THE RECONCILIATION OF UNBELIEF The death of a young gay artist, and the story of his faith
Mason, Alane Salierno
THE RECONCILIATION OF UNBELIEF For 'P' Alane Salierno Hasan There are only a few AIDS narratives. As there are only a few ways of talking about those who die young of other causes. Children...
...What was outrageous and brilliant and defiant in a letter to the friend became tame and opaque and self-conscious in the imagined context of a prestigious mainstream magazine...
...In the myth-making stories we told in the days after he left us, carving the grooves in our memories that might hold him, the images began to conflict, or if not to contradict, at least to separate from each other, like the planes in the Picasso print that once hung in his kitchen...
...I could feel his whole body, living and warm, against mine, the pressure of my arms around him and his around me, the tops of our thighs meeting...
...He wanted to know more, always, to hear with a roundness...
...Hast night I again met him in my dreams...
...Perhaps among his papers there is a masterpiece not yet seen or recognized...
...The fear of losing all his senses, his ability to smell gone and hearing and taste diminished by chronic sinus infections...
...part of faith and uncertainty part of hope...
...When I visited he made the best coffee, with cream...
...Perhaps his body itself lives longer than art, in the molecules of him now diffused through the Gulf of Mexico...
...In college he had been the professor's fair-haired boy...
...Once at Mass with another friend standing between us, I glanced over, tears in my eyes from some romantic grief, to see that he was crying too...
...Maybe he simultaneously believed and did not believe...
...He lived more dangerously than I. Away from our dorm we saw each other only intermittently, passing an afternoon sittting on a wall in the sun discussing books and classes, or listening to a lunchtime Bach concert in the Episcopal church...
...His death...
...but we also talked about belief and doubt, about the cynicism of intellectuals...
...It was the first time anyone had suggested to me that friendship had to do with risk and not security...
...The sperm, even, that carried the virus...
...But when he was sick, he could not write, and when he was well, he wanted just to live, to be alive, to celebrate hunger and its satisfaction...
...We cooked in the tiny dorm kitchen no one ever seemed to use...
...I said I believed that doubt was Alane Salierno Mason is an editor at W.W...
...The dry ness of the world we had seen and of which we could so easily become a part...
...He believed in God, and did not believe, and awaited the reconciliation of his unbelief...
...homemade cards, sketches, collages, scatter-paintings, woodblock prints, found-art reliefs and oils, piano sonatas and jazz improvisations, home-cooked meals, snacks of pickled okra and sandwiches of pimento cheese...
...he said, which I took to mean he would let us decide, after his death, whether anyone was...
...After he died I would think of the quality of his attentiveness as an aspect of the personality of Christ...
...If they died of AIDS...
...The heavy taste of the salt water like blood...
...He was not satisfied with it...
...His father's pale face where he drifted alone among the white carnations we had thrown, already swept by the current away from the boat, toward the Gulf...
...Early in his illness he dreamed that the bag in which he carried his books for graduate school was covered in blood...
...sometimes he brought it to me in bed, and sat on the foot of the bed, talking me awake for an hour or two...
...The test for Mycobacterium Avium Complex that involved driving a special needle into the knob of his hipbone, giving him new insight into the crucifixion...
...His last two years, after he knew he was sick, his innermost circle of friends were all Catholic...
...The tedium of sickness tormented him even more than the pain, the lethargy it induced, the necessity of preoccupation with medications and reactions and each new symptom...
...It was an embrace that was a completed and completely physical expression of love, an embodiment of it, physical but not sexual, and in it was resolved the entire thirteen-year history of our friendship...
...When we began to spend time together again, we talked about our uncertainties and frustrations over boyfriends and work...
...About his family, his three brothers...
...Contain him...
...The photographs of her are quite beautiful...
...Than the taste of her melt-in-the-mouth Yorkshire puddings...
...that I felt in me a faith I wanted to share, just by living, with my friends, most of whom for all I knew were agnostics or atheists...
...Where is that...
...Either he was rolling naked in the leaves somewhere else, and would do so eternally (but without repetition), or he would never do so again...
...The love of him filled the room...
...He had just left his job to work full-time on his master's thesis when he died, the final infection with its attendant septicemia taking him in a day...
...But maybe he did believe in it, and regretted the lack of time to make "a lasting contribution...
...he asked quietly...
...He did not want to give up the capacity to believe, the richness and beauty of the Catholic church in which he too had been raised, his spiritual life, his responsibility to what he would choose to call his soul...
...When he heard this during our freshman year he was surprised...
...There was little division in him between matter and spirit...
...He agreed, this time understanding me completely...
...Norton...
...his father had said of the black nylon bag, full of his "remains"), the thickness of the water on my tongue shocked me, and for a moment I thought I was tasting his ashes...
...His art was relentlessly private, journals and letters written with incandescent intensity to an audience of one, or no one...
...To be honest, it was not right...
