Telling Lives

By Craig Tapping

several people--gay men, lesbians, their friends, parents and children--strive to construct new family models and community as they move in and out of love and work. questions of trust and responsibility grow as various characters move from hidden to open lives, in various locales across the city. this is a study of urban living, gay and lesbian culture, and a testament to love and youth.
generational confusion and dialogue, personal fears and inhibitions, collective euphoria and hopes for a different world: all feature in a novel that is emotionally pulling, sometimes euphorically transcendent, and often visually emotive. the novel is a history, a fiction, an urban catalogue and a collective testament to the roots of contemporary gay and lesbian lives. its morality is generated by the emotional truths presented by different characters. there is no "agenda" in the novel, just the record of lives, friendship, love and dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Tapping
• Release date: Aug 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301931675

Craig Tapping

For a long time, I did many things. I’ve worked as a surveyor in northern B.C. and on the streets of Vancouver, sold music in a record store. I made ice cream desserts in a burger café in Ireland, and cleaned toilets and ran a dishwashing machine in yet another major restaurant. I pulled beer and made snacks in a Belgian pub, and earned my papers as a pastry and sweet chef back in Ireland. I even sheared sheep, and then helped dip them in the mountains south of Dublin. But all that sporadic employment led me to university in Canada and then Ireland, and to make a home here on Gabriola Island.Since the 1970s, I have taught in art colleges and in English departments—in Ireland, Nigeria and Canada. I have also guest lectured and organized small cultural festivals in several places around the world, including Singapore, Chicago, Ottawa, Sosnowice (near Krakow), Calabar (Nigeria) and in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island.Now, facing retirement, I'm painting (watercolours mainly) and writing, and--with my partner of over 38 years--gardening on a scale big enough to keep us in food and flowers most of the year.

Book preview

TELLING LIVES

published by Craig Tapping at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Craig Tapping

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Chapter One

On a morning like this, Joseph likes to sit at the table in the middle of the open room. Light pours in from every side, dancing across the furniture he paints. He shifts in his chair, almost unconsciously watching freighters load at docks across the harbour, smaller boats leaping out across the waves and through the bridge into sunlight.

Pleasure craft, he thinks and smiles, considering the varieties of cruising this new life has introduced. Images and words bounce off one another, his mind following the play of light. Joseph has learned that ideas just cannot anchor when he's in this calm almost trance-like state. Thinking is impossible if you wander with the light, the breeze. He's addicted to this morning reverie. Oblivion, pleasure, escape. It's a drug. Hovering at the periphery of his vision, his thought.

He moves away for another cup of tea and notices how the other windows reveal cars piling up before the bridge, secretaries lining up for coffee five storeys below, a balcony garden which can only have been planted for him to admire, and—down the street near the trees—people strolling casually into the park. So many stories, he muses.

Inhaling steamy jasmine, Joseph puts his cup on the counter and closes his eyes. He ambles back to the table, empty-handed.

He wanders into the lives he watches, imagining heartbreak, joy, motive and the boredom of repetition. He names some of the people, remembers others, invents new strangers, and plots whole narratives. Victory and loss, desolation and redemption. There are never enough loose ends, he thinks, remembering his own forays into knitting with a bittersweet grin. And then making it fit right.

He glances up, and catches sight of an older man across the way watering the planters. They smile. Joseph wishes he could talk across the distance about the flowers the man grows so far away from any possible admirers. He notes the elegance of the man's small balcony, the readiness of the man's smile. It's the third or fourth morning this week, he realizes. He wonders if the man's timing is planned.

Joseph blushes to think they might be flirting, but will not turn from the palette of blue and white suspended above the simmering pavement. The building itself is romantic, an earlier generation's notion of modern architecture.

He notices that—even up here and so city in its space—the pale and intermittent clouds of pink schizanthus draw butterflies to the man's open windows. Joseph thinks he's even seen a hummingbird, but can't be sure. He was dreaming, may have woken momentarily to glimpse its rapid transit. Or it could have been one of those images back-flashed against the retina. The kinds of mental play he searches for on mornings like this.

The man raises a cup to Joseph. He moves to lift his cup, and discovers his absent-mindedness. On the counter, tea and pot are cold. There is no drink to answer libations with. He turns, sees the man has gone inside anyway.

The range of his depression—he measures it like a scientist—surprises him. A stranger, a cup of tea, a passing smile. Deprived. Depraved. And suddenly awake to the day that's coming. He drifts again, remembering how he moved north to live with Jamie here. Seven years now, and still not officially here.

Sneaking in that first time, not even bothering to answer questions and driving through. Not that anyone can tell an American from a Canadian anyway. Once he faltered and had to get a tourist visa. But then Immigration officers never followed up when that ran out. Joseph stayed on, off the books, in the shade, unperceived.

