“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Texts from our new world arrived early the next day, with the first one from Mom asking if I had seen the news about I-95 and an armed stand-off that had shut it down. Putting the phone down and looking out into the gray rainy morning, I padded softly to the window before Chris was up in the other room. Even in co-habitation, there was still so much solitude, something I’d always sensed but hoped wasn’t true. Facing that is something I’ve worked at over the last few years, and it felt like I was finally at some sort of peace. In my head, this piece played along to the rain.
Originally planning to depart first thing in the morning, I took a page out of Chris’s own travel M.O. and decided to make the most of the last few hours in Boston. I decided to join him for a Saturday brunch and leave a little later, provided the route home was open and not blocked by an armed militia. The rain had also started up again – heavy and unyielding – so it would be wiser to wait on all accounts.
Chris stirred and we ordered a car to a restaurant across the street from the Boston Public Garden. On such a morning, only a lifelong friend could lend any sort of comfort and safety to a world that felt like it was crumbling around us.
We finished our brunch and stopped by the Four Seasons, where we’d shared a wedding lunch over a decade ago. The Bristol Lounge had closed since then, another mark of the sad passing of time, another lost place that would only reside in memory, and that grew more fleeting as well.
The rain gave us a little break, so we walked through the Boston Public Garden. Chris had been the officiant when Andy and I were married there, and it was his first time returning to this sacred space. The world surrounding the Garden may have been overcome by madness, but in here there was only peace and beauty and love. We walked around for a while. Every time we were about to take a path out, it seemed we would pause and go another route, perhaps not wanting to break the spell.
“The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.” ~ Oscar Wilde
When at last we departed the Garden, we stopped at the former Taj Hotel – now The Newbury – and where we’d once sat down for cocktails before our rehearsal dinner, we now ordered tea and coffee. Eyeing the arrival of a nearby table’s sundae, I splurged and ordered one of those as well. There may no longer be this epic chocolate cake from the Bristol Lounge, but there would be chocolate somehow.
Chris left me to my sundae while he went to call his family. I looked out at the Public Garden, remembering that sunny May day when Andy and I got married. Warmed by the thought, and the chamomile tea, I felt a slight reassurance in the world again. Chris returned and we delved into how we were growing old. He examined some of the photos we had taken over the weekend, lamenting how time had taken its toll on us. Wrinkles and lines, gray hair and furrowed brows that didn’t unfurrow so fast anymore, he seemed more bothered by it than me – the ultimate switch in roles from where we were twenty years ago. I always figured I’d be the vain one who despaired of losing my youth and all its accompanying physical charm and ease, but it was Chris who was having the tougher time of it. Maybe he saw something in my gray and white hair that terrified him. Maybe he couldn’t escape the deepening lines of our necks and foreheads. Maybe he felt the chill of being unnoticed in a room where everyone was suddenly younger than us.
I came to terms with that a few years earlier, life and age as a gay man advancing so much quicker than it seemed to do in the straight world. Maybe this was new to Chris and he wasn’t embracing all the good that came with it. There were sacrifices and trade-offs to moving beyond youth into middle-age. Maybe the approach of his 46th birthday spooked him, and in turn his worry spooked me. As one of the few pillars in my life on which I’ve always relied and depended, seeing him falter a bit chilled me more than any crazed militia or the threats of a post-COVID universe. It felt like we both needed a friend at that moment, and I decided to postpone my return home until the next day.
Outside, on the steps of the condo, we paused to take in Braddock Park. How many times had we lifted our feet trudging up these stairs? I still have a framed picture from a cold, rainy day in June from 1998 or so, when Chris was looking for places to live in Boston while he attended Harvard Divinity School. He is lying down on the couch, flanked by Suzie and me, all of us looking equally annoyed with each other, and all of it belying the happiness and joy of being young and not knowing all that we didn’t know. I distinctly remember that period of our lives, in particular one Sunday morning in early summer when we all gathered for brunch somewhere on Tremont Street. As I nursed a hangover from the night before, I still understood then that I was in the midst of what might very well be the happiest time in my life, so I leaned into the moment. Alissa was there that morning, and it struck me how she had been with us all this weekend too, appearing in scattered moments of memory, recalled by location and the company of Chris.
The rain began again, and we went inside before making plans for our unexpected dinner and one more night out together.
They sat us in the back of Citrus & Salt, where we ordered some virgin margaritas and fish tacos. Chris seemed itching to be part of the bustling scene near the front of the restaurant, and I didn’t want to stand in his way. Whatever he was searching for was something I could not deliver, and it wasn’t something I ever really wanted. Watching from the periphery and enjoying quiet time with close company was enough for me. There was nothing glamorous about noisy crowds or making small-talk with strangers. Chris, on the other hand, plugged into life that way. We accepted our differences, even as we never fully understood them.
Walking past the line of young people waiting to get into Club Cafe, I watched them without envy. Soaked and chilled by the unseasonal weather, waiting to get into a place where they would likely not find whatever they might be seeking, I still admired them for doing exactly what we might have done two decades ago. They were at that tender part of the journey where waiting outside in the rain would become part of the hazy morning-after retelling of the night-before at a brunch that I hoped they would remember and mark as one of the truly happy moments of their lives.
And my friend Chris, who was with me then, and with me now, still wanted to find that happiness somehow, still wanted to capture the elusive realization of contentment in the moment it happened. It was slightly sad, and slightly noble, and I could never knock him for trying. I hope he finds it.
The next morning I walked to Cafe Madeleine alone for breakfast. The rain had ended, but the world still drooped beneath its weight. Returning to the condo the back way, I passed the garden plot beside our building and found one of the bunnies sitting in the morning calm. Its eyes looked back at mine – dark pools of unknowable mystery from both sides – and I wondered what life it had known in its time in Boston.
“It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.” ~ Oscar Wilde
