Chapter Nine: Søren

Once upon a time, long, long ago—back in New York City, back in 1992—Søren would have looked at the life he is living now and seen nothing. Seen failure. Seen insignificance. 

Because, what does he have? A little stilt house on the eroding coast of a failing empire? The same job his mother had, the life of a small town tailor, mostly mendings and alterations, hardly ever the chance to design—one look, let alone a wardrobe—except this once a year in the service of the Players. It’s a modest life, without glamour, without awards, without any indication that he and his vision, his artists’ perspective, are in any way important. 

He’d wanted to be important! He was going to be, he was on track for it. The little boy who’d fallen in love with fabric’s many forms and their concomitant possibilities, sewing dolls’ cloths from scraps on his mother’s studio floor back in Lansing, son of the starched Midwest, he’d made it out, from backwater to the Big City; he was standing on a rooftop in Manhattan, Central Park stretched out before him, martini in hand, dressed in a cerulean raw silk suit of his own design, fending off complements, fielding proposals, being courted after a lifetime of being ignored, now The One every director wanted to give their characters form. He’d looked out at that expanse of newly leafed trees and felt a kinship with them, felt like a bolt of silk himself, shining with potential. 

Could that young man have looked farther than the park, could he have seen to the future, to this moment, he would have scoffed. Or maybe leapt right over the railing to prevent such a tragedy of inconsequence from ever coming to pass. 

And now he wonders, does she see his life as he once would have? As an embarrassment, as an insignificance? She who pulls into his driveway in her drop top Porsche. Who is dressed, each time he sees her, in a new designer fit. Who has twice offered to, “just, like, buy you what you need for this thing so you don’t have to be, like, hunting through your scraps and, like, whatever.” Whose very name, Desirée, with its accented flair, evokes the wealth that is her adoptive birth right. And, who, besides being wealthy, is young, beautiful, ambitious, and a student of his craft in the city he left behind, in class with those very designers who were his peers, once upon a time. 

He can imagine her disdain, her skepticism that this assignment—which Kimberly gave them both, for her to assist him with his fittings—could be worthy of her time. But she has said nothing to imply it. And, now, for the third afternoon, she is sitting at his kitchen table, which is his only table, and also his desk, sewing hems and pleats and fringe and buttons—finishing touches—without complaint. 

“These are, like, really beautiful pieces,” she says, her first remark on his work. 

“I’m pleased you think so.” 

“They’re almost, like, too good, you know? Like, no offense to this place. But who’s going to appreciate the intricacy?”

Søren laughs. “You underestimate ‘this place.’ But even if you don’t, isn’t it worthwhile to construct a thing of beauty for the simple sake of devotion? Even if nobody sees it, even if nobody cares?”

“I guess,” she says. “In theory. Like, my profs are always saying that, more or less. That we should be satisfied by our craft. Easy for them to say, with their thick fucking IMDb pages. But, I don’t know. Isn’t the point of art to have an impact? I mean, why go to all this trouble if it isn’t going to get noticed? To, like, do something in someone else’s mind?” 

“The point of art is up to the artist. If you want to have an impact, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what I wanted for a long time, too. Long ago.” 

“But you don’t anymore?”

“Look, it isn’t that I’m trying not to have an impact. But it’s not my goal, either.”

“Okay, so, what is?”

“For me, Desirée, the measure of my work has become: whether I have put something of the ineffable essence of being into my creation. Whether that vital force some might call ‘God’ is present, is palpable in what I’ve made.”

“And how do you know if it is?” She holds Don Quixote’s doublet at arm’s length, scrutinizing. Quilted, Søren has embroidered the piece with scenes from the knight’s adventures, detailing that won’t be seen by the audience, a tableau that will read only as texture from afar, to which he devoted a days.

“I know because I feel the spirit pass through me as I work. And then the work becomes a communion. With that which lives beyond the veil.”

“The veil?” Until this moment, Søren has felt that everything Desirée has said, she could have taken or left. She has been half present, half indifferent. But now she stops sewing. Sets the doublet down. He sees, he hears, she is in earnest. 

