Life Stories

Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall

I
January, 2021

The news of R’s death, which I saw earlier this evening on Facebook, has put on pause my worrying about next week’s scan. I can’t take it in; it’s always like this when I hear someone’s died: the thing at first unimaginable, which then slowly becomes familiar. R was charismatic, much loved. A writer, he published little. Had, it seemed, thousands of friends, and an aura somehow magic and tragic. Was famous, locally, as much for his personality as his prose. As I scroll through the evening, more and more Facebook tributes emerge—like fish near the shore after it rains. I consider posting something, but that would be to claim a closeness we never, or only momentarily, had. How lousy, claiming intimacy with someone once they’re gone.

I met R in Provincetown in the summer of 1995, when I took his workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center. C, a mutual friend, had recommended the class. There were about ten of us in “Life Stories.” We met in the morning, sat around an oval table. An aspiring gay politician who I knew vaguely from Act Up was also in the class, as was a woman from Pennsylvania whose not-so-good story about a fire on her grandparents’ farm has somehow stayed with me. I think she wore an orange kerchief. There was an arts administrator from Brooklyn who was writing about her father’s time in the CIA. The others: forgotten. One morning everyone in the workshop got up at five to go whale-watching. Everyone but me. I didn’t want to lose the sleep, or, more precisely, to go without my slow and careful morning rituals. Some were internal, some external; they all needed to be performed in a quite exact manner. Included were the cups of coffee I needed to drink (which I drank, that week, in the guesthouse’s breakfast room), and then digest; I feared an urgent need to go to the bathroom on the whale-watching boat. Although I didn’t see the whales, I did attempt, that week, to take advantage of Provincetown’s other offerings. To do the things that, in this particular beach town, one was supposed to do. Rode a bike to the dunes, walked through the dunes, tried to have certain feelings about the dunes. And about the ocean. I thought of the last time I’d been to the cape, nearly thirty years earlier, when I’d stayed with my grandparents at a hotel in Wellfleet. Dusk came, I couldn’t find my rented bike, then did.

I ate, that week—as I thought I should—or wanted to—a lot of fried fish. And tried, not successfully, to get laid. One night I met a boy from Boston. His shoulders were beautiful. The bar was noisy; I understood, through the din, that he was studying aesthetics. A light inside me shone; everything might work out for me after all; a boy with beautiful skin who was studying aesthetics; we walked down to the small beach under the wharf. The stars shivered; beneath them, I understood he was a student not of art but of skin care, an aesthetician. I am and was slow. My disappointment didn’t prevent me from making out with him for a while. I hesitated, however, to invite him back to my guesthouse. Perhaps because I was worried I wouldn’t get enough sleep if I did, wouldn’t be fresh for R’s workshop. Perhaps I had an assignment to complete. Perhaps I hesitated because I was afraid of the virus. No—of course I was afraid of the virus. It was never possible, then, not to be afraid; this was an underlying condition of things, one that hardly needed to be mentioned, the way that, in a story, it isn’t necessary to mention that the sky is above us. The sand was beneath and in my shoes. Had it not been night, we’d have been in the wharf shadows. Straight people thought there was something called safe sex; there was no such thing; there was safer sex, but how safe was it? No one knew. The stars shone over the ocean, the boy was beautiful, my pursuit of beauty was a quest, not unconnected to my desire to be a writer. I ran my fingers down his neck. Did gulls fly in the dark? This was the summer before the cocktail; do you know what I mean when I say the cocktail? I don’t know who you are; I didn’t know who the boy was; perhaps it was this very not knowing that kept me from asking him back to the guesthouse. Or perhaps I did ask, and he then murmured no.

