Kepler's Canopy; fiction by Robert Goronski
Kepler’s Canopy
Robert Goronski
Für Nina G.
Puck. I am that merry wanderer of the Night.
I jest for Oberon and make him smile.
(Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
“It is clearer than the rainfall of a thousand Sundays: I once fell in love with a beautiful boy.”
These words, or others with similar sentimentality, will be chosen by Bertram one day – in an unforeseeable future where he is to write the volume of his autobiography that will be dedicated only to Robert Goronski – only to me.
If you look closely, there is something peculiar at work in this sentence “I once fell in love with a beautiful boy”, something makes it tick – a sense of semantic uncertainty. Saying that I once fell in love with a beautiful boy can mean two things at the same time: It might mean that once upon a time, there was a beautiful boy with whom I fell in love, and it was one of many events like and unlike this one. But it could also mean that I fell in love with a handsome boy only once in my life, for only one time in my life. Depending on what interpretation I choose, I end up writing one of two autobiographies very different from one another. Bertram would give them the same title no matter what: Kepler’s Canopy. After all, that’s the title I have chosen again, too. However, I lack the patience and the vigor to write an autobiography myself. I’m not like Bertram. I’m not a protagonist in the grand narrative of the world. At his court, I was only the fool. Luckily, I am a poet first and a fool second and therefore must adhere to the brevity and swiftness of my trades. Terrible and cruel were the things we did under Kepler’s canopy; what I lack in remorse and compassion, I may hopefully make up one day through honesty about the things I tell. Let me therefore go back to the beginning, back to the afternoon where it all began, back to the things I have to be honest about.
Bertram and I met during the mildest of all springs. He was in California on a business trip and at the time, I was finishing my second collection of poems. There was virtually no reason for him to be in my run-down neighborhood, and the fact of the matter is that I’ve never learned why he was in the Bay on that day or why he came to my West Oakland demesne of all godforsaken places. Some might think it was fate, but I am wholeheartedly convinced that there was intent behind it; if God would not come to this place, then Bertram had of course to be there in His stead.
For propriety’s sake, I might skip most of what would have qualified as tender and proficient lovemaking if it had happened between anybody but Robert Goronski and Bertram Montgomery III. For three hours in total – the longest time I’d ever had sex until then – we were in utter paradise. Our bodies ached for the weight of the blissfulness between us. The adrenaline brought the poppers-induced ecstasy to ever new highs. He topped me; I topped him. We would rest one forehead against the other to achieve the full energetic discharge of pure skin touching upon purer skin. Our horizontal dance printed the bedsheets with the letters of our appendages; a different shape for every movement, a different movement for every moment; impactful, transient, and never out of tune with each other. It was still day when I had scouted him on Grindr and invited him over (the conversation might’ve lasted five minutes); and it was still day when we finished. But for all intents and purposes, no time had passed; my mind knew only poetry and no longer recognized any sort of linear progression. When I asked for a finish, it was only because I yearned for a reprieve. Otherwise, I would’ve collapsed from the purity of the exhaustion and he would’ve had his way with me all over again. He proved the most powerful, most beautiful, and most terrorful sight for my sore eyes. From that moment of completion onwards, I was – to deliberately misquote Judah Halevi – in love with a thing that death could never touch.
“There are three things I need,” said I, once the come on our chests was about to dry, “A shower, food, and then more sex. Necessarily in that order.”
About eighty-five minutes later, when it had become dark all of a sudden and the chilly Berkeley winds demanded that Bertram borrow a jacket of mine, we took our seats in a restaurant and he finally asked me for my name.
“It’s Robert. My name is Robert Goronski.”
“My name’s Bertram. Bertram Montgomery. The third, actually.”
“And what do you do in life?”
“I’m a corporate lawyer. I’ve just been made a junior partner at my family’s law firm.”
The sommelier brought our wine then. Bertram had me taste the one I liked most and picked the one he liked least. I expected, as probably did you, the conversation to be about the hardships of corporate law in NYC and expected to provide a free therapy session in exchange for a decent dinner, but quite the contrary. I instead caught him staring at me with his spectacular Bette Davis Eyes.
He offered me these eyes many times over, and would invariably do so to look for signs that proved I wasn’t who I claimed I was. It was my particular kismet that he would sometimes fall for the notion that I was some sort of doppelgänger who had come to him from an abode that was outside a mere mortal’s reach. If you followed this logic of his to its inevitable conclusion, it became clear that he and only he, surreptitious spirit that he was, could pursue me if I ever decided I wanted to return to the Elysian fields that we Manic Pixie Dream Boys called home.
“What about yourself?”
“I’m an MFA student here at UC Berkeley.”
“Prose or poetry?
“I’ve settled for poetry.”
“Robert Goronski. What kind of poet’s name is that?”
“It’s my name. We all have to work with what we have.”
