There are worse things than dying young.

In the Midst of Your Early Blue Period, Something Overtakes You

ou can paint your cheap New York studio apartment white, and it looks great for about three weeks. Then the window sills begins seeping wheat-plasma-color, becoming brown, next black. Finally some other substance arrives—some bubbling, tarlike force, unidentifiable. It is silt, it is toxic chem-plant New Jersey drift, it is others’ envy, it is the spittle of the roach eggs hatching, it is applicant Death.

The neighbors’ leaky pipes, the hall’s Rasta graffiti artist, something starts immediately resenting and reversing mere girlish (virginal) suburban white. And, seeing this, you will either leave NYC, or else repaint, or (likelier) learn to survive it. You’ve already learned to cohabit with hand-sized roaches, occasional break-ins, and a certain quota of phoned-in wrong-number “breathers.” Chaos becomes a constant, like Mrs. Park’s almost-always-open corner green-grocery where you score your eggs and milk and they all know your name. Chaos has a neighborhood nickname for you. Does that make things easier?

I noted that, since Robert’s blinding, we all walked in a new way. Darting, taking short breaks, sitting down on ledges, checking store windows’ reflection to see who followed—no longer just for purposes of stalking seduction-attraction—now, more self-defense. I had just learned what the word “tired” meant. The same ole hits of Cuban caffeine sometimes failed to pay their usual kickass magic.

While Robert was out sailing with the America’s Cup crew and that gym teacher from Lifeboat Thirteen, while he weekended at Aaron Copland’s up-river retreat, Angie and I tried distracting ourselves. We exchanged two bits and a challenge: Go to The Honored Owl, four storefronts down, find a one-page portrait of each other. The book had to cost fifty cents or less. We would meet back here in forty minutes and swap our one-page likenesses. There is, in the young, such a thin line between narcissism and self-knowledge.

I, being born an archive, can still lay hands on my own page portrait of Alabam. It was lifted from an aged tome, called Certain Problems of the Spirit, stuffed with Medieval-looking woodcuts:

Thus said Bernard of Clairvaux, the great thirteenth-century Cistercian, on the joys of bodily resurrection-

Do not be surprised if the glorified body seems to give the spirit something. For it was a real help when man was sick and mortal. How true that text which says that all things turn to the good of those who love God. The sick, dead and resurrected body is a help to the soul who loves God …

Truly the soul does not want to be perfected without that from whose good service it feels it has benefited in every way. Listen to the bridegroom in the Canticle inviting us to this triple progress: “Eat, friends, and drink. Be inebriated, dearest ones.” He calls to those working in the body to eat; he invites those who have set aside bodies to drink; and he impels those who have resumed their bodies to inebriate themselves, calling them his dearest ones, as if they were filled with charity … It is right to call them dearest who are drunk with love.