April 19, 2009

Charlie’s final dinner in the great atrium of the Pei library was sweet. I was seated beside Exeter’s angry lesbian, and the conversation was sharp and convivial. DW appeared, and we talked of his noble labors. I had such a crush on him from the beginning, his suave turtle-necked, dusky, blue-eyed beauty, his calm, his upright dedication to friends and to causes which seized his imagination. Now he is an old man. I didn’t know where to look, how to survive the succeeding minutes. The decay of one you love is worse than the decay of oneslf. Charlie cried several times during the presentation, as he had earlier during cocktails when he told me of a dying friend requesting to hear one of his poems, which, he said, “You liked too.” I tried not to lean too much on my Exeter friends, assuming that they had moved on and I was an incident in their past, but perhaps I was too abstemious. Relationships are intricate here and near the surface-- again, I think it is the permission given to such things by the presence of adolescents– and I believe they might have fit me in. Anyway, it was sweet, and I capped off the evening by vomiting the too-rich dinner into the darkling shrubbery of the Thing house in gentle spring rain. Somehow all of that was right.