“But I’m not sure if it’ll look good on a collection of poetry. A poet’s name must be something snappy like Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie or Friedrich Fritz.”
“The first two are not poets, and the third one doesn’t exist. At least not in this world.”
“Then claim it. Make it your pen name. A person like you can’t have a regular, quotidian name like Robert Goronski.”
“I am fairly certain that before they were famous, Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie and Friedrich Fritz were names like any other name. It’s the literature that gave the names their aura of significance.”
“I’m inclined to disagree. A poet’s name needs to emanate significance from the very beginning.”
“Like Bertram Montgomery III does?”
“Exactly. But I’m afraid that name’s already taken. I can lend it to you a while. If you’re good enough.”
“I could make it short and snappy – Bert Montgomery. That would look good on my collection.”
“Look at us – the two Berts flying away.”
I had listened to such conversations in the past, had even partaken in even some of them. Most couples-in-the-making had this incessant need – probably satisfying the narcissist indulgence of our age – to find instant common grounds, and gay couples were no different. Wait, you came out at 21? So did I! What do you mean you had a crush on Prince Philipp from Sleeping Beauty? So had I! But this time was different. The fact that our names shared a full syllable meant that the common ground just charted between us was legitimized to the core of our being. I mean what more could this Mayflower boy and the Chicago trailer park kid ever share than the auburn color of their hair and the refined features of their chins? Many gay couples get asked if they were brothers because they looked so akin to the other – and we were certainly no exception. Yet all this meant that we could love the other as much as we did ourselves. Self-love as true love – perhaps the closest I’ve ever come to the real deal.
Only two months later did I graduate from Berkeley and followed Bertram all the way to Manhattan. His Park Avenue apartment had an empty room – waiting for me all this time – and I turned it into a study. As we got ready for our first night in the apartment, he, private school kid that he was, kindly asked if he could borrow the UC Berkeley tee that I wore as a nightshirt for his next Halloween costume. I made a quick beeline for the other end of the bed, then, but before I could get up and actually leave, Bertram voiced his apology in the manner that worked best: “I’m sorry, Robert, it was a bad joke. Bert, babe – come back, stay.” Come back, stay. There is a way in which I follow that succession, the way in which these words are concatenated in come back, stay, to this day; I would come back because I always stayed.
For the next few weeks, there was very little for me to do. I spent a lot of my time in coffee shops around Greenwich Village while Bertram was at work, and whenever I spotted a gay couple there, I wondered if they were in any way like him and me. Our relationship was predicated on the fact that he worshiped me and that I admired him; and when I saw these other, younger and more assiduous gay couples so casually sharing a Saturday afternoon with each other, it was my question to ask what it would be like to be them and not us.
One time, I asked him about his family and why I hadn’t met them yet, but his answers were curt and sounded almost irritated. We were getting ready to go for a party of his college friends from Yale – those that had come to New York like he did, that is. He had no concern for those that didn’t make it here. He wouldn’t have had any for me, if I hadn’t followed.
“They are not the ones that need to concern you right now.”
“That sounds like there is something or someone else that should concern me.”
Bertram closed the last button on his shirt, and I pulled him closer. I opened the first two again and put one of my many neckerchiefs around his slender neck. “Somebody is going to be there whom you not gonna like”, he said.
“I find that very hard to believe. I’ve met only few people I don’t like. In most cases, they just didn’t like me.”
“His name is Jared. He’s my ex.”
Bertram had given me one of his shirts to wear because he thought that it would look good on me, given that my eyebrows arched just like his. It was probably a test, and most likely came abreast to a demarcation of territory. Needless to say, it intrigued me at first.
“But you needn’t worry. He just didn’t take the break-up very well, that’s all.”
“Why did you break up with him?”
“Actually, he broke up with me. But no sweat, I’ll have you covered, in case things get out of hand.”
“I can look out for myself, thank you very much.”
The party was menacingly larger than I expected; two friends of Bertram’s were celebrating their engagement in your standard WASP Manhattan rooftop bar with friends in NYC before they went to have the actual party with their family in Massachusetts. Bertram made a concerted effort for the rest of the night to introduce me to a whole array of remarkable and astonishing people.
“Natalie works as editor for Princeton UP. You have to meet Matthieu: He’s doing a PhD at NYU in French and is having a class with Žižek at the moment. Tina’s first novel is now under contract with Camden House. Mona is currently curating an exhibition on Instagram poetry at the MoMA. Guys – I’d like all you to meet Robert.”
All these people acted cordially around Bertram and were even nicer to me, though I could tell that they were slightly intimidated by him and probably thought that being in my good books would buy them some favor. Most had his remarkable intelligence, few shared his good looks, and none possessed his wealth. Whilst having graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in the country, I probably would never have gotten in touch with any of them in a casual setting such as this. Of course, they were all so occupied with telling me of the awesome things they did in their lives that it left little room for somebody else – somebody like me.