He knows, because Kimberly told him—not because Desirée herself has said anything of it—that her friend Will overdosed at the start of the summer. That this tragedy is what precipitated her pilgrimage to the Outer Banks, and so her apprenticeship with him. Which means he understands why she is serious, and he answers with equal sincerity. “It’s my belief that the world as we experience it is but the skin of existence. Its costume, if you will. An outward expression of something greater, vaster, some force or form—the body, or the being—invisible to us beneath it. Or, within it.”

“You know, I googled you,” she says, the last reply he’d have expected. “Kim said you were the real deal, and she wasn’t kidding. You were, like, someone for a hot second. Like, there’s interviews, there’s profiles. You’re on Wikipedia. You get name-checked in Page Six. You have an IMDb. It’s like, you were everywhere, and then you were gone. Is all this veil stuff why you disappeared?”

“I hardly disappeared. I came here.”

“I mean, but, like, same difference.”

Søren laughs. 

“So, why did you leave?”

There are moments from his past that remain as vivid to him as the present ever is. That he not only sees, but feels into, can return to and reside within at will. Or to which he might be dragged back by a scent, a glimpse, a word. 

“Why did you leave?” Desirée wants to know. 

And he’s walking through the door to their SoHo loft—first week of May, all the windows open, bowls of peonies on every surface—to discover Alvin in repose on their green velvet couch, backlit by the descending sun. “A vision!” Søren declares, and Alvin swings up to sitting, which is when Søren sees, when he understands, his lover hasn’t been resting there on that couch like some bourgeoise Victorian lady, he has collapsed in agony like the late twentieth century gay he is. 

“I’m dying,” Alvin says, straight-faced, matter-of-fact. 

And, what a thing to say! Just like that? Out of blue? Is this some elaborate joke? But Alvin is, it must be said, a hypochondriac. He thinks he’s dying every second Tuesday. 

“What is it this time?” Søren asks, going to him, sitting beside him, hand on his knee, kissing his cheek, still believing, for the last time, that nothing is amiss. 

His rude awakening comes quickly. Calmly, gaze fixed on his hands, clasped in his lap, Alvin reveals the secret history of his last six months: the first gnawing suspicions, his skin itching strangely, those nose bleeds, how tired he felt climbing the flights to their loft…intensifying, multiplying, driving him to make the first appointment, which led to the next, and to the blood tests, to the bone marrow biopsy, to, finally, at last, today, this afternoon, just hours ago, a diagnosis, a prognosis. While Søren was out meeting with another director, Alvin was sitting across the desk from Dr. Chen, learning what acute monocytic leukemia means. 

Which is, in short, slim chances. 

“Oh, Alvin! Why didn’t you say anything sooner? Why did you go through all of that alone?!”

“I didn’t want to worry you. And, you know, I thought it might be the other thing. Which would have been…I don’t know what I would have done. I’m so fucking glad it’s not. That I didn’t put you in danger.” 

“I wish it was!” Søren says. “I wish we had the same fate. You’re not dying. But I’d like to die with you.” 

As they’ve talked—as Alvin has talked—the light has been slowly draining from the room, leaving with the sun below the horizon, and it feels like some horrible metaphor. In the gathering dark, Søren breaks down, sobbing. 

“It’s alright,” Alvin tells him, the comforted becoming the comforter. “It’s alright, my dear. I’m almost certainly dying. And I don’t want to die. But I’m not afraid. I’m only sad, that’s all.”

“You’re not dying!” Sniffling, Søren wipes his tears away with a ferocious determination. “Alvin, you are not going to die. You got bad news. You imagined the worst. Of course you would. Anyone would. I did, for a minute there. But I was wrong, and you’re wrong. The worst won’t come to pass. There’s treatment, right? What’s the treatment? Chemo, radiation, something like that? What did she say, this secret doctor you’ve been seeing? Chen. God, why weren’t you just having an affair?”

Alvin smiles at that. “Impossible, my love. Yes, there’s treatment. There are things to try. But, dear, the odds aren’t good.”

“Then we’ll beat the odds! We’ll be the outliers!”

“But, Søren, when I think that, I think of everyone else having this same conversation. And, why should it get to be me who survives? It feels more than foolish, it feels selfish to hope.” 

