All Souls' Eve

My eye had caught on her as I was walking out of the train station, my work day done, my commute finally drawing to a close. Every day I walked this same pavement, and every day I passed through these doors. For all I knew, she was there every day, too, crouched against the great stonework fa�ade of New York's Grand Central Station. Maybe my eye had even caught on her before as I passed by. On this day, my eye not only caught but held; and my thoughts, racing far afield, returned to the moment, after making a detour through years long lapsed to when she and I were young together.

I stopped in my tracks and she seemed to take notice, her eyes fastening on mine in turn, her expression blank for a long moment - and then, at once, startled, as she saw it was me, and saw that I was seeing her.

"Janice," I breathed.

"Ranul!" she exclaimed.

I had no idea how long she had been homeless. I took her back to my place -- of course I did, what else was I going to do? I wanted to offer her a shower, a good meal.

And she wanted...

What she wanted was for me to keep the lights turned off. Nothing more than that, and to sit in the evening's growing shadow, last golden light of day trickling into ink. Silent we sat, as though waiting.

Darkness and silence, such silence I did not even hear her breathing. Slowly, I told myself. Let her acclimate. If she needs the room to stay dim out of pride or vanity or eye trouble or whatever reason, that's no tall order. And food, bathing, clean clothes, all of that will come in time...

She had taken up a position on an old sofa I kept around, not out of poverty or sentiment, but purely from inertia. She regarded me from dark eyes, from darkness that even more thickly knitted about her slight form, shrouding her as though to keep her safe and warm. I offered her tea... coffee... she declined. I almost offered her wine, and caught myself. Would she take offense? Would she fall onto a bottle with ravenous need? How should I approach the subject? Should I not approach it at all...?

"So," she said, her voice level and strong with a clarity she'd seemed to lack until that moment. "How are you coping with your..." The words choked off for a moment, and then she spat it out: "Homosexuality?"

"Better than you are, I guess," I shot back -- a joke, a poke, a reflex. We stared at each other. I had a nauseating feeling that whatever her woes, however her life had gone wrong, she was about to lay it all at my feet.

If it was to be, then let it be. I invited it, asking, "What happened to you?"

"The usual. Girl meets boy, boy turns out to be gay, girl tries her hand at becoming a composer. It all doesn't work out. Not for her, anyway... What about you?"

"Gay, as noted," I said.

"But happy too?"

"But happy..." The echo snagged in my throat. It was neither true nor false. Did I want to get into this with her? Tell her about Daniel, how our twelve years together had come crashing down in flames, the timbers and shingles of the home we had created together torched by his infidelity and my career priorities, his alcoholism and my workaholism, my diffidence and his...

"AIDS," Janice said.

I looked at her sharply. How had she known of his HIV diagnosis, of his tears, then his rage, then his stony withdrawal, the way he receded from me until he was gone from our home, from my life? But she wasn't conjuring visions from a crystal ball. She was throwing the word out to see what I had to say about it.

"I'm clean," I told her.

"But you live every day in defiance of God's design and He might punish you with AIDS," she said.

This was one of the main reasons Janice and I never worked out. Not just that I was gay... hell, how many gay guys did I know who had met "the right one" and settled in, with that "right one" being a woman, only for "right" to turn wrong after a few years. That sorry, trite picture might have been us. In the end, sense prevailed... or maybe it was a fear larger than that of being gay. A fear of doing something wrong, something atrocious, to a woman who loved me and wanted me to love her back. A fear of doing something abominable to myself, letting myself lose my integrity for the sake of meeting the expectations of others. I had always thought our parting of ways was a near miss, a narrow victory of truth and reason --�a lucky thing, and a blessed thing.

But she saw transgression everywhere, and this made us unsuitable for one another as surely as my innate sexuality. My leaving her was, in her eyes, a sin. The reason I left her was a sin, too. I had acted to avoid wrongdoing, and she declared me wrong all the same. Maybe she was right about that, but still... still, always, she sat in judgment. And who did she think she was? Who was she to make fun of fat people, or dismiss others as "sluts," or declaim about the "sin" of birth control?

Who was she to tell me that God was "punishing" people with a virus?

