To an aesthete dying young

I spent the summer thinking it was a mistake, but it was too late by then. We had thrown our lot in, and we had managed to get an enormous suite in Silliman, with a third friend, in keeping with Terry’s policy of living in a different college every year. I spent the first few weeks of that first semester, my sophomore year and his junior year, avoiding him, which was not easy to do given that we were in bunk beds. Terry’s initial strategy was to ignore my chill and rudeness, and my strategy was to spend all my time in JE, where most of my friends were. But finally, Terry sat me down and we talked about it. I don’t remember what I said; I can’t imagine what I could have said, but I remember a certain earnestness in Terry about being friends no matter what. It would be a lie to say that the rest of the year was free of tension. Sometimes, on a Saturday, I wanted to come back to my own bed and go to sleep, and was peeved about the presence of 70 other people at a party for which Terry had rethematized our room into a construction site, complete with orange cones and scaffolding and what appeared to be a large hole where part of the ceiling had once been. Sometimes, I would want to study and not be distracted by the Christmas lights he had installed in the small cove molding that ran around the room. Sometimes, I wanted to have a couple of friends over to prepare for an exam on Tennyson, and I was disoriented by having, in a living room that was over 200 square feet, a dropped ceiling made entirely of various kinds of root vegetables tied to lengths of fishing line that had been taped to the ceiling and then backlit with red gels. Sometimes, the people smashing their champagne flutes in our fireplace seemed like a bit much at 5 a.m. But for all those times, there were also conversations about music, which I loved but which Terry understood much better than I did, and about architecture, which I didn’t really understand but Terry did, and about friendship itself. There was a gradual revelation on my part that I was judgmental about his friends, but that he was always welcoming of mine, and that he could make anyone feel like a celebrity with the quality of his attention, even when the purpose of his attention was to seek their attention for himself. I was surprised that Terry took his academic work so seriously, and I realized that he loved learning just as much as all the people with smudgy eyeglasses whom I thought of as more serious than he was. Curiously enough, it was my mother who commented, after one of her visits to our room, that Terry was a remarkably kind person and had the best manners of any of my friends.

It took me many years to realize how difficult I’d been to live with. I was in denial about much of what was most basic about me, so while I’d been drawn to Terry for his absence of repression, I was also repulsed by it. I remember losing my temper with him when I walked into our room to find him in flagrante with an exotic-looking girl who was his dance partner in some squash-court jazz revue, college squash courts being the makeshift theaters of Yale in the 1980s. His sensuality challenged my respectability, and this made him subject to all my insecurities, of which there was no short supply. It took me another twenty years to assume some measure of his freedom of thought and spirit and life. He was Auntie Mame, feasting at the banquet table, while I chewed on a stale roll. I used to get mad at him, to discount our closeness, yet he had a doggedness; he never gave up on me. By the end of the year, we were permanent friends, and I had learned a little bit about the courage from which his outrageousness stemmed, and I had become a more generous person. We did not room together the following year; I got a single in JE, and Terry transferred to Branford, but we had dinner together, often.

I was always frustrated by one area of impenetrability, which was that Terry never flagged in his enthusiasms. There was beauty in that, but there was also a closedness in it. If something went wrong, he was always immediately thrilled by what he had learned from it. If it rained, he was rapturous about all the indoor things we might never have done had there been sunshine, and if we were arguing, it was always sure to make us closer. I’ve tried for a clearer formulation of this relentless quality; at the time, it seemed like only built-in cheerfulness, but now I know that it was a way of keeping despair always at bay, and reflected not perfect resilience, but a terrified vulnerability, as though he knew that the slightest incursion of darkness would be enough to swallow him whole. It was a pleasant quality in doses, but it precluded certain depths of intimacy. You couldn’t see Terry and not have fun, and sometimes, you wanted him to be bored, or tired, just for a minute. There had to be sadness in him, but you couldn’t reach it except when it came out of him in quick, rare flashes of anger, and it’s hard to be friends with someone who will never be sad with you.

Some of my closest Yale friends are no longer friends, and some of my vague Yale acquaintances have ended up being people to whom I am inseparably tied, but Terry was permanently in the same emotional proximity. We were never out of touch, and we were always glad to see each other; we were never each other’s closest of close. I moved to England and he moved to Italy, and I eventually stumbled my way out of the closet, and he eventually stopped romancing exotic-looking girls and settled on handsome Italian men, and I began chipping away at some of the kinds of denial that had made me treat him badly when we lived together for that year. He would fly up to London to see me, and I would go and stay with him in Rome. With time, I became less inclined toward convention. I didn’t ever get a green cape, but I did loosen up my style very considerably. Terry became slightly more conservative in his look, though he did grow a pencil moustache and always wore his polo shirts with the collar turned up; sometimes, he wore a Yale blue jacket that seemed more reasonable in his adult life than it would have in anyone else’s. I had been focused on academics as a student, but I moved away from them a bit; he got a PhD at Columbia in art history. We did not depend on each other, but there was no one of whom I felt fonder. There was a permanent energy in him that seemed more remarkable the longer it persisted.