A wedding in the sky - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Michael Klein

And Richard's house was dark, I remember--the house and even South Carolina itself--everything was dark or darkening, in the house, in the yard, on the road leading into Columbia, in the sky. All I could make out about where Richard lived was the photography equipment that reflected everything. I kept running into different versions, bouncing off different surfaces, of the same view: Two doorways into two bedrooms with big brass beds in them and wall space all taken up by his photography or artwork. Some of the photographs were of young boys Richard had met at the university.

Did I say that they were all gorgeous boys? Well they were, and it startled me, because I remembered Richard telling me years before that he'd actually stopped having sex. Because he was apparently celibate, there was something vaguely unsettling about the photos and I thought my ex-lover might have been someone I didn't know at all--someone in the early trance of a bad spell but awake enough to keep from going totally under.

I was overwhelmed by his photographs and how much of a different self was reflected in the rest of his domestic surroundings, as if in all the years we'd lived together, nothing about Richard exclusive of the relationship ever made it into the room, settled on the feel of clean sheets, or added to the toughness of old silk that got pulled taut enough so it could be nailed to the frame of a couch he probably found on the street.

After I left dark South Carolina, I wasn't in touch with Richard until a few years later. We had one of those phone conversations you might have with an old relative with whom you haven't kept up your end of the bargain nobody signed. You love them, but you've stopped telling them you love them or, in some cases, you can't remember why you do, apart from the fact of blood, which isn't love but the rhythm of you coming back, leaving, coming back into one another's lives.

Richard told me that he runs everyday, stopped smoking, and, even more shocking, that he still loved me. As for marriage, he hasn't met the man. I haven't either. And answering John's question in that parking lot at season's end was a way to bend affection the other way, a little. I know the men I love, secretly or otherwise, will probably marry other men because we live in the anti-nomad age. Today's gay traveler doesn't really like too much to travel alone--not for very long anyway. Too many men have died so that being alone, even for the healthy among us, feels like a version of waiting to die.

I'm not waiting to die, most days, but I wonder if being unable to move beyond the familiar comfort of a blood memory is keeping me single. Or, if I've gone beyond the ideal already, and new independence has put me in a country of dreams and actualizations I couldn't possibly inhabit with another person, couldn't ask of another person. I am so fiercely about one life that I can't call it what I used to call it--loneliness--anymore. Simply, loneliness. The past and present have sifted into one bright funnel of sand, into one, integrated life.