(4)

NUDE PRINCE

I had not seen Robert in quite a long time.  More than ten years had passed since he and I were lovers, and I seldom thought of him anymore.  Still, I felt the need to call him one day recently on the telephone, to ask whether it would be convenient for him to allow me to come over to his house.  I had, I said, a small favor to ask.  As always when he has run into me somewhere or heard from me unexpectedly over the years (I used to call him quite often), he didn't seem the least bit surprised.  As always, I found his casualness towards me strangely unsettling.  I never quite knew what it was meant to signify – a continuing welcome, or complete indifference?  At any rate, he agreed to see me later that evening.  He'd recently bought the house across the street from his own, he told me, for his mother to live in; it needed a lot of work done on it in order to make it ready for her, and part of his evening would be taken up with that.  But later on would be fine.

When I got to Robert's house he was busy doing some paperwork for his job and so, out of politeness, I came straight to the point.  What I wanted, I said, was to know if he had any copies left of an old poem of mine which had recently been much on my mind.  I had no copies left myself, having decided long ago that the poem wasn't any good; but lately I'd been thinking that I might have been wrong about that.  He said he was under the impression that I'd taken away everything belonging to me, poems and all, years ago.  "Oh!" I said.  And then, remembering:  "Yes, of course."  Of course:  when our relationship ended I had routed his house in a fit of pique and taken back everything of mine that I could find.  I hadn't wanted him to have anything left to mourn over and cherish after I'd gone.  Not that he would have done so – he's not that type of sentimental man.  I am.  He would have kept anything for me that I'd asked him to, naturally; and then simply forgot all about it.  But as it turned out I was the one who had really forgotten:  I'd forgotten the petty emotionalism of my youth, forgotten my peevishness, my brattishness.  Forgotten of my desire to hurt him.  I didn't tell him any of this, however, but said to never mind; the poem was probably lost for good and, probably, that was just as well.  Probably the poem hadn't been worth much to begin with.  And probably this is true.

I asked if he'd like to take a moment for talk, to catch up on our lives; and though he didn't have much time he did tell me a little of his mother.  He was moving her close to him, he said, because she'd lately been showing signs of a growing weakness in her mind.  She was becoming uncertain and vague, increasingly forgetful, lost track of time – that sort of thing.  This was of course a very painful process for her to endure, and a frightening one for Robert to watch.  I remembered that the thought of dependence on others, of someday becoming too feeble in body or mind to be able to take care of himself, was always a particular horror of his.  I told him that, although I wouldn't want to second-guess anyone's journey down such a difficult path, I'd always felt that the loss of one's mental faculties might not be so bad if we could just learn to gradually let them go.  To accept one's fate, no matter how unpleasant – and what else, after all, can any of us do? – might yield some hitherto unforeseen insight that would make acceptance easier to achieve.  Of course, the ability to do this might require a clarity of wisdom which, in his mother's case, the loss of mental acuity itself would render forfeit.  And what the answer to that was I really did not know.  Still . . .

Robert gave an impatient sigh as I was saying all this and lifted himself suddenly up out of his chair.  "Well," he said, "as for me, I'd rather commit suicide if it came to that."  And he meant it.  I responded with a laugh.  "Robert," I said, "if it comes to that, rest assured:  you can always depend on me.  I mean, by that stage of the game you'd probably forget what you were doing anyhow.  But I'll happily drop by anytime and do you in.  Oh, yes," I cried, "I'd be glad to do that for you anytime – anytime at all!"

I'd only intended this as a sort of joke, and was surprised myself at the crude sound of the words as they left my mouth.  Many of the people I associate with now enjoy this rude sort of humor, particularly when it comes to matters of human intention and the vagaries of fate.  Not so with Robert.  I felt suddenly that I'd embarrassed myself and opened my mouth again, meaning to apologize – but he only waved me politely aside, then began walking me quietly towards the door.  I exchanged my apology for a sigh.  It had, after all, always been like this.  Robert had always refused to take personally other people's ungracious remarks, preferring to assume instead that they had betrayed some weakness of their own to him and, in so doing, had the right to ask for some small gesture of forgiveness.  There was a time, I imagine, when his forgiveness had taken the form of a genial accommodation, which in turn would have given the other person a little space in which to make things right; but eventually Robert's ability to sympathize with the faults of others had hardened in him until, by slow degrees, he had developed a protective shell, which he'd then rationalized into a philosophy by which sympathy was subordinated to a rigidly defined sense of individual responsibility.  He refused, in other words, to lean on anyone else, and thus saw no reason to allow them to lean on him.  When I was younger I recognized this as a source of strength in him but did not altogether understand it; it seemed to me that it created an emotional barrier between us which I could never overcome.  Robert is nearly twenty years older than I; he was, so to speak, always ahead of my time.  I could never catch up.  And yet, as I grow closer to the age he was when we first met, I find myself feeling and acting much the same now as he did then.  For life, as I have come to find out, is in some ways like a sentence imposed upon us, a cross we must bear – and we must each of us learn to bear as much of its burden as we can alone.

As I left Robert's house, got into my car and drove away, I remembered something else I'd said to him once many years ago.  If it is true, I'd said, that we are each of us, in the most profound sense, alone, then perhaps the most important thing we can do with our lives is to find out what that aloneness is really about.  For what else can we do but play the hand we are dealt, solve as much of the riddle of ourselves as we can, and hope that the most important discovery we might make would be found within?  And this act of discovery we must somehow learn to accomplish, like a magician's trick, even in the midst of our need for each other – our need to love, to possess, and sometimes even to inflict upon one another the pain we must each of us bear because we know that we are, in the end, so completely alone.