How did she know so long ago what it was I would need? We would need? How has she done it — continually been willing to reinvent, the world and our lives, so that we might not only continue, but thrive?
And at Vassar there is Miss Page, my beloved teacher, my most trusted ally, my support, my role model. Everything about her awed and terrified me — a brilliance, an intelligence as I have never seen, a sensitivity, a discretion, an extraordinary intuition. And six-feet tall! She was everything. Miss Page, who allowed me my first chance to write, to try, even though I had been rejected from the creative writing senior central course where one wrote a creative thesis. And for many years I will be rejected over and over from almost everything — but not by Barbara Page and not by Helen. And not by my mother. What can they see that I can’t? That no one else can?
Miss Page introduces me to the third woman — Virginia Woolf. We read her together in class. I begin to write. For the first time. And I am left permanently changed.
On almost any page of those luminous, beautiful novels I can find peace, challenge, the shock of recognition, company. One could live here, in lines like this, happily, for a long time. And I have done just that. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Between the Acts, The Waves.
And in fact I feel more at home there than just about anywhere. And it is for the most part home enough to dispel the terrible house that mental illness builds, for the first time really during the time I am at Vassar — a place that will become so demanding and after a time so familiar that I do not have a choice but to live there. And chanting sentences is the only way to feel better finally. And writing sentences, making shapes, is the only way to feel better. Sustaining, miraculous language, that all these years keeps illness at bay. Dear Virginia Woolf. Dear Barbara, dear Helen. Dear fifty pages toward a novel I write as a senior in order to graduate. Maybe I will be saved.
72 CARMINE STREET
Where we ran the ten blocks breathlessly because back then you got the Village Voice classifieds the night before and ran to each possibility and hoped somehow amid the crowds of people all wanting the same thing, you would somehow luck out and find a home in it all.
We did find one. We have kept it now since 1978. We will never give up these two rooms, and when I think of home as a place, this is the place I think of. Two minuscule rooms I share with you and our two cats on the edge of Soho in the West Village of Manhattan. I love you, though it doesn’t always seem so obvious, and I love unreasonably these two altogether unremarkable little rooms. The place I have witnessed in every kind of light, at every time of day, and in every season. A place of so many intimacies, and revelations, and heartbreaks. Sometimes for breaks from writing I will talk to Mr. Angelo, our ancient, Greek superintendent, in the street; or bring my clothes to the Rastafarian tailor; or pray for whatever seems dire and impossible at Our Lady of Pompeii. In fact, we have grown up here together. The Minetta Tavern, the Van Dam Theater, the Bleecker Street Cinema, all the things that were once ours — now gone. I feel the accumulated memories of being long in a place — or at least having that place as a base. Here we bought the Christmas tree that year, here I kissed another, here is where we sweated under lights, dancing. Here, the corner where we wept, and here — all this — a place so resonant. If memories take up space and possess color, these streets are black by now from the overlapping of so many accumulated events. Here I lay down in the snow for hours, unable to imagine a way to go on.
How many times did we walk those same streets “dead drunk,” and for once a phrase seems to fit, seems to make some sort of sense, “dead drunk,” limping toward home? In all the sorrow and regret and frustration we could not express any other way back then.
But somehow we have survived. Survived the deaths and acquisition of cats, the thousand disappointments, all the drunkenness, all that we did to each other that was unforgivable and that we have somehow forgiven. All the good and bad news — and the devastating news — deaths of friends. This is where the calls come. This is where life seems unlivable and I get under the covers for days and days.
And you launch me again, sending me off on the next necessary thing I must do in order to write, to keep writing. You set me off for the first time in what will be many times, to do what I must do — and it doesn’t finally somehow destroy us (though it sometimes comes close), but strengthens us in our love for each other and allows us to go on and change and grow and grow up. Much of the time we live off your student loans or a credit card or a meager salary or nothing. I go to my first artists’ colony. It is the first time I am given months of uninterrupted time. When Yaddo says no, when MacDowell says no, when there is nothing, nowhere to go, there is Cummington, a community of the arts where artists are not guests but residents, a place that offers space and solitude in an excessively beautiful countryside. I stay for months and months on end.
NEW YORK CITY
And then I am back and suddenly Gary is dying. The new virus. Thus begins our long season of suffering. Of renunciation. Of fear. Of sorrow. Of good-bye.
And my first book is finally published. Without compromise. And with that, I am satisfied.
And then the phone call in the middle of the night: the first of October 1986.
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS
I am returned to the ocean, pale zygote, after a long separation. Back in silence to my one dreamy cell of being. Another new home. Provincetown in winter. The off-season. I am given a small studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. I have brought my few familiar things, my portable Virgin Mary, my pocket Sappho. I paint everything white. In this home at the end of the world — surrounded by water, desolate, beautiful — I enter my long period of mourning. Home of grief and water. Home of sorrow. Having for months counted T-cells, having learned the incredible shadow a Τ is capable of casting, I try to heal. I walk the streets, the dunes, the beaches. I go to the bars and St. Mary’s of the Harbor.
If home is physical sanctuary, comfort, recognition, bliss, then home for me is Provincetown. Much of my earthly longing goes there. I ache for the place. It’s a primal longing, a sexual one. It is the place I am most drawn to in the world. And irresistibly, and a little against my will, I keep returning there. I am a Pisces after all.
It’s strange. I have lived now almost ten years without fear. Fear was a home and then it was not. Sadness was a home and then it was not anymore. And what could be worse? AIDS. I think of the urgency in me that Gary’s death created. A monstrous acceleration, a new conviction to living, working — loving with a new recklessness, abandon, urgent, urgent. Gary who taught me to do everything, to be everything, to want, to have, to try everything — to not be afraid anymore.
VENCE, FRANCE
To keep living. To keep writing, to not tire. I get an NEA and decide to leave the country and live cheaply for a long time on the money. I choose an artists’ colony in France called the Michael Karolyi Foundation.
It is perhaps the oddest and most strangely lovely time in my life. I am at once utterly at home and completely estranged and alone.