Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?
Yeats, "Vacillation"
I hadn't known it would mean so much to me, Granger said, staring at his nearly empty brandy glass.
It had surprised him.
Martin looked at him silently.
Outside the traffic had begun to disappear, and the darkening streets were beginning to wear the deserted look that covers them nighttime.
Granger put his hand on his brow, ran it through his hair, pressed it against the back of his neck.
How had you known him? Martin finally said quietly.
We met a few years ago, and we've been seeing each other since. He answered just as quietly. I didn't know anything about this until I read about the investigation in the Times. We hardly spoke.
Did he pay you? Martin asked.
At first, yes, Granger said softly, but then, no. But what makes you think^Å
I meant no offense.
I'm not offended, but I'm curious.
In a corner booth a handsome woman in a smartly tailored suit, her face carefully made up and her brown hair streaked with blond frosting, sat across from a distinguished looking man in gray flannel, his thick, dark hair graying at the temples. They drank martinis. Heads nearly touching, they spoke in animated whispers, gazing at each other with loopy lusting eyes. The antique Victorian clock above the bar read seven-thirty.
I don't know. I have a good intuition. Are there others?
I'm on sabbatical.
Martin grinned and drank to that.
Granger finished his drink, insisted on paying and they left the bar. It was still raining, but there was no chill in the air.
Neither of them felt like being by himself.
I'm hungry, Granger said. What about you?
Yes, Martin said, I am. But in this neighborhood, at this time, we're not going to find anything.
Let's take a cab to the Village, Granger said. I know a good Japanese restaurant on Sixth Avenue.
The place was full, and they waited by the door. Soon, amid bonsai and jade plants, there was a small table for them in an alcove by the window.
It was not the Sixth Avenue they looked out onto of my youth, when the Beats were turning the world around with kicks and Bop and Brahms and motorcycle ecstasy, but the sullenly fashionable world of the colorfully defeated. They stalked the streets with hip-rap in their ears and perpetually talking on the telephone.
After dinner, the rain had stopped and the air smelled of spring moisture despite the car engines. They wandered past the cruising grounds of Sheridan Square and Christopher Street, and walked down to the river. They stood at the edge of the pier. There was a moon.
Martin put his arm around Granger and drew him near.
It's been rough, no?
For Mathew?
For you, too.
Me?
Yes, you.
Granger shrugged.
What about you? How did you know Mathew?
We went to high school together, were best friends. I had a crush on him, but I suppressed it, re-routed it. We played chess together for hours. I smoked a pipe and met Ruth, and we got married. Mathew went to Princeton. The night he left, we almost, but everything was confused and we just got drunk and very depressed, and I^Årealized I had done something stupid, so a few days later, I did something even stupider. That confused Ruth. But there was nothing she could do about it. And she was scared for me. So that blocked her anger. Luckily, I survived. So did her anger. Only she had even more reason for it when I got back from the desert. That was it. I'd had it. I stayed with Mathew and Lynn after I left Ruth. But Mathew was mostly in a world of his own.
And then it all came together for him, the tension and the discontent that Lynn and Mathew lived inside.
So it was because of you.
What was because of me?
The trouble between Mathew and Lynn.
Was because of me?
I put it badly.
They stood silently looking out at the Hudson, Martin still with his arm around Granger; Granger still leaning against Martin.
I don't want to be alone tonight, Granger said. I would like us to spend the night with each other.
I would, too, said Martin.
It's something I've never wanted before, Granger said. I usually prefer being alone.
Martin turned and faced Granger and gently kissed him on the lips, and Granger responded, and they remained softly kissing, feeling their bodies press against each other with a gentleness both of them had never known before, with a delicacy which quite transformed them, and they stepped apart and began to walk back, holding hands, across the pier to the gate and then across West Street and up Christopher.
They were silent the whole way to Commerce Street. Their breathing was easy; their minds were empty and there were no thoughts in their heads.
Slowly they undressed each other in the dark with only the moonlight coming in at the window, kissing each other's lips as they did.
In bed they lay in one another's arms and drank in each other's breath. Their gentle arousal made them feel the boundaries between them dissolve, and immediately they fell asleep.
I have to go into work today, Granger said afterwards while Martin was still inside him and they were gazing into each other's eyes with adoration.
What do you do? Geoffrey asked, aware that it was odd, considering how they were, that he had to ask the question.
I work with horses at the stable on 89th Street, off Central Park.
You do?
I do.
Can we go horseback riding through the park?
If you like.
When?
Whenever you want to.
Today?
Maybe. I have to go in, but I don't have to stay long. Actually I'm just doing a favor covering for an hour for another guy who has a dentist appointment this afternoon. I'll call up and see what's available afterwards. You're free?
I make my hours.
Consequently and incongruously, that afternoon, after a week of sitting inside the court house at Foley Square with aching heads and watching Mathew's trial, and while Mathew was being processed in a minimum security prison in Connecticut at the same time, and while Lynn was doing God knows what -- Martin noted to himself that he had to call her -- Martin and Granger were trotting along the bridal path in Central Park as a fiery orange globe of sunlight was lowering itself in the western sky.
After a brief canter, their horses were walking beside each other.
Why did you do it?
Do what? Granger said.
With Mathew? Were you in love with him?
