Just Kids

A note to the reader

ON MARCH 8, 1989, ROBERT AND I HAD OUR LAST CONVERSATION. The last, that is, in the human form. He knew he was dying and yet there was still a note of hope, a singular and obdurate thread, woven in the timber of his voice. I asked him what he wanted me to do for him and he said take care of my flowers. He asked me to write an introduction to his flower book. They are color flowers and I know you prefer the black and white ones so perhaps you won't like them. I will like them I said and I will do it. I told him that I would continue our work, our collaboration, for as long as I lived. Will you write our story? Do you want me to? You have to he said no one but you can write it. I will do it, I promised, though I knew it would be a vow difficult to keep. I love you Patti. I love you Robert. And he was wheeled away for tests and I never heard him speak again. Save for his breath, which seemed to fill his hospital room as he lay dying.

I wrote the poem for his memorial card as I had done for Sam Wagstaff. On the twenty-second of May, Fred and I attended the service at the Whitney Museum. Fred wore a suit of indigo gabardine with a burgundy tie. I wore my Easter dress of black silk velvet with a white lace collar. There were two grand vases with white lilies flanking the podium. His flowers hung on the walls. As I sang his memorial song I held the image of him from two decades before, smoking a cigarette outside the museum, waiting for me to emerge. Robert’s entire family was present. His father, Harry, greeted me with warmth and compassion. His mother, Joan, was in a wheelchair fitted with a small oxygen tank. When I knelt to kiss her goodbye she pressed my hand. You’re a writer, she whispered with some effort. Write me a line. I imagined she meant a letter, but Joan passed away three days later and was buried at Our Lady of the Snows.

I wrote the piece for Flowers and honored Joan’s request. I wrote The Coral Sea and made drawings in remembrance of him but our story was obliged to wait until I could find the right voice. There are many stories I could yet write about Robert, about us. But this is the story I have told. It is the one he wished me to tell and I have kept my promise. We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.

May 22, 2010

–from Flowers, 1989

In all the world one may always hope to recapture something lost. But sometimes we are obliged to set the memory of certain things in a dresser of small regrets. Yet occasionally we discover in the folds of an old handkerchief a shell or insignificant stone that had once embodied our happiest of afternoons. We experience a moment of respite when all sense of bad luck vanishes. As when the corrected proofs of Finnegans Wake, left on a backseat within a maze of taxicabs, were magically returned to the hands of an astonished and grateful James Joyce.

In mid-July, as I was assembling these pages, I received a message from my friend the photographer Lynn Goldsmith. She had met a young girl of fifteen named Delilah, who read my book and had given it to her mother to read. Her mother told her that years ago, after the birth of her first child, she took a trip with him on the Concord. Robert was sitting next to her and had a loving connection with the infant. This did not surprise me, as Robert was always tender and caring with children.

When Robert passed away, remembering his kindness, Delilah’s mother obtained his desk at auction. Lynn assured me that if it was the desk that I had written of, that it was in good hands. When I opened the attachment I burst into tears. It was indeed his desk, as glowing as I remembered.

Seeing the photograph of Delilah, working so diligently, as I had dreamed I might, filled me with great happiness. I used to close my eyes and picture Robert showing it to me, saying, I thought of you when I got it because you always loved desks. Now I am at peace. I imagine Delilah writing at the desk, perhaps stopping for a moment, to give us both a good thought.