been. Often you would call me just as you were on your way out, which would completely exasperate me, but I can see now that although you still wanted the connection, you didn’t want to spend any time on it. And frankly, it was the same for me.
But Paris was good. It felt easy to travel with you, so familiar that it didn’t require much thought or negotiation. We had a sweet little hotel room with twin beds on a quiet street in the area of Paris where my novel takes place. Your side of the room was a heap of clothes and pieces of paper. (You always overpacked.) My side was neat—a small pile of books and my knapsack. I didn’t unpack. You unpacked immediately and used up all the drawers.
Every morning we went around the corner to a café for breakfast. Then I headed off to research a building, or an area, or a street, or visit a museum—I had a careful list of all the places I needed to see in the two weeks we were there—and you walked over to the Louvre. You had decided to spend all your time there, visiting a different room every day.
In the evenings we would sometimes meet up, but you had friends in Paris and would visit them as well. When we did go out together you were distracted, as you often were, not listening to anything I said, or talking right over me, never making eye contact. If I wanted to tell you anything important, I had to say it all in a burst, so that there might be a chance of your hearing some of it. This was wearying, and once I was standing on the street near our hotel and I saw you hurrying past, and I didn’t call out to you. It seemed easier in that moment not to, and I watched you as a stranger might—a tall, thin man with long, dark curly hair, dressed in loose black jeans and an old T-shirt, walking briskly back to the hotel with a painting under your arm that you’d just bought from a street artist near Notre-Dame.
But we slept in the same quiet way, awakened at the same time in the morning. From our twin beds we talked as we used to. You told me a secret you’d been carrying around for years. I told you how I really felt about the relationship I was currently in.
In a tiny shop near the Métro, I bought a bronze sparrow. It was the only thing I wanted and I placed it on the table beside my hotel bed so that the still, round bird was the first thing I saw every morning. The plumpness of it reminded me of the middle-agedfigure of Sainte-Beuve, the poet I was writing about in my novel.
One of your friends from Paris called me the day you died, having just heard that you were in hospital. I held my phone up to your ear so that she could talk to you, and I could hear her crying. The nurses had given you a lot of sedation because you fought if you weren’t completely knocked out, tried to get rid of the tubes and the needles and the ventilator that tentacled your body. You were young and strong and when you struggled it was in earnest.
This was the day you were going to die, the day we were going to let them unhook you from the machines, because we had been told that you likely had brain damage from liver failure—a direct result of your compromised liver having to process the drugs they used to keep you sedated.
But when I held that phone to your ear and your friend talked to you from Paris, you thrashed your head back and forth, strained to open your eyes, pursed your mouth and flexed it, not unlike the way the fish you’d caught when we were children looked when they were out of water for a few moments and gasping for breath.
It was clear you were trying to communicate. It was clear you wanted to say something back throughthe phone line, but I could do nothing to help you. I took the phone away from your ear.
“He heard you,” I said to the sobbing voice on the other end. “He heard everything you said.”
14
I’m in Italy, at a literary festival, in a small northern Italian town surrounded by three lakes and with a small river running through the centre of the town.
But Paris was good. It felt easy to travel with you, so familiar that it didn’t require much thought or negotiation. We had a sweet little hotel room with twin beds on a quiet street in the area of Paris where my novel takes place. Your side of the room was a heap of clothes and pieces of paper. (You always overpacked.) My side was neat—a small pile of books and my knapsack. I didn’t unpack. You unpacked immediately and used up all the drawers.
Every morning we went around the corner to a café for breakfast. Then I headed off to research a building, or an area, or a street, or visit a museum—I had a careful list of all the places I needed to see in the two weeks we were there—and you walked over to the Louvre. You had decided to spend all your time there, visiting a different room every day.
In the evenings we would sometimes meet up, but you had friends in Paris and would visit them as well. When we did go out together you were distracted, as you often were, not listening to anything I said, or talking right over me, never making eye contact. If I wanted to tell you anything important, I had to say it all in a burst, so that there might be a chance of your hearing some of it. This was wearying, and once I was standing on the street near our hotel and I saw you hurrying past, and I didn’t call out to you. It seemed easier in that moment not to, and I watched you as a stranger might—a tall, thin man with long, dark curly hair, dressed in loose black jeans and an old T-shirt, walking briskly back to the hotel with a painting under your arm that you’d just bought from a street artist near Notre-Dame.
But we slept in the same quiet way, awakened at the same time in the morning. From our twin beds we talked as we used to. You told me a secret you’d been carrying around for years. I told you how I really felt about the relationship I was currently in.
In a tiny shop near the Métro, I bought a bronze sparrow. It was the only thing I wanted and I placed it on the table beside my hotel bed so that the still, round bird was the first thing I saw every morning. The plumpness of it reminded me of the middle-agedfigure of Sainte-Beuve, the poet I was writing about in my novel.
One of your friends from Paris called me the day you died, having just heard that you were in hospital. I held my phone up to your ear so that she could talk to you, and I could hear her crying. The nurses had given you a lot of sedation because you fought if you weren’t completely knocked out, tried to get rid of the tubes and the needles and the ventilator that tentacled your body. You were young and strong and when you struggled it was in earnest.
This was the day you were going to die, the day we were going to let them unhook you from the machines, because we had been told that you likely had brain damage from liver failure—a direct result of your compromised liver having to process the drugs they used to keep you sedated.
But when I held that phone to your ear and your friend talked to you from Paris, you thrashed your head back and forth, strained to open your eyes, pursed your mouth and flexed it, not unlike the way the fish you’d caught when we were children looked when they were out of water for a few moments and gasping for breath.
It was clear you were trying to communicate. It was clear you wanted to say something back throughthe phone line, but I could do nothing to help you. I took the phone away from your ear.
“He heard you,” I said to the sobbing voice on the other end. “He heard everything you said.”
14
I’m in Italy, at a literary festival, in a small northern Italian town surrounded by three lakes and with a small river running through the centre of the town.
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