"I don't believe that, and you shouldn't either," I told her.

"Why? Because lesbians have the lowest rate of infection and in Africa straight men are the hardest hit -- and the biggest vector? I've heard it all," she said. "It changes nothing."

"It makes God petty and surly and provincial, if that's how He chooses to punish people for their sexuality," I said.

She rose and moved across the room toward me. The kitchen light snapped on just then, the timer set for 6:45. It was another mark of my carelessness that I had never changed the setting after my last trip out of town, when I was overcome with a sense of dread at the thought of Daniel... of no one being home in my absence. As if a timer on the light was going to scare off burglars. As if...

My thoughts stood still, and, for a moment, transfixed by the light, so did she. The light from the kitchen glowed right through her, her blue shirt translucent. She saw me looking, and she let me look. She saw my shock. And she let me be shocked.

Then she completed her transit and sat next to me, on the newer, nicer sofa.

"Ranul," she said, her voice softer. "I didn't mean to fight with you. I've had to give up all that anger. I mean, I haven't... but I need to. It's what's keeping me here. It's the source of my damnation."

"Your damnation?" I said. What did she mean by that?

"We are the damned, we ragged ones. We cling to this life though it's over. People see us, but don't see us. Know we are there, but don't notice us. We are shadows. Just as in the days of Ancient Greece... shades. Faded and blurry remnants of those who once lived. Park benches, bus depots, train stations, parks. Among the human derelicts, we shift and shuffle, peer at the world of the living. And no one sees us. We are invisible... as ghosts should be..."

I tried to take her hand, but she raised it away from my grasp. Her sleeve fell away, exposing a long, long gash - a deep and bloodless gash. " 'Gibbering, the soul left her body,' " she quoted. Well, misquoted. She was referring to a refrain in "The Iliad." We had studied it together. She had laughed, a rare occasion when she wasn't tight-assed and tetchy, when I translated a passage from "The Iliad" in a frankly pornographic manner.

And then we had made love...

If her anger kept her here, as she said it did, and made her a shade, my shame kept me from moving forward. It was the root of my workaholism and my distance from Daniel, the original sin that kept us apart.

The Vengeance Fuck.

That's what I called it in my own mind. It happened just before we broke up... rather, just before I broke it off with her. When I realized that I was never going to stop yearning for men, for the strong, specific line of a man's shape, for the sound of a masculine voice, for the strength of a man's arms and the erotic, instant yes! of how a man smells.

I took her to bed once more, my rage and hatred fueling my passion. I had a mental narrative unspooling even as I went through each action: The decisive, even brusque, way I guided her to the mattress and removed her clothing. The kisses, volatile and laughing, that met her giggles of anticipation and pleasure. The way I plunged into her, each thrust a mortal stab into her core, her gasps a malicious delight to my ears as I sent a knock and a throb through the whole of the works, throwing a fuck into her to end all fucks, a memory of conquest and ravagement to slay all who would come after me...

And now she was here. Looking for more? Or looking to let go?

She touched my arm. "You have to put your guilt aside," she said, not ungently. "It's one more nail in my soul. One more spike that's keeping me here..."

I looked at her for a long moment, thinking back, thinking of what might have been, if only --�If only I had been different. If only I had been someone else, someone not gay. Someone not me at all. Someone not so afraid as I had been, not so outraged as I had been, not so willing to hurt others because he thought his own nature was hurtful...

Yet here I was, and didn't I also have a place in the world? Tears blurred my eyes and when they cleared, she was gone.

Put aside guilt? Forsake shame? Even for something as shameful as The Vengeance Fuck? No, it went deeper than that. It was guilt for more than a moment of lashing out, of cruel tenderness designed to soften her up for the shock to come. It was deep and burning, and it was the thought that I had disappointed her. I was not the man she had needed me to be.

I would be that man now. I would be the man I was. That would have to be enough for both of us.

"Janice," I whispered, in the dark of All Souls' Eve. "Janice, I never loved you. I used you to answer a question. I'm sorry.

"Goodbye."

The word fell into the gathered darkness. Night was upon the world: Night that could once more promise rest, and the delights of passion, and peace.