Sleepless Nights Read Online Free PDF Page B

the winter and blossomed once more in the spring.
    Often I lay awake fretting over some delinquency of J.’s. His coercive neatness inflamed me at times, as if his habits were not his right, but instead a dangerous poison to life, like the slow seepage of gas from the hotel stove.
    In the evening he carefully selected and laid out his clothes for the next day; a preparation for going off to a much-despised job. Worst of all, J. had an unyielding need to brush his perfect teeth after dinner in the evening. This odd harness of habit held him in a vicious embrace and finally meant that no fortuitous invitation, no beguiling possibility arising unannounced could be accepted without a concentrated uneasiness of mind. These sacred routines did much to inhibit his sex life, even though he was, like the tolling of a bell, to be found every Saturday night at certain gay bars, drinking his rigid ration of beer.
    Dear J.: Now you would be in an intense middle age if the carelessness of others had not annihilated in an instant all of your martyrdom to detail. A car went out of control at a crossing in Los Angeles and struck him down, he who was patiently observing the traffic lights. Hard not to imagine that the car, released from the oppression of brakes and the tyranny of a king at the steering wheel, malevolently rushed into an ecstatic terrorism against J.’s neat, clerkly life at the curb.
    Even now I can still hear J. singing in a thin, pure tenor with a hint in it of the mountains, where his family came from. He greatly feared his father, a large, large, fair man in black clothes, a country businessman. When the father died, the state government sent a police escort to the funeral and the mountain people stood staring in the streets. J. greatly cared for his mother—classic that he was—although of the two the father was the more interesting, but too large, clothes too black, white shirts too starchy, collar too stiff.
    I remember when I first toddled into his office, J. would say, a queer from my first breath, and knew that I had been dealt a wrong card—this man weighing three hundred pounds, sitting behind a roll-top desk. I’m told I screamed like the girl I was.
    At home, as a clever and by some richly disliked high-school boy, J. developed a passion for jazz or maybe for blackness, even though he was hesitant with black men. The pursuit of records took hold of him and he brought to it the methodical, dogmatic anxiety of his nature. The music seemed to cut into his flesh, leaving a sort of scar of longing never satisfied, almost a wound of feeling. Like all passions it was isolating because there was much he did not admire that others would, to his fury, press upon him. And then he always said that it could be distressing to listen to jazz when one was troubled or with the “wrong” person. At times he would think of giving it up altogether, so difficult was it to define, even for himself, what popular music and certain ways of doing it were all about. What was it?... the sea itself, or youth alone?
    We lived there in the center of Manhattan, scorning the ups and downs, somehow believing the very placing of the hotel to be an overwhelming beneficence. No star was to be seen in the heavens, but the sky was always bright with the flicker of distant lights. No tree was to be seen, but as if by a miracle little heaps of twigs and blown leaves gathered in the gutters. To live in the obscuring jungle in the midst of things: close to—what? Within walking distance of all those places one never walked to.
    But it was history, wasn’t it? The acrimonious twilight fell into the hollows between the gray and red buildings. Inside, the hotel was a sort of underbrush, a swampy footing for the irregular. What a mark the old hotel dwellers leave on your own unsteady heart—their brooding inconsequences, their delusions and disappearances.
    These people, and some had been there for years, lived as if in a house recently burglarized,