We spend our nights with men with the waists of seven-year-olds, men who know how to tie bow ties over Italian cotton shirts, men who cross their legs, fold ascots, quote Gertrude Stein and Julia Kristeva, and we're all listening to one of them say, "He is the subject born out in death," which becomes the joke of the night, but really, when we're laughing, we're thinking about that boy--not swinging from the basketball hoop, but swinging like strange fruit--so now we're thinking of Billie but listening to someone quite different, maybe some electro-pop band who thinks seriously and plays seriously; and these are men I only see through a veil of cigarette smoke. And, in fact, this whole city is shrouded, but not in smoke and not in mourning. Something like too much time. Memories "inherited through an umbilical cord," a friend said--a flood of nostalgia for a mother's memories before she was Mother--and do you know how weighty this can be? Inheriting age when all you want is salve for your raw tongue and vodka (not the Naragansett shit they use to grease themselves) and something close to but not quite love: "all sharp new remarkable ... collection of angels." Most times I just sit and listen to their chatter. Our ashes fall through cracks in the wood floors. We spill beer on the floors, too, our libations to the architectural gods of the mid to late eighteenth century. Most times they let me be. We always play music, and there wasn't it time it wasn't on. I pretend I'm with the smoke and this is New England, my friends: an invitation to watch what might have been and what has been, the happy voyeur.
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