On really bad days, he imagines himself pursued, almost discovered, on the brink of being deported. He fears jaywalking, and getting caught. No identity to share with any policeman, that's for sure. Or being a witness to someone else's problem, having to give them your name, address. The panic of being involved, noticed, asked to stand out from the crowd for even a brief moment. Dealing with the police in this country just doesn't bear thinking about, girlfriend, he says out loud, pouring fresh tea he into the coffee bowl he bought after watching too many films by Truffaut. Stolen kisses, hidden lives. A penchant for style, a yearning for another life, lived elsewhere under quite different conditions.

It's unnerving. He stays in.

And now he’s learned that Jamie's colleagues—most of them, anyway—are unaware that Jamie shares a life with anyone. That was a jolt, after the passion of their meeting, that delicious courtship in upstate New York. Nothing and no one in their way, and they hanging onto each other, grinning. Almost two glorious years, free, disconnected, together. Then this new job, and all this sudden discretion in a city that’s open and gay, everywhere else but...

That's unnerving, too. More reason to stay in, stay away. He doesn't even know the names of everyone Jamie works with.

The in-laws aren't such a different story, either. They visit or telephone, but he is always invisible. It's Jamie's chez: they’ve made that clear. And he's just visiting. How long can a body be on holiday, he wonders.

All their demands that Jamie, always alone, come visit for special family times. Oh, that tourist friend from America, he can mind the apartment, he'll be glad of the space. No one ever wants to ask a real question, just How long's he staying for, dear? I used to think the answer was eternity, m'dear.

Face it, girl, I am the original foreign devil, and I've seduced and corrupted your precious son. None of you have ever made any effort even just to tolerate me. Never so much as a how are you? I'll bet you don't even know my name.

Thank God, they live so far away. It's a real excursion just to get here and that doesn't happen so very often. I couldn't face another visit just yet, thank you. Always so careful to keep us very separate. As if, well, as if no one can tell anything. Two men our ages just don't stay together so long, and not suck a cock once in a while, Helen. That's just life. Watch, we swish. Listen up, we're dishing someone. Wake up, momma, your little boy's a queer.

Joseph knows that the few friends he has for his own are frequently upset, want to help him through what look like bad patches. No one ever quite knows how to intervene. None of them speak about it with each other. It's a black hole that no light gets into, a sealed off area in all their lives. Mostly he stays their curiosities, tactfully but firmly. His grand manner silences them. I don't want even to begin answering the questions they want to ask. Vagueness, silly laughter, non sequiturs serve me well: No one asks a direct question anymore. No one can comment on how I've decided to live this life.

Only trouble is, my teeth are beginning to feel funny. We can't afford the dentist, and I 'm not listed on any of Jamie's work plans. That'd give me away. And me. After years of living in big cities, I'm suddenly terrified of traffic, the great big outside world.

It isn't so different, really. Even in upstate New York, I was the stay-at-home. Jamie worked in colleges, teaching undergraduates the rigours of French pronunciation, composition. I've more degrees, but he's got all the ambition in this family. I just cannot imagine me, dressed up real straight, sitting in front of an interview panel, answering glib questions with smart answers, coming up with the job.

I run our lives, and that's some achievement. I sew, knit, read, keep this place going. Cook, plan parties. And paint the furniture.

When it was New York, I planned all those forays into the city. We wanted art, music, food and—one of us, as has become increasingly obvious—wanted regular sex with casual strangers. I was never entertained by his stories, but I listened. Is that when the rot set in?

Mama, where has your child gone wrong?...It must be love, because I feel so bad.... This morning's improvisation gets Joseph through the mire. To him, scat-singing is something you do to chase the blues away. He imagines the blues as a delicately padded leopard sniffing around the edges of your disappointment, waiting to pounce on your fragilities. He sings louder.

Lost in music, he looks up from the misery he's skirted, sees his neighbour re-emerge to sunbathe amongst the blossoms. The heave of his heart as he registers how handsome, how frail, how near—how beautiful—the man is. He admires the still youthful body, untrained muscles, the slight belly grazed with golden and silver hair swooping down into pink cotton briefs. A satyr resplendent, behind sunshades, recumbent on a striped sunchair. Joseph's groin stirs in the morning light.

He sits back at the table, somewhat consternated, and decides to anchor himself instead in the attainable. He considers the table, its beauties he so carefully brought to life. This much I know, am glad of. Everyone remarks on my painterly touches, how I've made the flat so chic, so liveable, so enviously sophisticated. This is one answer to those unasked questions.

