"I was in love, and he insisted that he was too. Only he was a tease, and I wasn’t. Only he was lazy, and I wasn’t. Only he was gay, and I wasn’t." |
Ohara Koson, Geese and Full Moon (ca. 1910)
The latest acquisition was a pair of Egyptian white geese he bought on Craigslist.
“You only find them in Asia, so it’s incredible I got them. You get $175 for a cygnet. You know, the babies.”
“I know what a cygnet is, Mark. It’s a baby swan, not goose.”
“Anyway, now I’ll have another stream of income. Last month, I made more money than I’ve ever made in my whole life. And with these geese, I can take you back to Paris. You remember Paris, Darling, when we drank absinthe at Le Dôme? Or the time you fancied the young American airman at the canteen when you were covering the blitz for your column in the Herald during the air raid, and we ended up ducking under the same table?”
“Of course I remember, Darling. I’ll never forget.” We often improvised like this, for hours on end.
He also, really, took me dancing, swinging me around, off the floor, out of my wits. He held me close, sweet breath on my neck, large hand in mine, the other tight round my waist. We belted out Broadway songs while driving—the perfect ingénue couple. We reveled in every little story we made up together, like the one with the little orphaned waif (our voices getting higher and tinier), so afraid, far, far away, drifting, lost, always… forever… alone. He would laugh until his dazzling blue eyes glistened with tears and the deep cleft in his chin quivered. In dark movie theaters during the violent parts, he always leaned in close and whispered in my ear, describing us together on a warm beach with sea breezes and swaying palms, while I kept my eyes squeezed shut until he said, “It’s all right now, Darling. The bad stuff is over.” He also told me he’d love me forever.
I’d say, “But I love you more.”
He’d reply, always, “Oh, Darling.”
Even though we only lived fifteen minutes apart, we emailed often, making up stories and names for one another, making up distant times and worlds when we were never apart. Sometimes he called me Serena (I’m really Kate) and I called him Jeremy.
O, Serena, I so wish it was the old days when we could hop in the car and motor down to the South of France, laughing all the way, a picnic basket in the boot and a bottle of Beaujolais in the car, your red silk scarf billowing behind in the wind… safely billowing.
And I’d write back: Jeremy, even better was when we holed up in the stone cottage and wrote that little gem of a play, Hark the Tempest Speaks. It had a delightful run in London, however brief. We were always able to pull anything out of the hat in record time. And for the record, I love you still. Serena
We had so much fun together. And we did love one another, very much. It’s just that I wanted more. I wanted to have sex with him, make love, make wild, passionate love—in bed, in the last row of the cinema, down by his pond among the pampas grass with his birds singing nearby. Anywhere. Anytime. I wanted to kiss him full on the mouth as his fingers leafed through my long hair and his hand cupped my breast. He had the softest hands. They smelled like cantaloupe and baby powder. We often held hands, but I wanted them all over me all the time.
I was in love, and he insisted that he was too. Only he was a tease, and I wasn’t. Only he was lazy, and I wasn’t. Only he was gay, and I wasn’t.
We had so many plans. At one point, we decided to write a musical about immortality, because we never wanted to grow old. The story would cover everything—reincarnation, parallel lives, alchemy, even a homunculus. We agreed that I’d come over to his house every Sunday at eleven and work until dinner. Then we’d make our favorite fettuccine alfredo and, with a bottle of wine, sit on the porch and watch fireflies. After dinner and a few more hours of work, I’d drive home.
We both had full-time jobs, so spending an entire Sunday with him every week was my one chance to have him near. Mark was a publicist, and for the last year, he’d begun to make money after years of being poor. He said, “I’m going to make a lot of money. I’m willing to devote the next two years of my life to that.” When I said there was more to life than making money, he said, “Darling, I’m too self-obsessed and busy to have a lover.”
I know he was making it clear it wasn’t going to happen with us, but I never lost hope. I was obsessed. Besides, the guy was so gorgeous, just looking at him made up for the lack of sex. Almost. But in the end, I stopped our Sundays, continuing the project on my own.
This was all before his money started rolling in and he’d embarked on yet another project—a sanctuary for rehabilitating birds.
He managed to give this project all his spare time, which left none for me. He dredged his back yard to make a crystalline pond, added bucket loads of emerald-green algae, cleared away vine maples and salal for lush, free-range pastureland. He planted tall, ostentatious pampas grass around the pond for peaceful seclusion, bought an expensive pair of Nikon binoculars and a tripod for kitchen window-viewing along with fifty-pound sacks of organic grit and grain-scratch feed. Of course, I helped. There was no other way I could see him.
