A Boy I Once Knew by Elizabeth Stone

Author:Elizabeth Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2000-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

ONE DAY WHILE IN the middle of reading about Craig’s stay, I drove to Brooklyn to visit my mother, and as we sat in her kitchen having sandwiches and coffee, she asked me what I was working on. I told her about Vincent and his diaries and Craig and about how I’d been thinking about what it means to read someone else’s diary or to let someone read yours.

“That reminds me,” she said. “Once when I was young, I was dating someone named Gordon. He was very handsome, and I was wild about him. We were studying acting in a repertory company together.” The best memories of her life were from the time in her twenties when she had been an actress. Way-off Broadway, she’d done Thornton Wilder and Clifford Odets. Once, on Broadway, she’d starred in August Strindberg’s Bridal Crown for all of its three-day run.

“Every night after rehearsal,” she told me, “Gordon would take me home by subway from the acting studio in Manhattan to Brooklyn. Then he would get back on the subway and return to the apartment in the Village he shared with Alex, another member of the company. But the relationship with Gordon didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He never kissed me. Then one day he showed me his diary. There was a passage which praised me to the skies and then it said, ‘I wish it were truly possible for me to love her.’”

Fifty years later, and she still remembered the line verbatim, and repeated it again. “I wish it were truly possible for me to love her.”

“What did you think was going on?”

“I was young and very naive. I didn’t understand at all. I told the line to my best friend, Dorothy, and asked her what she thought he meant. ‘Oh, Aurora,’ Dorothy said, ‘He’s trying to tell you he’s a homo.’”

In the months following Vincent’s diagnosis, he began to adjust to a future he now understood was limited. At his best, he struck a balance between fatalism and humor, and nowhere was this more apparent than in a small but telling incident at work. For some time, Vincent had kept an ant farm in his cubicle near his desk. Though the space was entirely his, it had no door and only rib-high walls on three sides. Anyone passing by could readily see anything on his desk or on any other surface in his space. Like all ant farms, Vincent’s had gone from thriving to moribund, but he kept it on display all the same. One morning, he arrived to find a note in his box from his boss letting him know (somewhat apologetically) that an unnamed coworker had complained about his visible ant cemetery. Could he please, asked his boss, move it to some place less visible?

Well, of course there wasn’t any place less visible, and that meant Vincent’s ant farm had to go. He guessed immediately who the complainer was and referred to her acidly as “Roach Lady” in his diary that day.

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