Letter 3 - Letters From London
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. -- Joan Didion
On the first weekend they are in London, he and Dustin travel out to Stoke Newington to have brunch with their friend Florian. They decide to sit upstairs in the front of the double-decker bus out from Bloomsbury. A woman and her teenaged daughter sit in the seats next to them, looking side by side out the window. The mother speaks. She tells a story about a boy the daughter knows. He apparently went out drinking with friends, was separated from them and climbed the fence at a marina, injuring himself in the process. “He wanted to see the water,” she says of the impulse. “He then walked onto one of those super yachts, went into the cabin and climbed in bed. A man was asleep there and was not happy to see him. He called the police. The boy was detained and released but his parents don’t know about it.”
How does she know about it, he wonders. He turns to Dustin ever so slightly, whose eyebrow raises in return. They are both listening, rapt.
“Was it really him,” the daughter asks. “I thought he’d gone sober.”
“Alcohol affects different people differently,” the mother says primly, as if she’s been rebuked. They get off at their stop. When they are gone, Dustin says, “That sounds like it was a trick gone wrong.”
He nods. He is thinking of the daughter, disturbed by the mother’s story, and he and Dustin discuss the strange assortment of details that she knows but that the parents of the boy somehow do not, and all that this implies, and then it is their stop and they exit the bus.
He opens a file in his phone for notes about moments like this, something he hasn’t done in a long time, and writes it down. He remembers the Joan Didion anecdote from The Year of Magical Thinking about how she had noticed her husband had stopped writing moments like this down for stories as he neared what became his death. As he starts the note, he has the feeling of retreating in that moment from the edge of whatever that was.
*
Florian’s apartment in Stoke Newington is charmingly twisty, a one bedroom with narrow stairs down to a garden out back, visited frequently by foxes. It is late August, unseasonably warm. They eat their brunch out there until the weather changes, when they leave the garden and go back upstairs to his living room. Florian asks them to be sure to close the door to keep the foxes out. As he closes it, he notices a cat door.
“Do you have cats?”
“No,” Florian says, and then describes the way the cats of the neighborhood move through the houses, typically uninterested, he says, in being fed or even affection—they are really just seeking a right of way. On their way to see each other.
Florian is an artist, one of Dustin’s best and oldest friends, a slender and handsome man from Germany who met Dustin when they were both theater ushers in New York in their 20s, a kind of fraternal organization all its own. Florian poses for many stock photos as a model and so he sometimes appears in ads or on book covers many years later with no sense of connection to the project. He has lived in London for some time now, working in advertising and having adventures. The last time they were in London, in 2019, he remembers sitting through much of a party at Florian’s absorbed in his framed photograph of Princess Anne and Diana Ross in conversation. The photo is by Chris Christodolou, and there is something about it that keeps his attention again on this afternoon, but he moves away from it, determined to be a better guest.
They spend the afternoon talking about art and pseudonyms, and the mystery of Florian’s grandfather who may or may not have posed for a portrait Florian found years after his death in a junk shop. So like him in a way, he thinks, of the way Florian appears in a catalogue or an ad without knowing he is there. His image just out in the world, on the cover of a romance novel or an ad for a bed. Was this even something that could run in the family, he wondered. Maybe.
He and Dustin ride home on the same bus, upstairs again in front. No daughter and her mother with mysterious knowledge of her friend’s troubles this time. No one with an interesting dramatic story. Instead he watches near miss after near miss, a spontaneous improvised modern dance with the bus and the pedestrians, and resolves to sit in the back more.
*
Identity weighs differently in London, he has noticed. It doesn’t seem much of anything to be mixed here now the way he is, at least to anyone else. No one is surprised by it at least, so much so that when a new colleague is surprised, he is startled by the way she looks at him as if he is transforming in front of her, changing along with her astonishment. He has the feeling of being held up to the light in a way that hasn’t happened for years. “I see it now,” she says.
It feels recent. He recalls the radio interviewer a few years ago who had asked him point blank what a UK audience would want with essays by a Korean American gay writer, saying each term like it was a chore. This was a media appearance done to promote his essay collection as it published there. He was so taken off guard he doesn’t remember what he said to the man in return. There is just a blank spot, this man’s face but no name. An older white man in a suit. But he has noticed lately that his mind has taken to erasing the names and features of people who had done wrong by him, like somewhere in his unconscious mind Lila from Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is going around cutting the faces out of his memories. Some different way to hold a grudge had arrived, almost weightless: to vanish them.
He is trying also to recall London from the first time he visited, in 1990, but he can’t. Was there a grudge there? He was 23, not yet a novelist except in his own mind. He had set up a trip with the only three people he knew in Europe and in the UK at the time: his friend L. in Berlin, his friend S. in London, and his brother, C., in Edinburgh, at a program like the one he is leading currently in London 33 years later. He was trying to decide if there was anywhere else in the world to live besides America. He came to no conclusions then, returning instead with the feeling that he had not found his path out.
