CONTENT NOTE
Joel Keith’s ‘The Last Supper’ makes mention of suicide and features depictions of animal death.
‘Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.’
Matthew 26:34 (KJV)
Sunlight was falling from a great height. Passing lesbians tilted their bicycles into the wind, which whistled through the bristling pockets of their cargo shorts. I was holding an old papaya box full of groceries from Psarakos as yet another Sam, Sam Robinson, my third, told me why they could no longer, could never again, be with me.
‘You just can’t tell the truth, can you?’ Sam Robinson said. ‘Like now, when you asked to split the groceries, you said you don’t have the money—why did you say that? Because you do, Gracie, you obviously do, you’re a fucking landlord at 22, it’s okay you have it but honestly it’s bad enough you do, you don’t have to hold everyone else hostage making them pretend like they don’t know you have it. It’s like that with everything you say. The basic things you say don’t refer to a world that’s real.’
‘Please, Robbie,’ I said (Robbie was my name for them), ‘why now? Why could you not have waited until the bus had arrived? Until we were home? Until the asparagus was away? Until we were somewhere I didn’t always come and would now always only think of as the place where you did this? Where you left me?’ But I knew why. They wanted this shop, this part of High Street, in the divorce.
They bit their lip. The 510 bus pulled up like a chivalrous gentleman on horseback. ‘Keep the asparagus,’ they said, ‘this is goodbye.’ And they were gone.
Papaya box in hand, I began walking down Clarendon Street to the train. I had been presented with a theory of my life that demonstrated it to be worthless; the thing to do was to seek out some immediate, practical crisis with which to selflessly intervene, thereby disproving it. But none were forthcoming on the way to Croxton Station, and soon I was on the train home with nothing but a wounded heart and a box of vegetables bought for two. How, I wondered as we climbed and climbed above the roofs of houses, would I eat this much pumpkin alone?
It hit me as I got off the train. I, Gracie Comfrey, would throw a small dinner party for close friends.
There is a dissonance one feels, these days, at many queer gatherings. We draw from a language spoken via the dropped flower, the stolen glance, the confidential allusion leading to perilous exposure, and yet thanks to our elders, everything that once had to be kept thrillingly secret is now out in the open, withering into normalcy; one steals glances as one steals Meredith Goat Cheese, as a free and convenient route to pleasure. Oh, she’s just a very good friend, we joke, as our parents in other cities knit us socks the colours of the bisexual flag. We are now to the AIDS generation what the decadents were to the aristocracy; we have taken what for them was life—promiscuous sex, direct action, bad poetry with real feeling, and constant danger; hats, frills, trips to Italy, and grand displays of poor taste—and turned it into a kind of elaborate, doomed play.
The dinner party, then, is one of the few forms of social theatre we queers have left still tinged with the kind of comforting repression that would make it recognisable to, say, a supernaturally resurrected Virginia Woolf. Food is no less bound up with sex for all the unpublished essays we have written about the fact, and the dramas that play out around the dinner table, many of them wordless—of pride and insecurity, animal satisfaction and mechanical boredom—are not so dissimilar to those of the bedroom or stairwell. The secret, of course—and this is what makes it so old-fashioned—is that it must all be treated, by tacit agreement, as if it were the safest, most sexless thing in the world, like tying one’s shoe. When it is perilous with desire.
Walking home from Bell Station, I began to plan whom I’d invite. Not everyone would say they’d come, and not all those who’d said they’d come would come; for a party of twelve—including Andrew, who was my housemate and tenant and so would be there by default—I would need eleven others; therefore I’d invite twenty.
Then there was food. I could ask for people’s dietaries, but no-one would provide them; the dishes would have to be vegetarian, one vegan. A pumpkin, burnt butter, and sage rigatoni would stretch the pumpkin; grilled asparagus for a side, with lemon; some kind of spring salad; apple cake; mulled wine. I felt calmer. Things, I saw as I walked, were still in their positions. A cool wind blew and magpies yodelled in the shadow of the Novotel. Peace, I felt turning onto my street, would be restored.