In a few months, his bird sanctuary grew. He now had two pairs of dabbling mallard ducks—the males with iridescent green heads—one pair of adorable wood ducks, and one majestic great blue heron, all in need of rehabilitation. The bird sanctuary was only an hour away, and he was in constant contact with the owners.
The pond became a veritable paradise, his birds gliding among a chorus of peepers and bullfrogs. Red-winged blackbirds whistled, dragonflies darted, swallows swung, butterflies looped, and wild purple iris thrust their long necks toward the sun. Not to mention his crowning glory—a pair of Canada geese, now plump and lazy. They never left his land.
He called his bird sanctuary Walking on Water. Mark often used biblical references, like being the Saint Francis of the Pacific Northwest and I his Bathsheba (probably because I was waiting to be seduced, though I never asked). He also called me Sphinx, which was Oscar Wilde’s name for his beloved friend, Ada Leverson—platonic, dogged.
“It’s my little ark, Darling. They’ve imprinted upon me and follow me everywhere now. When I get in the canoe, they follow me about like a little army. So precious.”
Unequivocally, he loved his birds. When I called too early in the morning, he was always in a hurry, bustling about. He fed his birds up at the cabin so other creatures wouldn’t eat the food, keeping vigilant watch. At sunset, he’d go down to the pond to admire his flocks, throwing handfuls of grain. His latest project was planting red bee balm and purple and yellow flox around the pond to attract more insects for the birds.
Once or twice a week, he sent me pictures from his phone of “my family.” The pictures were really only indecipherable black rectangles bobbing on swampy water, because he didn’t want to get too close to bother them.
One day, he called me, panting. “It’s been three days!”
“What has?” I could hear his heavy breathing on the other end, like a prowler was in his closet. “Mark, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my geese!”
I knew this was coming. Some fox had finally gotten them.
“They’re gone!” His breath became erratic, like he was having an asthma attack. He was obviously pacing back and forth in his tiny cabin, probably stopping at the kitchen window with the view of the pond below.
“Darling, you’ve got to calm down. Take some deep breaths. Sit down. Drink some water.”
“I can’t, don’t you understand? They’re gone. And all the other birds too. Every single one. They’re all gone.” And in a whisper, he added, “Especially my geese.”
“For God’s sake, of course I understand. Those geese were your best friends and now they’ve flown away.” Why I hadn’t flown away by now was something that kept me up nights.
“Oh, oh, oh…” Believe it or not, he started to wail.
“Oh, stop, will you? Relax. They’re all healed and probably on a walkabout. It is fall, you know, and birds do migrate. They’ll be back.” I hoped they never would.
“I know. I know they migrate, but they’re all gone now, and I don’t think I can bear it. What if they don’t make the trip safely? What if they’re gone for good?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Listen, don’t be sad about the geese.” What I really wanted to say at that moment was, Listen to me, will you? My wrist burned on the toaster this morning. Or, I’m moving to Budapest. Instead, I said, “I want to make love with you. Today.”
That got us both quiet. He said nothing for a while, and neither did I. I wanted to hang up the phone in shame, wait for him to come over, wait for the inevitable ‘sorry we can’t be friends anymore cause I don’t love you that way and never will.’ Instead, I gripped the phone so tight, I hung up.
Ten seconds later, he rang back.
“Kate?”
I couldn’t speak.
“Kate? Kate? Are you there?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t here, not technically. I’d flown away with the geese or been eaten up by the fox. I wanted to disappear. How could I have told him I wanted more, needed more, fantasized more? We were best friends. He was gay. I was an idiot.
“I know you love me,” he said. “And I love you. You know that. So… what are we talking about here?”
“I want you. You know.”
There was a pause, and then he laughed. This was my worst fear—that he would laugh and not take me seriously, or else so seriously, he’d have to break off our friendship. I was his geese and would die without his grit and grain. Every day, he gave me buckets of that in attention, laughter, and warmth.
I begged him to stop laughing at me, and he assured me he wasn’t. It was just the irony of the whole situation—him languishing over his geese and me languishing over a gay man. Both unattainable.
“Like Zeus as a swan wanted Leda,” he said.
“More like Zeus snatching up the beautiful boy Ganymede.” I couldn’t help myself. My hopes of an erect Priapus, son of bawdy Dionysus and sexy Aphrodite, were dashed upon the cliffs of erotic Greek mythology.
After we hung up and I’d had a stiff drink, I looked up the Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan.” Maybe Mark had meant something different—some inference of hope. But no; again, any promise of something more was dashed, especially in those last lines: “So mastered by the brute blood of the air/Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” I was dropped, all right—Icarus scalded, paradise lost, Doña Ana in hell.
