Ruins at the end
I.
It was in the third month of lockdown. The wind blew in cold drafts over Lombard St.
Down Leavenworth, blue grey waters of the Golden Gate were restless against Alcatraz. Even now there were tourists, taking photos against the famous hairpin turns on this block of Lombard.
Further down, dark grey walls encircled the elevated estate. A small danger sign hung next to the front gate. I had tried to arrive at a reasonable time, but was still a little early. He spoke from above. The gate swung open. His feet were pale and bare on the ground. I followed the concrete steps up into the garden, where Old olive trees curled high around the sitting place, flanking both sides of the long fire pit table.
Propane flames smoldered in the cold June evening.
Fog swirled around Coit tower, which seemed at once so close, so far off—as if etched onto the horizon. Look to the right, there’s Benioff’s tower and the Trans America pyramid, the downtown, entirely in this city a few hundred years worth of view, within an arm’s reach. One of the few places in this town where you straddle the city, instead of it straddling you…
II.
Guests arrive one by one, or in pairs, and the evening proceeds into ideas of happiness and unhappiness, ideas I’ve had since last summer. Alone in the big house? and Cancellations. Expressions of perplexity, or sadness, come over each of our faces. His face is strong, rugged. Carbonated water comes out of his taps. The wind moves slowly in the branches.
Once you feel something, can you unfeel it? Pale shoulders next to mine in the foaming hot tub. Close, but not touching - what birds hide in these branches? Each time the button has to be pressed twice to get the water going. He has piercing eyes, ostensibly grey, blue, but with flecks of other colors mixed in. Depending on the time of the day, it is either the sea or the sky in those eyes. Already, it was getting dark. The wet adjoining shrubbery had shaken off its remaining color. Night lights were coming on in the city.
Reds and whites were poured alternately into our glasses. The Coit tower now lit in purple. Columbus statue at the tower is to be soon taken down by the city officials. Christopher lived in the fourteenth century, he was a master navigator. The SF Chronicle polls Who should be honored in place of the Columbus statue at Coit Tower? the Ohlone people, many of us seem to agree. If this is so, another statue would not be suitable. Maybe do a mandala instead in the sand, mark a wilderness preserve or bring out one of those Goldsworthy arrangements.
Regardless, if the statue is any indication, Columbus had strong limbs. His face was long, his cheek bones high and beset by an aquiline nose. He had light colored eyes. It looks to me that he made a good thing out of his life. Had he not acted in his best judgement? Were his cruelties not merely the standards of efficiency & governance at the time? Or had he ended up being harder than average, perhaps as a consequence of his extreme circumstance - all that he had put on stake, the pain, sacrifice, and the loneliness that were the inevitable accoutrements of his daring journey - had they all made a mongrel out of him?
There is perhaps a fatality to those who are marked for distinction, the sort of misfortune that has stalked, throughout history, the footsteps of Kings snd Queens. It seems that there could be an easier path, to be on the sidelines, to neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Nonetheless the game between the conquerer and the conquered is not as simple as taking down of one statue and putting on another.
Meanwhile in the tub the conversation was stalling. Joel sat on the water’s edge, overheated. Matthew, instead, sank deeper in. A complementary pair. New romances were taking off in the pandemic, still others had been strengthened by the lockdown, but I had only felt further alone by the strict lineation of amorous priorities that the virus demanded from us. We invoked a cast of characters, who while not here, still exerted a greater force on the evening than we’d admit. C—? L—?
Each of us took turns bathing under the golden noose. Later we toweled off in the glass changing room.
I am quite drunk this evening. Already a feather in the wind. How many years I’ve spent learning the right balance between decorum and improvisation? But today I cannot do. I am without purpose. I am in the cross hairs of my feeling. He is. I am on mute, when I do speak, it is of unrelated things. When I am addressed, my responses are unthinking, automatic. I laugh in places. I stretch my legs in the water. I give myself over. Floating somewhere outside my body.
III.
Days later I will discover a picture in my phone. I don’t remember how I took it, or what I thought when I did. But he is in the garden, lit from behind and from below. In his one hand a stemless wine glass, in the other, his boccino. He is looking down at the results of the game, assessing, perhaps, where the balls have ended up relative to each other. He likes a good sport.
Soon it is past midnight, all the guests are now curled in their places.
Cold wind had been stirring amidst the trees of the garden. A car set out in my direction, and I took it, as if obeying a command, breaking perhaps the expected decorum or promise of deference… among other promises that I broke that evening…
You can look up, or you can close your eyes entirely
Making some of the world go away, but only some of it,
Not the part about hurting others as the one good answer to being hurt,
the part that can at first seem, understandably,
a life in ruins... from the Silverchest of Carl Phillips.