CORPUS CALLOSUM
Sometimes I like to split in two. Other times I’d prefer not split in two, but it happens anyway. There’s a subtle but important difference between taking a walk and wandering. Sort of a passive vs. active thing. Taking a walk is an activity with a singular purpose. In fact, the activity and the purpose are inseparable if not indistinguishable from one another. Conversely, wandering casts wide a net that is as likely to catch a whole lot of nothing as it is likely to catch something new or something terrifying or something strange. One way or the other, one doesn’t really wander but rather realizes at a certain point that he has been wandering. On the morning during which the following events took place, I was kind of engaged in both activities. I didn’t really want to be on the 4 train uptown. I didn’t really want to be running my hand along the dirty handrail looking for a cool place on the metal. But I also didn’t particularly desire to be elsewhere. But, like I said, I sometimes like to split in two, so I didn’t put up much of a fight once I found my two selves wandering.
The High Line was dusted in the sort of shoreline winter wind that makes your entire body squint. It was sunny and January and early in the morning. It was also a sunny January day in the subway, but I couldn’t tell. I was reading, occasionally shaking my head as the train slowed. As I walked along Manhattan’s long western edge (it seems longer than the eastern edge because it’s straighter and the Hudson’s width renders the view all-in-all grander) I locked eyes with a small old dog who was out for a walk with her small old owner. I could tell it was a girl. I walked over, squatted down and pet her all over while she turned circles. “Happy New Year,” I smiled to the small old owner as I rose and strode away. I was going to visit the new Whitney that morning, assuming that having worked overtime the previous night would afford me the ability to arrive late. The 4 Train stumbled over the bit of track over which it always stumbles as it neared Bowling Green. That made my feet slide around in their shoes, so I reached hurriedly for the handrail above me, sliding my hand to a cool spot. I was reading a book that I’d been reading for a couple of weeks. It was really good, intriguing. But it was difficult to concentrate on it because I couldn’t stop thinking about Donald Trump and how troubling, how pathetic things had gotten. I once thought that a political maneuver was one in which the nation’s Federal Bank, for instance, would move in to a city and, in exchange, the nation’s Capital would move out. That morning I’d learned that a political maneuver was actually more akin to getting blackmailed by an asshole in high school. I saw you go behind the bleachers with so-and-so at the dance dot dot dot. And so I couldn’t unhinge myself from wondering if I might have it in me to expatriate someday.
Before descending the steps from the High Line to the street I took a small pause. I do this sometimes. I couldn’t really tell you why. I don’t think about it. A woman of about 40 nearly ran into me. She was pretty. Not the sort that attracts me but I’d bet her grandmother commented on what a pretty little girl she was. Of course, leaning forward slightly and slipping gently out of her way I threw her a smile, which made her blush and look down. She walked down the steps and I glanced through wild branches to the other side of the river: sunlight etched by buildings. When we, finally, pulled into the station I did up my scarf in the reflective surface of the door’s dirty window. My knee started to hurt while walking up the escalator, but that was nothing new. Just one of those things that make a life imperfect, no stopping it. There’s always someone handing shit out at the top of the stairs. It could be 5am during nuclear winter and someone would be pushing a promotion for a free fucking medical massage in your face. The latest news from Paris, I thought, could that possibly be as they say it is? I mean, really; could a bunch of folks reading from an old book be that much more dangerous than choking hazards from China, than trucks driven by the tired, than poison Pacific tuna belly?
Hallway lights in the office were off. I was the first one in. Had just enough time to go to the bathroom before my morning conference call. It was yet another one of those calls where five guys older than me talked in a solution-less direction for an hour and I read about the latest supposed ISIS beheading. It hurts to harbor doubt at a catastrophe, but in an era when lies are so easily disseminated (and are so exciting) it seems an act of foolishness to trust most any report. Even if it were a possibility to move abroad, where in the world, figuratively and realistically, could I go in order to live deliberately, as a fellow says? But the museum was full of beautiful things. Some hung on walls, some lay on the floor, still, yet full of motion, and some drifted about in black high-heeled boots with black jeans and tight-fitting coats with fluffy collars, like dainty grazing animals. Of course each was accompanied by a similarly-dressed and much older male companion, but that’s no reason not to offer a story lifted from a college art history course. Even insincere smiles lighten the soul. Right?
At the far end of a large bright room there was a small painting. I couldn’t tell what it was of, but the bronze frame gave it an Edwardian appeal. Maybe it was its odd-ness that drew me to it because I can’t think of any other reason why I would find myself ignoring the life-sized decapitated head on a hotel maid’s cart, ignoring the life-sized Huck Finn and Nigger Jim. A lump rose in my throat, I remember. It caused a thought — a concern, really — like I hadn’t had in a very long time. Not since the onset of puberty, actually. Do me favor and think about that strange age when you were first starting to consider your private parts. If you’re a guy, think about those times when you would have to cover your erections with your backpack. Girls, your periods have begun and you need to use deodorant for the first time. Other kids in school are speaking in what seems like code. Sex terms and innuendo that don’t make much sense to you — not yet. You follow along, doing as the Romans do, you suppose, but you don’t really get it. You can feel the skin, really feel it, on your face every second of everyday and you know that touching it is a bad idea, but you need to touch it. This, this pubescent feeling, is what arose in me along with a lump in my throat as I neared the strange and out-of-place painting at the far end of the room.
