The American Friend: May 2020

The Change

It had been a long and sometimes turbulent flight from JFK in New York to London’s Heathrow airport. Unable to sleep, Susan Holt spun a fretful scenario over and over in her head. All it would take would be an unceremonious nudge to push her jobless into the New Millennium. At the Zen-like warning bong, Susan squinted at a panel above her. A flashing Fasten Seat Belts joined No Smoking, which had remained on during the flight. The pilot’s announcement discombobulated her. It was neither a New Yorker’s abridged bark nor a Londoner’s genteel enunciation. His flattened nasal twang floated across the re-animated economy cabin, informing sleepy passengers of altitude, time, and weather on the ground. Susan peered from her aisle seat to the middle-aged woman at the window. Neither of them had dared to co-opt the empty seat between them for a nap. It took a blurry concentration to see the window shade had been pulled up. The gray rectangle was the color of morning now.

Susan shoved a crumpled polyester fleece blanket from her lap. With that, her book flipped into the aisle. She knew Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day was the wrong choice for the flight, but she’d kept it open on her lap. Flashy tabloids of rumormongering and celebrity Schadenfreude were better suited to being trapped in claustrophobic spaces. She bent stiffly to retrieve the well-thumbed paperback. Yes, one might suppose she’d passed the time of life when ambitions were personal—that it was time now to observe and reflect. Doubts about her job would be put on hold while she was in London for the next ten days.

Take the overnight, Dónal had insisted. Susan hated the overnight flight. It forced her into a full day ahead with no chance of sleep for another twelve, maybe fifteen hours. He expected her to get right to work. Her annoyance with him would be short-lived once she’d had a hot shower and a typical English breakfast in one of those workingman cafes Dónal was always rediscovering, like his poverty. Her love for him would return with the first tickling draught of vintage champagne he’d insist on, and once the badinage between them had taken off. She’d tell him about the awful in-flight teen film she’d forced herself to watch. He’d take off immediately on a hilarious homo version of American Pie. He was nothing if not a remarkable storyteller. She was his captivated audience.

Dónal Brennan was forty-six and desperate. In fact, he was always at some level of despair: desperately poor, desperately behind in meeting a deadline, desperately in need of a sponsor, desperately in love or desperately shattered when a lover had had enough of the desperation. His poverty was of his own making, as was his inability to complete grant applications on time, if at all. Desperation was trumped only by sporadic bursts of supremely self-confident behavior. Then, in no time, he produced hundreds of pages of a novel-in-progress. There was no middle ground. His name said it all. His surname meant little drop. His given name, also a form of Irish Gaelic, meant world ruler, or world mighty. In correspondence he insisted on the accent. It stood out like a tiny sword over the “o” in Dónal. No one ever called him Don.

Drinks on the plane had long since outlived their anesthetic purpose, turning on her and leaving Susan with a painful throbbing behind the eyes.

“Purpose of your visit?”

Muse, was what she wanted to reply to the customs officer. But on this gloomy late November morning he was not smiling. She was, in fact, carrying over 1,000 pages of Dónal’s novel—in duplicate—in her hand luggage, which no one bothered to search. Dónal didn’t trust the Internet, forcing their collaboration to move at a snail’s pace.

Susan Holt was editor-in-chief at a French-owned publishing company in Manhattan. She had held that position for five years, churning out magazines that catered to women who cooked, decorated, lost weight, parented, and still found time to knit. In a time when so many gay men were dying, Susan’s boss had died unpredictably from ovarian cancer. Olivia Sinclair’s prognosis, her rapid decline, sent Susan’s department into a tailspin. The object was to keep the pump of advertising flowing freely while they milled holiday specials and bridal issues. Susan had once offered a wry observation that their department—so different from their fashionably upscale counterparts on the floors above them—was like the Special Olympics of magazines. She’d been shot down by a withering look from Olivia. After Olivia’s death, Susan—eminently qualified—slipped unchallenged into the number one spot. She was an unmarried workaholic. She was thoughtful regarding her assistant. She was not disliked.

