For those catching up, the story thus far: Letters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And for first timers, perhaps begin with the bibliomancy.
He had brought a neon orange desk calendar and they tried using it to organize themselves—it sat out on the dining room table, and they added dates as they came in. And so it was clear October was going to be a marathon well before it arrived.
The Saturday night before October begins he sees there is a table for two at 9PM available at one of his favorite London restaurants. He asks Dustin if he wants to go out for a payday dinner and he says yes, and so off they go, out into the crowded night. They are unprepared for the numbers of people they see on the street. This is the night they learn of how Soho and Leicester Square can make Times Square seem like a quaint country village. Like the one they live in most of the year.
The room is red leather banquettes and white table-cloths, the maitre’d passes out illustrated menus as they sit. He orders the grouse and it comes served with potato chips on a piece of toast with a kind of paté made from the grouse’s liver underneath. A bowl of bread sauce is served with it, a cherry sauce also, on the edge of the plate. The bread sauce is a revelation with the grouse, a perfect accompaniment. This is the kind of meal he likes to order out because he would never cook this at home.
The restaurant has a private club upstairs and there is a party going on that night. The stairs periodically emit celebrants pulling on their clothes as they are about to leave, getting their look back together. Soon it seems as if Mike Leigh has been auditioning for two very different films upstairs. The waitstaff are all beautiful and very young and some perhaps are still being trained, though they are minded by an affectionate older woman who makes sure all is exactly right, narrating her activity with what he feels is a Cockney accent. He watches as one young waiter takes a tray with his and Dustin’s martinis across the room and remembers how he used to carry trays that way before he learned to support them from underneath across his finger tips, palm up. The key, he was taught, was to press up through the finger tips as he leaned back, to keep the martinis from spilling. He never learned why this works, just that it did.
He is careful not to react with his face as she approaches except to smile with welcome as she sets them down, thanking her.
Outside the crowd grows, staggering. A game of some kind has let out and the streets are full of those who left the game meeting up with those who were at dinner. He and Dustin seem to have arrived just as the crowds began to fill the streets, and he has the feeling of ducking under a wave.
*
Most of the time, he and his husband live in that aforementioned quaint village: a small town in eastern Vermont, so small almost no one really goes there unless they live there–there are no bars, no restaurants, no cafés, not even a farmer’s market, though there are many farms and in nearby towns, their farm stores. The postmaster lives upstairs from the post office as if it is something they thought of, a quirky little postal business storefront with odd hours he can never remember. The two main industries are a junior year program for high school students learning organic farming and a Tibetan Buddhist center. A tiny shop opens on Saturdays for a few hours so that local people can sell things they’ve made–apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, knit goods. What looks to be an abandoned gas station does have a pump that actually does have gas–just regular–and the owner accepts only checks or cash–but you would have to pull over to find this out. There’s a church, a graveyard, and some service garages, as if fixing cars and trucks is big business here. One garage at the center of town has a Black Lives Matter Flag and a Trans Lives Matter flag hanging from the upstairs. No one has ever attacked them that he knows of. The kind man who runs the town dump has a sign in his yard that reads VACCINES ARE POISON.
A food truck of the old kind – cheeseburgers, fries, fried chicken – comes on Saturdays in the summer, and arrives a few years into their time there. It is the talk of the town for a weekend. In the time before the pandemic there had been a neighborhood soup night but it has not returned that he knows of. Instead, the town’s focus seems to have moved to mutual aid–the purchase of clothes and food for children in need. And the need for a new garage for the town’s emergency vehicles.
They’d found their house in 2019, just months before COVID. It was inexpensive, a solid contemporary home 35 minutes from his work by car, with a writing cabin out back and three acres of property, much of it woods, from which periodically turkeys, a fox, a mink, a porcupine, a feral cat or luna moths appear like guest stars on a variety show for some short vivid performance, often but not always indifferent to his and his husband’s attentions. A few times, it has sounded as if someone is eating their house, and that was, they learned, the noise a porcupine makes when they are doing just that. The solution was a spray made of capsaicin, a kind of hot sauce for the wall to keep the porcupines away. A Have A Heart trap decorates the front yard, almost an art installation at this point, as the ground hogs pay it no mind, capering across the grass sometimes if they are surprised from their resting place in the stone wall lining the kitchen garden. A ruffed grouse used to take to the stone wall at the far end of their property and thrum their mating call from under the ancient apple tree there. In the first three years, they each thought the noise was a different thing. He believed it was a rubber ball bouncing and slowly coming to rest. His husband was sure it was a lawn mower.
When the ruffed grouse died violently after abruptly striking their picture window, they left his body by the nest of fox kits they’d seen in their neighbor’s yard, and then set out bird decals on their windows. This took getting used to until he walked down the upstairs hallway and saw they glowed like the ghosts of birds at night, illuminated by the security lights or the moon.
A replacement grouse arrived, as if the stone wall were an assigned beat of some kind and he is the next on the shift. He performs in the exact same spot, and sounds the exact same way, and has thus far not struck the window. He knows this bird may or may not be descended from the first grouse, though he secretly hopes he is. As he orders and then eats his grouse in London, he thinks of the grouses back home. How it would never have occurred to him to eat one.