But I shouldn’t be too hard on them; eventually, one of them did ask what it was I did; he was a strange type – weirdly out of place and clearly not belonging to Bertram’s extended group of friends. He smelled like a lawyer, if he did not look like one. I knew well by then how to recognize that particular smell.
“So, what is it you do in life, Robert?”
“I’m a poet.”
“Like an actual poet?”
“Indeed. I published a collection last summer. Wagnerian Love Songs.”
“Wait a minute – you’re Robert Goronski?”
“Yes, I am he.”
The excitement was evident in his features, and he shook his head out of disbelief. I could see why Bertram hated him – and ignored him wholeheartedly. “You wrote Wagnerian Love Songs? My girlfriend and I loved it – it was incredible.”
“Thank you. I’m very proud of it.”
“Let’s take a selfie. My girlfriend won’t believe it otherwise.”
He quickly pulled out his smartphone and I motioned to be next to him on the picture. Bertram had kept his hand around my shoulder the entire time and he did not let go of me, then; he barely even looked at us, so Todd and I ended up in this half embrace that was almost too imperfect for Instagram.
“This just looks great! Thanks so much, man.”
As it usually goes with events like this, Bertram was soon drawn into a conversation I could not give a care in the world about, and I took the loosened grip on my hip as an opportunity to finally make a beeline for the buffet, where I discovered that Bertram’s proclivity for oysters was apparently bred into his genome and into that of his friends.
“Bertram! Hey, Bertram, how’s it going?”
Admittedly, it was too curious that I thought my beau closer than he could have been; but in a way, I did not want to face what was about to transpire. You remember whose shirt I wore, right?
“Bert! Have you gone deaf?”
Somebody – gently, I gave them that – pulled at my right shoulder and dragged me away from the buffet. There was still a canapé, half-eaten and gloriously delicious, in my mouth. The man had a look on his face that I knew all too well. With the tilt of his head, his facial expression changed from confusion to attraction, from nervousness to lust; it was the look that men and women gave me all the time; it was the look that welcomed me every morning when Bertram woke up. And its predatory cry rippled so loudly that not even the band could cover it up.
Jared was handsome, I gave him that, but he was also a human chimaera and as such uneasy on the eyes. From chest to forehead, he looked peculiarly like your average jock with his short hair and a chiseled chin and nose that would put Superman to shame. The t-shirt, spectacularly depicting one of the musicians from the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, vibrated in a fashion almost too nerdy to be true, and from waist to heel, he sported a number of tattoos that you spot only on the lowliest of hipsters. How he got past the doorman, I have no idea.
“You’re not Bertram, at least not the one I know. But you could be his little brother. You look awfully like him. To a T, actually. Even the shirt would fit him.”
“I’m not. I’m his boyfriend actually.”
I was almost too hard on Jared. His face melted in the light of the dying sun. “So was I.”
“It’s nice to meet you, finally.” I knew that if I had said I was sorry that he and Bertram broke up, he wouldn’t have believed me, even though I would have meant it wholeheartedly. But I also knew this: If I said that to him, somebody else might say it to me too, one day. That’s how karma works, right?
“I didn’t know that Bertram was seeing someone else.”
“It’s pretty new. I guess that’s why I’m here. To meet everybody and have everybody meet me.”
“So what do you do?”
“I did comp lit and an MFA in poetry at Berkeley. I’ve graduated this spring.”
“And what are you doing right now? Live of somebody’s dime?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll apply for grad school again or I could go into publishing. What do you do?”
“I work at Yale. I’m a software engineer.”
“That’s cool. What do you do there?”
I listened for eight minutes about his menial job designing apps for students to see their grades and get in touch with their RA and the people in their classes and other minutiae. It does not bear repeating.
“Sounds neat. I don’t think we had anything similar at Berkeley. I guess you meet many interesting people there.”
That was all I got from the buffet. I excused myself quite quickly and left an hour later because of a storming headache. I must’ve gotten it because Jared kept on staring at the back of my head and punched telepathic needles into my skull; at least that was what he very much wanted to do. Bertram didn’t come home until many hours later, after I was asleep. Unexpectedly, he woke up long before me and had already procured some croissants when Morpheus let me depart from his realm.
“Somebody’s still looking very sleepy,” said he.
“Not all of us are born with the stamina of a NYC lawyer. Some of us need the sleep of the righteous to keep up with you.”
“Indeed they do. I’ve brought us some croissants.”
“Great!”
“Na – not yet. There is one thing I’ve got to ask you first. Remember Jared?”
“Your ex? Not sure how I could not.”
Bertram chuckled and pulled the blanket slightly over my hip to make sure that I’d stay where I was. Then, he told me what was on his mind. He always would: “He vomited into the whirlpool, and broke one of the windows in the patio.”
