Visiting Leo is one of my weekly rituals even as it gets harder to reach him. He has become a recluse. Leo, in his puffy vest with duct tape over the holes, in his baggy gray sweatpants. I call him twenty minutes before I am coming to alert him to the possibility of getting out of bed. Sometimes, the phone rings and rings and I debate whether I should make the drive over to his neighborhood in North Oakland or not. I usually do though and the second call, outside his dilapidated house, gets him to open the door.
“Hi Leo.” I am all false enthusiasm.
“Too loud! Too loud!” he screams.
“Oh sorry,” I say as he leads me into the first room of darkness and mold of his quilts which are bundled up in bags, stuffed into shelves.The creaky door to the main room is opened, eternal shadow falling around a round table which is lit by a hanging light, the only circle of a illumination in a diminished world. I bring a latte from the nearby drive through coffee place, a sip of the outside, delicious world.
“How are you?” I ask and get the same answer.
“Terrible, terrible,” he says.
“You are looking a little better today,” I suggest.
“I don’t know what anything means. There is something wrong with my brain,” he explains as if for the first time.
“Yes, I know,” I say.
He looks at me blankly. I have noticed the smoothness of his eyes, the way they can rest on you without suspicion.
“Did you call before?” he asks.
I pause before answering, waiting to see if Leo has anything more to say. He has complained that I cut him off when he is thinking, that he can’t then remember what he was about to say.
“My father, he is coming in ten minutes, so if you are here too, I don’t know if that will work.”
Leo is about eighty, his father dead for decades. His eyes are like polished stones wet from the ocean.
“If he comes, it’s no problem,” I assure him. “It will be nice to see him.”
“He is coming from California. He lives there now with his wife.”
“Great,” I say and take a sip on the latte, putting the lid upside down on the table.
“Is that white stuff getting on the shelf?” Leo seems upset.
“The steamed milk from the latte? No, it is all just inside the lid, not on the table.”
Words that have lost their mooring from the object. Words that cram your insides and get tangled on the way out. Words that explain themselves in their own mysterious ways. Words like jazz.
“Don’t touch anything,” Leo warns.
“Of course not.”
“Where did you park? You didn’t see me looking outside the window? Next time, park right by the window and I can look out and see you.”
“Of course.”
“And don’t interrupt me when I am talking. When you do that, I lose what I am trying to say. There is something wrong with my brain.”
“That’s okay. We’ll work with it.”
“My wife is dying,” he says.
“Your wife,” I point to the photo on the wall behind him.
“What was her name?” he wonders. “I used to be brighter.”
“Ann,” I suggest, having heard the story of their meeting many times.
This is the “official” and “authorized” version of Leo’s life. The stories have winnowed down to just a few. As if dementia has obliterated all other narratives and left only the straight one. His wife. His father. His sister.
“And that’s a picture of your boyfriend Steve, right?” I point to an old photo of a cute, young, Chinese guy who is seductively beckoning. The photo is not prominently displayed but hidden on a cluttered shelf adjacent to Leo’s green memorabilia.
He doesn’t answer and I wonder about the selectivity of memory even with dementia.
“It is great that Steve is right in the middle of your collection,” I say.
Leo’s green collection is a menagerie of glass figures, swizzle sticks, salt shakers, thimbles, spoons, vases, knitting needles, feathers, tins, strings like a cat’s cradle. Sometimes, we sit and and stare at the shelf it is on. I imagine him moving the objects around to create a different tableau, like Laura in Tennessee William’s famous play. It is better to stare at the objects in Leo’s house than try and have a face to face conversation which is frustrating.
“Tell me about your wife,” I say.
For whatever the reason, it is one of the few intact stories left.
“She was the most brilliant, did I tell you that?” he asks.
“Yes, you have.”
“I didn’t understand because I never had an exam with a woman before.”
“You met her at school, right?”
“Yes. And she was the most brilliant. Did I say that?”
“And she liked you.”
“Yes, she lived with her two fathers before that, one lived on the East Coast, a place where she would spend time in bed. 970, they both had the same number when she came up there.”
“And she liked you, right?”
“Yes. I didn’t understand it because when I was first born no one would pay attention to me but the girls. The boys weren’t interested in me and I wasn’t interested in them except for a few I was interested in.”
“You found some of the boys attractive.”
“Yes and I told my wife I wasn’t interested in girls that way but then we got married and I found that I did like it. I was surprised. Then I got an appointment in Mexico and she got high in money and then we bought this house.”
“You loved her a lot,” I say.
“That’s true,” he says. “But she got mad at me and cancelled our loving and moved away. I still don’t understand it. I sometimes call her but I can’t remember if she died or not.”
“And then you met Steve?”
“Are you gay?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “And it’s okay to remember him with me.”
“You like girls that way?”
“I do, so it is safe here.”
“Where do I know you from?” he asks suspiciously.
“We were in a writing group.”
I remember the younger Leo. The admirer of my writing and the ruthless editor who tore through it.
“I don’t remember that but I turned 80 before I met you.”
Leo, the writer who documented the quilts that African American women made out of the fabric of their lives, who pieced together their histories and stories and refined them them to a resplendent shine.
“I am 40 today,” he says.
Leo, who wrote a memoir of growing up in the Bronx in the ’40’s, calling to life the sounds, sights and textures of that era. He wrote about his father calling him a sissy. He wrote about the boys taunting him. His mother and her sisters who tried to comfort him.
“The chair that reaches against me is warm,” he says.
“Are you getting cold?” I ask.
“Maybe,” he says. “I can’t talk normally to people.”
“Well, we do okay.”
“I don’t like any of my changes,” he says.
“It’s hard for sure.”
“I want to die.”
“Yes.”
“I had a lifetime today.”
“Yes.”
“Was that my boyfriend?” he points to the picture of Steve.
“Yes.” I say. “You loved him.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deborah La Garbanza lives under the dark shadow of the Mormon Temple in Oakland. She writes memoirs, plays and fiction. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print publications including MAYDAY Magazine, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, Identity Envy – Wanting to Be Who We’re Not and Old 67.