the wind. Also, the brewery was affined with my name, Brewster, which I always equated with brew ever since my father fed beer to me in that little one-ounce mug with the cork on the bottom. I was a hophead and no longer ashamed to admit it, living in the heart of Germantown. Nothing pleased me more than to be sitting at the table with Meg in our little kitchen sipping a fine German brew, a nice thick dark one, while the winter winds swept through that giant empty brewery and Meg warmed up a pot of our ongoing stew. We were like this odd couple grown somehow old before our time.
As for sex together, or making love, like in Mexico I don’t remember it. Usually I remember sexual positions I get in with women so that I can play them back in my memory as a turn-on, but I don’t remember any from those early days with Meg. It must have been going on between us, but I don’t remember it. Night was always the time of warm snuggling while the radio played in the dark, after manybeers, which relaxed me enough to allow me to fall into a childlike sleep, free of all desire.
Next to Meg, beer was my best friend. I loved to look at it in the simple glass that I drank from. I loved the musty autumn smell of the hops as I lifted it to my nose. I loved the tickle of its foamy head as it left a white mustache on my upper lip, and the feeling of its smooth thickness going all the way down. Yes, it’s odd to say, but I have to admit it: I remember more how I made love to my beer than how I made love to Meg.
There was another reason that Meg and I did not make love at night and that was our cat, Phil. We found Phil as a stray kitten in the hall of our building. Our friend Barney was working in the kitchen of Maxwell’s Plum, a fancy Upper East Side restaurant, and after work he used to bring over big plastic bags full of leftover meat which he’d hang on our doorknob. I had a great ongoing stew made from that meat. One morning I opened the door to find this sweet little emaciated tabby kitten crying and licking the bottom of the meat bag. We took him in and Meg named him after her brother who had died as a child of leukemia. So Phil grew up with us and actually slept between us at night, and stranger still, Phil slept on his back with his little paws over the edge of the blanket. The only thing that was missing was a pillow for his head. So on our first Christmas together, Meg made a little pillow for him. Phil was like our only child and we treated him that way.
Our night rituals were clear and set. Everything felt in control. There were the beers and Phil, there was classical music on the little radio, there was Barney’s stew and hot baths in the kitchen. Whoever was not in the tub would read to the other from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
. It was a good life as lives go. It was a life of moderation and in-betweens. It was a settled, regular life.
I was collecting Texas unemployment from the Alamo Theatre and lived off that as well as what I made from modeling. During the days I would walk. I would walk and walk. I would walk the city and get to know it that way. Walking was my therapy. Some days I would walk the whole length of Central Park, or just sit on a park bench and watch people and listen to them talk.
Meg got a job selling postcards at the Metropolitan Museum gift shop and also made money by selling some of the rugs she had brought back from Mexico. When she wasn’t at work in the day she was doing her own artwork at home. She was getting into extremely dense charcoal drawings, which she called “landscapes,” although they were like no landscape I’d ever seen before. They were a foreign land to me and a home to her.
Meg would start with a blank piece of white paper about two by three feet, and then lay a piece of masking tape across it like some artificial horizon. She’d proceed to fill in the whole piece of paper in gradations of charcoal. When she finished, she would tear away the masking tape to
As for sex together, or making love, like in Mexico I don’t remember it. Usually I remember sexual positions I get in with women so that I can play them back in my memory as a turn-on, but I don’t remember any from those early days with Meg. It must have been going on between us, but I don’t remember it. Night was always the time of warm snuggling while the radio played in the dark, after manybeers, which relaxed me enough to allow me to fall into a childlike sleep, free of all desire.
Next to Meg, beer was my best friend. I loved to look at it in the simple glass that I drank from. I loved the musty autumn smell of the hops as I lifted it to my nose. I loved the tickle of its foamy head as it left a white mustache on my upper lip, and the feeling of its smooth thickness going all the way down. Yes, it’s odd to say, but I have to admit it: I remember more how I made love to my beer than how I made love to Meg.
There was another reason that Meg and I did not make love at night and that was our cat, Phil. We found Phil as a stray kitten in the hall of our building. Our friend Barney was working in the kitchen of Maxwell’s Plum, a fancy Upper East Side restaurant, and after work he used to bring over big plastic bags full of leftover meat which he’d hang on our doorknob. I had a great ongoing stew made from that meat. One morning I opened the door to find this sweet little emaciated tabby kitten crying and licking the bottom of the meat bag. We took him in and Meg named him after her brother who had died as a child of leukemia. So Phil grew up with us and actually slept between us at night, and stranger still, Phil slept on his back with his little paws over the edge of the blanket. The only thing that was missing was a pillow for his head. So on our first Christmas together, Meg made a little pillow for him. Phil was like our only child and we treated him that way.
Our night rituals were clear and set. Everything felt in control. There were the beers and Phil, there was classical music on the little radio, there was Barney’s stew and hot baths in the kitchen. Whoever was not in the tub would read to the other from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
. It was a good life as lives go. It was a life of moderation and in-betweens. It was a settled, regular life.
I was collecting Texas unemployment from the Alamo Theatre and lived off that as well as what I made from modeling. During the days I would walk. I would walk and walk. I would walk the city and get to know it that way. Walking was my therapy. Some days I would walk the whole length of Central Park, or just sit on a park bench and watch people and listen to them talk.
Meg got a job selling postcards at the Metropolitan Museum gift shop and also made money by selling some of the rugs she had brought back from Mexico. When she wasn’t at work in the day she was doing her own artwork at home. She was getting into extremely dense charcoal drawings, which she called “landscapes,” although they were like no landscape I’d ever seen before. They were a foreign land to me and a home to her.
Meg would start with a blank piece of white paper about two by three feet, and then lay a piece of masking tape across it like some artificial horizon. She’d proceed to fill in the whole piece of paper in gradations of charcoal. When she finished, she would tear away the masking tape to
Similar Books