Their Vermont town is the first community anyone has ever thrown him and his husband a welcome to town party. Another gay couple lives up the road and a lesbian couple also. They get together on the hill in the front yard of the other gay couple, a pair of vegetarians who like gin, and drink gin drinks around their fire pit. He has dubbed their hill Gin Hill.
Before moving there, he had tired of travel. He had been wanting a smaller world and found one. There was a silence he’d been missing, the emptiness of just being at home with his thoughts, in the present, not upset about a president. The Trump era and the pandemic had burned something deep inside him, had left him deeply weary, the daily eruptions and lack of any accountability. After Biden was elected he celebrated and then went into a deep depression. He knew what Biden and his team would do. They would fix things maybe a third of the way, maybe half, and act like that was that, that was all they could do. This was the pattern with Democrats and Republicans. After two years the Democrat would begin doing some really terrible things in the name of getting re-elected, offering giveaways to Republicans who didn’t need them. The whole adventure would reset somewhere lower than the last Republican disaster, never to recover fully. And then January 6th happened, and he had maybe the smallest hope that this might change something. A hope that has frayed. He has been watching current intently, if he was honest, since 2004, since the stolen election of Al Gore. Almost 20 years of his life spent clutching whatever screen it was with his eyes. It is time to admit his hyper-vigilance has failed him.
*
In London he is aware he is excited about being alive again. He hadn’t exactly been aware he wasn’t, before this. He had called it depression but there was something simple that felt left out of that word. He looks forward to the next day again. Not because of what it does hold but because of what it might hold.
Sometimes he wakes up and looks out the windows in his living room and sees the mother and daughter who come out for walks on the other side of the building on the second floor plaza there. He has seen the young mother go from holding her infant on her lap to coaching her toddler to walk to doing her exercises as her daughter tries to imitate her.
Sometimes he wakes up and he sees the falconer on the plaza below him, the falcon leaving his wrist to fly across and back in loops meant to scare the pigeons.
Sometimes a seagull does battle with the falcon.
His heart lifts up a little each time he returns the Brunswick, his Brutalist former bomb site apartment building, sitting like an abandoned spaceship amidst the older brick and stone buildings around it. He typically gets one of his tiny coffees at Project 68 or the coffee cart right by the entrance to the Tube at Russell Square, having a coffee on the way to work or on the way home. Sometimes he stops in at Gay Is The Word which is nearby, the queer bookstore he recalls from his first trip to London in 1990, practically the only thing he can remember about the trip. Or he visits with the second oldest plane tree in London, called The Brunswick Plane, across the street from his entrance. He feels reverential toward this tree that has seen so many people come and go, soon to include him.
Or he passes through St. George’s Gardens, the park full of graves from its former life as a burial ground, feeling each time a kind of pulse of some kind, like he is meant to wait there for a message. He never does.
Each day the plaza at the building’s center below the apartment begins empty and silent and then fills gradually with people doing their errands, first, and then with the breakfast crowd, the tourists, the students. Eventually people come with children. Then it is time for lunch, those who are grabbing something fast, those who linger. Then the older children get out school and come by for snacks and brief occasional fights, the street opera of youth. The Greek restaurant downstairs begins to play Greek music on the patio, and in those hours it is a little like being on holiday in Greece, if he squints and it is very sunny out. But in winter the night comes early and the people below are warming themselves now on heatlamps in restaurants and each other. Drinks also. People coming home from work do their shopping for dinner or a quick meal, sometimes a longer one. Or they come for a movie in the cinema downstairs. Eventually it is quiet again, by 10PM or midnight at the latest, though by the time December starts there is some dance party that goes late into the night in the park behind the plane tree, with “Good Vibrations” blasting one night like a wedding party gone terribly wrong.
Was all of this, even the loud music, the secret to his new happiness?
*
October’s flood of friends and family visiting is more than he could see but he tries all the same. He doesn’t go in for lunches normally but he takes them up, game. Sinead Gleason, Max Porter, Monica Youn, Lucy Ives, Fatima Bhutto, C Pam Zhang, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Damian Barr, Nikesh Shukla, and then Cleyvis Natera sliding into the first weekend of November.
Over a lunch in the middle of the flood with his friend the writer Priyanka Mattoo at Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch, she says something he’s been thinking. “A lot of visiting London is about listening to Londoners complain about how bad things are here and realizing they have it pretty great,” she says, as the waiter places the bread down and walks away. He reaches for it, hungry, as he laughs and agrees.
He has noticed this. “It is exhilarating to have the use of public transportation that works so well,” he says. “I resent how much I have to use my car back in America.” He jad remarked on this some to Londoners in September but now mostly keeps it to himself, because on the few times he has mentioned it to them, they insist their trains are terrible, and with vehemence.
He knows, as their food arrives, London may not be the answer to the problem of where or how to live but it is still somehow the place he returned to himself all the same, almost as if by accident. Running into himself one morning like he is one the friends he didn’t know had come to town. The biggest adventure ahead then perhaps for the last: how to take himself home.
🩷🩷 I’m so glad London did this for you -- I love it more now just for that 🩷🩷
Lovely, thank you. And yes, the biggest question of all: how to take ourselves home. And also, can we? Or, should we?