, and yellow lights; the street empty but for one or two people; fire trucks and ambulances and police cars converging at Fourteenth. The rumbling of the wind. Sirens.
O is lying on the couch, I am in the easy chair. We crack the windows; strong puffs of air cool our feet. We have opened the bottle of Veuve Clicquot left over from his birthday; we figure it will get warm otherwise. We listen to the transistor radio; people calling in with reports and sightings, fear in their voices. O recalls the blackouts during the war, during his childhood, and the first major blackout in New York—November of 1965—when he had to walk from Bronx State back to Christopher Street; it took him six or seven hours.
Here we are, how many years later? Oliver is seventy-nine, I am fifty-one. We have no power, no running water, no phone service, no gas, no heat.
We drink champagne. We say a toast. We count our blessings.
Freddy and Hollywood
ON BEING NOT DEAD
One night I called Oliver and told him to meet me on the roof of our apartment building. I had pulled together a simple dinner—roast chicken, good bread, olives, cherries, wine. We ate at a picnic table. I’d forgotten wineglasses, so we traded swigs out of the bottle. It was summer. The sun was setting on the Hudson. Neighbors were enjoying themselves at nearby tables. The breeze was nice. The surrounding cityscape looked like a stage set for a musical.
What is the opposite of a perfect storm? That is what this was, one of those rare moments when the world seems to shed all shyness and display every possible permutation of beauty. Oliver said it well as we took up our plates and began heading back downstairs: “I’m glad I’m not dead.” This came out rather loudly, as he is a bit deaf. Even so, he looked surprised by his own utterance, as if it were something he was feeling but didn’t really mean to say aloud—a thought turned into an exclamation.
“I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” said a neighbor gaily, taking up the refrain. “I’m glad we’re all not dead,” said another. There followed a spontaneous raising of glasses on the rooftop, a toast to the setting sun, a toast to us.
I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.
After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t.
The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.
I think now about that summer night on the roof, and how many people I have known or loved that I’ve lost since then: my mother, three friends, two neighbors, and my agent, Wendy, who was like a second mother to me. Her many friends and relatives came together for a memorial one afternoon last week. It was beautiful, joy-filled. Irishman that I am, I wept all the way through. Oh, well. I’ve come to believe that a good cry is like a car wash for the soul.