“Really? He didn’t strike me as the aggressive type. I thought he’d rather cry by the end of the night.”
“He did. But I think most of it was because of his bleeding hand. You really did a number on him, I’m impressed.”
“I don’t think I see what you mean.”
“I thought you would never lie to me, Robert. I’m not mad. As I said, I am actually impressed. I wasn’t sure if you’d have it in you.”
“Well, I could see why you made him break up with you. Too simple, no edge. Until then. And now.”
“And what do you mean by that?”
“You gave him a butterfly moment. That was your parting gift to him, wasn’t it?”
I still had to do a bit more to earn my croissants apparently. At least, he said so quite clearly: “Tell me what you mean by that.”
I snorted. I had prepared this speech all of last night; ever since the moment I first met Jared, I had prepared it in my head and it engraved itself into my cerebrum, which is why I can give it to you with little change from the day it was first spoken: “Every human being has a butterfly moment. What it comes down to is a moment that ripples through your life like the wings of a butterfly that might cause a hurricane. Some moments might be tremendous choices, whereas others merely reveal themselves in hindsight only as the point where everything changes. It can be anything. Perhaps your hamster died, and you just never got over it; perhaps it was one act of kindness that perpetuated your belief in human generosity; or perhaps somebody had sex with you against your will and you were never able to trust a human being again. These stories shape and define our curriculum vitae in the most decisive manner. They fashion our hopes, dreams and fears, and alter the course of our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. They’re what fuels our ambitions and burdens our existence at the same time. Once you locate a person’s butterfly moment, you can chart the space of their identity, turn it on its head and make it your own.”
“You’re just using a fancy literary term for trauma.”
“Not really. Trauma is, for the lack of a better word, inherently traumatic. A butterfly moment can indeed be a tragedy, but it can also be your favorite moment in life. I have to pick the terminology of my choosing. I am a student of literature and not a therapist.”
“And that’s what you did to Jared? You found his tragedy, his butterfly moment, and played it out again.”
“It was very easy. His tragedy could only have been you.”
“And what is my butterfly moment?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. Why do you think I’m still here?”
He hadn’t moved a single muscle during my speech. And from one point to the next, he towered above me; now he swooped down and pinned me on the bed, sucking in my breath like a gush of fresh air. I had learned my lessons long ago. I did not flinch; I did not squirm away.
“I guess I should tell you to get out of my head, so that I stay out of yours, but it seems too late for that now.”
“Indeed it does.”
“But I’m not without options. I can just tell my friends that you broke up with me and went back to California. Certainly, nobody would miss you here or there. I could lock you up here. Make sure that you never get out of Bluebeard’s Chamber, and so that any knowledge you’ve thus obtained about me will never get out either.”
“You may do that,” said I, “But you must face the inevitable possibility that in that case, I might have you exactly where I want you to be.”
Bertram just chuckled, as he did so often, and went on to ravish me right there. We did have our croissants right after in case you’re wondering.
For the first six months of our relationship, things kept on moving in a slow rhythm of weeks. I kept on writing poetry while I was there, and even though I had only few bills to pay, I started freelancing as an exam author for the national test services and Bertram hired me as his personal assistant through the firm. I assume that only few of these things are of actual interest to you; but they matter to me.
He would always say to his friends, wise as he was and accustomed to people listening to him about whatever he had to say: “The most obvious and most pleasant thing about having a boyfriend – and not necessarily a yielding and doting boyfriend such as Robert in particular – is the copious amount of time you can spend with company without the need to entertain somebody or be entertained by them in return.”
My main task in the capacity of his assistant was to wade through his emails and his paperwork, to identify those parts that needed to be addressed by him personally and to take care of all other secondary matters for him. Two or three days a week, I’d Uber to the firm in the morning and right after lunch to pick up anything he might need and get him an iced mocha. Initially, it had only taken minimal supervision to ensure that I’d get the right tone and proper register; in fact, I only rarely let myself be derailed by any linguistic delusions of grandeur that a liberal arts major is so accustomed to.
One of the few times I did so, I called myself his amanuensis – his secretary and scribe, if you like, whose sole task was to answer the correspondence of the great writers and bring the notes of their great works into a clean copy for the publisher. He responded to this image with ease: “What do you think your colleagues from the past are going to say when they learn that all you take care of is boring legal correspondence?”
“I think they’d like us to switch sides and ask you to read and take care of my literary musings as well.”
So one of these Tuesdays – having an amanuensis meant that Bertram could spend more time in his home office to do his work and fuck me – he read the manuscript for my latest edition of poetry and put his personal touch on my experiments, as requested, as required of my amanuensis himself.
In this new function – a function for which they were never intended – the words served as a string of lanterns illuminating the path that led from me to him to now. By reading and re-reading my poems, I could come inexorably close to him. And by editing the written word as it so doubtfully stood, he could bring himself a bit closer to me, too. We were, for all intents and purposes, purely of one mind.