This table. It's very solid, very old, very much here wherever you are in the room. It's like me, it's like us. Maybe we're like it. An old table which looks like it should have been something else. Changed, translated by being in this life with us who've had to translate, alter so much just to get on with everyday routines. The way it's painted is an answer, I'm sure.

Here we are on the west coast, an affluent neighbourhood. Everyone wants to be natural. Pine is in. Well, m'dears, not for this girl. If you sit around the house, arranging flowers and sometimes books, writing letters and even planning some entertainment, then the pale untouched surfaces of wood as it comes from the tree is just not uplifting. I have always prided myself on living for uplift, shunning the natural and obvious, casually searching for the kinder qualities of strangeness.

When I got this table, it just didn't work. Lots of visitors exclaimed enviously at its deep rich tones. It looked so much like an heirloom and suggested a private income, a secret past life, a fall from gentrified convention. Immediately I realized what it was saying about lives and people, what it told people about me and about us, it was damaged. It looked too natural, for all that natter and admiration, too much like the pine aesthetic I so loathe. We've had enough of lectures on what is natural, normal—as in respectable, allowed—to last several generations. Fuck them all.

This conversation with things, with the past, with the light pouring in now from every side of the apartment, often goes on for hours at a time. Every once in a while, he punctuates these inner musings with controlled fits of giggles, or hums a tune he half remembers. As Joseph sees it, the best lyrics are infinitely adaptable.

The neighbour stands, his arms hieratic, addressing the blue and empty sky. Joseph stops the song midpoint, moves to the window. He's blessing and being blessed, inviting, wanting to be invited.

Joseph suddenly realizes he's wrapped himself up as if it were early spring, or late fall. Sweater, shirt, trousers, woollen socks. Where am I and why am I here, so out of touch with this reality? he asks, moving into the shadows to watch the man on the balcony more closely.

He hoiks his sweater off, undoes the buttons of his shirt, watching all the while the man move behind his flower garden, in the light, on display for his eyes only. He bends to pull a sock off, kicks the other off. He decides to change his entire look for the day. The man sees him, beckons Joseph into the light, into the green, into the freedom of being seen, sharing the morning.

Joseph stands, half-undressed, shrugs ruefully at his neighbour. Silence vibrates in the air between them. His cock swells. He moves back, away from the window, away from this adventure. Back to the chores at hand.

He tries a song, imagines a new wardrobe, a different look. He throws something casual, cotton, together. He hums, moves back into the beautiful empty room. He decides that his songs can, must actually, be put on hold, especially for tonight's menu.

There'll be people over. There's food to think about and shop for, seating arrangements and entertainment to consider. Joseph, bathed in light and shiningly attired, conscientiously considers such minutiae, now more fully in his element. He notes that the man next door has retreated, but thanks him anyway for the energy and sudden focus.

He loves the process of planning an event, almost more than the achieved results he is noted for.

Jamie, by contrast, likes large dinner parties, the finished thing. The food on the table, the plates full to bursting with colourful and pungent foods, the wineglasses sparkling in the candlelight and, of course, men. He lives for the men gathered round the painted table, searching for conversational openings, bantering their way through innuendo, gossip and the mannered exchanges of trivia. He dreams that minds loosened by alcohol, friendship and the celebration of the evening will lead to bodies merging. For him, a shirt unbuttoned carelessly while explaining the finer points of some arcane issue, shoes kicked to the side in the passion of argument—such small points sign the man, reveal his desires and habits.

For both of them, a good party begins when men with not much in common beyond their desires for other men and an inbred talent, genius even, for talking about singers, painters, dancers, discard their inhibitions and agree to meet on some new plane. When people are only slightly acquainted, they can't initially relax into the comfort of old friends, silences. The rituals of abandonment interest them both, pulling them together in this conspiracy to create fabulous, remembered soirées. The table sings with the food and the celebration of wit and bitchery, the ease of flesh discovering its appeals, the litheness of minds sniffing out new territories, possible mates, probable rivals. It feels like what a salon is supposed to feel like. And it keeps Jamie home, at least on the nights Joseph can manage to organize the proper magnitude of an event. If, too, he manages to forewarn his errant, sometimes lover.

We'll all sit around this table, drink, and smoke, talk grand, relax, open these windows, let the night air waft in from the inlet over our ideas and the coffee. We'll hear the treetops moving in the breeze and think we're above it all. The table will almost groan under the weight of the plates, all the food and flowers we'll put out. The table, which used to be very special, is even more so now. Often, it's the centre of the night's entertainment, a conversation starter, a challenge to rise to its level of splendour, travesty, and translated traditions.