We read, in the workshop, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. I wanted to like it; it seemed I was supposed to. But I just found it cold. R talked about the hazy land between memoir and fiction, how one always makes something up. The woman from Pennsylvania vigorously disagreed with his position, insisting on the importance of accuracy in her story about the fire on the family farm. Honesty and accuracy, R maintained, weren’t the same. I also recall—unclearly—a comment he made about how autobiographical writing—if it was good—had to be honest, and how this honesty would change the writer’s life. I understood him also to mean that writing well would make you a better person. Although in my thirties, I still had the capacity to idolize a teacher. R had rosacea, gray-blue eyes. Or were they green? In one of the assignments he gave, we were to bring in ten snapshots that held special significance for us. Then we were to write a description of each photo, put these together, and witness the birth of a narrative. Later, when I taught writing, I’d give this assignment myself. That was a decade or so after I took R’s workshop. But time now seems to collapse. Before coming up to P-town, I’d carefully selected from a shoebox, which I kept in a closet in my apartment, the photos that had, for me, the most personal meaning. Now I can only recall one of them. In that photo I’m seven or eight years old. I’m in bed with my grandmother, Lenore, in her house in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Lenore, who came from a family of great wealth, was a poet. She knew a number of famous writers and must have wanted to be one. I’ve sometimes said (and it’s likely true) that it’s because of her that I became a writer (and thus am writing these words now). She decided—or observed—who’s to say?—that I was special, that is to say special in a way that mattered to her. For we’re all, clearly, special. She would, she once told my aunt, live on through me. Call this madness, call it love. I began, as a child, to write poems, which I showed her. One she got published in a national magazine. Her bedroom was pink, with a slanted ceiling, a window that looked down at her expansive garden. Two or three years after the photo was taken, she’d die of stomach cancer. Soon thereafter, my grandfather, an attorney of some prominence, saw to the publication of her memoir—a collection of journal entries, really—in which a paragraph was given to praising me, to certifying that I had, indeed, been—in her eyes—an extraordinary child. No doubt this paragraph caused pain to my siblings and cousins. I read it often, during my passage through middle school, and on the dark waters beyond. It proved I was special. None of this is evident in the photograph—where is it now?—that I brought to R’s workshop one morning in August 1995. I’m not sure how I described the photo, when, sitting around the oval table, we wrote our descriptions in our notebooks. But I do recall, during a private conference with R, sitting in white wooden chairs on the grass at the Fine Arts Work Center, how he remarked (as perhaps, a fly buzzed near his straw-gold hair), “You are with her in a golden cage.”

“I do remember—almost sensually—the aura of glamour that surrounded R that week. It was like a halo.”

That’s true, I thought, looking up at the light blue sky. But how had R known this? I’ve always wanted to believe there are people who have a heightened ability to see into things. Who are special. R, I thought, was clearly among them. Since I always have more than one hypothesis about any given moment, it also occurred to me that perhaps R might know more about me than the little I’d revealed in the workshop. Maybe C had spoken to him about my relationship with my grandmother. But from the vantage point of twenty-five years, this seems beyond implausible. C had alluded to R being ill, but, if I recall correctly, hadn’t been specific. I’d assumed he was positive. You didn’t need, in the nineties, to say positive for what.

I do remember—almost sensually—the aura of glamour that surrounded R that week. It was like a halo. It arose from my knowledge he might soon die, but I’m not sure when I understood the nature of his ailment.

II

I’m scheduled to have a PET scan a week from today. This will determine if I have cancer. I am, of course, worried. Because of the not-great odds of living that long after a diagnosis for this variety of cancer, because of the prospect of chemotherapy, and because of the very real possibility that I will not have time, in this life, to conquer my OCD. Which will make me think that, on an essential level, my life has been a failure, as will the fact—or narrative—that I’ve failed in certain eyes (my own) to live up to Lenore’s designation of me as special. I would like to find a way out of the maze of thought that construes life as a story; ultimately lives aren’t stories; stories are webs of words, they keep us from (and sometimes open onto) the real. Or: all lives are the same story: born, did things, died. But I’m stuck in the story of life being a story. Can’t see past it, out of it.

Another thing I’m worried about: the scan is scheduled for 8 a.m., and I’m not to eat for six hours before. No coffee. Since, these days, I depend on caffeine to lift me out of the night’s Trazodone haze, I’ll stay up all night. Otherwise, I’m afraid I simply won’t be able to make it uptown in time. Lenore, too, had many fears. She was afraid of fires. Wouldn’t spend the night in wooden houses. Or hotels. For many years I had a terrible fear of flying. My compulsive mind required me to perform elaborate private rituals to keep the planes I was on in flight; Lenore, too, feared flying. She’d take the train across the country when she came to visit us in Arizona. Or, I should say, she and my grandfather did. But, at that time, he hardly figured. It was all about Lenore. Only during the last year of her life, on her last trip to visit us, did she get on a plane. On that trip, the flight she and my grandfather were to take back to New York was canceled. They stayed an extra night. For many years—no, for my whole life—I’ve believed, deep beneath the water’s surface, that if someone’s flight is canceled, if they have to spend an extra night in the place they intended to depart, they—or someone—will likely die.

When reading a book, I don’t stop on page fifty-eight: five plus eight equals thirteen. Same with forty-nine. Once, a friend told me the word four sounded the same as the Chinese word for death; I avoided, for years, fourth floors. Where do these beliefs come from? I’m deeply ashamed of this magical, compulsive thinking. I tell myself not to be. Which does no good. I struggle with this hydra every day. I don’t know what it’s like to be in the world without it. During the week of the workshop, I’d sometimes run into R on my nightly perambulations through P-town, looking for sex, or was it love, or was it … R would invariably be surrounded by friends—or acolytes. He’d be holding court; the night air: silky. I wanted to belong to the world R belonged to; I didn’t; he had scads of friends; I didn’t. He’d wave me over; I’d come over; an attack of nerves, and then OCD would overcome me; I’d stand awkwardly, then excuse myself, continue on my sojourn, reproach myself for having a mind that constantly sabotaged me. One two three One two three …

With what words did R, on the workshop’s last day, indicate to me his desire to … continue the conversation? Keep in touch? Was it during the last meeting of the workshop or did I run into him later that day, or the next, on Commercial Street? Did the gay flag hang from a phone pole above us? Did we walk past gray and tan clapboard houses, passing a gray-haired lesbian couple, sitting on a stoop, eating ice cream? We walked from somewhere down to the wharf under which I’d made out with the aesthetician. The sky: gray and luminous above the ocean.

