After the Ice Storm

I have an acquaintance from long ago who I’m back in contact with following the death of his partner of more than forty years. The deceased was known for both his great beauty and for the tumult he caused, tolerated perhaps because of his good looks. Alcoholic rages. Infidelities. Fistfights with cab drivers.

My re-found acquaintance, now friend, tells me that he has been sitting through some nights in his old house in a small upstate New York town talking aloud to himself and his deceased partner, questioning and arguing why he spent so many years with someone so difficult.

Recently, he said that he had awakened at 5 a.m., and when he went into his living room, he found a giant leaf flattened against a window.

“As I started to peel it away,” he told me over the phone, “it felt like velvet. I thought, what kind of leaf could feel like that. But it was a bat, and it flew into my face, covering my eyes.” He then told of running in a kind of panic to pull it off as it gripped his ears, and then slipping on the kitchen floor, snapping a tendon in the process. “The first thing I heard myself say to myself on the floor was, “God damnit, Paul, where are you,” referring to his deceased partner.

But in our phone conversation on a Sunday afternoon, after his power had returned following an ice storm, my friend tells a story of discovering something about that partner that forever changed his views about him.

Many years ago, every morning, his partner would leave the apartment well before 7 a.m., the reasons for which my friend didn’t yet know. My friend was at the time, the mid 1980s, attending to a friend of his who was dying from AIDS and was a patient in the famous/infamous ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital that housed so many young men during that era. I could see that floor, in fact, from the roof of my West 11th Street tenement building, where I would often go to pace and think, aware, too, that just blocks away from my healthy self, men my age were suffering, close enough to me that they might be able to see me in the open air. I would sometimes issue a wave to the building in case any of them were looking out from their windows. As I stood six floors above the street on my tarred-roof surface, warped from the elements like shallow waves, the ward at the top of the since-demolished hospital appeared to hover over the whole of the West Village in a blue nursery-like light, crowning the neighborhood. Some people mistook the blue glow as the maternity ward.

When my friend was on his way into his friend’s room one morning instead of late in the day as was his usual routine, he saw his partner in another room shaving a patient’s face, running a buzzing electric razor over the cheeks and chin, then stroking the skin to test for remaining stubble. My friend had no idea that this is where his partner had been going every day, for many months, not announcing his destination to him or to anyone. As he tells it, the Jamaican nurse on duty said to my friend, who was about to call out to his partner, “Don’t disturb that one. He comes here every day. Let him do what he’s doing.”

This was at a time when even some nurses were reluctant to touch the young men, but my friend’s partner would trim, without gloves or a mask on, the night-sweat-soaked hair of the patients, pet their cheeks to brush the skin free of bristles, trim beards, neaten sideburns, smooth their uncreased napes.

My friend, who attended to the long demise of his complicated partner from a variety of ailments, says that moments before his partner died, he asked my friend, “Why did you stay all these years,” to which my friend, as he tells me, said, “Because I’m your guy.”

My friend tells me this, saying he wished he could have said more, that what he said wasn’t enough. “I had literally only minutes to answer him.”

But I tell my friend that he had said it all, that there could be no better phrasing.

And when I think of the deceased partner, who I barely knew but, like many beautiful people, whose beauty I can recall still given its power, what he did for those dying young men makes him a person who did a lot of right in his life.