“Who are you?” he asked. I told him. He said his name, it started with a D, and he said he was an artist. He had a foreign accent I couldn’t place. He scooted over on his little shelf, protected from the wind, and I sat down right next to him. It was a tight squeeze, so our thighs touched, and far warmer here than on the street. There was an instantaneous intimacy, as if we’d known one another a long time, even though I hadn’t caught his name and I couldn’t understand everything he was saying.
He asked me more about my pictures, and I showed him my website on my phone. He looked carefully at many of the pictures, not saying much, murmuring, “Nice, nice, nice…” Then he showed me photos of his paintings—strange, vivid canvases of women with red hair. Not red—“Ginger,” as he said, “ginger.” He said he was obsessed with ginger. He showed me a photo he’d taken of a woman with red hair. He zoomed in on her hair until the image became a pure abstraction—shimmering cylinders of gold and orange and red. “See?” he said, shaking his head in wonder, “it’s impossible to understand the source of that color.”
I got it; I got what he was talking about. I told him he should do paintings from those enlarged photos—abstracted images of strands of ginger hair.
“I love you,” he said with a deadpan look, “let’s get married.” He was joking—I’d known the moment I sat next to him that he was straight—but there was something sincere about it, too. I actually could marry him, I thought to myself—let’s say, if he needed a green card: Men can marry one another now, and women, women: This still amazes me. Recently I met an attractive young man, just twenty-two or so, Dominican, who said something about “me and my husband,” and I thought for sure he’d gotten the word wrong—that he’d meant to say “boyfriend.” But no: They had rings and had gotten married at City Hall. I thought to myself: Twenty-two is way too young to be married—male, female, I don’t care.
The artist and I sat there for a while and showed each other pictures on our phones. It was sort of like—actually, it felt a lot like—two boys trading baseball cards, although I was old enough to be his father. He showed me a photo of himself and friends at a party in Brooklyn—it all looked drunken and wonderful, like the kind of thing you’d still be recovering from at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.
He reached into his backpack and took out two small oranges—clementine oranges—and gave one to me. “I’m like your mother, I take care of you.”
I laughed, disarmed, and was touched. This was all so strange, but so normal. I said, “It feels like I’m having a déjà vu.”
He disagreed. “For me, this is a nostalgia.”
The orange was delicious. He asked me more about myself, about my books and writing, my agent and publisher. “Will you be my agent?” he said.
“What? You want me to be your agent?”
“I want everything from you that I don’t have,” he said.
The line stopped me. It was both very beautiful and very spooky.
“You don’t want everything I have right now, trust me,” I said.
I impulsively patted his head. He had the softest hair.
“I have to go. Let me take one more picture of you,” I said, and I went to one side and took one, his face peeking out from the wall. We exchanged phone numbers then and promised to hang out one day and see some art.
“We’ll go to the opening of your first exhibit together,” I said.
He agreed.
We said goodbye, and as I walked away I immediately sent the young man sitting in the wall a text message: “I want everything from you that I don’t have,” it read.
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
4-14-15:
I have been taking pictures constantly—every day, hundreds sometimes.
If I can’t get outside, I bring New York inside my apartment—do portraits of people I meet on the street.
At the end of each day, I show O my pictures. He reads to me what he’s written. He is working on five or six things at once. As when he was a boy, his fingers are stained with ink.
_____________________
Undated Note—May 2015:
Intensely creative and productive time for both of us—
Some days, I feel like Sylvia Plath married to Anne Sexton—or is it Anne Sexton married to Sylvia Plath?—but without the depressions or suicides.
Just poetry.
_____________________
5-1-15:
On a flight to London, where we will stay for a week, seeing O’s friends and relatives, perhaps O’s last time—then to Dorset for three days: O reads an article in New Scientist about a study showing that when dogs look into their masters’ eyes (and vice versa), oxytocin (the “love hormone”) is released; this helps explain, in part, the bond dog owners may feel with their animals.
He puts down the magazine. “We should look into each other’s eyes more,” he says.
“Let’s do it right now,” I say, and we do.
_____________________
5-6-15:
At lunch, the husband of O’s niece tells me how he first met Oliver, some forty years ago, at the home of his future father-in-law, O’s older brother David: Nicky looked out the window, where he saw a large, bearded man lying on the grass in the garden. “What were you doing?” Nicky asked once he came indoors.
“I was wondering what it is like to be a rose,” replied Oliver.
_____________________