How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time. (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited)
A prefatory note: I wrote up notes at the end of last summer (gay summer ends at Halloween), but I never tidied them up to post. I’m doing so now because I feel like I learned different things in 2019 — my first summer in Ptown — than I did during the summer of pestilence. And different again to what I’ve learned this summer. Humans are notoriously bad at remembering previous emotional and mental states, which suggests that this post is less reliable than it would have been if I’d published it a year ago. On the other hand, I certainly would have been more circumspect about some topics than I am now. I would, for example, have hesitated to say that it was a magical summer: perhaps the best summer of my life. I don’t have the words to express how grateful I am for summer 2020. But I’ll try…
In February and early March 2020, as covid shit was getting real, I was in Thailand and then Seattle. I rushed back to London, worried about being far from home (and, especially, far from Bunter) if the UK or the US decided to close its borders. My husband (AB) and I had been separated for 18 months at that point, and we had begun therapy three months earlier, to figure out whether we were heading towards divorce or reconciliation. We were living in the same building (in different flats, on different floors, in different wings). I was writing one or two memos a week on the long-term societal impacts of the pandemic, but I had no expectation that it would make any meaningful difference to our deliberations about the future of our relationship.
This isn’t a post about my marriage exactly, but it is important context for what I learned from my long (six month) summer in Provincetown. AB and I, breaking some of the UK government’s key rules in the first lockdown, decided that we were a single household split across two flats. We started having lunch and/or dinner together almost every day. Without other distractions or people to impress with our independence, we remembered that we actually liked spending time with one another. We re-learned to appreciate each other’s company.
Despite my nascent hopes about how things were going, I fled the situation. In early May, on the first day I was allowed to leave the UK, I flew to Boston, rented a car, and drove to Ptown — a move that was ill-advised for any number of reasons, at least in retrospect. At the time three thoughts were foremost in my mind:
- I expected summer rentals to go ahead, and I needed to get the house ready for them if I wasn’t going to cover the (rather expensive) mortgage out of pocket
- Restrictions in the UK continued to be very strict (e.g. leaving the house no more than once a day), and I wanted to ride out the pandemic in a place where I had my own garden so I could spend time outside safely.
- Things had been going really well with AB for about three months (a few weeks before the pandemic plus seven weeks illegally bubbling together), and I didn’t want to put too much pressure on it.
Was I sad that I couldn’t dip back into the (pre-pandemic) summer that I’d loved so much? Yup. But I still suspected that Provincetown would be a relatively pleasant place to hide, physically if not epidemiologically. The next morning I woke up to a snowstorm. Ugh. The spring in London had been LOVELY up to that point. I lowered the blinds and went back to sleep. It was cold and bright when I woke again, and there was no snow to be seen. I cycled through quiet streets to the dune trails. Near the visitors’ center I passed two men, in coats and facemasks, trousers around their ankles doing sodomy. I dinged my bell and waved at them without slowing down. And remembered how much I fucking love this place.
Fairly quickly, I settled into a satisfying sort of solitary rhythm. I was, at the time, leading several colleagues in a working group thinking through the long-term implications of covid for our company. The participants were spread around the world. In an effort to spare my colleagues in Asia horrid meeting times, I had a 4.30am meeting every Tuesday and Thursday. With no one to see in the evenings, going to bed at 8pm every night was no hardship. As a bonus I got to see countless beautiful sunrises.
Within a week or so, I’d made a new across-the-street friend. Jonathan (and his metallic, baby blue 1991 Dodge Dakota convertible) arrived in Provincetown the day before I did, seeking refuge from a very messy breakup. After my gardener introduced us at a safe twenty-foot distance, we began a friendship made up of conversations shouted at one another, each of us sitting outside our respective abodes. When we tired of that J would come over so we could sit six feet from one another in my garden. J works a lot. He started Live From Provincetown to help the town’s performing artists continue eking out a living with in-person performances impossible. That meant running one or two livestream performances every evening, an undertaking for which I soon started providing margaritas and cookie dough. He’s also a truly amazing performer in his own right…though I wouldn’t know that until a few months into our friendship.
