The Morning To Come

"The Morning To Come"

by

Timothy Stillman

"I'll pray to go quite mad/ live in long ago/ when you and I were one/ so very long ago."

Janis Ian

"Tea and Sympathy"

Passion, I thought, irony's knife at my neck.

And nothing but a ghost of the reality sat across from me every morning at the breakfast table, behind the Cheerios box, over the plates, and the steaming coffee cups--congrats, I got what I had always wanted. But the template was broken and hanging by a painful looking wedge, and it was always too early or too late to move. Something building, and that thing never acknowledged. Runny eggs and nothing to talk about. Past favors and failures into a modicum of middle class that had Joel in it.

Joel of the thinning sandy hair and the long once lascivious body and the eyes that were 'pon a time blue the way the sky supposedly get in summer, though you couldn't prove it by me. Besides summer sky doesn't really glower the way those eyes do these days, blue with a storm in them--or echoes of one. Joel, lust, sex, body, ecstasy--a soggy fuse gone out for good.

There might as well be a Greek chorus of mice in the corner singing the coming of Christmas blues, which is more than one man, or two, could take. Something like shimmering lake, something like nothing nose dived on plane trip, just that terrible little abundance of cake walk space between us, like from here to the Andromeda galaxy.

Flattened newspaper pages turning on the table top as Joel thumbs his way through the news of the Mid South as the smudgy print coming off on his hands and fingers. Newspaper that I wish would form a small and tenuous world in little paper castles. and hide us from us for the rest of our lives.

Desultory conversation now, as though we aren't aware of what we are saying and don't care about the response. Calm anger, peaceful in a way. Compared to all the fights we have had over the years--runnels of anger that we jibe, one to the other. Riding on a terrible crust of blackened toast I bite down on and hurt the left side of my jaw where my bad tooth has been giving me fits the last week or so, and know I will have to have the damned thing pulled, since we don't have the money for dental work and a crown. It's come to that.

Flowing gold sunshine on the table in front of us, mock full of the promise of cream, where love languished for a time and turned the fronts of all pictures to the wall. Pictures that are constantly sliding slowly down the buttery yellow walls, and the thing was, it was love, it was the real McCoy and that was the terrible pity of it. We weren't mistaken. That and something furnished about more than the future that was pink and plastic and believed in because of it. The thing was, there was all the straight forwardness of it, there leaning backward and into the future as well.

Days had been, once, long ago, as we had made them, and nights had come on soft and sweet and full of a tenderness which used to make our eyes weep. It seemed somehow all those years we were racing toward this, toward dissolution, and there seemed to be nothing but the glint of freedom in our eyes for such a long time, for the want of it. All the country roads we traveled and all the delight we excited in each other were only precursors to this little slip of time, the building blocks of all of it. That turned us upside down when I first met him and fell in love with him and a long time later when he fell in love with me.

There is no wistfulness now in that thought, no jungle adventure that is quiet and quick and full of burgeoning summer sun like a blood blister in the high and buttressed sky as though the sky was up to me, and I could paint it any color I liked. How a world he used to be and now the world he is and that is the terrible joker in the pack. That is the terrible trump card we both played so heroically and this time is ours and we made it as a Frankenstein monster.

I take another determined bite of blackened toast, and Joel says, "You can't fix breakfast worth a damn." Off handed, flipping a page, irritated, like an emotional hang nail that never gets well, and I can't rise to the bait, because I can't endure another argument like last night's. For he might leave for good then. And where would we be at that point? I chew with my mouth open, like a third grader, being kid brave, at some bully, during institutional lunch, and he doesn't notice and I don't care.

His voice is Northern. It used to send my spine into convulsions of rapture. It used to come prickling down into the heart of me and make me feel as though I was going to explode in a million glory song directions it was so beautiful. Every word he said, every laugh he made, was composed of all the madrigals of all the winters and Christmases I had spent so terribly sad and alone before he came along.

Just being in his presence and his words soft and whispery being directed to me--all of it was hope and a catcher's mitt and a safety net and a greeting on each syllable, as though he had carved out the accent and the words from a language that he had personally invented for me and only I was allowed to understand. It filled my mind with all the shimmery and sensuous, sturdy and durable--a verbal visible touchable series of furnishing, no longer walnut size and frozen and dying inches. He made the world suddenly cozy. We were each other's lyricism. His voice, that first kiss, god--it sent me to silken lands beyond imagining--he deduced and solved all our problems. Once upon a time.