Dónal had often referred to her as his muse. She’d eventually seen through the flattery he draped her with, his insistence that he could not do it without her. It didn’t take a muse to covertly photocopy his Herculean novel. A muse would have had better things to do than to spend countless late nights in the office. For all the editing she had done on Dónal’s novel—this one and others prior—she wasn’t even sure she could call herself his editor, much less his muse. Nursemaid would be closer to the truth.

Dónal was nowhere to be seen in the forlorn cluster of rain-sodden drivers holding up signs. Susan buckled under the wave of annoyance that preceded a hot flush, grabbing the nearest empty seat. Dónal’s capricious nature, his Irish inattention to another’s time, was infuriating at the best of times. Now her hormones were firing on all cylinders. She rummaged in her bag for the cell phone she’d bought on her last visit, praying it had not expired. Her personal cell phone was useless abroad. Dónal refused to have one.

“Why aren’t you here?” she demanded. “You promised me you would be here.”

“I can’t tell you,” he whispered dramatically. “It’s easy now anyway to get here on the tube from the airport. Don’t take a taxi. The traffic will be mad in the city. It’ll be too expensive.”

To spend it on you is more like it, she thought, restraining herself. She was too angry, too early.

“Sure, you’ve done it before,” he chided, filling the silence at Susan’s end of the line. “Don’t be a silly cow.”

She hung up on him.

It was like diving through soup in the tube, cold soup. The Piccadilly line was overheated, nearly empty, but at each stop before Acton station a blast of wet, cold air sloshed through the open doors of the carriage. Susan shivered in her coat, wishing she had brought a scarf. She was awake now, wide-awake. Though why she was made no sense. The night before her flight she had not slept well. That night, and for that matter many nights, had been passed in sleepless battle with her body’s raging hormones. At King’s Cross, she swam with the rush hour surge, changing for the Northern Line to the Old Street tube station.

She’d spent the previous evening with a close friend, Ralph Lyon, another gay man. Most of her friends—her male friends—were gay. She did not have many female friends. Womanly contact was relegated to her office, in which were dogged legions of females pitched in a passive-aggressive battle in a male-dominated corporate world. She was their beleaguered captain, but not often invited below deck to raise a pint of anything. The last voice she needed to hear, anyway, at the end of a grueling day was one that sounded like hers.

Ralph was bewildered by Susan’s ongoing friendship with his Irish friend—his former friend, he reminded her. A tenuous rift had widened over Ralph and Dónal’s temperamental friendship that had lasted some five or six prickly years. It finally became an impassable crevasse between them on the same day that Susan began her own odyssey with the mercurial Irishman. Ralph had mentioned him in a way that predicted the apparent tension when she’d finally met Dónal at the funeral of a mutual friend. “He is genius,” Ralph told her, “and smiles with teeth like a leg-hold trap.”

She was seduced immediately by that irreverent grin. Ralph watched from a distance as Susan was charmed. His own relationship to the dead man was dear. Susan understood his vexation with her. So many had died that the funerals were beginning to blur. Not this one. The presence of a coffin crafted as one might for a pharaoh—specifically to the dead man’s wishes—elicited a wicked observation from Dónal, causing her to gasp and then giggle. Ralph’s anger with Dónal was still raw and had never healed. He’d forgiven Susan.

Dónal’s novel—the one she was carrying—was titled On the Wings Of Plagued Angels. She had spent the better part of the past six months editing it, or trying to. Dónal balked at so much of what she recommended that she would have thrown in the towel if she had not seen, down the line, that he had incorporated much of her input. He revised, confident it had been that way all along.

By the time Susan reached the flat, the downpour had slowed to a bitter drizzle. Dónal answered the door in an aged plaid woolen scarf wrapped desperately around his neck. He was disheveled and shoeless. His big toe poked through a mismatched sock. He was wearing an un-ironed shirt, worn at the collar and cuffs. His jeans were weirdly out of style and unlike him.

They skimmed an awkward kiss. “Why are you dressed—?”