Did I, as I sat with R, look down at the sand where the aesthetician and I had made out and wonder where that moment had gone? And ponder how, when one returns to the place where an event has occurred, it seems strange one can’t retrieve it, can’t recapture all that was—for a moment—possible?

I don’t know. What I do recall about that afternoon, sitting on the wharf with R, is the feeling, so rare for me in this life, of an incisive mind focused on me fully. I’d been to many therapists. All lacked this skill. R was unlocking me, on the wharf—in P-town. I told him about my OCD. He revealed to me that he too suffered from this affliction. I’d not before met anyone who also had it. Or at least not anyone who talked about it. This led, the following fall, to my going to see Dr. F., the behavioral therapist I’ve often said saved my life. An exaggeration. I would still have lived, but how?

III

I’m concerned by the superstitions circling in my head around the PET scan. If I write about R’s death, if I even use the word death—in my written story or in my head stories—I’ll be making it more likely—perhaps inevitable—that I’ll die. It’s possible, even probable, that this isn’t so, but I can’t be certain. I know this kind of reasoning is stupid. It’s ruled my life. At the heart of OCD: the need for certainty. For many years, I couldn’t write about my parents’ illnesses, which went on for years and years, for fear that if I used the word death, I’d kill them. Same with writing about AIDS. Thus, I stayed silent. I’m determined, with the PET scan situation, to break this pattern. Even if it kills me. R had been working for many years on a book about his mother; it occurs to me now that part of the delay may have had to do with the affliction we shared. I want to change the workings of my mind but, in spite of my work with Dr. F, I’m often not sure how. For, it seems, only with my mind can I change my mind. I scroll through more Facebook posts about R. He was charismatic, one mutual acquaintance writes. And immensely witty, I think. The particular instantiations of this wit, even if I were to remember them, would convey nothing now. I wanted to be witty too. In some moments, in some circles, I was, back then, considered witty. But I could not compete with R. One of the terrible things was that I did want to compete with him, with everyone. I was almost as ashamed of this as of my fraught, intrusive thoughts. I always wanted to impress. Although I hadn’t written anything since childhood, I wanted to think of myself as a writer.

On the last day of the workshop, R took a group photo. He must have gotten someone not in the class to take the picture, for there he stands, in the middle of the group (in the photo as I remember it), grinning widely, his hair disheveled by the wind. R was, I think, a kind of connoisseur of loss. It wasn’t until after the workshop that he made his move on me. I don’t remember the circumstances exactly. Nor do I think they matter. When I taught the class that was based, partly, on R’s class, I would have the students—after they’d described the photos they’d brought in—describe scenes in their lives that hadn’t been photographed. They were then to imagine photographs of scenes that might have taken place.

So let’s go back to the wharf, where I sat with R, who, I recall, was subtle and strategic in revealing his desire. Or was I simply dense? For it was a desire I didn’t want to see. I just wanted him to like me, approve of me, provide entrée into a new world. Maybe, for a moment, he was in love with me. Maybe it was just a crush. Maybe someone knows how to distinguish between the two. The sky was hazy above the gray-green ocean. It’s impossible to say whether my inability to reciprocate R’s feelings, which emerged as we sat on the wharf, had more to do with not being attracted to him or not wanting to have to think about death. It was during that talk on the dock that I understood—imperfectly—his condition. I asked what his beeper was for. It was for a liver. He was awaiting a transplant. I scanned the waves; they faltered and swelled. It always seemed somehow mistaken and implausible that someone might want me. I was concerned with the ways I didn’t have power. And so, as I’d missed seeing the whales, I looked elsewhere than at his courtship, which continued for some time after the workshop, in emails he sent me when I’d returned to New York, and then surfaced, some years later, at a conference we both attended. At which, after some further evasiveness, I finally made my rejection clear. Whatever hurt remained from that has now, I tell myself, vanished from the world. It will, I tell myself, do no one harm if I post something about R, if I insinuate a greater relationship than was really there. No one will call me out or call me false. Do we really think the dead aren’t watching? It occurs to me that the manner in which I couldn’t focus on R’s wit-concealed feelings isn’t un-akin to my inability, thirty years later, to take in that he’s died. And that I might join him sooner than, just weeks ago, I might have anticipated (we’ll see how the scan goes). I didn’t want to see my power. I wanted to be the person Lenore had described. I was always evasive. Beautiful young men walked by us on the dock.