He was sad because his geese were missing. I was sad because I was missing.
And he stayed sad, no matter what I did—pots of lentil soup, backrubs, reading Leaves of Grass to him while he lay sprawled on the couch. I even cleaned his cabin when he was too lethargic to get out of bed. He held himself responsible for losing all those birds, and so did I. But I didn’t tell him that, like so many other things.
A year passed in this way. Another spring arrived. We’d had a rough winter with month after month of below-normal temperatures. One could feel the lightness and euphoria in the air after so much cold and rain. Oh, the beauty of green; how I had missed the green. Mark’s pond would be a haven for mating, everything matching up—seeds spinning in the air, the breeze ruffling the pampas grass and churning the algae-laden water. I too felt the intense need to frolic off through the wildflower meadows, all heady and confident.
And the geese returned—along with an enormous crate filled with water fowl he’d gotten from the bird rehab. Now he had, along with his beloved pair of geese, two more and eight mallard ducklings. Yeah, they were adorable. But what was worse, his geese were preparing a nest for their brood, which would give, according to Mark, at least five and sometimes twelve eggs for every pair of geese. He also announced that every female could produce more than fifty young in her lifetime. “Quite a brood I’d have, huh?”
I didn’t say, And what about ours?
That was not the worst news. It would come during dinner at our favorite little Trattoria. As we were finishing a lovely bottle of Cabernet and I was feeling slightly giddy and again hopeful (he was just so loving and kind and exuding), Mark took my hand.
“Darling,” he said. “Darling, we never finished our conversation on the phone that day, and I want to. I need to tell you something I think will make you very happy.”
My alcohol-drenched heart sped up, and my cheeks flushed. I squeezed his hand and looked at his unbearably beautiful face. I waited. After three years, I could hold out a few moments more. My eyes welled with tears, and he reached out to wipe my cheek.
“I know, Darling. I know just how you feel. I do too. You know I do. I will never leave you. You are my love, forever and ever.” He took my hand and raised it to his cheek. “You are my dearest, deepest, best friend in the whole world. We will always be together, you and I.” He wiped a tear from his cobalt blue, his Aegean blue, his Tintoretto blue eye. “And you know something else? This is what I wanted to tell you. I found out that my geese mate for life! They’ll be with me always, too. I’m ever so thrilled about that. Aren’t you?”
“You only find them in Asia, so it’s incredible I got them. You get $175 for a cygnet. You know, the babies.”
“I know what a cygnet is, Mark. It’s a baby swan, not goose.”
“Anyway, now I’ll have another stream of income. Last month, I made more money than I’ve ever made in my whole life. And with these geese, I can take you back to Paris. You remember Paris, Darling, when we drank absinthe at Le Dôme? Or the time you fancied the young American airman at the canteen when you were covering the blitz for your column in the Herald during the air raid, and we ended up ducking under the same table?”
“Of course I remember, Darling. I’ll never forget.” We often improvised like this, for hours on end.
He also, really, took me dancing, swinging me around, off the floor, out of my wits. He held me close, sweet breath on my neck, large hand in mine, the other tight round my waist. We belted out Broadway songs while driving—the perfect ingénue couple. We reveled in every little story we made up together, like the one with the little orphaned waif (our voices getting higher and tinier), so afraid, far, far away, drifting, lost, always… forever… alone. He would laugh until his dazzling blue eyes glistened with tears and the deep cleft in his chin quivered. In dark movie theaters during the violent parts, he always leaned in close and whispered in my ear, describing us together on a warm beach with sea breezes and swaying palms, while I kept my eyes squeezed shut until he said, “It’s all right now, Darling. The bad stuff is over.” He also told me he’d love me forever.
I’d say, “But I love you more.”
He’d reply, always, “Oh, Darling.”
Even though we only lived fifteen minutes apart, we emailed often, making up stories and names for one another, making up distant times and worlds when we were never apart. Sometimes he called me Serena (I’m really Kate) and I called him Jeremy.
O, Serena, I so wish it was the old days when we could hop in the car and motor down to the South of France, laughing all the way, a picnic basket in the boot and a bottle of Beaujolais in the car, your red silk scarf billowing behind in the wind… safely billowing.
And I’d write back: Jeremy, even better was when we holed up in the stone cottage and wrote that little gem of a play, Hark the Tempest Speaks. It had a delightful run in London, however brief. We were always able to pull anything out of the hat in record time. And for the record, I love you still. Serena
We had so much fun together. And we did love one another, very much. It’s just that I wanted more. I wanted to have sex with him, make love, make wild, passionate love—in bed, in the last row of the cinema, down by his pond among the pampas grass with his birds singing nearby. Anywhere. Anytime. I wanted to kiss him full on the mouth as his fingers leafed through my long hair and his hand cupped my breast. He had the softest hands. They smelled like cantaloupe and baby powder. We often held hands, but I wanted them all over me all the time.