Outside my house was a moving van. Andrew stood beside it. Seeing me, he turned away. Two moustachioed men came out of the house carrying Andrew’s couch and, heaving, hauled it up into the back of the van.
‘Andrew—’
‘Don’t try to talk me out of it,’ he said. He turned. His face was unreadable, but he spoke in his country voice, which usually lay buried beneath the voice he’d invented for himself since moving to the city but sprang forth, halfway through a word sometimes, without his seeming to notice, in moments of intense emotion, in grief or delight. ‘I’m sorry, Gracie, I didn’t know how to tell you, I’m sorry I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. Some friends of mine—Hannah, Sam, Cantaloupe, and Hannah—they have a room. They were looking for someone. I just—’ He stopped; sighed. ‘I’ll pay the next month’s rent to give you time to find somebody new.’
The moving men slunk back into the house, their moustaches fingering the air before them like cats’ whiskers.
My throat caught. ‘You don’t need to pay the extra rent,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said Andrew. ‘Okay. Thank you.’ He smiled.
We had been friends, I should say, for years, for years before we’d moved in together, we were friends when his mother died, we had been more than friends.
In half an hour Andrew was gone, along with the movers. I hovered by the stove, waiting for my Dolce&Gabbana Bialetti to boil. I would have to buy a couch; I would have to buy a spatula. The coffee bubbled. I waited until it had burned, then poured it down the sink.
I was being left by people close to me because I had too much money and had tried and failed to, without exactly hiding it, hide it—to banish it to that realm of understood yet unacknowledged and in some way unfelt facts that included, for example, the easiness of suicide, abrupt sexual currents between oneself and ugly people, and the Global South. This I understood. I also understood that, having been left by two people, I would now have to be left by a third, probably before the end of the day. As to who exactly this third person would be, I realised, I had some agency.
First, I turned off my phone. In order to narrow down Fate’s pool of candidates, I would have to restrict the number of people with whom I’d be in contact for the rest of the day; otherwise I might simply be dumped by a friend over text at eleven o’clock. I made myself a cup of tea and took it to the backyard. Loneliness overcame me—loneliness that was the threat of dying alone. They’d changed the colour of the teabags and I hated it. I smelt my sweat and my neighbours’ weed. A lone dry leaf scraped across the courtyard and I heard in it the footsteps of my childhood dog, Antonio, a labradoodle.
And what was it I saw in Antonio’s sweet, pathetic eyes—as he sauntered, ears flapping, through my mind—that convinced me in that moment, as I had not done in years, to pray? O, God, I thought, and clasped my hands, I know there is more suffering in this world in an instant than I could endure in a lifetime, I know it is this very suffering that keeps me warm and fed and in whose bloodied sheets I make my bed each night, and I am sorry, God, and thankful for all that you have given me, but please, if you are listening, I am lost, God, and in pain. Please, Lord, if you are there—give me strength. Give me guidance. In Jesus’ name, Amen. Warm regards, Gracie.
There I sat—eyes closed, hands clasped—for some minutes. I felt sheepish. The wind picked up, sending another dead leaf skittering like paws across the brick. Sighing, I opened my eyes.
It was no leaf. There in my courtyard stood Antonio: real, alive, almost a puppy again. But in his face lay strange wisdom, and from his throat—as the wind rose, rose, buffeting the courtyard and the tree above—came a man’s voice.
‘My child—’
A large branch, pulled free by the gale, fell crashing from the tree and crushed Antonio. I gasped. The wind died down. From the pile, a leg twitched.
‘God?’ I ventured.
The twitching stopped. And for what had He died? I felt, lodged in my stomach like a tennis ball, the intractable knot of sin with which the world was bound together. Perhaps it was my own soul I felt.
The neighbours’ rooster squawked. They giggled, stoned. I turned on my phone and, wiping away a tear, created a Facebook event: ‘Housecooling Din Dins!!’