The pandemic stripped Provincetown of the activities and public institutions that underpin its summer freneticism. That created real economic hardship for many of my friends in town. People here rely on their summer earnings to see themselves through the quiet of the off-season. As Michael Cunningham wrote in Land’s End:
If you were sensitive to crowds, you might expire in summer from human propinquity. On the other hand, if you were unable to endure loneliness, the vessel of your person could fill with dread during the long winter.
Many folks in town work two or three jobs in season to be able to afford life here, and the specter of hard times ahead cast a shadow over the pandemic summer. But the quietness also created opportunities: to pause, to breathe, to live. And it was in those opportunities that I learned the most.
Radical egalitarianism
I’ve always said that Provincetown is the only place in the US that I don’t get homesick for Clerkenwell. In my imagination that was primarily about how the town uses space: high density, with mixed-use neighborhoods and vanishingly few chain stores. It’s a place that favors pedestrians and bicyclists over cars, which encourages moving at human pace amongst human-scaled buildings. It avoids the critique Sartre leveled at US & Canadian cities in his 1946 essay Manhattan: The Great American Desert — that the orientation towards the horizon created by rigidly-adopted street grids fails to protect people from being oppressed by infinite space.
The pandemic summer, though, helped me realize another important way that Provincetown resembles London more than it resembles other parts of the US: the de-centering of work as a primary identity attribute. I’ve always found it extremely jarring to be asked what I do for a living. Perhaps that’s because I never expected to find a job after my doctorate in sixteenth-century English property law or because once I did find a job I never expected to like it. Or because I have spent the whole of my career in England, where people ask the question perhaps 5% as often as Americans do. It’s also a question one rarely hears in Provincetown…at least amongst residents. I noticed this summer that weekly visitors ask it more often, though they tend to lead with “where do you live?” or “where are you visiting from?”
My theory is that, in Provincetown, this quirk is driven by a preponderance of artists: painters, sculptors, writers, performers. Most of them don’t subsist on their art alone, so they work other jobs. So we collectively understand that asking someone what work they do does rather little to help you understand them as a person. In the UK, the reticence to talk about jobs is underpinned by classism: at least in part, your job doesn’t matter because other class signifiers (not least the class of the person making the introduction) have told one enough to parse the person’s (whispered) background, making their profession an immaterial (even unhelpful) detail.
In Provincetown, an introduction isn’t necessary. We joke, anyway, that a gay introduction is sex. And Emile Post taught us all that it’s rude to break the energy with swapping names, an undertaking best reserved for after the fact. But certainly in Provincetown, no one cares what you do for a living or, really, whether you’re wealthy. You choose your friends because of affinity…and proximity, of course. As Mary Heaton Vorse noted nearly a century ago:
The miles that separate east from west are long miles. My next-door neighbors had living with them an aged relative whom I knew only as Miss Philomena and whom I saw as a delicate, aged profile against a window. When she died, Mrs. Higgins said,
“Poor thing, she was lonely here. She didn’t get to see her friends often, so far from them.”
“Where did she live?”
“Oh, she was from the westward,” Mrs. Higgins said. It was as though she spoke of a prairie woman planted in the Eastern seaboard.
Such atomized choices create a radical egalitarianism in Provincetown.It’s not that there are no inequities or power differentials. But the ones that dominate most of American society are out of focus here. It would not be surprising to find oneself kissing a bartender at a famous actor’s place…or a famous actor at a bartender’s. You may find that the friends you feel closest to range in age from 25 to 60, and that everyone around you thinks that’s to be expected. It’s liberating, and I’d like to think more about it.
It certainly doesn’t mean there are no wealth or power gaps in Ptown. Although the housing crisis was much less acute in 2020 than in 2021, the security of owning a house here sits in uneasy contrast with the precarity faced by renters. Most renters have to move twice a year, between winter and summer housing, and as soon as they move into one place, they start looking for the next place.