Grandmother brought it from Chicago out to Montana at the turn of the century, one story goes. It had been vaguely European, somewhat Italianate in its florid excess. The family always used it as a refuge against the western roughness of their new lives, the lack of couth among their social acquaintances. The table truly was a keepsake, an heirloom, and a touchstone. It said we'd all been something quite other in another time and place. Its dark brown tones suggested cellos, hushed voices. The table was an icon, even then, of an almost forgotten, legendary past. A sign of the fall into these rougher, more savage times. A shard against their ruin. O Hieronymo, mon amour.

Well, that much is still true, he chuckles, remembering how his mother on her last visit had gasped, gone through the vapours, and then tried to suggest that his primary goal in life was to induce a coronary in her already too frail, too tried system. A week later, she loved its exquisite chicaneries and false surfaces. No one back home or even further afield—according to her devotion to magazines and the like—had anything like it, nor the imagination to invent anything remotely similar. You had to want to break something first, to trample on an almost sacred history, before you could start making furniture like this. Joseph is proud, even now reminiscing, of the way his mother had thought her way through to understanding his aesthetic. It marks them both, aligns them spiritually. He's glad she knows things, without him having to argue past preconceptions or prejudice. As she saw it, the table—the madeover, Josephed version of it, she meant—wasn't queer so much as elegant, artistic, special. She was always mixing up distinguished and distinct, but it didn't really matter.

There was only him on these visits to listen to her otherwise sadly unfulfilled memories of other places and times, her stories of life in the gruelling climate of where she now lived. She'd move north to be closer, except he could offer no stability, no hope of a comfort in the coming storms of old age. And no guarantee of any help with immigration officers, who—experience has already taught her—don't all take kindly to a tale of distress. This only adds to the melancholy of midwinter in Montana. And depresses the hell out of both of them.

One grey November morning soon after they'd arrived here, Joseph had first moved against the continuing onslaught of grey skies and damp.

This place was to be a respite from the grim, sad thoughts engendered by that other home, that other city. Except no one had warned him of the rain, the damp which ached in your bones, the continuing wet, gray skies which seemed to make everything look pewter, even on the best days. He didn't appreciate, and wasn't about to start learning how to understand, the nuances of green branches, sea grays. This umbrous atmosphere. It was far too monochromatic. Style was after all about choice.

He began, first, simply to pick out the details in the old brown wood. Before he knew what was happening, the curtains were down forever, the windows open to the sky and the air. That new light and space changed everything, and stunned him with this first discovery. It was gray outside but light and clean inside, filtered by the glass.

Strangely, it most affected how he looked at the table.

Where once he'd been content to follow the patterns some craftsman had carved, he now decided to bring them gawdily to life like a fresco. His deep brown study of a family's past would become the carnivalesque of applied plasterworks in that now lit room, like the newly restored convent which he'd visited on a tour of vineyards in northern California.

His mother and he had snickered as they glanced around the vast caverns of the cellars, now lined with wooden barrels and vats, everything painted those bright pastels so tastefully discovered by California's interior designers. They kept imagining nuns, returned from the dead, discovering such lively goings-on, confused by the way their world had been transformed. Wine was wine, and miracles held that God was in it, but this refined snifter and apprentice vintner who was teaching them to enjoy the bouquet and resonances of a variety of new wines was just not in the same universe as those earlier, equally zealous sisters.

Later, they encountered the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Boom-Boom and her pals. Men who were nuns, who wore rollerskates, cheerleading women on Harley Davidsons—Dykes on Bikes—roaring down the mainstreets of the city. It was then that Joseph realized, for the first time, that he'd been born in the right century, and in the right place. The whiff of that holy wine—its promise of redemption, a new life—filled his dreams for weeks afterwards.

That had been his first experience of the west coast. He had actually witnessed transubstantiation. Gay men were changing the world around them, brightening the palette, opening doors and windows, letting new light in where once only shadows—ghosts from other family histories—communed. Festival beckoned, a world order founded on love and celebrations.

The altered table maps his family chronicles and his own, more recent commitment to a very different history. It's the key to interpretation, an icon of lives intertwined and mingling. If he had a word for it, the word would be legend. In this lifetime, such congruencies. Begun as jest, it now stands in the centre of the floor commanding attention, demanding respect.

Grapes and their leaves, roses and the cherubs emerging from behind those deliciously sensual blossoms, streamers of vines and the carved columns of the exquisitely lathed legs: everything enamelled in as bright colours as Joseph could find. He especially loved painting the toenails of the angels bright scarlet. At first, their innocence had seemed only a tad provocative and studied. Painting their fingernails proved the decadence curling around the edges of the finely wrought carvings. Rouged nipples led to blushes and