At one point, I left the tiresome paperwork and stepped through the room at an uncanny pace. I hugged him from behind and kissed him on the neck the way he loved most. Then, I spoke: “As I see, you’re being at your best.”
“I just need to get rid of all these typos.”
“There can’t be any typos. And if there is one, it’s probably deliberate and you’re just missing a pun.”
“Well, there is one thing I don’t understand.” He chewed on my pen and tapped it at his nose.
“And shall I illuminate it for you?”
“I read every line of poetry in this charming little book. And it truly is, it is breathtakingly charming.” He made a pause for mostly dramatic purposes. “But why is it that you call the collection Kepler’s Canopy and not a single line is dedicated to Kepler or mentions a canopy of any sort, neither figuratively nor metaphorically?”
I let go of him instantly. I turned away my gaze and held my fingers to my nose to suck in the scent Bertram found so irresistible. It was a show of my purest autistic delight. Bertram watched it frequently, whenever I heard something I did not like at all or liked far too much for my own good.
“How can you say that Kepler’s canopy is not in there?”
“Because I’ve read every word of it, and I have yet to find these two.”
I chucked. “And why do you think they would be anywhere in there?”
“Because they are the fucking title of the thing. Why is that so hard to understand? Am I talking in riddles?”
“I’ve never called it Kepler’s Canopy. Not until you just did. In fact, the collection doesn’t have a title yet.”
Like so many times before, my words gave him pause, and I made use of that opportunity most exaltingly. “Maybe in some way, your reading and editing the poems has ushered in a novel understanding of them. Maybe I should call it Kepler’s Canopy now, but that means there’ll be a dimension that needs to be included so that it can be addressed.”
“And how can we mitigate this problem?”
“There can only be one way. You’ll write the poem for me and I’ll include it for you.”
“I couldn’t write a poem. I wouldn’t know how to.”
“Of course you could. It’s as easy as watching the setting sun. The words just have to be as clear as rainfall on a thousand Sundays. You’ll write through me and for me – use my words and my handwriting and make it just. Like an amanuensis. Isn’t that what you are?”
Those of you who know my collection guessed that it was exactly what he did. I may not be a literary critic per se, but when I re-read the collection as it first came out, “Kepler’s Canopy” became the final apotheosis of the anthology. Its words filled the gaps of my otherwise so impeccable lyric and followed suit with all the blank spaces that we cannot fully attribute, yet of whose presence we were finally fully aware. The way he remembered it, I had already written the title on the page when I objected, but I insisted that I hadn’t when he told me so. And when we checked on the title page of the print-out, I have to admit that our handwriting had become so similar it was entirely impossible to keep it apart. As with every amanuensis, it never mattered whether he wrote it or I wrote it, for as long as the other approved it.
It should go without saying that Kepler’s Canopy appeared under my new pen name of Bert Goronski. It was the compromise we had reached at this point. In the end, he was as much Bert as I was; it was our name, the shared siglum of our relationship, and should thus feature on the cover of our collaborative work – just as we were lying under the canopy all together as we wrote it.
Not long ago, I learned the simple answer as to why Bertram didn’t want me to meet his parents: He was an orphan, and so was I. His mother had died a couple of weeks after he was born and his father a couple of years before we even met. All he had left was a stepmother with whom he continued to work at the firm and whom he despised; he kept on referring to her as “The Accountant” whenever he hung up on her after a long argument and she would then always cancel his checkbooks. Apparently, she didn’t like his recent boytoy acquisition any more than I liked her condescending sneer whenever I walked past her at the rare instances we crossed paths in the city.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, however, Bertram’s firm always threw a party in lieu of a Christmas event, and this year, that took place at his stepmom’s favorite country club because she was in the final stages of becoming Montgomery, Hathorne and Kline’s next naming partner (which, ironically, she already was in some way since her surname has been Montgomery for a long time). And it was his great pleasure to take me along for the ride and present me to the senior partners not as the recent boytoy he had locked up in his bedchamber, but as the poet and partner for whom he could ghostwrite. That night, we even wore complementary ties and, to the attentive observer, matching cufflinks. I could barely tell us apart when I saw us in a mirror.
At the reception’s lowest point, I was standing where I always was at these events: the buffet next to the canapés. I was engaged in polite conversation with Todd, my fan from a few months ago, who, as it turned out, was one of the firm’s junior associates and so clearly lusted after me I could’ve made him ejaculate with the mere metaphor of a blowjob.
From that position, I had of course an excellent view of my beau, and I watched him, as Meredith approached him from behind. I did not hear anything they said, but this is how it could’ve gone down:
“So you get your new boy a suit and think you can come here like this.”
“Don’t worry, Meredith, I won’t put his Long Island Ice Teas on the company bill.”