Sometimes, I think I loved him, but it was something else he set off in me. I'm not sure what it was. Pity? I could sense how frightened he was, even if he didn't know it. I could tell he got off on fear, and making him afraid made me feel powerful. But if I think of it now, maybe all along he had the power, even when I seemed to. He tapped into something in me that made me do what he wanted, something that he was pretending -- maybe even to himself -- he didn't want. And I fell for it.
He spoke hesitantly. He was experiencing a sense of embarrassment which was new and unfamiliar to him.
Do you know what power feels like? What it feels like to control someone whom you don't care about? Or at least you tell yourself you don't. You can do whatever you want and you don't give a damn whether they like it or not? And they do whatever you want whether they like it or not because you represent danger?
Power, said Martin, I don't know. Maybe. It's kind of there when I withdraw myself. But danger, that I know. In the desert I learned what danger was, and it scared me. I felt rage at everyone who was putting me in danger -- from the president of the United States to some little sniper suicide bomber who thought he was protecting his land and his home. But my strongest hatred was reserved for myself.
I was tough, Granger said. The tighter and the less caring I got, the sexier I felt. Power is much sexier than love. Danger and fear are pretty heavy aphrodisiacs.
They weren't for me, said Martin. They only made me so sick to my stomach that all I could taste was bile. My mouth was coated with it.
But now, I don't know, Granger continued. Mathew was running away from something, I guess, and it's starting to dawn on me that I was, too. That I still am. And that power is a lie.
Whatever it was he was running away from, he got caught, Geoffrey said, bitterly. Maybe you should stop trying to run away from whatever it is you're running away from and just let it catch up to you so you can see what it is.
How do you do that?
You just do. I do it by hypnosis.
Granger glanced at him, handsome on his horse, trotting through the urban pastoral landscape of Central Park as night was darkening the daylight.
What are you looking for? Granger asked.
Love, Martin laughed. Or, really, that's not true. I'm not looking for anything. I'm trying to be ready for what's looking for me. And that's a matter of faith.
Granger leaned forward in the saddle and patted his horse's long, solid, warm neck and looked at Martin again. He wanted him, and Martin knew it and it excited him.
What does the word love mean when you say it?
It means, Martin said -- the branches on the trees around them turning black against a darkening sky -- feeling completed, feeling whole, feeling like the reason I am is because somebody else sees me, knows me, wants me.
I thought I had power with Mathew, but now I think I never did, Granger said, but they both knew he was saying something else.
They cantered along quietly in the dusk and turned out of the park at 86th Street and made their way back to the stables.
It is not always so that people who ought to meet do. Far more often we meet the people we ought not to meet and live life longing for something embodied in someone of whom we have an unformed, imperfect sense. Him we never meet. Or we once had a hint which we never forget, of what ought to have been because of someone who suggested something missing, something essential, someone who passed through our life one day and refused to stay.
We do not know what we want and we miss it. It is something else. It lives around the corner from our happiness and we only meet it in our dreams. And even then we don't know how to recognize it, to figure it out, or even what it really means.
We pursue what we think we want, and it gets us into trouble.
It may seem strange, consequently, and simply fictional, that after such a bizarre convergence as the one I have been tracing, that Granger and Geoffrey should recognize in each other a thing which completes each of them and binds them together.
When Alcibiades in the Symposium says we are all partial, split beings endlessly and usually hopelessly searching for the other part of ourselves now separated and lodged in another who is no more whole without us than we are without him, we take it as mythological hogwash or as a claptrap metaphor. Unless we are among the fortunate, like these young men, who can unpack the metaphor and find themselves inside it.
In the case of our two friends, some unifying chord was struck that enchanted them and united them, and as the weeks went by their affection amplified and was filled out because of the integrated complexity composed by their harmonious counterpoint.
A fugue is a perpetual motion machine always approaching resolution but always able to go one more joyous round, and so it was with their affection. It perpetually chased after itself, swelling and diminishing; the breath which cooled their heat reignited their flame.
But life is more than love. No, that is not so. But love is the figured bass, the ground, the perpetual rhythm over which life runs, the foundation upon which life stands, the bridge life crosses again and again, coming and going and coming, back and forth.
They had noticed each other; they spoke to each other. They had acquiesced to the affinity they recognized as neither would have been able to do earlier in their lives.
Hypnotize me, Granger said as they walked one evening in early summer at the approach of dusk along the river. You know how to.
Hypnotize you?
I feel your influence even without hypnosis.
But?
But I want to feel what it is like to be and not to be all at once.
Is that what you think hypnosis is like? Geoffrey said with a quizzical smile.
Am I making a fool of myself?
No, Geoffrey said. No, you aren't.
Geoffrey, I know what it's like to have you inside of me physically, filling me, controlling me sexually. I want to feel what it is like for my mind to be coated with you, to be dissolved and be replaced by your mind. I want you to turn me inside out. I want you to transform me and destroy the distinction between being asleep and being awake.
You're still thinking of Mathew.
You see. That's why I want you to do it. You understand already.
Geoffrey looked at him tenderly.
I can't stand it when you look at me that way. I feel like I'm on a high balcony without a railing and I get light-headed and the earth is dropping away from me and gravity is pulling me over the edge.
They had stopped and were leaning against a parapet by the river and Geoffrey looked into Granger's eyes with yet a deeper intensity of adoration. Pressing his lips to Granger's, he penetrated his mouth with his tongue until their breaths swirled in their depths like the whirlwind.
I know the feeling, he said.
The darkening river stretched away on their right, slowly flowing, as they resumed their walk back to the Village. Through the city's rush and commotion, they took their solitary way.
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