...She said, maybe you need to get different friends...
...Sometimes we walked around the neighborhood, sat by the fountain, went into a bookstore...
...He scorned superficial pieties, but he was afraid of becoming cynical...
...About himself, the youngest, who saw and felt all and reinvented it with the lushness we know to be the evergreen lifesap of art...
...I told him that my friendship with him had taught me how to love...
...After his death, his partner talked about how much time they had spent together "doing nothing special," how good that was...
...He had his own yard sales, returning the no-longer-wanted materials of his own life to the reincarnating cycles of secondhand commerce...
...perhaps we will be able to put a book together from his journals and letters, to which this may serve as introduction...
...The talented one, full of the arrogance and self-hatred of his difference...
...That it will last over an otherwise unpredictable lifetime...
...The problem, he said, was how to find a voice, a form, that could exist in a public space...
...At his famous friend's insistence he wrote a piece for his magazine, a special issue on AIDS, but the piece never ran...
...Ida, a perfect mockery of artistic creation, striding in all her brilliant inauthenticity up the public steps of city buildings, briefcase in hand, her face composed of the deconstructed lines of Gertrude Stein still as evocative as before...
...Like the others it is not a story my friend, a storyteller, would have wanted his death to tell...
...perhaps his famous friend, in a book on friendship, will immortalize him...
...That's what it means to be saved...
...For a while after he moved to a new city and began to explore not just gay sex but a gay life, and since we both worked at jobs that did not pay us enough to travel, we did not see each other very often...
...His imagination of his death, he said, was something like that...
...That it can be fed by the other changes in our lives...
...I tried to say that the essential beauty of his way of describing things, and the importance to me of his telling, transfigured them...
...He said, "What do you mean...
...As memory and therefore narrative...
...The profits would go to buy himself and his friends a good dinner...
...When he was a child and couldn't sleep, he used to imagine his mother's womb before sperm and egg had met to form him, then his parents before they met and were married, and each of his parents in their mothers' wombs, and their parents before they were married, in their mothers' wombs, and his grandparents' parents before they met, unraveling the thread of his own existence until he fell asleep...
...He was physically beautiful, and remained so even in death, pale hair dusting strong freckled forearms...
...He respected the rules of the church that allowed him few options, that would have preferred he marry only part of himself to a woman like me, rather than live all in the life to which his heart and body led him...
...There was the home IV kit, the ritual of flushing arteries with saline before and after the antibiotic drip, the night-fevered heat in his ears that would not let him sleep...
...imagine, he said, "they nailed his hands, feet, and hipbone to the cross...
...We began to go to church together when I was in town...
...He reminded me of a deer running in the woods...
...At his deathbed we all prayed, and all partook of the Communion of his last rites...
...His hometown priest, singing Broadway showtunes after the scattering of the ashes, saw his mother each week in steadfast prayer to Mary, and thought of her strength as that of the Virgin Mother herself...
...we rolled them on my desk and cut them with a glass...
...he was playing Rachmaninoff, with no one else there...
...He was afraid of dying...
...His writing mentor wanted him to write a book, a journal of his illness...
...He wrote, it is true, beautifully, sometimes fiercely, coldly, abstractly, deliriously, heatedly, in painstaking particular detail...
...Later, I would try to tell him everything I thought, to risk all in words, and often failed, especially at the end...
...once we each got a pair of shoes repaired...
...He was sitting on the steps of a church, wearing a thin shirt and shivering a bit in the cold...
...In any case there was little division in him between matter and spirit...
...He never published a word...
...When people in their twenties, thirties, and forties die, their children represent both the tragedy of the loss and a hope that not all is lost...
...Push on out from shore," one of his brothers said, "you're going to a better place...
...What do you mean...
...From the beginning I considered him one of my best friends...
...The additional burden of leaving a written legacy was one he both did, and did not, need...
...He had trouble imagining it, he had said, his death...
...Who would be interested...
...Children become angels, older people have lived "good" or at least "full" lives...
...He invented hilarious anecdotes about his trips to the store, recounted overheard snatches of conversation with relish...
...When we all jumped in the water after pouring his ashes off the boat (not scattering, pouring, clouding the water like milk...
...His gay doctor, who had turned the monitor away so that only he had to see it, told us finally that his heart had stopped...
...When we were both in college, in North Carolina, the campus was flooded with evangelists who would interrupt your solitary reveries on a step or a wall or a path to ask, "Have you been saved...
...Heavy, isn't it...
...Nor pleasant...
...A fellow freshman told me that as a Catholic, I would go to hell for worshiping the Virgin Mary...
...When I asked him a couple of months before if he had ever thought of publishing his journals he almost spat, no...
...His big toe was turning white as his heart slowly stopped beating- I saw when his brother lifted a corner of the sheet...
...He taught me how to make sourdough biscuits...
...he said I had not yet risked anything with him...