“Well, he should be old enough to drink first.”
“Is there anything you need to get off your chest?”
“Just make sure you get back our silverware when you take the trash out.”
Bertram then left his stepmother and her abysmal sense of self-loathing and made headway towards me – his ray of moonlight. My connection to Bertram was so strong at this point, I realized that I had made the gravest of all mistakes – I had been talking for ten minutes to his stepmother’s ill-fitted protégé. Todd “The Cockroach” Jenkins, the man in question, was laughing wholeheartedly and I responded with an idle laugh of my own as Bertram approached us.
His hand came to rest on my bicep, and he joined in our laughter when he asked Todd: “Mind if I take my boyfriend to get some fresh air, Todd?”
“Absolutely not. I’ll have to go and find my fiancée anyway. No worries – see you at the drinks, Robert.”
“I’ll see you there, too.”
“So, what were you guys talking about?”
“You know how good I am at these Alec Baldwin impressions. Didn’t take any more to have him eating out of my hand – again, I might add.”
“Give me your tie.”
“Excuse me?”
“I need to put on your tie and you need to put on mine.”
“And what would be the purpose of this?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Probably more than I should.”
Bertram opened the first of his buttons and undid his tie. He reached it out towards me, and with a sigh, I took off my own and put on his. As he re-tied his knot and mine, I had another look in the mirror and had to admit that at this point, we were truly indistinguishable from one another. Was he on the left or was I? It did not matter for it never had.
“I need you to go into an upstairs suite. Take the second one to the left. Wait for me there.”
“And what will you do in the meantime?”
“There is something I have to take care of.
“Bert, this is not making any sense.”
“Do it. Please just do it, Bert, I’m not asking a second time.”
Alas, he went back into the fold. I was him and he was me; he became Bert as I became Bert, so I knew everything he did and he knew everything I knew. Such was the nature of the enchantment between us. There was nothing remarkable about what I did – I took on his form and walked up the stairs; he, on the other hand, went up to Jenkins and his dim-witted fiancée.
“Excuse me, Juliet, but could I borrow your fiancé for a second?”
He gave no reason as to why he would need Todd; it was one of the many things you could get away with if you were handsome and confident, so Juliet had of course no other option but to let Todd go.
“What’s up, Robert?”
His right hand retraced the course of Todd’s arm and came to rest on Todd’s left shoulder. To the outside observer, it was just a gesture of male companionship; to the internal interlocutor, the static let the hair on Todd’s head stand on end with excitement. “I was thinking about what you said earlier,” said Bert, “About my Alec Baldwin impressions.”
“Really? What did I say about them?”
“That I still need to make them more authentic.”
“And would you like me to help you with that?”
“I think there is a lot I can still learn from you. Meet me upstairs – second suite to the left – in seven minutes for some practice?”
“Why seven?”
“Because I need five minutes to get ready, and you need two minutes to get upstairs.”
Then he disappeared into thin air. Todd didn’t know what had happened just yet, but a part of his brain had taken over that went active every time I came into view. And whilst Todd was busy contemplating his escape in the hall, Bert already made his way upstairs.
“Ok, Bert, what’s going on?”
He held me firmly with his hand on my shoulder as he looked at me. “I’m going to go into the closet in about three minutes. Then, I need you to do something.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I need you to do what you do best.”
“You need me to make him believe.”
“Exactly. It’s time to let the butterfly spread its wings.”
He had just closed the door on me when Todd opened the other one. There, he could hear everything that happened – the static between Todd and me was so powerful it carried the sounds of their exchange forward through the thick wood of the door.
“You’re here,” said he.
“There is nowhere else I could be.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing the right thing, Robert.”
“Don’t call me that. My name is Bert now.”
A week later, Bertram’s stepmother came by with some papers for him to sign. Usually, Meredith quickly parachuted in and out our apartment, afraid she might catch the gayness in the air, but this time, she came in and dropped her keys and Birkin bag on the sideboard as if she actually intended to stay. I told her that Bertram had just headed out to meet a client. If I had known he’d sensed his stepmother coming by, I’d have gone out with him of course. It wasn’t fair to call him a bastard since I was the only bastard in the house.
She sighed and took up her keys again but dropped them – there was no strength in her grip, so I had nothing to fear. Until she spoke, that is: “I know it was you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yesterday, one of the junior associates at our law firm was outed as a closeted homosexual. Everybody in the office received envelopes with pictures of the most delicate kind, showing my very own protégé clearly engaged in some unspeakable, sodomite activities at our Thanksgiving event. We all received one picture and I’m sure you could put them into some kind of perverse series if you’d get them in the right order. At least, that’s how I think Bertram probably did it.” I didn’t react to any of this. I just waited Meredith out – which you can do easily. Her patience was even shorter than that of her stepson. “Why did Bertram have to do this now? Just as I’m about to become partner after 24 long and hard years of service? Todd is engaged to the daughter of one of our senior partners, my own goddaughter! He is the most elegant, promising young lawyer I have ever laid eyes on. He worked so hard to get where he is – he did not just fall into it like Bertram. And now Todd’s on the verge of being ousted, as am I!”
