Someone I thought I'd meet someday.
Desmond Sheiham
Paul's best friend at Cambridge, of whom many stories were told with a smile over tea. Who had the guts to turn down a job at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, for moral reasons. Who used to stay up to have a late-night snack and chat about math. Who convinced Paul it's useless to vote; who had a fine, thoughtful cynicism I'd have liked to argue with him about.
I'll miss you, Des, even though I never knew you.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Apartment in winter
from 1/21/05.
I walked down towards Kingsley Street tonight, in the downy, damp snow. Paul used to live there, in the apartment above the drive, overlooking the small back parking lot that stood above a steep, wooded slope. I used to walk down the drive, open the thin creaking metal screen door, and bound up the linoleum steps to the hall where Paul lived. His door stood on the second floor. I remember, once, we found a dead bird on the balcony, and I avoided it for some days, where it lay with its neck exposed and head thrown back; until at last, with a sense of the inevitable and a quiet pity, I picked it up with my hand gloved by a sandwich bag, and took it down to lay it on the soil beneath some thin trees. Its center had gone to dust underneath, a thin veneer of which still lay on the cement where the bird had fallen, and among which a few small, innocuous-looking beetles wandered, confused.
Inside Paul's apartment stood his usual austerity, not of character or habit but of a negligent detachment; Paul does not decorate. He kept it neat but questionably clean, and a thin grim developed along the edges of the kitchen floor, and along all cracks of the bathroom. The living room, though, was carpeted, and Paul kept it assiduously vaccuumed; a pink-and-white flowered couch that he acquired on the street stood stolidly against the wall; his piano faced the window; his "sideboard," as he named the desk and its associated shelves that flanked the door, was scattered with an assortment of small objects, coins, CDs, his stereo, and a small number of books. The big window overlooked a sunless view of the parking lot, but also, more romantically, the edges of town falling away beyond it, with the Broadway bridge and the thoughtfully changing traffic lights and the deep pine and oak woodlands. It had a wide flat stone shelf at its base, and could be shuttered by wide white blinds.
On the small table in the living room sat his small squat teapot, white with tiny blue flowers, that I bought him for Christmas one year. Beyond, in the kitchen, a rack of spoons adorned the counter by the microwave. A stained stove; a metal sink; a few pots, and a drying rack. His bedroom, adjoining, we spent little time in, and I remember it as a place of clothing piled on the backs of chairs, with a mirror in which I would sometimes tidy my hair, or admire my image when I'd wind up in some large shirt of Paul's.
I used to stand at the window, I remember, especially in the late evening when exhausted after work. I'd gaze out over the softly twinkling lights, drained, separate, and Paul would silently make dinner for us, not his usual role, but sometimes necessary in my lethargy. In the days, the cool grey light would sift in, and I'd touch my finger to the blinds, making them swing slightly. I used to sit on the couch and wait for him to change his clothes or put the laundry in or make the tea. Then we'd sit together.
If he'd gone to put the laundry in, I'd hear him banging up the other set of steps two at a time; I'd hear the screen door slap shut.
All this slipped into my mind as I walked past that plain, rectangular brick building, set a bit back from the road. The habit of the short journey, three blocks from my apartment to his, drummed its quiet rhythm back into my thought. I hadn't visited Kingsley Street since Paul moved away. All the images were fresh; the wet street glistening, flagstoned there where State Street begins its downward descent; the snow past which I've walked so many times; the crumbling concrete steps that encounter Kingsley at the corner. I was walking there to join a carpool to frisbee, as my ride lived just a bit further down the street. But for a moment, I felt I was visiting Paul again, and I felt the soft, empty sadness of nostalgia, that is so sweet and bitter.
Soon Ann Arbor will all be this way, a sweet, sad memory of calm and still and softness. For years ahead of me the images will startle up in me, brought by a song, a scent -- the scent of humidity or snow; by a church, a person, a late night. I'll walk its streets in the dream of the mind.
I think of Paul, his parents visiting him now, living his new life in the wood-floored apartment with its enormous windows on the hexagon-section walls. We placed his couch and his lamp and his piano neatly in their places before the fireplace; the little table found itself a comfortable spot in the kitchen. We tucked his bed against the wall, where at night the lights must dance, as he as yet has bought no curtains - his parents said they'd bring some. There's a reality to his life in that place for me, a clearness, a sharpness Ann Arbor never holds. The east coast is blunt, present. New Haven is unromantic and gray, its streets with their faintly dilapidated shops opening to the green square in front of city hall.
So different, that, from the tiny dim cell he lived in at IHouse, cluttered with his meager belongings and the substance of my suitcase. So different a place without, all hard light, cold and clear and damp with winter, unlike the diaphanous California coast, San Francisco rising all delicate and white, the great rocks by the sea holding their desolate beauty as the gulls winged tiny over the surf. No standing heads of pelicans, like a flock of outrageous, prehistoric bowling pins, await me in New Haven. Somehow my future on the east coast promises to be hard and cold. Yet I'm eager for it, for its blunt reality.