Without the daily distraction of Tea, and without a venue like the A-House to publicize the fresh meat that arrives every Saturday, it was easier to fall in with a community of washashores and long-term seasonal residents, valued for being myself, and invited to build new friendships with anyone I felt an affinity for. J definitely helped, by introducing me to some of his crew, but it also grew organically, and it remains a source of great joy for me.
Productive conflict and social support
I fled London, but AB caught up with me. He came to town for August. It was the first time he’d ever stayed for more than a week. As the month drew to a close, he extended his visit by a fortnight. At the end of that visit, we decided we were back together.
Provincetown in the summer is an objectively bad place to test a rocky relationship. Every couple I know fights more here. There are more options, more temptations, more distractions, more FOMO, less sleep. Before AB flew, our therapist explicitly questioned whether it was a good idea to try to make a decision while in town together. I was adamant, however, that I had waited long enough (we’d been separated for two years already, and things had begun to unravel a year before that at least), and that by the time of my 40th birthday in December, I needed clarity about my relationship status.
So we attempted to hash things out amidst the hubbub. Sure, it was quieter than a normal summer. But there were still limitless opportunities to get into trouble. The apps were hopping. The dick dock beckoned. The house of broken cats had thumping music and an active sling. And we fought.
Now, it’s probably important to note that I don’t hate conflict. I believe, deep in my bones, that we learn more from where we disagree with others. I know it’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Perhaps most importantly: I don’t want to be surrounded by people who are just like me. I’m super fond of myself, but a world full of me would be intolerable. Still, there are fights and there are FIGHTS. We had both, and (at the risk of speaking for AB) we learned from the experience.
In defiance of the default advice to newlyweds, we learned that it’s not only okay to go to bed angry; in many situations, it’s actually the best decision. For us, at least, no argument unfolds in a more collaborative or productive way after dark. And so we practiced putting a pin in contentious conversations if they started at night. We’d each explain our thoughts and feelings. We’d agree to pick the conversation up again the next day. If we were both feeling secure, we’d reaffirm our love for one another. And then we’d each do exactly what we wanted. Was that scary sometimes? Definitely. Could the jealousy, vulnerability, wrath, or insecurity feel overwhelming in certain circumstances? Oh yes. But the next morning, out of the heat of the moment, we could revisit the topic with more generosity to each other, and more willingness to find sustainable compromises.
The experience also reiterated to me the importance of having an emotional support network outside one’s primary relationship. I found it immensely affirming to have a group of friends who accepted that conflict is part of every relationship, and could help me talk through a rough patch without taking my side, vilifying AB, or offering up easy solutions. I know that helped me immensely. That, though, led to a challenge: we had spent such different amounts of time in town that I worried my support network was more extensive than AB’s. There’s no instant solution to that. Several people in my circle did offer to make themselves available to him, though. And he invested in building friendships as well — he’d never spent more than a week in any given year until 2020, when he was here for eleven weeks. Increasingly, we have plenty of joint adventures in town, but we’re able to have our own adventures as well.
Time is a flat circle
Almost everyone seems to have experienced time differently during the early pandemic. Provincetown, though, has its own relationship to time. The combination was (and is) fucking magical. Without a clear Saturday break in the crowds at the Boatslip and on Commercial, each week slid into the next almost unnoticed. On Mondays, we’d join a sunset picnic at Herring Cove Beach, though even those seemed to melt into one another — dresden figures of pastoral gaiety, indeed!
That aside, though, every day was much like the last. It might involve some work; it might not. It might involve a boat ride; it might not. As Mary Oliver wrote in “To begin with, the sweet grass”:
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
The tides, of course, advanced fifty minutes each day, as is their wont. And I have distinct memories of all the full moons. The seasons progressed in due course, but the precise timing of individual events is fuzzy. Arriving seems to have happened after something like sitting in the back of J’s truck as we rushed to Hatches Harbor to enjoy our moon shadows. AB’s six weeks during high summer passed in what felt like five days. It felt (and still feels) as if the first 60 hours back take a week to pass, and the rest of the time, however long, seems to pass in a few days.
Leaving in the middle of November was impossibly hard, but so it always is. And, unexpectedly, I was only gone for 6 weeks, before returning for the winter.