“I’m beggared,” he whined. “Skint.” Then, as if talking to a foreigner, he snorted, “Dead broke.” He nodded toward the tiny bathroom. “The toilet won’t flush.” He prodded a plastic bucket filled with water at the ready by the bath. She shook her head, not comprehending. “You have to flush with the bucket when you take a piss, or, whatever,” he said.

And it was cold because the heat had failed.

Susan brushed past him. She closed the oven door in the kitchen of the tiny flat and turned off the oven. It was a council flat Dónal had once shared with his Argentine lover. “Where’s André?”

“He’s left me!” Dónal wailed. “I’m—.”

She cut him off. “You’ll kill yourself trying to heat the place. At least do it after I leave.” She called the caretaker about the heat, explaining that she was a relative from America visiting her sick cousin. Assurances were made that the heat would be back on by the evening. The toilet, however, wouldn’t be looked at until Monday. It was Friday.

It crossed Susan’s mind that she could book into a hotel. Bring him along. But that would be regarded as desertion or worse, an insult to his perceived poverty. He lived on the top floor. There was no lift. He said he was starving, far too weak to accompany her to the shops. There was nothing for Susan to do but head back out into the dismal morning. She wouldn’t be enjoying a fry-up any time soon. He wanted granola and yogurt and fresh fruit because he was, “…as you can see, not in a good way.”

Heading down Pittfield Street, Susan considered that she had made a mistake coming over. “He’ll be the death of me,” she muttered. She flexed her stiffened hands and touched her burning forehead with icy cold fingers. She hoped he had gloves to borrow.

Stepping into the road she was nearly clipped by a black cab barreling through the intersection from an unfamiliar direction. Breathless, Susan leaned against a railing at the crosswalk until she could no longer feel her heart banging to escape her chest. She shopped for groceries for breakfast and dinner. Then the alcohol: red wine and a bottle of gin, some tonic. She went back to the market for limes. It was as much as she could carry up the hill past Hoxton Square to the council estate, yet she felt mean for not having bought champagne. She could go back out later, after she’d had some food, maybe some rest.

“Ralph says hello.”

“No he doesn’t,” Dónal retorted, directing her to the cabinets, which were, surprisingly, crammed with bags of pasta alongside cans of tomato juice. Containers of pesto were wedged into the undersized refrigerator. She forced the package of lamb chops he’d requested between them. The freezer held an unopened bottle of Stoli.

“You’ve been poisoned by him,” he said petulantly.

“Poisoned? How?” Though she knew exactly what he meant. “You know how he feels,” she replied, abandoning on the counter the rest of the groceries—whole meal bread, Weetabix, Walker’s crisps for her. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the flat, restoring her. Yogurt and granola was probably the better way to go, though she’d make sure to get a plate of bangers down her neck while she was here. Miraculously the heat did come up. She wanted to call the caretaker to thank her for getting the job done but Dónal stopped her. “She’s a cunt,” he said.

After the dishes were washed and put away, Susan managed a sponge bath, draining the tub of murky standing water before filling it calf deep with hot water. Dónal shouted through the bathroom door, “Remember to fill it again when you’re done in there. Just don’t use any more of the hot water.”

He was anxious to get to work. Susan changed hurriedly into fresh clothes. Wet hair clung to her neck and she was glad of the heat steaming up the few windows in the flat. He’d discarded the moth-eaten scarf for a pristine Burberry, one of many she knew he owned. He’d slipped into a pair of glove-soft loafers, red suede branded with that telltale horse bit. Italian.

“My God, your face is red! What on earth?” Dónal had purged her carry-on bag of its contents; his manuscript sat among her personal things on the table between them.

“Oh, you know. It’s…(she pinched the air with invisible quotes)…my time of life.”

Dónal covered his mouth as if she’d just said: I have tuberculosis. “Ugh. The change.”

“What, ugh?” she asked, indignant. “You know, I’m actually having a hard time. Especially at work….”

He flipped through the pages of his manuscript, avoiding her question. “Mother made life absolute hell for all of us when she went through it. The Vale of Estrogen, I call it.” He chuckled softly.

The afternoon passed unnoticed into early evening with little change in the blustery lowering sky. “What about dinner?” Susan said, lowering her glasses.