“Then don’t hope for your sake, hope for mine. How could I live without you? Really, it’s me you’ve got to save!”  

Like softest petals of the blushing peonies all around them, Alvin’s lips touch Søren’s, linger there. “Alright, my love,” he says. “You’re right. We’ll beat the odds.” 

So it was, with tears and a kiss, on that velvet couch in the dying light, that the twenty-six months commenced, which would transform Søren from the man he had been on that Upper West Side rooftop to the one he is in this imperiled coastal bungalow. 

At first he tried to maintain those routines he had confused for his life, to keep caring about the minutia that had long consumed his thought, to believe such a thing as his career could matter. Alvin encouraged this. Insisted upon it. Begged Søren not to sacrifice too much. 

But Søren wanted to sacrifice everything. “Everything,” as he had previously imagined it, he saw, with crystal clarity, amounted to very little when compared with Alvin’s life. They had not existed in opposition before—devotion to his beloved, devotion to his craft—but now they did, and it was easy to know which he would let go. He quit every project to which he’d been committed and committed himself entirely to Alvin’s care. 

Would it be strange to say those days were the happiest of his life? Those days of sleepless nights and hospital rooms. Of blood counts and biopsies and chemical drips. When he gained an intimate knowledge of Sloan Kettering’s wards, wings, patients and procedures. He’d never say it, but it might be true. Because, for twenty-six months, thirty-two years ago, he was totally devoted to that which mattered most. Each morning, he woke with purest purpose. No matter how fitful his sleep, how brief, he hopped out of bed, ready to give every ounce of his time, his energy, his attention, to his beloved. He had found that cause for which he would suffer anything, and with religious fervor he did. 

“Sometimes,” Alvin said, Alvin who accepted his fate with such philosophic composure, “I think this cancer is harder on you than it is me.” He’d lost thirty pounds and all his hair, and his mouth was just then so painfully ulcerated he could barely stand to sip a smoothie from a straw. 

“Don’t be silly, you goose,” Søren told him. 

But what’s true was that he’d never faced a greater challenge. The two a.m. trips to the emergency room when Alvin’s fever spiked, when another infection took hold. The obsessive disinfection of every surface he might touch. The constant vigilance, and the constant anticipatory sorrow. Because, worst of all, all the while, he had to watch as the man he loved turned to a ghost before his eyes, turned pale, shrank away, grew weak, so obviously retreating from—at the time he’d thought from life, but now he only thinks from this plane of existence. 

In short, it was heaven, and it was hell. It was and will remain the time in his life when he was most alive. 

“I want you to remember this forever,” Alvin told him the day Dr. Chen told them there was nothing more to be done. “I don’t regret the disease. Don’t think I’m leaving with regrets, though I regret that I have to leave. Because, here we are, together. All my days, Søren, there has been nothing sweeter than living in your embrace. Do you know what I mean? You’re a revelation I’d die for a hundred times over.”  

He didn’t want to die in the city, though; least of all in a hospital room. Steel, cement, neon, fluorescents, latex, linoleum, antiseptic, he’d had enough of all of that. 

“Tell me what you want,” Søren said, “and you shall have it.” 

What Alvin wanted was the ocean, so they borrowed a sky blue Beetle from an actor Søren knew and started driving down the coast, taking it slow, stopping everywhere that charmed them. They lost to the slots in Atlantic City, rode the Menagerie Carousel in Ocean City, watched the Chincoteague ponies grazing on Assateague Island, flew kites from the False Cape dunes. They were headed for Key West, but Cape Hatteras was as far as they got before the road turned exhausting, before the fun had run its course. 

“This will do,” Alvin said, in the light house gazing out toward the tip of the peninsula and nothing but the ocean beyond it. “This feels fine. This feels right. You know? It feels like the end of the world.” 

