Sunday, June 27, 1999

Something happened, and I'm going to write it down before I talk myself out of it.

Thursday afternoon I was at Open Book, the bookstore with the coffee bar, waiting on an espresso, and the man at the next table was reading a novel whose jacket I designed in 1994. Blue, with a heron standing in reeds. I don't usually say anything when that happens. Designers don't. We're like the people who do the lighting at a concert. But he kept touching the cover, turning the book over to look at it and turning it back, and finally I heard myself say, "Do you like the jacket?"

He said, "I bought it for the jacket. Don't tell anyone."

His name is Alan. He's fifty-two. He teaches history at a community college out in the Valley and has a grown daughter in Portland. He was married for fourteen years and came out when he was forty, "which is a long story I tell better over dinner," he said, and then went a little pink and said, "or coffee. Coffee is fine."

We're having coffee on Thursday. On purpose. At a time we agreed on.

When I told Gil he screamed, actually screamed, and Neil took the phone away from him and said congratulations the way a dentist would, very calmly, and then Gil took it back and screamed some more.

Tuesday, June 8, 1999

A young man came to the House last week. He's twenty-four. He never got tested, never thought he needed to be, and by the time anyone found it he was very sick. The drugs have a lot of catching up to do. They may still catch up; Maxine says his numbers are moving the right way. But he lies in the bed by the window and watches the door, and I know that look, and I had hoped I was finished seeing it.

His mother calls every night at nine from Fresno, and he tells her he's fine. Then he hands me the phone, and I tell her he's fine, which is true enough, tonight. She asked me tonight whether I have children. I said no. She said, "Well, you're good at it," and hung up before I could say anything, which was just as well.

Men his age think it's over. I hear them say it at the coffee places on Santa Monica. It isn't over. It's only quieter.

Saturday, May 22, 1999

Forty-nine today.

Gil and Neil took me to dinner, and Gil gave me a shirt that is, and I'm quoting the card, "a color." It's blue. A kind of French blue. I wore it under protest and three people complimented it, including the waiter, which Gil will claim he arranged.

Sonny called from Bakersfield and sang to me, badly, over the sound of a cash register. Maxine sent a card with a parrot on the front, and inside she wrote, "He says hello, you know what."

At dinner Gil lifted his glass and said, "To forty-nine. And to one date before fifty." I said I'd drink to the first half. Everybody drank to both halves.

Sunday, April 11, 1999

Six years. It's a Sunday again, like it was.

I didn't go to the flower market this year. I went to the beach at Santa Monica at seven in the morning and walked north with my shoes in my hand, and the water was very cold. Gil turned up, uninvited, with coffee in the thermos from the comet.

We didn't talk about Philip. We talked about the war, the bombing over Kosovo and the pictures every night of the refugees walking along the roads with everything they own on their backs. We talked about Neil's mother's hip. We talked about whether a pelican was the same pelican we'd already seen.

On the way back up to the car Gil said, "You know, he'd have wanted ..." and I said, "Don't," and he said, "Fine." We walked about ten more steps. Then he said, "...you to get a haircut," and I laughed so hard I had to sit down in the sand.

Sunday, March 14, 1999

Gil had a dinner party last night. Six of us. Every chair had a little handwritten place card, and mine said RUSSELL, and the one next to it said WARREN.

Warren is an orthodontist. Warren is perfectly nice. Warren spoke for forty minutes about his mutual funds, and then asked me what I did, and when I said I design book jackets he said, "Oh, I don't really read," and then, because he really is nice, looked stricken, and then told me about a mutual fund that invests in publishing.

I don't blame Warren. I blame Gil. On the porch afterward I said, "Never again," and Gil said, "That was a rehearsal," and kissed me on the forehead like a nun.

The truth, which I'll only put here: sitting next to Warren, with his nice teeth and his nice funds, I felt like I was cheating. On a man who has been dead nearly six years. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how it sounds.

Sunday, February 14, 1999

Gil sent me a valentine. Inside, in his big loopy capitals, it said FROM YOUR FUTURE, and nothing else.

So today I did something I've been putting off for almost six years. I took Philip's clothes out of the hall closet. Not all of them. I kept his painting shirts, the ones with blue on the cuffs that never washed out, and the leather jacket, which never fit me and never will. The rest I folded into boxes for the clothes closet at the House, where men who arrive with nothing can pick out a sweater.

I held each thing up before I folded it. You'd think after all this time they'd still smell like him. They don't. They smell like the closet. I don't know why that was the part that got me.

I drove the boxes over to the House before I could change my mind. Maxine met me at the curb and took the first one out of my arms without a word, and carried it inside, and came back for the next.

Sunday, January 10, 1999

Stamps went up to thirty-three cents today, and I have forty invoices to mail and two sheets of thirty-twos, so I've spent the evening licking one-cent stamps. I can't think of a more fitting way to begin a year.

Gil and Neil came over New Year's Eve and we watched the ball drop in New York at nine o'clock our time, which Gil calls "the early show, for seniors." At midnight, our midnight, Gil made my resolution for me, since he says my own resolutions are all about kerning.

"In 1999," he said, "you will go on one date." Not fall in love. Not "move on"; he knows better than to use that phrase in my house. A date. Coffee. One hour.

I said, "Gil, I'm forty-eight." He said, "Exactly." I don't know what he meant, and I'm not going to ask.