But I put on weight, as did he. I started losing my hair. As did he. Reality caught up with us and bit us hard in the neck. One became slowly painfully two again. Joel's dreams of being a famous poet fell through, and we each blamed the other and we found that something to cling to--the anger. We used it to coast for a few years, believing we had our success in each other ,and our failure in all the other regards was just gilt painting of ourselves. But that justification didn't last long. That cove we both ran to was a kind of feasting on the other's eyes and hands for a time. Because that was childhood's last hurrah, and we learned to take pleasure in its destruction.

I ached a bit and delighted a bit at one or the other of us leaving, perhaps unannounced, secretly, while the other was at work or running errands. Then houses would be lonely again. It was a world, a territory I knew quite well. And better than this it seemed, seeing my dream die right in front of my eyes. And knowing what I had been to him, if I had been anything at all to him, his seeing me dissolve as well.

The world would be cold again. No one to warm it up for either of us. Age had taken him too and it would not be easy even on this former golden boy. Everybody would know he had left me--for of course, I would never leave him. We would have to run the gauntlet of their knowing and clever and superior eyes--"I told you they couldn't be monogamous"--and we would each fall, because we had picked up traits, electric arcs from each other, and that was the really terrible thing--we knew each other too well and that was become the gun that was aiming back at us and getting ready to pull the trigger at any second. We were each other's property and we were helpless to lust within it, as w used to and make it so much more than even then we knew it was. Before our joys and our arms stopped being fledglings, and became too tired, and it shamed us to see how little distance we had traveled in the last 35 years.

Joel mentions something he's reading in the paper, crumpling the edge of it in the fingers of his right hand, next to the plate of food untouched, his silent rejoinder for my lack of cooking ability. His fingers that used to be tapering and gentle and tallow warm. Tapping those now cold pendulous human utensils on the paper edge, maybe trying to beat out a desperate SOS, but no one is listening, save for me. I am not the one anymore, if ever. I didn't count the numbers of nights he didn't come home back then. I especially don't count the numbers of nights he stays at home with me now. Don't think of the reason.

That is standard operating procedure because he is the one for me and I am the one for him and that is the thing that is killing us dead, because it's become childish doggerel. Even that had once been beautiful. So it seems.

As we sit scant inches from each other hearing the other's words, but in a cynical manner, in a laconic manner, correcting grammar for each other and correcting in sad scared patrician arch voices, the thoughts expressed by the other. But more and more, the terrible stumbling humbling silence, where we both blunder about the edge. Someday soon to fall in. We have been in free fall for a good many years now and we need to escape each other in whatever hurtful way we can think of.

Joel is talking (impersonal, newscaster like, killing time--his voice has turned gravely, where is that lilt and trill I remember--was it ever really there?) about the November 3 election in which there were some serious blows dealt the religious right, which we call Nazis or Christers, and how maybe things are loosening up in the Bible Belt mentality this country has been steeped in for a number of years now. That perhaps the Clinton persecution is having a backlash effect, which is of course a good thing, he says, as he sips some lukewarm coffee.

"If the dreaded Monica had been a 17 year old man, the lynching of both would have been at dawn. There would be no backlash. Ever." I respond.

Joel sigh, looks up a bit vaguely in my direction, then falls his eyes back into the eye sanctuary of news print a moment, then gets up, goes to the counter, to the coffee maker.

"Trouble maker," he says. Not kidding. He does little of that any more. The coffee maker he pours from is to the right of the sink which is stacked with unwashed dishes (neither of us has the time or the energy or the inclination to tidy up the house anymore)--one more queer myth that bites the dust.

"Trouble maker?," I say, kiddingly, and caustically alarmed--hoping the twist of my words hides my fear at what he has become, the fight he has given up, his not remembering, "Joel of long hair and pot and LSD? Joel before the three piece business suit. Joel forever in jeans and over sized over shirts and boots. Joel, protester of the Vietnam War? Joel with the American flag patch sewed to the seat of his pants? Joel, of demonstrations and long endless talks of Right On!. Joel?" But he just pours more coffee, wordlessly.

I try to remember us both young. I can't, and I can't remember us so afraid of telling our parents about us. I can't remember how it was so difficult at first, overcoming the prejudices and fears of homosexuality that were surprisingly mostly inside ourselves when we had thought we had had a clear view of it all our lives ever since we had known. The awkwardness of it, and then over a gradual period of time, when the awkwardness left the premises and we lay in bed, comfortable and sexual and free, and held each other and felt the other's beating heart and perhaps we wept a bit, knowing things would never get better than this. We were right.