Every goddamn article was about starvation in Madaya, matricide in Raqqa, the 25 Ways Russians Know How to Have a Better Time Than You. The conference call had left little work for me to do except prepare a revision of an investment proposal by the beginning of the following week. So, since a revision first required input from partners distracted by a business trip (which had nothing to do with the proposal) my afternoon and evening would be consumed by consumption. Very American. Very modern. Half an article, text message. First paragraph of an article, GChat. Nine minutes with a photo gallery, 30 seconds with an article, this head got chopped off, this guy was burned to death, a billion animals were slaughtered, a basketball player turned an ankle and was a game-time decision. The infinite scroll. By 4:30 I was fourteen minutes into a gallery of some 200,000 images that the New York Public Library had just released into the public domain. Click click click click click. An image of an old painting, a nude woman with a small bust. An arched cave framing a soft sea.
I had to close my other tabs.
It took a while.
The figure’s flesh was gentle, but it regardless aroused a discomfort. I couldn’t look at any point on her body for long without experiencing a welling in my chest and a need to avert my eyes. It was peculiar, though, because each action of aversion only led my eyes to another point on the figure’s body. Her toes frightened me. The crease in her stomach frightened me and so too did the fact that she wouldn’t look at me. Confused and sick, like I’d eaten too much sugar too quickly, I tried to make sense of it all. That is, I wanted to know why, of all the sick shit (the beheadings, the slaughters, the articles of political discord, the partying Russians) I’d seen that day, why in the hell was this painting of an unremarkable (except for her nudity) woman making me feel ill?
I hadn’t spent much more than a moment with any work of art in the museum up to that point. Just browsing, I’d have said if I were in a clothing store. The melting clocks and classic video games, the cans of Campbell’s Soup and wall-projected GIFs, hell even the model-types in their black boots were like trees in a forest; yet this borderline-attractive figure, with matted but gently blowing red hair (a trait I admit does not trigger a libidinous response in me), had me transfixed, stupefied. Dumb.
Have you ever listened to classical music really, really loud? If you combined that experience with the embarrassment of being discovered making an office bathroom stink, then you’ll understand what it was like for me sitting in that office chair and being hypnotized by a naked figure with an out-of-date body type. Tits. Tits! Nipples! The words, children’s words, kept coming up in my head. Bush and tits and fear and nipples and disgust. Adolescence. Boners and what is this stuff?! and secrets kept from friends and I had to run to the street. The elevator is taking too long. Can I take the stairs without setting off the alarm? What if there are people in the elevator? Am I hard? Not hard. OK. Should I take the sta- OK, the elevator. Empty. Phew. Thank God there are construction panels up in here, if I had to look at myself in the mirror I fear seeing pimples. My nose matured so much earlier than the rest of my face. Oh, please don’t let me be bothered by the security guard! He’s a nice guy but I need air. I am flushed. I am impassioned. I am horny and bizarre.
I need to get out of this museum! These thoughts, my Lord! I can’t look at these model-types in the black whatever-they’re-fucking-wearing. Fuck them, I need air! Jesus, imagine if this were a museum of mirrors. What a cruel joke that would be! Holy hell, I am suffocating. I swear it. I swear I am suffocating and I need some goddamn air. Are these walls red? Are they pink? I’m looking down but I can’t see the ground. What in the hell does that mean? Where is the exit? Where is the goddamn exit?!
Oh, thank God.
I t was gray out now. The two young-ish men were now outside. I saw the first come out of the museum because I just happened to be across the street. I was smoking a slow-burning cigarette, an American Spirit, the light blue pack, as I was wont to do not for any buzz or any addiction (not any that I would admit to you, anyway), but because I enjoy the time it affords me. Tell someone you’re taking a break to watch the street life and they will think you entirely strange. Tell them you’re going to smoke a cigarette and you’re just a bit behind the times. I was rather old by the time of the event I am about to unfold to you, having recently reached the age when my white hair and white little beard not only items with which other people identified me, but with which I myself had finally begun to identify. White hairs are a special kid of costume, aren’t they? One that you have to wait a very long time for. I probably could have told people I was taking a break to watch the street life and made them feel as though they were the strange ones, if I wanted, because once you’ve accepted that you’ve got white hair and that you are old, you have a bit of occasional fun with your new authority. But I’ve never inclined towards invention. So I smoked. Smoked long-burning cigarettes so I had plenty of time for making observations. On this day I observed a flushed young man emerging from the Whitney Museum. His startled movements aroused my curiosity. Very few people are jumpy at 11am on a weekday in New York. This boy was about ready to dive into the Hudson, if for no other reason than to wake himself from a nightmare. Maybe even to drown himself.