Dónal returned from the kitchen holding a bottle of red wine aloft. “Oh, I think a wee bit of imbibing is in order, don’t you?”

The label looked expensive. “That’s not what I bought.”

“No-o-o,” he purred. “Jason gave it to me.” Jason was one of those hyphenated trust fund boys who followed Dónal like the stock market. He showered Dónal with his cast-offs: the Burberrys, the cashmeres, designer shoes and tailor-made shirts. Susan had met him a few times. She always came away thinking, he’s not really straight.

Dónal’s coterie was an ever-shifting bunch of both sybarites and guttersnipes. There was always the brilliant straight male—or two—among them, those who loudly professed their ease among gay men. Then there were the women. Some, from his university days, had remained out
of loyalty or boredom. One was the daughter of a famous pianist. Others were beautiful, eccentric—a few with their own wounds. All had the capacity to wound him. The lovers, when they stayed for any length of time, were sideshows to the party. Dónal had lived with André, who had never liked any of
the hangers-on, least of all Jason. André worked with an international human rights organization, eventually tiring of rescuing Dónal. Sy, who had come before André, was rough trade.

Susan looked around the disheveled flat. No wonder André had left. She liked him and vowed to reconnect once she got back to New York. It really was all Dónal, all the time. She tried to bring the conversation around to her—what she was facing in her life—when they broke from the job at hand. The only time he paid attention was when she said, “I may not be able to afford these trips after a while.”

Then he launched into recounting the last terrible days of his life in Manhattan, how some had deserted him when they’d found out he was hiv positive. “Diana especially, and I don’t mean the princess.” A nearly overflowing glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape was suspended before her. “We’ve worked hard today,” he said. “We deserve this.”

During the night, Dónal slid in beside her. He’d graciously offered her the double bed, insisting that he was fine in the front room on the futon, “…if you’ll just help me unfold it and make it up.” She, unable to sleep, felt his unwelcome warmth, his weight beside her, inching ever closer, claiming the space. When she got up to pee she tripped over the bucket.

In the morning, hung over, her body stiff from avoidance, Susan checked her watch and saw it was past eleven. A mechanical purring came from the kitchen. She knew that sound. Dónal was making Bloody Marys. The lingering aroma of last night’s feast—copious amounts of robust red wine, baby lamb chops, and roasted red potatoes—sweetened the whole-foods artlessness of another breakfast of yogurt and granola. A hint of garlic still hung in the air until the stronger aroma of fresh coffee overtook it.

Susan declined a second Bloody Mary. The vodka wasn’t helping. She’d been trying to find her way through the plot of his novel, deciding there was none. She asked, “Is that it? That there is no plot?” He refused to allow her to “shape” things in the manuscript. He believed his style was the plot, pure genius as he so unabashedly claimed. She’d surmised that On the Wings Of Plagued Angels—subtitled Life In the Age of AIDS—wasn’t about life. It was about childhood abuse and death—more specifically, the death of his mother.

“But there is life,” he insisted. Dónal had abandoned the wearisome jeans. Leaning theatrically in the kitchen doorway, he was dressed in camel-colored wool trousers. He had layered cashmere with a flamingo-pink pullover over an eggshell-white turtleneck jumper.

“You look nearly presentable now. Better?” Susan asked, almost sarcastically. “Maybe we can still go dancing while I’m here.” He ignored her.

There would be no dancing, she pondered. No theater either, although on previous visits they had made the most of both. There was always dinner, the theater, usually something classical, along the lines of Medea, where a famous actor once sat directly in front of them two rows ahead. Dónal, of course, knew the man’s godchild, “…a dreadful little queer who sucks up.” They’d gone to drama school together; while Dónal had had to work his way through school as an usher, the other was already blowing his way into film roles. “Minor roles,” Dónal emphasized.

Susan enjoyed dancing with him, though she doubted she had it in her these days. Off they would go to Camden Town for drinks and dancing at drag bars like The Black Cap. The last time she’d been there, Cher’s song, Believe, had resurfaced as a huge disco hit. Susan and Dónal had danced like the possessed. Sy, the lover of the moment, wasn’t a dancer, but he watched.