I took a step back from a clearly exasperated Meredith Montgomery and picked up the keys she had dropped. When I handed them to her, I said, “I don’t know what this has to do with me.”
“I’ve seen the pictures. You may not see much, but I have bathed that boy when he was just a three-year-old and not a thirty-one-year-old do-no-good. You can clearly see that it is Bertram, who slept with Todd, seduced him out of some macabre self-indulgence. And I know that you were in the closet, taking the pictures for him. Don’t you deny it.”
Of course, I had nothing to deny at this point. The charade had been going on for too long, and we were both in so deep, we would never have known how to stop. I never saw Todd again after this, and Meredith stopped looking at me after the very first time she had ever talked to me.
Bertram’s many contacts eventually got me into a bigger publishing house and Kepler’s Canopy was as much a hit as collections of poetry are in the days of Twitter. The first reading of my new collection had been generally well received; a couple of months down the road, the sales had dropped somewhat expectedly, and my editor proposed that I should do some more readings to heighten social media awareness. Bertram had offered to bankroll most of the trips under the condition that he could come along for parts of it; and for more than a dozen of my visits along the East Coast did he share a hotel room with me, and everything else.
The beginning, and end, of my journey had been McNally’s in Manhattan, and I read out pieces of Wagnerian Love Songs that some of the Gossip Girl wannabees might be more familiar with, the new pieces from Kepler’s Canopy of course and a couple I had written for my next collection, Ultraviolet Catastrophes. When I turned to the new poems, they were less well received, but people clapped out of politeness at least.
Hilda came to me after the reading. Some people always do when they’ve asked me questions whose answers they’ve enjoyed or did not like at all. Hilda was different. She didn’t approach me with humility or false nervousness. She appeared right in front of me after the last sycophant had left. I hadn’t seen her in the audience, and I surely would’ve noticed because she was Bert’s type.
“I need to ask you a question.”
“Well, go right ahead.”
“I need to know who wrote ‘Kepler’s Canopy’.”
“As should be clear from the cover, the poems were written by Bert Goronski, who just happens to be me.”
“I’m not talking about the collection. I’m talking about the one poem: ‘Kepler’s Canopy’.”
“I see. What’s your problem with it?”
“You placed it so potently at the end, as if you wanted to keep us waiting until we’d get to see it until – and I quote you here – ‘Kepler’s canopy was ripe.’”
“I’m with you so far, but I fail to see your point.”
“Your entire work culminates ardently in this final poem – comes to rest finally under Kepler’s canopy. And when I read it, it appears in synch with the rest of the collection and yet there is nothing to dissuade me that it wasn’t written by another hand and speaks with another voice. Granted, it’s a voice very similar to yours, but not quite the same – misaligned, with a different tonality and vibrating to a slightly different measure.”
“It’s a poem I wrote at a different time, in a different life, from a different perspective. You might say that all of the poems in the collection had to be written to come to terms with the poem, or the other way around, that Bert had to write this exact poem to grasp with the rest.”
“That’s not it – you know I’m right, Robert.”
“What I know is that it’s time for me to go. The bookstore might be closing any minute now. But we can have a discussion over a drink or a cup of coffee, if you like. And please. Call me Bert.”
That threw her off course. If she turned out to be anything like the others, she’d relish in the prospect of it, and if not, she at least did not say no.
As it so happened, Hilda Bronstein was unlike any women either of us had ever encountered. She would make a most welcome addition to Bert’s group of ragtag Harvard rejects. Where Bert was charming, she was delightful, and where Bert evaded a question, she found a new route of attack.
“But if ‘Kepler’s Canopy’ was written over such a different period of it time, why include it at all?
“To me, it speaks to the entirety of the collection as well as about it. Ultimately, I completely arranged the poems so that their order would correspond to their correlates in this poem. I wrote ‘Kepler’s Canopy’, wrote the other poems and then re-sequenced them accordingly.”
“So, you’re suggesting that every poem in the collection is interconnected with a word in ‘Kepler’s canopy’?”
“Each poem is connected to the word in ‘Kepler’s Canopy’ that inhabits the same numerical position. The first poem finds its nexus in the first word, the second poem in the second word and so on. That’s why you may perceive them to be in… sympathetic vibration.”
“I don’t believe that. ‘Kepler’s Canopy’ is not a pastiche of all these different titles.”
“I do not mean the different titles. The connector, the nexus between Kepler’s canopy and the other poems, is the word in the other poems that matters most to me.”