He started west on 14th St, towards the river, and then stopped. Another thing most people don’t do at 11am in New York: stop. Changes of direction, like changes of heart, leave one vulnerable to instant ridicule. Something in its suddenness, the stop, that changed my curiosity to downright intrigue. It was as though he had felt the force of a spontaneous magnet. I was across the street but I may as well have been standing one foot from him, that’s how clearly I could see him, sense his intentions, or really, his lack of intentions. Sorcery. Sorcery beckoned him turn and sorcery drew his eyes a hundred yards down 14th St, to the east, where walked an identical young man, identically in the throes of identical magnetic sorcery.
They walked towards one another. Eyes fixed. Feet fixed. Directions fixed. Movements distilled to a perfect essence: that-a-way. I wondered about fusion and grew concerned for my own safety. Perhaps I was watching a car crash. I envisioned an explosion, I saw myself duck for cover, emerging only when I felt safe again, only to catch a glimpse of a flaming tire bearing down on me. The mortician would have to be creative in leveling out the tread marks on my brow.
But that isn’t what happened. You won’t believe me when I tell you because you are a skeptic. You think that if Jesus was real he was a dark little Jew, possibly even a homosexual. So you won’t believe me when I tell you that right there, right then and there in the middle of 14th St in Manhattan, two identical young men stripped bare, hard-ons stuck out like ship masts, and smashed their bodies together in unbridled, passionate embrace. This thing going in there, that one entering the other, fluids from everywhere onto and into everywhere else. Every damned thing we are told we ought not talk about dinner parties or in front of friends’ wives. Acts that would make the most coarse of comedians blush. Call me a sicko if you must, but I pulled on that slow-burning cigarette until it was only hot ash, and I watched every lude and deprave gesture, each painful thrust and eruption with wide-eyed fixation, as though it was my first Fourth of July.
When they were finished, spent, exhausted, the scene slowed. Everything. Became slow. And soft. I watched them as they stood silently in front of one another. I watched them as they stood hand-in-hand, face-to-face, each gazing into the core of the other. They intertwined the fingers, one hand each, and together watched the joined hands rise. The gesture was elegant and gentle, in time with some symphony that must have swung around them, silent to the entire universe but not for them. The final movement. Tension resolved. Coda.
The hands lifted above their heads and they tilted their heads back to watch the formation point straight up, perfectly straight up, and watched as it lowered back down to the level of their hearts. It was no dance, it was nothing rehearsed, and it was not a thing the young men partook in actively, but it was nonetheless composed, designed. A genial puppeteer. Resting one forehead unto another forehead they exchange a smile, then a sigh, then separated, dressed and walked in opposite directions, presumably back home or back to work.
That was over five years ago and I have yet to smoke a cigarette since. It might be out of fear that I’d faint, the nicotine bringing back visions bizarre and thrilling enough to stir up a stroke, but I think there is another reason why. I think it is out of reverence. I am a straight man, romantically speaking. Not that I didn’t have my brushes with adolescent confusion or interest around the time I first began to get hairs on my legs and under my arms, but I have always been a man attracted to women. I have had many feelings over the years about what in the hell I saw that day. I have wondered on and on about why in the hell I couldn’t turn away, and I can only imagine you are wondering the same thing.
I don’t think I witnessed anything pornographic that day. No, I don’t think I played voyeur to a scandal and I surely don’t think I was an audience to any sort of incestuous homoerotic scene. You see, there is this theory about Adam and Eve. The theory proposes that Adam and Eve weren’t disgusted when they evacuated their bowels until Eve took a bite of that curséd apple. And gradually, over time, they, and all the men and women who came after them, learned to be ashamed of more and more. (I, at one point, as I’ve told you, was ashamed of my whitening hair!) Prior to the apple debacle man had but one shepherd and that was God. Once expelled from Eden they needed to exert control over themselves and, so it follows, over one another. If you want, for example, to work on Wall Street, you’d better get yourself a nicely-tailored suit. Why? Because someone says so.
One night, several weeks after the event, having mostly returned to life as usual, I came across an advertisement for a new exhibition at the Whitney in The New Yorker. It was night-time. All was calm. A century earlier there would have been a crackling fire in the fireplace. I was sitting in my favorite chair in the fine-enough apartment that my wife had spent the past 25 years turning into a charming and comfortable home. She was in the shower, preparing for bed. I would need a few more hours of dilly-dallying before I was sleepy enough to do the same. And this advertisement reminded me of that day. That strange, strange day. And so I, as if half-hypnotized, uncovered an unused piece of small paper from the drawer in the little table that was beside the chair I was sitting in and scribbled these words: Eden is a naked place / Where I am not afraid of you / You are not afraid of me. Love is the easiest thing in the world when we’re not afraid of each other.
The next morning, I found that piece of paper tacked to the refrigerator door, kept there by a magnet. My wife had drawn a small star on it as if to give me a passing grade. As I gazed at it, I felt her arms wrap around my waist from behind. I put my hand of one of hers. And then I turned around. And then I kissed her. •••
