I am barrelling dry-eyed down 81, listening to Spem in Alium, the sun in my face, determined to have Fun on this trip, coming up for air after a stressful conference, hopping from friends’ beach house to townhouse in the sunny East.
Andrew died. Several days ago, actually; suicide by means I haven’t yet learned and can’t bring myself to ask. I discover this when I open Facebook, trying to make Fun plans for New York, finding that I’ve been invited to join a group whose name begins “In loving memory…”.
It’s late, all the lights off and the house asleep, after a long cab ride, plane ride, bus ride, train ride, drive through sleeping Rockport and Gloucester; a thimbleful of rye on the back patio, watching the lobster traps bob in the cove below, and the stars.
I knew Andrew for a little more than a year, and not well enough (evidenced, at the very least, fact that I find his self-erasure totally incomprehensible—the experience is less of grief than of reading a book with missing chapters, or a proof with missing steps). He was singular, a dynamo, radiant in his ambition. I have only meories of him at parties in East Campus, jabbering animatedly (Gogol? The electoral system?), emphatic up-and-down motions of his short arms, and a handful of invitations I missed by a thousand miles. For years, when people have asked how I liked college, when I have said “oh, you meet the most incredible people”, I have seen his face….
The Island is like a Rockwell painting—the hard coast too comfortably craggy, the sunset too pink, the wood vaults and granite towers and long lawns of this house too much like a picture book. And I am having Fun, of a refined, restorative sort, the sort involving the Atlantic on the beach and expensive bottles of wine and unexpectedly long voyages in boats.
It seems like there should be a lingering discomfort at the base of my neck, a memento mori with an easily-retrieved proximate cause. In fact for much of the trip I am blissfully unconscious of anything other than the salt spray and the rough stone under my feet, the paddle-ache in my shoulders. The remembrance, when it comes, is a catch in the throat, a tension at the edge of the eyes, departing as easily as it came.
I didn’t make much of an effort to keep in touch with Andrew after graduation. I can’t help but think (perhaps just by way of self-justification) that this is because he was so luminous, so obviously going to Become Someone, that I felt assured of finding him whenever I needed him.
So here I am, with this bus and this highway and this Tallis Scholars album, having Fun and trying over-earnestly to meditate on Andrew’s memory like Donne before his portrait. And all I can think of, other than that Andrew was a swell guy and that I miss him terribly, is that the satisfaction this song and this Connecticut countryside give me (a catch in the throat, a tightness at the eyes) are no less accidental than his bewildering accident—a biochemical fluke—a handful of ions enough to make self-preservation a joy or a horror, make flesh into dew.
It’s been a long time since I listened to this song. The final cadence never resolves, lingering, open.