Joel, back at the table, with his hot coffee.

I say, "Joel, let's get away next weekend."

He goes back to the paper, doesn't respond, doesn't hear me, doesn't care?, losing his hearing?, which would I want it to be? Once again, here is the great old party of selfishness I have entertained in my stuffed stuffy mind from the day of my delivery into this mad sad scary and lonesome world, and odd that the lonesome I feel now is the lonesome I've always felt, even with Joel. Even at the first meeting when he looked at me and smiled quicksilver. Even when he put his hand in mine. Even when he said, "please adore me." He's had others, all during our relationship, because he has always felt, I think, the same way.

We gave each other the bonfires of our previous rather melancholy years and here we are as if the other had never happened, so I say the sentence again, a little more loudly. Joel crumples the paper with his fingers and slams his left hand down on the scarred old wood table top, "Dammit, I heard you the first time."

I cringe and I want to lash out and I want to tell him that I count for something in this world too, that he can spend hours every night wringing some damn poem out of his brain, a poem that he will never send off because it is crap of the highest order, taking up our time at night, hiding in his curvy and tenacious and twisty thoughts, going down there in those poesy snake coils somewhere where I sure as hell can't find him, and I at the same time want to run to him and kneel beside him and put my head in his lap and have him put my hands on his shoulders and massage them a little. I want him to tell me everything is okay and maybe get hard with me, because I miss him so much. Instead, I just sip my now cold coffee, hoping not to cough on it.

We don't look at each other anymore, not really. We see what we see and maybe it is a blot on our imaginations, he the failed poet, I the failed journalist English major, whatever the hell good that ever did. We should be cobbling together our lives and changing and rearranging the blocks when we don't like what we see, for we are both prodigious readers, something like five books a week, but we do not read the same writers, not the same genres. I read the spook books, and he the historical biographies. I read old books that we used to read together. They remind me of him. He is right here in front of me. That is why. I wish he would read those old books we once loved together, because he would like to be reminded of me. We never read in the same room at the same time.

We should use other writers words to make that golden threat that hangs on the outside of impending old age less of a poseur at a masquerade ball, that would get us past past youth. But was there ever Joel, especially when youth left us alone? Why could it not hold us before it like a second chance of young skin full of laughs and light and weightlessness, nothing crimson about it or heavy handed or heavy stomached? Just the memories that would peruse us as we pursue them and would be standing at a corner in our love making (when was the last time we made love or just had sex?) and would say what took you so long, guys? You don't have to feel guilty for leaving us. We'll protect you. Blend you with us here. All the time in the world. Here, slip again into your teens or twenties and go at it like no one else in the whole world would understand, but these days, these days, the poseur behind the mask is Lon Chaney, Sr., wearing a skull face in "The Phantom of the Opera." It breaks your heart, I'll tell you plain and simple and straight out, it breaks your heart.

"What do you think?" I ask, "about going away for a few days?" I pester him. It makes him grumbly. I seem unable to help it. If I annoy him, then I know I'm still with him. He tears a page, he turns the sheet of newsprint so hard.

I take my fork and play with the remnants of my runny egg. Joel tells me the traffic will be helacious with the holiday weekend coming up and besides "you know how much I hate to travel and we never really have any fun with it anyway."

All the hurrying, and me, afraid we'll miss our flight, "up tight"--antique phrase no more used-- or that we'll get robbed or mugged or that relatively new and most embarrassing affliction that comes to smile on people around our age that says wherever you are, always locate the nearest restroom because as sure as you don't have one in sight, you will have to go. I think this is our main reason we stay home all the time, this cruel little disjunction of bodies breaking down, when all these years, long ago, we had mastered each other's genitals, and sang to them and loved them and kissed them--mixed up our pulse and heart beats. Unable to distinguish which was our own.

O, how I loved him then, so extraordinarily, so rousingly naked, there before my eyes and hands, and real, God, real, the curve of his long willowy back, the standing out butt with the pale cheeks so kisssable. His thin straining abdomen and chest reaching up to me, like a poem become flesh. The way his sensitive knowing hand fit so beautifully on my stomach as though we were made to fit perfectly, his thin alabaster smooth as glass legs draped around my larger ones. The beautiful blue vein in his left temple that beat delicately and reminded me of a baby bird all translucent and alabaster. How his lips met mine. It was like kissing velvet smoke. It was home. And home was a great and marvelous place to dwell for a time, but our bodies had begun, so soon, so far ago, dying. We had become Fall in front of each other. And we are ashamed. Perhaps that was really the key to the problems now, our shame. We are dying, and we weren't wise enough or imaginative enough or caring enough to stop this stupid cruel heartless mindless process from happening to each other. My Joel, I can't stop it. I don't know how. I want to put my hands to the wall of time and press hard. Press on the break. Make a fireworks of friction. Break the clock. Stop the acceleration. Nullify time's engine. Disable the machine for you.