“I’d imagined I would go back,” Søren says. “But, by the time he died, I couldn’t kid myself that any of it mattered. You know, I’d seen what really mattered. I’d felt it. And it cured me of all my old ambitions. Like a purifying fire, right? I was going to have to aspire to something different, now. I was going to have to do everything differently. I didn’t know what that meant. But I knew where to start. Which was with Alvin, of course. Who he was, his spirit, his nature. I knew if I just kept him in my mind, like a guiding star, I could never go far wrong. And, yes, we’d had our time in the city, but here was where he died. Here was where he chose to die. I can’t be closer to him, anywhere on earth, than I can here, so here is where I’ll stay.”

It isn’t often that Søren has cause to tell this story. Three decades on, he doesn’t speak of Alvin much, although he still speaks to him every day. But that’s different than dreading up these memories; that keeps him in the present, doesn’t return him to the past. He expected to feel more melancholy, journey back in time, but instead he is so happy to have returned to those vivid rooms. He finds the pain of the loss has all but vanished, leaving only the love, and he’s feeling aglow with it, smiling, until—

He looks to Desirée and sees she has buried her head in her hands and has, quietly, begun to cry. 

“Oh!” Søren says, “Oh, no! Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said so much. I wasn’t thinking. Kimberly told me about your friend.” 

“Will,” Desirée says, through her tears and her hands. “Will. He was my best friend.” And now she’s positively sobbing. 

And, he misses that. Is that strange? That rawest grief. When the veil is still so thin. When you’re reaching with your whole soul to try to reach through it, to touch who you love on the other side. It’s horrible to grow past that grief. Does she know how lucky she is? 

Hesitating only for a moment, he stands and goes to stand beside her, sets a hand on her shoulder, lightly, because he doesn’t want to rush her through her feelings, just to let her know she won’t drown in them, someone’s here to pull her from the water, should it come to that. 

When her sobs subside he steps back and takes a seat on the arm of the couch, the same couch upon which Alvin was sitting when he proclaimed that he was dying, which Søren drove down in a U-Haul himself, six months later, when he was certain he wouldn’t be returning to the city, so well-worn someone else might say it’s mangy looking, but he’ll never reupholster it. 

“Fuck,” Desirée says, lowering her hands, shaking her head. “Life is so fucking, fucking tragic.” 

“It is,” Søren says. “Yes, that’s half of what it is.” 

Desirée considers this. “You want me to think, like, the good stuff cancels out the bad, or something? Blah, blah balance? But the good stuff gets wiped out by the bad. Because the bad is how it ends. It’s the final fucking word, man.” 

“Is it?” 

“I mean, yeah. Will overdosed in a fucking, in that fucking…he was alone! He was fucking alone in that stupid room. That nothing, nowhere. And he died before he got to do, like, anything. All the everything he was going to do!” 

Søren has known his own grief, and Desirée’s is all too palpable, and certainly the midst of grief is no time for points, counterpoints, persuasion. Nevertheless, he would like to offer her something, some vision that might suggest what he believes: that death is not the final word. That it is nothing more or less than a doorway.

“I used to believe,” he tells her, “something along the lines of what you’re saying. It’s part of what made watching Alvin die so awful. Feeling like, at the end of that struggle, he, who I loved most, would cease to be. And of course, he is gone from the world as we know it. And I still hate that. And I’d still give anything for it not to be so. I’d give everything for a hair’s breadth of a second more in his presence. But, when he died, I realized…it was like all the things I’d thought, all that I’d been taught to believe, that science says, about ‘lights out,’ that party line, it was effortlessly, instantaneous disproven by what I felt beyond a shadow of a doubt. That, though I could no longer perceive him, Alvin’s spirit, the spark of his life…there was no way for such a thing to have been obliterated.”  

“Does that mean—?” Desirée asks, serious as a person can be, “do you think that, when you die…do you think you’re going to see him again?” 

“I know I am,” Søren says. 

By the time Hazard arrives for his fitting, Desirée has dried her eyes, and they have resumed their sewing, though their conversation lingers in the air. Hazard’s knock dispels it. He enters without waiting for admission. Enters with a flourish and a bow. “Good sir, gentle lady.” He enters in character, raving about the giants he spied on his way to them, the castle for which he’s bound, the fair maiden whose honor he defends. Then he breaks from Don Quixote’s voice to ask, “Hey, have you heard about the hurricane?”