The London he remembers from then is confined to small memories: buying books at Gay Is The Word, around the corner from his sublet, being the largest of them. He remembers discovering the flapjacks that were not pancakes but golden oat cakes made from butter and honey, and the baked potatoes sold from windows with different fillings. London was the first place he ordered and paid for a very expensive martini, as he mistook the 10£ for 10 dollars.
But while his Berlin visit and his Edinburgh visit are etched in his mind forever, his 1990 London visit has almost no features. In Berlin he arrived accidentally on the day of the celebration of reunification. In Edinburgh, he entered a Gothic landscape with hostels and pubs that seemed full of attractive Australian students and Americans from Florida who drank enormously and wanted to have adventures of all kinds. The London trip could have been great also but in his mind it is misty. A book published by Serpent’s Tail whose title he almost remembers.
He writes to ask his friend S., who he was visiting then. It’s a little awkward: Do you remember my trip to see you? I don’t remember much of it for some reason. But he manages it.
The later visits he’s made to London are more vivid. Him in 2005 with a suitcase of books, most of them for a prize he was judging. He left most of the books behind on the “Take one leave one” shelf at his Bloomsbury hotel. On that trip he also saw Hedda Gabler with Honor Moore and afterwards they went to J. Scheekey for a beautiful fish dinner. And the enormous paper bird in the Mother Goose exhibit at the British Library then still hangs in a memory in a tiny corner of his mind.
He almost packed the jacket he bought on a visit with Dustin, in 2013, partly to see their friend Ves, partly to see Florian. He had been on a fellowship in Leipzig, a little longer than this London term. And then in 2018, when he came as a keynote speaker at the Frieze Art Fair, he stayed as their guest at the Nobu Shoreditch and ate a beautiful lunch at Quo Vadis with his editor, Angelique, now a literary agent. As he runs over the memories in his mind, each time he came, he can see, London had become more vivid, with better food and more kinds of people. Calling it diverse feels like misunderstanding it.
His students mention this sense of the city to him in their conferences. His friends who visit also mention it. One friend brings up a column in the Financial Times he read about this that seems like the writer is also struggling to describe the experience. Every day he hears several different languages spoken anywhere he goes in the city, including inside his apartment, the voices rising up from the restaurants and sidewalks below. The streets, theaters, restaurants and classrooms he is in look almost as if someone has done color-blind casting but for a city’s life in some way no one possibly could.
Whatever it is, he finds himself awake in the middle of his life as he tries to think of how to describe it, and in some way that feels new. He feels interested in being alive again, interested in writing again, interested in stories.
*
He stands against his front window, looking for the falcon and the falconer that he sees sometimes in the late morning just about 11AM. He and his husband Dustin had noticed this man and his falcon on the common area terraces below his apartment at around this hour—not every day, but on a few days out of the week. A month into life here, they are a part of the pattern. Morning coffee, writing. A falcon flashing by. A falconer walking away with the bird on his arm.
At first he’d been impressed to think of someone living with a falcon in the city. After he tweets about the falconer, he learns from one respondent that falconry was a service of a kind, meant to control the pigeons who throng the mall that runs through the center, drawn by the food dropped by the crowds. A seagull flew by the other day and they had a charged face off, the gull shrieking as it ran wild and ragged above the falcon.
He has the impulse to take a photo of them to post online, and he has even managed one, taken just as they were leaving. Not a great photo for Instagram, but good as a photo note. But as he imagined the next result, the urge to get a better photo and to post it, that had quickly seemed like maybe the saddest response to it all. Here he is! And the falcon! 75 Likes, seven reposts, no thank you.
Go fucking live your life and let him live his, he tells himself. He is trying to break the habits of his previous life. “I don’t want this to just be another great place I was on Instagram,” he told his husband Dustin a few days previous.
The falconer appears. The falcon leaves his arm and flies off in a wide circle. He takes what he hopes are good photos anyway. But it is this way he learns that it is like taking a picture of the moon on an iPhone. Something reduced by the camera maybe. More beautiful just to watch in the present and let it be.
I sometimes wake up, especially if something outside my van window has woken me early, composing the narration of my dreamscape, satisfied, as I am in waking life, if I’ve just come at something from a new, unexpected angle. This is particularly true after days devoted largely to writing (more and more frequently of late, luckily). I find myself wondering if you--as you delve into these essays--find yourself narrating in he as you go about the business of your waking or dreaming world.
It occurs to me, too, this may be similar to when I was in South America and finally started dreaming in Spanish and then tried my hand at writing in a second language. I could say things I wouldn’t have said in English, the structure of the language like a door I hadn’t know was closed. Is the third-person voice, I wonder, a similar type of opening?
Thanks for allowing the digression. In short, I quite love these essays. :)
Seems your third-person personal essay voice is becoming more natural--or more nearly transparent. Is this a change in you writer or me reader, I wonder. I wonder if aspects of your life are richer, more nourishing, more fragrant, generally more accessible, as a he than an I.