And we blame each other--if you had cared, your fault. So we don't care anymore. It's a terrible round robin-- like slow murder or slower suicide. All has seemed to be for nothing, thus loneliness sits like a little demon from hell on the table before us, two headed, two faced, one looking at me, one looking at Joel, and the demon says, "Hey, Slick, how's it going?, thought you'd beat the rap, win the game? Everybody always thinks that. I'm here now, though. always have been. You just refused to see it before. Aw, hell, I'm a nice guy. Trust me. Think about what I've got comin' up for ya? Makes this look like a sandlot ball game, it does. Can you say 'prostate cancer'?"

How I loved Joel's penis, key word, loved, how I carried the sweet image of it in my thoughts all day long like a golden key to open what I had always used to think of as the impossible. And there for me. Magic.

How it grew and arched to meet me as though it were a lonely heart's club bridge rising against time and eager and silken and strong and how I used it to keep the barking world at bay. How it flinched in my hand and how it entered with grace and delicacy my mouth. Holding it, sucking it, was holding on to the very center of him, sucking every thing he was into me. How he would whisper love to me and how there was no greater happiness extant in the world at those times than this, but there are no bridges. Even the days of its just quick and duty bound was a long time ago.

I no longer trace the brown rings round his penis heart. I no longer coax him and limn the blue veins in its marble halls that go into making it the miracle I once thought it was, and I wish I had been smart enough to know there are no bridges, not really. I wish there was no Joel. I wish he had turned me down so long ago. Because this shell being here, as well as the shell once known as me, is hampering my search for Joel, just as perhaps I am hampering his search for--not me, but someone else. As he has always been, probably. It is long past time to face it. And no one left in this aging young world for him. So there is no where else for him to go. There is only me. Who will take him back again. Always have. Always will. He's my Joel after all. Somewhere in there. Somewhere.

There will not be a denouement. There will not be a specific ending. We will go on this way, until time in whatever manner it chooses, ends us, one before the other. He's still handsome, pale like chalk, not the lovely periwinkle pale he used to be. He has put on weight and he has too many ragged facial lines, but still good looking. I think he has stolen the boy Joel, though, and some day I hope to trick him into telling me where he has put him. So I can run to that Joel again.

Joel checks his watch, says he's late, and begins preparing to head out the door, going to the living room, tightening his tie, putting on his suit coat and overcoat, checking papers in his brief case, muttering something I take as "so long" and heads out the door. My job starts later than his, so I have this hour each morning to myself in all that huge emptiness that is like a scream. I think back to last night when we held each other in bed a moment, before slight sleep. Our trying to hold someone else, trying to pull translucent membranes over us like warm blankets or large encompassing butterfly wings of summer over us, to keep out the chill we make away. How can he compete with what he used to be? How cruel I am.

We drifted, turned away from each other. I thought of how we used to talk--how we chattered like magpies, and giggled, and had such word duels with each other, jokes and memories and tomorrows in them, when we first knew each other and knew each other all over again every night-- about movies we loved, and about our childhoods, when, in those days, we were still children, and how we wished we had known each other then. And how in those early days of sex and love, we would fall asleep, cupping the other's balls. Now though, he snores. He tells me I do too. I choose not to believe him.

I thought, when I was a young child, there might--just might-- be something more than poetry writing at night and books to read and TV to watch, that there might be a Joel ahead. I would pray--oh please. I had created him only in my mind, before I met the real article. I had not known his name before. But Joel was a perfect name. He could have been named nothing else.

I thought of our search that had traveled down all the cold paths of the world and how there was something longing in both of us, something virginal, that had never been touched, had never really been expected at all--not seriously, and how to find it and how to find it soon before it died of neglect, and maybe it was all a ruse, all a charade. It became all so ordinary all too soon. We tried to prevent it. But did not know how.