“Why is this the first time I’m hearing about this? You have twelve-page-long afterword and never mention this.”
“I let people find out for themselves. Reading poetry in particular means to re-read and discover. I have no business in excavating the manner and microscopic convergences that make up my collection if that would mean taking pleasure away from somebody who might discover others by themselves.”
“Then why tell me?”
“You were on to something; your instincts just led you in the wrong direction.”
“So far, they never have. I still believe you didn’t write it.”
“Do you want me to show you the manuscripts, so that you can see it for yourself?”
“I’d like that.”
As Hilda paid for our drinks, I let him know quickly about our approach, and called our Uber so that I could take her home. I didn’t know whether I could be bold on the back seat, but alas, I didn’t have to be, for Hilda made the move and we were kissing and necking right away. I was so well-trained by now, I could think about laundry, letters I had to write and yet another future set of poems about The Biology of Dreams. But Hilda was the very volta that turned “Kepler’s Canopy” into such a vivid experience of poetic reality. I did not keep on thinking for long.
Her kisses were sprinkled with bites and her firm and tender sucking drove chills up on my non-existing backbone. I pulled her out of our cab and we gently breathed when we walked up the stairs like two giants who climbed up the stars towards Mount Olympus. The light was dimmed accordingly as we set foot in our apartment. We made out on the couch, but I knew where we had to go.
There was something different in the air this time; something far more ephemeral and powerful, though I did not recognize it for what it was back then as I can now: Bert no longer dealt in a fantasy; his verses had long endowed the fabric of our world with the purest and most powerful delight no fancy could ever dream of.
“Go into the bedroom,” I instructed her, and added, as I had added to all the others, “Wait for me there. I’ll be with you shortly.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have let you wait under Kepler’s canopy until it is ripe and rife with stars,” was what I said to her and that finally made her comply.
He waited for me in the bathroom. He kissed me as a simple greeting and to get a taste of whom I had kissed before. “Where is she?”
“Under the canopy, as always.”
I got a kiss on the cheek and an affectionate pat on the butt. Then, Bert flushed the toilet, turned off the light and stepped out into the night sky. We had conducted this bed trade so many times in the past year that I had a particular ease to imagine it inside my head. Bert would step from one star to the next, and as he raised his celestial foot, the stars along Kepler’s canopy would go supernova though never so bright that they could reveal who he claimed to be. None of the other dozen boys and girls had been so lit up by this cascade of dying light in the night sky that it crept in through the crack at the bottom of the bathroom door as Hilde was. We should’ve recognized its brightness as a sign this time that things would not be like that for long, but– Bert kept his gaze forward and I kept looking only at him.
Both he and I, and perhaps even Hilda, thought it would go as it had gone all these other times. However, when Bert kissed her like he kissed me and like I kissed her, Hilda did not show a moment’s hesitation and pulled him in, as if she wanted to redistribute his molecular structure along the cosmic plane. And when Bert was about to enter her in a way that Robert or Bertram never could, she caught him by the jaw and looked him in the eye. We do not know what she could make out in the fading light of the supernovae, but her words resonated so strongly through the spheres that even I, incarcerated and untethered from my bones, could hear them as they finally tore apart the glamour with which we had brought Bert to life.
“You’re not him. You’re the other one. I can see it clearly now. Clearer than the rainfall of a thousand Sundays. You’re the one who wrote ‘Kepler’s Canopy’.”
Robert Goronski hails from the tedious mind of Dennis Schaefer. Originally from Germany, Dennis studied literature in his home country, the UK and the US. Recently, he became a Ph.D. student at Princeton University where he does research in literature, film, and media studies. Follow him on Twitter.
Inquiry
The following has been provided by the author:
Author’s Postcriptum: A Brief Taxonomy of Power
Someone once told me that love was the absence of power. However, I do not believe that to be the case. In the rarest of instances, we might consider love a momentary homeostasis of power – a completely evenly distributed harmony within the set of personas that evoke it. In the most common of instances, power makes itself known, sometimes obviously, other times more surreptitiously, through well-established emblems such as money, status and age (or others like sex, charisma and youth). Gender would certainly not be one of these emblems: being of any gender has little bearing on the kind of power one obtains in a given setting. As same-sex-relationships can reveal, they also generate and perpetuate power through exactly those external emblems that distribute it in a heterosexual constellation.
As easy and hopefully plausible as this brief taxonomy of power might appear, I would not wish to undercut the complexities, dynamics, and homeostases that this at times joyful and/or sempiternal tug-of-war might constitute. The way in which Ro(bert) and (Bert)ram seek this eventual sanctuary from – N.B. not absence of – power should give some disputable credence to that. Power can never be fully and wholly institutionalized as one thing or another because being in love means to be selfish and selfless at the same time. Nobody would ever be able to gain any power whatsoever without those that, for all the right and wrong reasons, cede power to them.