I walked down towards Kingsley Street tonight, in the downy, damp snow. Paul used to live there, in the apartment above the drive, overlooking the small back parking lot that stood above a steep, wooded slope. I used to walk down the drive, open the thin creaking metal screen door, and bound up the linoleum steps to the hall where Paul lived. His door stood on the second floor. I remember, once, we found a dead bird on the balcony, and I avoided it for some days, where it lay with its neck exposed and head thrown back; until at last, with a sense of the inevitable and a quiet pity, I picked it up with my hand gloved by a sandwich bag, and took it down to lay it on the soil beneath some thin trees. Its center had gone to dust underneath, a thin veneer of which still lay on the cement where the bird had fallen, and among which a few small, innocuous-looking beetles wandered, confused.
Inside Paul's apartment stood his usual austerity, not of character or habit but of a negligent detachment; Paul does not decorate. He kept it neat but questionably clean, and a thin grim developed along the edges of the kitchen floor, and along all cracks of the bathroom. The living room, though, was carpeted, and Paul kept it assiduously vaccuumed; a pink-and-white flowered couch that he acquired on the street stood stolidly against the wall; his piano faced the window; his "sideboard," as he named the desk and its associated shelves that flanked the door, was scattered with an assortment of small objects, coins, CDs, his stereo, and a small number of books. The big window overlooked a sunless view of the parking lot, but also, more romantically, the edges of town falling away beyond it, with the Broadway bridge and the thoughtfully changing traffic lights and the deep pine and oak woodlands. It had a wide flat stone shelf at its base, and could be shuttered by wide white blinds.
On the small table in the living room sat his small squat teapot, white with tiny blue flowers, that I bought him for Christmas one year. Beyond, in the kitchen, a rack of spoons adorned the counter by the microwave. A stained stove; a metal sink; a few pots, and a drying rack. His bedroom, adjoining, we spent little time in, and I remember it as a place of clothing piled on the backs of chairs, with a mirror in which I would sometimes tidy my hair, or admire my image when I'd wind up in some large shirt of Paul's.
I used to stand at the window, I remember, especially in the late evening when exhausted after work. I'd gaze out over the softly twinkling lights, drained, separate, and Paul would silently make dinner for us, not his usual role, but sometimes necessary in my lethargy. In the days, the cool grey light would sift in, and I'd touch my finger to the blinds, making them swing slightly. I used to sit on the couch and wait for him to change his clothes or put the laundry in or make the tea. Then we'd sit together.
If he'd gone to put the laundry in, I'd hear him banging up the other set of steps two at a time; I'd hear the screen door slap shut.
All this slipped into my mind as I walked past that plain, rectangular brick building, set a bit back from the road. The habit of the short journey, three blocks from my apartment to his, drummed its quiet rhythm back into my thought. I hadn't visited Kingsley Street since Paul moved away. All the images were fresh; the wet street glistening, flagstoned there where State Street begins its downward descent; the snow past which I've walked so many times; the crumbling concrete steps that encounter Kingsley at the corner. I was walking there to join a carpool to frisbee, as my ride lived just a bit further down the street. But for a moment, I felt I was visiting Paul again, and I felt the soft, empty sadness of nostalgia, that is so sweet and bitter.
Soon Ann Arbor will all be this way, a sweet, sad memory of calm and still and softness. For years ahead of me the images will startle up in me, brought by a song, a scent -- the scent of humidity or snow; by a church, a person, a late night. I'll walk its streets in the dream of the mind.
I think of Paul, his parents visiting him now, living his new life in the wood-floored apartment with its enormous windows on the hexagon-section walls. We placed his couch and his lamp and his piano neatly in their places before the fireplace; the little table found itself a comfortable spot in the kitchen. We tucked his bed against the wall, where at night the lights must dance, as he as yet has bought no curtains - his parents said they'd bring some. There's a reality to his life in that place for me, a clearness, a sharpness Ann Arbor never holds. The east coast is blunt, present. New Haven is unromantic and gray, its streets with their faintly dilapidated shops opening to the green square in front of city hall.
So different, that, from the tiny dim cell he lived in at IHouse, cluttered with his meager belongings and the substance of my suitcase. So different a place without, all hard light, cold and clear and damp with winter, unlike the diaphanous California coast, San Francisco rising all delicate and white, the great rocks by the sea holding their desolate beauty as the gulls winged tiny over the surf. No standing heads of pelicans, like a flock of outrageous, prehistoric bowling pins, await me in New Haven. Somehow my future on the east coast promises to be hard and cold. Yet I'm eager for it, for its blunt reality.
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