Now I look back from forward. Something is fading, not the memory of him but the press of memory, the urgency of writing, the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not. He is fifty and I am fifty-one. He is smiling in the green backyard; now his garden does not grow tall, does not grow at all. He is a photograph in the living room; he is, for the moment, still.
But he was always still in a certain way, a north star, a compass, who was loyal and predictable. I must have needed that; I used to joke with my mother that if my father said he would pick you up at ten and it was ten-oh-one, you’d know he was dead, he was that punctual, therefore that reliable. My parents never don’t call back, don’t reply, fall off the map, check out, and neither did Ficre, ever. Even in our worst moments, he was central, there, rooted at home and in us.
I never once doubted him, because that is how he made me feel. So I walk forward knowing I was loved, and therefore am loved.
Four
May 2011. Jason Moran and Me’Shell Ndegocello played Fats Waller, and we danced all night at the Harlem Gatehouse.
Was it true that dancers moved among us holding outsized papier-maché masks on sticks?
Was it true that Me’Shell said to you from the stage, Look at you, brother-in-pink, loving on your woman like that?
Was it true Bobby O. was there in a cream-colored jacket and a papi lindo hat?
That night we danced in a fever, in a dream. The professional dancers came and took me by the hand and led me to the hypnotizing floor. It was the start of spring, blowsy and humid, incipient.
New York New York, big city of dreams.
Two springs later I am searching the earth for you, four corners, finding you in a seashell in my underwear drawer, oregano and chives coming up in the winter garden after a few warm days, the pink argyle sweater folded in a cedar trunk. No—that is the sweater we buried you in.
The winter garden is razed now, cleared, and you are no longer there, not there this spring.
April 1, April 2, April 3, April 4.
No, start counting at your birthday party, March 30, March 31— No, start counting on your birthday, when we brought you coffee and etan in bed.
March 21, your fiftieth birthday.
Beloved.
Five
Leslie and Douglas give us a welcome-to-New-York party at their home in Brooklyn. We eat hummus with pomegranate seeds scattered over it, kibbeh, and Italian butter cookies. The Palestinian food comes from Bay Ridge and the cookies, from a venerable Italian bakery a few Brooklyn neighborhoods over. We drink fizzy scarlet Lambrusco, fall and summer together in each delicious slurp.
Friends appear from hither, thither, and yon. New ones, old ones, former classmates, former students. Beloved former students all grown-up are one of my favorite categories of people in my life, the greatest reward of a long teaching career. Ficre loved that I was a teacher, and always welcomed my students to our home.
Vincenzo and Alex come, with their two baby daughters. Vincenzo and Ficre loved each other. Vincenzo is the Sicilian husband of my friend Alex. Since Ficre died, the silly phrase “bromance” has come into fashion, and had it been current when he and Vincenzo met, Alex and I might have used it to describe the instantaneous pull our husbands felt to each other. Both artists, both soulful, both woman-worshipping monogamists, both aesthetes, both fixers and makers, both uncensored, both un-pretentious, both similarly self-effacing and similarly dramatic, both creatures of the nest, both passionate cooks and eaters.
We are seeing Vincenzo for the first time since Ficre’s death, as he was out of the country when that happened and he and Alex have had two girls back to back in the interval. Alex came to the funeral hugely pregnant and I remember the urge to protect her as I saw the sorrow on her face.
Bella! Vincenzo says, taking my face with both hands and kissing me in greeting, and I hug him and break contact quickly because I know if I linger for even a moment we will cry.
Eh, the boys are beautiful, amazing! he exclaims. I told them to move around, to stop sitting in their chairs like the aunties. He is large and funny, voluble and direct. The last time they came to visit us, he and Ficre lay on the ground under a flowering dogwood tree that Ficre had planted and drank their wine and laughed and talked in Italian, sometimes holding hands. Fratello this, fratello that. Bromance.
As they leave the party, Vincenzo is draped with his girl-babies, with their loose curls and pierced ears and confectionary dresses. Like Ficre, he is a Pied Piper with children. He grabs each boy by the scruff of the neck and kisses them hard on each cheek to say goodbye. I think, no one outside of the family has kissed my sons quite like that since their father died.
We loved Vincenzo the best, the boys say to me later as we do the excited post-mortem of the welcome party. He made us think of Daddy.
Six