“Have you heard anything from Sy? I wonder how he’s doing?”

“Oh, poor man,” Dónal sighed. “I hurt him a lot. I left him right after I started the Minor Wounds book. I am a little sorry about that. It was unavoidable. He was a bit of a lost soul.”

“Was?”

Dónal swayed past her questioning stare.

“The thing, Susan, is to carry on being good in the present.”

The afternoon dragged on. Tomato juice ran out. They drank vodka straight. Susan groaned periodically. When he asked her why she said, “That’s the sound of my brain trying to sort though all this.”

“All this” was the manuscript splayed out before them on the table, on the floor, on chair seats. He balked at cutting anything. Every word was precious. “Even” was the last one they’d argued about. His response—so musical in its delivery—to her suggestion to eliminate it seduced her and, without totally understanding why, she agreed to its oft-employed inclusion.

“I have come to love certain expressions, and words like ‘even’. They leave open the possibility that we can never have the last word.” He sipped from his glass, pausing dramatically. “It is my mission to recognize that the last word does not exist. This word allows for fallibility. I have created this arena.” He gestured grandly to the pages scattered across the tabletop. “It’s Joycean, you see. Life. Death. Begin again.”

The sky had darkened when Susan rose to switch on another lamp. There had been many esoteric references: Hegel, Spinoza, Joyce. They had picked through the manuscript; in some places it was like picking at a scab and then suddenly: Beauty. Light. Hope.

Dónal took the telephone into the kitchen and made a call. It sounded as if he was making a dinner reservation. He returned, an expression of smug satisfaction etched into his face. It was a beautiful face, carved into ageless stone. In summer, when his face blossomed with freckles, it had the quality of cork, especially as he grew older.

“What are you up to?” Susan asked.

“This is the season,” he declared mysteriously.

She prodded, almost annoyed, “Season for what?”

“White truffles, my dear!” To her vacant look he added, “White truffles, infinitely superior to the black ones, are cultivated from October to the end of the year.” He studied her face. “That’s now.” He headed for the bedroom. “Tart up my dear, we are dining at Carluccio’s.”

Susan bathed and then dressed in a little black wrinkle-free number. She pulled her hair into a soft knot at the nape of her neck. She added just a bit of lipstick, as nature had taken care of the blush in her cheeks. Dónal was drawing his arms through the sleeves of a camel hair frock coat. Black cashmere turtle neck jumper, charcoal wool trousers. Another Burberry scarf at the ready. Just before they left for the restaurant, Susan flung her coat open as she experienced the greatest spike in her body temperature yet.

Dónal ignored her. “Hurry, the cab is downstairs. We’ll be late.”

She let him order the wines; he did not stint on expense. Champagne arrived before their starters. Vintage. Susan let the effervescence drain the tension from her. She was prepared to laugh, to have a good time. As she pushed her fork around her risotto, watching him tuck daintily into his porcini, Dónal confessed he was afraid.

“Of what?” she asked, not unkindly.

What if the next century brought him nothing but failure? What if he fell on his face? He drained his glass, threw his head back before demanding of her, “What if I am past my prime?”

Their main course arrived. Quail for him, sea bass for her. Both dishes enriched by what they had come to pay homage to: the white truffle. “Jolly good wack,” he said in a comical attempt at Scouse. He called for a second bottle of Pinot Noir. Susan loved his odd habit of stealing and combining expressions. Dónal’s temporary despair, as he put it, had mellowed with champagne. He became light-hearted during the first bottle of wine, funny again, making her laugh. Into the second bottle his mood shifted. He was pensive, almost dreamy.

“Ah, well then. To me.” His Irish was up and with it his glass of wine. “Now it’s failure I’m used to. It’s not a bad life. After all, I have made my way on a wing and a prayer generating literature, enemies and friends.”

He returned Susan’s smile with a smugly innocent expression of “whatever.”

