Blinded by the light? She's not blind. She's so blind. She's not so blind. She is. She saw me. There's nothing to see. What would you know? She knows nothing, sees nothing, wants nothing. Nothing matters. That's right. You're right. ## **8** ## A BIRTHDAY FOR BEAUREGARD BRAMANTE I turn twenty-nine, and my mother has me dress in white and ride to the graveside of my favorite poet. We spend the morning drinking champagne, eating shrimp, and listening to "A Birthday for Beaugard Bramante." I can see myself the way Bramante saw himself: young, healthy, at least fifteen years younger than I was at the time, and alive. He is dead now, but he wasn't at my funeral, he wasn't at the hospital when we said good-bye to my daughter, he didn't help us make that decision. He has no reason to keep me company at twenty-nine. I'm the only one who could still call him on the phone. I make a note to call him when I'm twenty-nine years old. I'm not there to tell stories about him or reminisce about the night we made love on a mountain in San Francisco. I've already told him most of the things I'm going to tell. I wish he were there to tell me things about his childhood, because I have nothing to tell him now. My only memories of him are of being sad, sitting in a small, crowded theater on a warm afternoon while the smell of hot dogs and popcorn lingered in the air, listening to poetry. His poems, like mine, are love poems. My love for him has been strong and silent and true, but in the end it isn't much good to anyone else. We drank champagne, ate shrimp, and ate white-bread toast, but there is no cake, or at least no one is going to allow me to bring a cake. I was never allowed to bring a cake or a gift or even a stuffed animal. I had been told over and over again that there was no room in this world for me and him together. The people who were supposed to love us never did. In that way I had a choice. That was the worst of it. They took my love away from me, and then I went to California with them and looked up people I loved, like T. R. Simon, and I found out he never loved me. The most disappointing discovery of all is that he never loved anyone at all. I'm not interested in that information. T. R. and I had sex once in a hotel room on his twenty-second birthday while he was on vacation with his family, and we kissed at the end of it, like lovers, like real lovers, but that moment of tenderness would never happen again. That afternoon I went to the cemetery wearing a dress that I loved so much I had bought it, even though it cost a lot more than I usually spend, and I put on expensive perfume that made me feel like a woman of the world, even though I had never really been a woman of the world. I wore earrings and a necklace and lipstick. All of those things were things I never wore before. They felt like lies, but I wore them anyway. I bought them. They cost money, but I bought them. And the truth is, I looked the way they were made to look. The look was always there. I just had to put the pieces together and turn them out. The truth is, I wanted to be like Bramante. My mother looks sadder than I've ever seen her look. I wonder if she wants to cry. She's very pretty, and even though her cheeks are wet with tears she is beautiful. A beautiful sadness. I wonder if I can learn how to cry from her. I say good-bye and take the subway to Greenwich Village to meet my sister. I see her on her way out the door. I wish she'd come with me, but I can tell she doesn't want to leave her neighborhood. It is a world of women who wear fur coats that are too small for them and make-up and plastic-looking hair. It isn't the same as my world, where women dress like Bramante and look at him with adoration. It's a world of women without an image of him to carry with them. He had an image of himself, but he didn't use it when he was with us. And who could blame him? There are women everywhere who carry an image of him with them everywhere they go. They are the ones who wear the gray business suits and white blouses and earrings and expensive perfume and get married and have kids. We all have a lot of money in our pockets and we all have gray business suits in our closet. We get bored looking at one another, so we look away. My mother is right about one thing: I have no interest in his stories about the past. He tells the truth about himself, but he isn't the same man anymore, so it doesn't matter what he thinks or how he lives. I want to find someone like him, someone who isn't the same as everyone else, someone I can look up to who will know me the way I know him. It is hard to look up to a man and imagine he's a real person. I could be fooling myself if I looked up to a woman who looks just like the one I think is my mother. It's hard to look up to anyone. When it is someone I love, I think it's easier. I think it would be easier than looking up to Bramante. When I leave my sister's house, I don't see a single man on the street with his arm around a woman. There are so many, but no man is with a woman. What do they have, I wonder? Not his arm? Somewhere in all of this, he made a choice that women couldn't compete with, and he was right. It didn't matter that we loved him, we had to stand on our own. I like to think he had done this with all of them, but I know it was really one woman. The proof is in the empty seat beside her at the restaurant we ate at. He was a man who had his choice made for him by a woman, just as I had my choice made for me by my mother. I used him up and I put him away, but I did it to myself. He had to make his own choices, but the end result was the same. It was about the body and time and death and memory. It is a story that will always be told and retold. I know how it ends. He wrote about the truth, but he had to leave his body to tell it. I think about a small dark room with windows that look out onto the nighttime city. I think about the people I know, the ones who I always meet again and have to look at for a long time. They are small and dark and a little sad. I want to bring them back to life, but they are gone. Bramante didn't write for a woman who looked like my mother. He was in love with a woman who looked like his wife. He wanted someone who knew what he wanted. He wanted the same thing I wanted, but we are left with this feeling that we didn't have all of the same things he did. That's what I can't accept. I can't accept that he only ever had one body. That's what I can't accept. ## **9** ## THE GOLD STAR My mother calls me on the phone, but it isn't to talk to me about my twenty-ninth birthday. It is to talk to me about some piece of junk mail I have sent to her in New York. She calls to talk about it because she is in New York and I have sent her something. I tell her it is a birthday present. She tells me that she has no interest in receiving birthday presents. She tells me to please not send her any more birthday presents. I tell her that if she gets a present I'll mail it and she can send it back. It was such a dumb thing to do to her, something I shouldn't have done, but I'm sorry. It wasn't the first thing I thought of when I wrote that piece of mail. I don't remember, but I hope I didn't think of something else. I don't want to seem like I don't love her, because I love her more than I love Bramante, and he's gone. We're both gone. I think about that word and my own body and the way it used to be and I am not sure where the beginning is or the end. If someone died, and another person died to save him, would he come back? Would he come back for his wife? I think about death and time, but I also think about the woman I have imagined Bramante being with. She's an artist's wife and his lover. She's a rich woman who can wear anything he tells her to. She's a woman who doesn't need him to remind her how to make a bed, or how to buy earrings, or how to paint a picture. I think about being alone and I think about being together. I think about the words of women, but I can't think of the