...It is difficult to know, isn't it, what we are meant to understand by "the resurrection of the body...
...He was not one to pretend he understood you when he didn't or wasn't sure...
...But if they are childless...
...I do not think he believed in the immortality of art, though he devoured it, honored it, yearned for it...
...Of unlimited conversations with him in eternity as the only conception I could have of heaven...
...In talking of this he told me of trying to imagine his death, and in the telling I felt he had made it beautiful...
...Sometimes at night the whole lobby would be vibrating...
...I could not say, though I felt it, that our conversation itself was a sacrament...
...I said no, not really, I did not want to be sure...
...He retained a privacy that was no longer an elusiveness, no longer hiding from himself and others, just a staking out of a territory that was his own...
...He would not take Communion, so as not to be a hypocrite, as I suppose I was...
...It is possible he believed that art was no more immortal than the shape of him in the clothes his mother so wanted to bring home with her after he died...
...This jumping out at us from books he read and music he loved and food he relished, things he made us buy, coming to us in our dreams to wrestle us out of sleep into a lake of cold water (as he tried to do to me, mischievously, when he had only been a couple of months dead) or in others' memories of him, alive and rolling naked in a pile of leaves in the park, orchestrating a seduction to 'The Girl from Ipanema," getting young women to pose topless for his sketchbook when he was still only twelve ("I could always tell he was different," his mother said, "he could draw a perfect basket of Easter eggs when he was three years old") - what kind of immortality is that...
...I thought, what does it mean, to go to be with God...
...The mysterious gut infection that brought a pain that made suicide understandable, a pain that filled his entire consciousness, leaving no room for anything but pain...
...He imagined us in our middle and old age, riding bicycles around a college campus, impassioned professors, with enough time to think and read and talk and teach and write...
...He was elusive then...
...He imagined the grief of his family and friends and was saddened, but when he thought of himself, of his own death, it was not unpleasant...
...Or like the sentences in the Gertrude Stein novel he once cut to pieces to make the papier-mache face of a mannequin called "Ida," the figure of the book's protagonist, whom he photographed in her mannish brown suit in different locations around his neighborhood...
...with a rusted chain halo, and Mary, gracing either end of the living room window, which looked over the city in an apartment where several times a day you'd hear a chorus of church bells ringing), the couch and chairs and little marble-topped end table...
...secular modern ones, tragically or gaily wrought, of immortality in art...
...There are the traditional religious dramas of salvation or damnation...
...It is a story outrageously true, and defiantly, untrue...
...Or was it the living room...
...In our high-rise college dorm there was another public space that was never used, a ground floor "common room" with a grand piano, which he made his own...
...Then he was in Jerusalem with me, the earthly, not the heavenly city, and for a moment I was preoccupied, as I have been in dreams before, by the difference between authentic and inauthentic relics...
...She lives in New York City...
...He loathed slop-piness, self-indulgence when it came to serious work, so he avoided taking his most important work seriously...
...He loved yard sales and flea markets, the castaways of other lives furnishing his own: the sheets, the dishes and cook-ware, the coffee maker, books, religious artifacts (a plaster Joseph, or is it Anthony...
...Then we went inside the church, and held each other tightly in the back corner for a long time...
...Observant and nonobservant, atheist, agnostic and devout, gay, lesbian, and hetero, fornica-tors all...
...When he tried to contemplate an end to his own existence he was simply mystified by it...
...The complete set of Faulkner, each volume of which he had read twice, imposed, in their lurid paperback covers, a certain obligation on his bookshelves, a requirement...
...I said, our being able to accept distances and disagreements and even irritation, having confidence, certainty, that this friendship has its own life...
...He could not understand it...
...I was still so conscious of the danger of his getting sick...
...I chastised him for not wearing a jacket...
...you're going to be with God," his most devout gay friend said...
...For those who died too young to know what might have become of their creations, who had not enough time to realize their enormous talents in forms the rest of us can hold, there is the narrative in which death tells a tale of the loss of potential- and, enragingly, tells it over and over again...
...Enthralled and repelled by his own sensitivity, and his lusts...
...Another student asked me, "Don't you want to be sure that if you were to walk out onto that highway and be hit by a car right now, you would be going to heaven...
...Existence as exhortation...
...pan-tossed angel hair pasta with vegetables, egg pastina with butter (from my childhood), cheese grits and pork chops (from his), extravagant omelets (he showed me how they puffed up more if you cooked them with a lid on the pan...
...He told magnificent stories about his panhandle hometown, the woman next door who taught him piano, and the one who came to the screen door to listen to him play, the old priest, the boy he loved secretly who later worked on an oil rig and died suddenly in a wreck...
...Didn't he hang an extra yard-sale frame tilted before it and a doll or a wig or record album cover or some other piece of junk to give it a third dimension...
...The unsolvable geometry of it became a recurrent figure of his nightmares...
Vol. 123 • March 1996 • No. 6