“I have learned to be soft, to understand differences.” He leveled his gaze at her. “I can even tolerate intolerance. I am able to lubricate rather than irritate. Rather than reacting, making a situation more polarized, I calmly propose a solution for intolerance.”

Without waiting for a response, he excused himself, rising from his chair. “I need the loo.” Susan watched as he swayed across the intimate dining room, navigating around a display of fresh funghi.

She concentrated on her wine glass until the waiter arrived to clear away the plates. She accepted the dessert menus. How had she come to have so many gay male friends? Recounting them in her head she saw Ralph, of course. He was a theatrical costume designer. He and his actor partner were her closest friends. There was the ex-priest, and a corpulent poet and his partner, the psychiatrist. Susan often accompanied another friend, a public relations guy for the Bronx Zoo, to opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, knowing full well the unspoken, that she was his beard. There was the journalist, now dead. There had been a landscape artist in L.A., also dead.

She had been reading Virginia Woolf on the flight over. Why didn’t she have a Leonard? She did not because she could not have endured a Leonard. She recalled with fondness the closeted Argentine painter without a green card who had once proposed marriage for the obvious reason. She sometimes wished she had taken him up on it. With a start, she remembered something Ralph had said to her the night before she’d left. “Honey, I never thought I’d hear these words come from my mouth: You need a man. A straight man.”

Dónal stood before her. His face was beaming like a window in a red light district. “What’s happening to me?” he cried. “I’m burning up!” He leaned over, pulling her hand to his cheek. He was feverish. “You witch!” he shouted. Others in the restaurant turned to look.

“It’s transference,” she joked. “You know, when women spend a lot of time together they get their periods at the same time. You’re just a big girl.”

She didn’t care who heard them. He slumped into his chair, laughing. Susan called for the waiter. They ordered double espresso and cognac.

Dónal reached for the bill. When the waiter left, he passed it to Susan declaring, “It’s very extravagant, shockingly so. Alec Guinness dined here often.”

They stepped onto Neal Street into a bone-chilling downpour. He took her elbow, propelling her over to Covent Garden where they would find a black cab. He was noticeably drunk, gripping her arm tightly for support.

Back at the flat, his mood darkened. He instigated an argument, insisting that she and Ralph must talk about him, and not in a nice way.

“I know why he won’t speak to me. It’s the condom conundrum.” He told her he was having sex with five men, as it happened. Five. He refused to wear a condom. “I ride bareback. Shoot me.”

Susan managed to ask, “Are they poz, too?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he cried. “I have no need for protection. That is something you condemn me for, you and Ralph. I go for it, neither innocent nor guilty. My mind is innocent though, the mind of a child, a fool. I am sure you are both appalled.” He stopped for a moment to gauge his effect on her. “That is also fine,” he said.

He stumbled off to the bedroom, leaving his camel hair coat in a heap at her feet. Susan started for the remaining vodka in the freezer. It wouldn’t do. Instead she brewed a pot of strong coffee. She and Ralph did talk about Dónal, this promiscuity he embraced with a vengeance. “He’s a carnival act,” Ralph said. “Only he’s a dangerous clown and he can kill.” They had often debated whether Dónal had purposely set out to get himself infected with the virus. “He’ll live to be a hundred, I think,” was always Susan’s response.

In the morning, Susan greeted Dónal with a fresh cup of coffee. She had made a decision.

“I’m going back to New York today.” Before he could utter a word, she told him she would re-book at the airport.

“It will cost you,” he warned, still dazed.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

He saw she had packed. Both copies of his manuscript were neatly stacked on the table. His face went crimson. “I’m burning up! I haven’t slept all night.” He looked her up and down. “Those are my—.” She shot him a determined look. He almost touched her shoulder, but resisted. “Please change your mind.” She shook her head. He shouted, “You’re still drunk!”

“Maybe,” she offered. “But I think it’s best that you sort this one out on your own. The change will do you good.”

Susan pulled the front door closed behind her. She stood at the top of the stairwell adjusting one of his Burberrys around her neck. She slipped her hands into lambskin gloves lined in cashmere. He wouldn’t miss them. She could see her breath. It was cold, but it was sunny.