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By Root 434 0

been plucked out of time, become emblem and artifact. It is, in memory, something I have made, like a poem or a vase. Now it lasts. In the room that remains there, in the building on Beacon Street, the plaster ceiling caved in—luckily, when we weren’t home, since hundreds of pounds of plaster fell right into the center of the room, right into the sleigh bed where we—sometimes—slept. (It hurts me now, to think of that bed, of the wood imbued with us, lonely without us, abandoned. Cavafy says of the furniture of one of his remembered rooms: “They must still be around somewhere, those old things.” What poignance that simple line has! Chairs and bed and wardrobe and mirror: the things that reflect lovers, that come to embody their moment.) I don’t imagine, in those declining days, that ceiling was ever fixed; those three big windows full of the rainy light of Back Bay in early spring probably still give onto a room piled with plaster fragments, a ruin.

Of the countless things I remember about that room, most of them nocturnal, radiant, passionate in either joy or misery, there is one diurnal memory of such force and beauty I want to recount it here. It was Christmas, the first one we had together, and we’d decked a small live tree bought from a little city lot on Charles Street in front of the toney grocery, with paper snow, lots of it, so that it resembled something from the forests of New Hampshire or Vermont—not a thing on the thick green branches but heaped and gleaming white.

The weather that December, though, was anything but northern, and Christmas Day itself was brilliant and weirdly balmy. Roasting (for once; the boiler was broken down more often than not), we pried open the windows which had been shut since October, and a warm wind redolent of fresh mud, cleaner than any city air down in the street below, came pouring in, filling our lungs with pleasure. But when the wind suddenly gusted, whipping off the river into the room, our tree’s tiny flakes all rose into the air at once, swirling around the room in the mildest of blizzards. We were englobed, inside the shook heart of a paperweight. Our room, which already felt outside the rush and pour of things, seemed still further set aside in space and time. In memory that snow spins still; our laughter and our wonder in the storm’s interior, lovers suddenly stunned into recognizing how small what’s divided and troubled them has been, how lovely their singular, flake-streaked moment is.

My companion—my Virgil, guiding me into this underworld?—doesn’t offer to take me upstairs, which is fine, somehow. I want to leave, to pull myself away. I tell him I feel as if I’m dreaming, as if I have stepped outside of time, into the house of the past. And he leans over toward me, conspiratorial, and says, “Well, just don’t you plan to come sweeping down those stairs in a big crinoline, honey, because we’ve got enough ghosts in here already.”

With that I thank him and am out the door, onto Beacon Street. I’m walking toward Berkeley and Clarendon, looking at the pouring traffic and the Emerson kids on the sidewalk and the shoppers on the way home from wherever—a world of radiant particulars, in bright late winter light seen through tears. I have never felt so implicated in a story. Until today, I have never felt what I’ve heard other men I know say, that they don’t understand why they’re alive, when so many are gone. I am alive walking down this street in the early March sun and all the men I knew in that house, that stacked repository of time and memory, are dead. Wally and Bobby, David and Doug, others I never even knew. I am here today, in 1994, walking a city street indifferent with its own hurrying life, and I am filled with the presence and weight of their stories. What am I to do with them?

A Shore Walk

Early May, a foggy Sunday. It’s rained all morning and the sky is contemplating further action, which is lucky for us—the two retrievers and I—because it means that the bicycle trail into the dunes, and the marsh along the shore, and the shore itself will be deserted