We did what everyone did, when they, scared and shy and skittery, fell in love with something, as well as someone. And so early on, earlier than we would ever admit, then or now, made love to get the little death, the rush, then over with. For in truth, we must have made love because the right strings had been pulled and the right combinations of fluids had been correctly stirred and emitted. There was only Joel for me. But if that Joel had not come along, there would have been another somewhere. How it shames me to admit that. How untrue it seems. But it is true, no matter how impossible. The same for him as well. I happened along at the right time. Lucky us. There was no sorcery. There was no "wolf winter," not Lord Dunsany silver tapestry of poetry. We had made it so because it was the right thing to do. We worked with what we had. Do not hold onto the joyous lies of first love. They shall devour you in the most monstrous ways. They age very badly indeed.

The thing that was in each of us, maybe in everybody, even Christers, was screaming out in a high pitch we couldn't hear, "find me and make the stars less cold and make the night less certain; even the cruelty that comes with it--I will take that as well." We talked so big in those days. About things we are only now just beginning to understand. Maybe we never knew each other at all. Our physical closeness was an excuse to remain strangers to each other.

Maybe, I think, finishing my coffee, and sitting back and stretching arms and legs, maybe every time we touched, every time we thought we were easing life for each other, we made that hidden thing, nameless and shapeless, lonelier and lonelier. Maybe we sewed into ourselves the malcontent and alienation and discontent and rue every time we took each other into our arms.

Was it love we had felt for so many years?, or a comfortable melancholy that was sad because it wasn't alone and missed that so terribly? But isn't that what love--true love--really is? Is really founded on? That's the twisted golden threaded beauty of it. Maybe in a very real way we were killing each other with third rate while the real beauty aged before our eyes, or our true loves we had never found, and they now aging, none of us knowing what we missed. Just fumbling groaning sex stacked like wheatcakes on top of each other, fault on fault.

I stand and go to the straight backed painted yellow flaking chair Joel vacated a few minutes ago. I sit on it and feel his warmth still there and wish for a boy with a little beating vein in his forehead, a vein that I kissed when he said he loved me, for the first time, and I remember he said then, we will never be transient, we will never forget.

I held him against me, his warmth on that cold night and he put his arms round me and we were the whole world and every galaxy sliding in whatever quadrant of space you can name. His lips kissed mine and the flavor was autumn because it had been autumn then and it had been good to think of growing old with him, of not being alone in crowds, like at the mall at Christmas, seeing couples and friends and people in groups of threes and fours, laughing and being together and communicating and sharing bagels or Christmas cookies fresh and warm from the Cookie Shop.

Us then, there among the throngs and the piped in Christmas music and the bright seasonal lights and decorations and Salvation Army pots and bells and some jerk dressed as Santa bouncing kids on his lap. Buying gift wrapped presents that crowded shoppers' arms that were never long or wide enough to carry all, thus, dropping and picking up packages here and there.

All of the people, being one, rushing down the days with each other and making every minute count, though of course I know this was a very idealized image, but still and all, and I, alone and of singular life, for so long. That only a bad memory though, when we were still one, and not yet two again, but our coming home to each other, when there was still Joel--everyone in the world, I thought then, (how can all of this be so long ago?), can have all the joy, all the happiness, all the magic they want, it's puny stuff as far as I'm concerned, and the hell with them, I need none of it, because I turn out to be the winner, after all. Because Joel is my love and I don't have to pretend anymore.

I run to him, because I'm loved and I love and it is appreciated and Christmas isn't sad anymore, and never will be again. It will never leave me feeling my arms have been amputated, and there is no longer liquid darkness all around through which I will forever have to swim, no. Joel won't let me. And I won't let him, either.

His warmth is fading from the chair seat, and there is all the Joel who is left. I begin to get ready for work. We will be together again tonight. Separate and apart. We have no where else to go. Thus, this evening, he scratching his pen of poetry on notebook paper and I plowing through Joyce Carol Oates' latest literary heart operation, on the sofa in the living room, and perhaps, just perhaps, I will stop reading for a moment, and he in the bedroom will stop writing at that same moment, and in the membrane of our house, we will hear each other breathing, softly and with whispers that only we can interpret.

Then, with exhaled breath in tempo, we will continue on with what we were doing before. And maybe, for a little while, it will comfort us and let us know we are still together and still trying, though we perhaps don't know it, in all our fumbling and all our clumsiness and chagrin and sometimes short fuse anger. We still try, because there is simply nothing else we know to do about it, about us, the enigma of ourselves and each other. The screwy loopy enigma that still and all, has a few laughs now and then, a few kindnessness and soft touches every so often. And that carries us on, if we are lucky, perhaps the rest of the way, to morning.

the end