I was in love, and he insisted that he was too. Only he was a tease, and I wasn’t. Only he was lazy, and I wasn’t. Only he was gay, and I wasn’t.
We had so many plans. At one point, we decided to write a musical about immortality, because we never wanted to grow old. The story would cover everything—reincarnation, parallel lives, alchemy, even a homunculus. We agreed that I’d come over to his house every Sunday at eleven and work until dinner. Then we’d make our favorite fettuccine alfredo and, with a bottle of wine, sit on the porch and watch fireflies. After dinner and a few more hours of work, I’d drive home.
We both had full-time jobs, so spending an entire Sunday with him every week was my one chance to have him near. Mark was a publicist, and for the last year, he’d begun to make money after years of being poor. He said, “I’m going to make a lot of money. I’m willing to devote the next two years of my life to that.” When I said there was more to life than making money, he said, “Darling, I’m too self-obsessed and busy to have a lover.”
I know he was making it clear it wasn’t going to happen with us, but I never lost hope. I was obsessed. Besides, the guy was so gorgeous, just looking at him made up for the lack of sex. Almost. But in the end, I stopped our Sundays, continuing the project on my own.
This was all before his money started rolling in and he’d embarked on yet another project—a sanctuary for rehabilitating birds.
He managed to give this project all his spare time, which left none for me. He dredged his back yard to make a crystalline pond, added bucket loads of emerald-green algae, cleared away vine maples and salal for lush, free-range pastureland. He planted tall, ostentatious pampas grass around the pond for peaceful seclusion, bought an expensive pair of Nikon binoculars and a tripod for kitchen window-viewing along with fifty-pound sacks of organic grit and grain-scratch feed. Of course, I helped. There was no other way I could see him.
In a few months, his bird sanctuary grew. He now had two pairs of dabbling mallard ducks—the males with iridescent green heads—one pair of adorable wood ducks, and one majestic great blue heron, all in need of rehabilitation. The bird sanctuary was only an hour away, and he was in constant contact with the owners.
The pond became a veritable paradise, his birds gliding among a chorus of peepers and bullfrogs. Red-winged blackbirds whistled, dragonflies darted, swallows swung, butterflies looped, and wild purple iris thrust their long necks toward the sun. Not to mention his crowning glory—a pair of Canada geese, now plump and lazy. They never left his land.
He called his bird sanctuary Walking on Water. Mark often used biblical references, like being the Saint Francis of the Pacific Northwest and I his Bathsheba (probably because I was waiting to be seduced, though I never asked). He also called me Sphinx, which was Oscar Wilde’s name for his beloved friend, Ada Leverson—platonic, dogged.
“It’s my little ark, Darling. They’ve imprinted upon me and follow me everywhere now. When I get in the canoe, they follow me about like a little army. So precious.”
Unequivocally, he loved his birds. When I called too early in the morning, he was always in a hurry, bustling about. He fed his birds up at the cabin so other creatures wouldn’t eat the food, keeping vigilant watch. At sunset, he’d go down to the pond to admire his flocks, throwing handfuls of grain. His latest project was planting red bee balm and purple and yellow flox around the pond to attract more insects for the birds.
Once or twice a week, he sent me pictures from his phone of “my family.” The pictures were really only indecipherable black rectangles bobbing on swampy water, because he didn’t want to get too close to bother them.
One day, he called me, panting. “It’s been three days!”
“What has?” I could hear his heavy breathing on the other end, like a prowler was in his closet. “Mark, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my geese!”
I knew this was coming. Some fox had finally gotten them.
“They’re gone!” His breath became erratic, like he was having an asthma attack. He was obviously pacing back and forth in his tiny cabin, probably stopping at the kitchen window with the view of the pond below.
“Darling, you’ve got to calm down. Take some deep breaths. Sit down. Drink some water.”
“I can’t, don’t you understand? They’re gone. And all the other birds too. Every single one. They’re all gone.” And in a whisper, he added, “Especially my geese.”
“For God’s sake, of course I understand. Those geese were your best friends and now they’ve flown away.” Why I hadn’t flown away by now was something that kept me up nights.
“Oh, oh, oh…” Believe it or not, he started to wail.
“Oh, stop, will you? Relax. They’re all healed and probably on a walkabout. It is fall, you know, and birds do migrate. They’ll be back.” I hoped they never would.
“I know. I know they migrate, but they’re all gone now, and I don’t think I can bear it. What if they don’t make the trip safely? What if they’re gone for good?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Listen, don’t be sad about the geese.” What I really wanted to say at that moment was, Listen to me, will you? My wrist burned on the toaster this morning. Or, I’m moving to Budapest. Instead, I said, “I want to make love with you. Today.”
That got us both quiet. He said nothing for a while, and neither did I. I wanted to hang up the phone in shame, wait for him to come over, wait for the inevitable ‘sorry we can’t be friends anymore cause I don’t love you that way and never will.’ Instead, I gripped the phone so tight, I hung up.
Ten seconds later, he rang back.
“Kate?”
I couldn’t speak.
“Kate? Kate? Are you there?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t here, not technically. I’d flown away with the geese or been eaten up by the fox. I wanted to disappear. How could I have told him I wanted more, needed more, fantasized more? We were best friends. He was gay. I was an idiot.
“I know you love me,” he said. “And I love you. You know that. So… what are we talking about here?”
“I want you. You know.”
There was a pause, and then he laughed. This was my worst fear—that he would laugh and not take me seriously, or else so seriously, he’d have to break off our friendship. I was his geese and would die without his grit and grain. Every day, he gave me buckets of that in attention, laughter, and warmth.
I begged him to stop laughing at me, and he assured me he wasn’t. It was just the irony of the whole situation—him languishing over his geese and me languishing over a gay man. Both unattainable.
“Like Zeus as a swan wanted Leda,” he said.
“More like Zeus snatching up the beautiful boy Ganymede.” I couldn’t help myself. My hopes of an erect Priapus, son of bawdy Dionysus and sexy Aphrodite, were dashed upon the cliffs of erotic Greek mythology.
After we hung up and I’d had a stiff drink, I looked up the Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan.” Maybe Mark had meant something different—some inference of hope. But no; again, any promise of something more was dashed, especially in those last lines: “So mastered by the brute blood of the air/Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” I was dropped, all right—Icarus scalded, paradise lost, Doña Ana in hell.
He was sad because his geese were missing. I was sad because I was missing.
And he stayed sad, no matter what I did—pots of lentil soup, backrubs, reading Leaves of Grass to him while he lay sprawled on the couch. I even cleaned his cabin when he was too lethargic to get out of bed. He held himself responsible for losing all those birds, and so did I. But I didn’t tell him that, like so many other things.
A year passed in this way. Another spring arrived. We’d had a rough winter with month after month of below-normal temperatures. One could feel the lightness and euphoria in the air after so much cold and rain. Oh, the beauty of green; how I had missed the green. Mark’s pond would be a haven for mating, everything matching up—seeds spinning in the air, the breeze ruffling the pampas grass and churning the algae-laden water. I too felt the intense need to frolic off through the wildflower meadows, all heady and confident.
And the geese returned—along with an enormous crate filled with water fowl he’d gotten from the bird rehab. Now he had, along with his beloved pair of geese, two more and eight mallard ducklings. Yeah, they were adorable. But what was worse, his geese were preparing a nest for their brood, which would give, according to Mark, at least five and sometimes twelve eggs for every pair of geese. He also announced that every female could produce more than fifty young in her lifetime. “Quite a brood I’d have, huh?”
I didn’t say, And what about ours?
That was not the worst news. It would come during dinner at our favorite little Trattoria. As we were finishing a lovely bottle of Cabernet and I was feeling slightly giddy and again hopeful (he was just so loving and kind and exuding), Mark took my hand.
“Darling,” he said. “Darling, we never finished our conversation on the phone that day, and I want to. I need to tell you something I think will make you very happy.”
My alcohol-drenched heart sped up, and my cheeks flushed. I squeezed his hand and looked at his unbearably beautiful face. I waited. After three years, I could hold out a few moments more. My eyes welled with tears, and he reached out to wipe my cheek.
“I know, Darling. I know just how you feel. I do too. You know I do. I will never leave you. You are my love, forever and ever.” He took my hand and raised it to his cheek. “You are my dearest, deepest, best friend in the whole world. We will always be together, you and I.” He wiped a tear from his cobalt blue, his Aegean blue, his Tintoretto blue eye. “And you know something else? This is what I wanted to tell you. I found out that my geese mate for life! They’ll be with me always, too. I’m ever so thrilled about that. Aren’t you?”
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Dian Parker has been published in New Critique, Yolk, 3:AM Magazine, Assay, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for Observer, Art & Object, ArtNet, and other arts publications.
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