In Which The Last Days Of John Keats Met Our Expectations

Piazza di Spagna

by LINDA EDDINGS

I am ashamed of writing you such stuff.

The last days of John Keats involved a great deal of wishing for death. Indigestion plagued his stomach, and the severity of his symptoms from tuberculosis drove him to leave England for Naples, where it was thought that a better climate would enhance his prospects. Because of his illness and general low mein, none of Keats' friends wanted to accompany him to Naples. Instead an acquaintance would go.

John Keats by Joseph Severn

The young painter Joseph Severn had little in the way of money, so he took on the job of caring for Keats. Storms prevented them from going any farther than Northampton at first, and Keats was deeply bothered by a female passenger suffering from consumption. He had observed years earlier that "Milton meant a smooth river."

Keats had already left his previous life behind when he boarded the Maria Crowther. He penned goodbye letters to his sister and fiancée, both of whom were named Fanny. On board the Crowther he could not even muster the strength to masturbate and regretted never having sex with Fanny Brawne. "I should have had her while I was in health," he complained to a friend.

She contrived to disappoint me in a way which made feel more pleasure than a simple kiss.

Because of an outbreak of typhus in London, the Crowther was quarantined for ten days. Keats described his chest as burning with the fire of hot coals, and continued to regularly write letters to his friend Charles Brown. Penguin has recently put together the best of Keats' letters in a single collection, and although some are childish, others contain the best writing of the period.

He understands many a beautiful thing, but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses, he begins an explanation of such a curious manner that our taste and self love is offended continually.

After his ship was again quarantined outside of Naples. Keats moved to Rome, into an apartment at the Piazza di Spagna. "The very thing I want to live most for will be the great occasion of my death," he explained somewhat insincerely in one of his last letters. He spit up what Severn noted was "fawn-coloured phlegm," and Keats' doctor predicted diarrhea. Their plan for daily walks through the plaza was now out of the question.

Severn gave up the responsibility for administering opium to Keats' doctor, because he was giving John too much of the substance. Dr. Clark hired a nurse because Severn would stay up all night sketching the poet to keep him company, never bothering to sleep. "He talks of a quiet grave as the first rest he will ever have," Severn wrote.

Severn had never eaten so well in his life as he did by Keats' bedside. He served Keats bread and milk every day, because it was all the man could keep down. For himself he had fish or meat, and always pudding afterwards. He loved the convenience of having fresh produce in Italy. Keats finally feel asleep for good one night in Severn's arms.

Casts were made of Keat's face, hands and foot. Doctors found in the autopsy that his lungs had been entirely devastated for the past two months. Despite not really knowing each other all that well, Severn and Keats are buried next to each other in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. All of Keats' friends in Italy put daisies on his grave.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Simon.

"Words" - Seinabo Sey (mp3)

"Pretend" - Seinabo Sey (mp3)

In Which We Reveal All In The Time And Place Of Our Choosing

12 1/2 Months

by LINDA EDDINGS

January. He is the surprising replacement for the host's brother at a themed dinner party held by my oldest, most literal friend Janet. "Here is Simon," she says. "That is not his name, but it is what he likes to go by." I never ask the story behind it, because I am truly tired of the games we play, naming things, asking what everyone wants to be called.

Simon is dressed very finely, but only if you take careful notice. "My apartment just burned down," he announces to everyone, and receives a round of condolences. He is living in a hotel. He confesses that he could move out of it, live in a short term lease that would be less expensive, that offers more space, but he does not really want to.

I ask what it feels like to have all of his things gone, and what started the fire. "It feels terrible," he said, "but I don't remember what's gone. When they asked me to make a list, I could not even do it." "You had insurance?" He doesn't answer, but Janet tells me that he did. I ask her if she was ever in the apartment. "Once," she tells me. "It was a sty. I'm not surprised in the least that it no longer exists."

February. He asked for my number. I gave it to him, not really thinking much of it. Lately, that is how it goes with these flimsy meetings. There is never anything like an attachment being formed; all contact seems so preliminary.

He does not call until the middle of the month. He asks what I want to do. Whatever I suggest, he says he has either already done it, or is not interested. Finally he tells me to show up in Bryant Park. I come early to write; he is already there.

He walks around looking at all the people. I ask him what he does for a living, but he does not tell me that either. The only thing he wants to talk about are the other people. Who did I think they were, where did they live, what were they doing in the park in the middle of the day?

He asks me to show him my apartment. When I say no, he reaches into his back pocket and gives me a little blank book, like some curio journal you would purchase in a small bookstore. He tells me not to open it until I leave. On the first page is a detailed, highly realistic drawing of my face.

March. Simon did not call me for all of March, and I figured I would not hear from him again. He left a message with Janet, who I gathered he had hit it off with, perhaps better than he had with me. She told me that he was in Los Angeles working on set design for a small film, but that he would be back in a month, and that he wanted to see me again.

I asked Janet, "Isn't it strange that he would use you to relay that message to me? It's kind of insulting." She said, "That's the way he is. Perhaps he sees me more accurately than you see me."

I bristled at the time, but now I think that is no doubt true.

April. He calls me the day he comes back, and he asks if I wanted to get dinner. I hate that stinking phrase, and I tell him so. "You're not the first eccentric person I've met," I tell him. "It's not funny, or more entertaining. Surprises aren't an artistic medium." He apologizes, and says our evening will not be like Bryant Park.

I wish I had not said yes, but I did. His body is surprising muscular underneath his light clothing. No one could be like that through no exertion of effort, of time spent in the gym or natural world. He showed no sign of this. He had, then, long blonde hair tied up. The one thing I did not like about that night was the apologizing. He seemed genuinely sorry about our previous meeting, but it went overboard. At first I thought I was seeing him as he is, but after some time I discerned it was simply another layer.

May. When he wakes in the morning the first thing he does is draw. He is basically non-responsive during this period, so I learn to do other things while he crouches over himself. It is a relief to not have someone desperately trying to get away from you. I am grateful he allows me into that space, and then I pity myself for being pleased by something so innocuous.

His mother visits from Sweden. She stays at a cheap hotel near Times Square. She is a small, insensate woman with grey and blonde hair who is always putting herself down. She strains her hip bending over to pick up a quarter she has dropped, but she won't let Simon take her to the doctor. "A little thing," she scolds herself, "a little thing."

His father couldn't make the trip, Simon tells me. I want to ask Janet if she knows what the story is here, but she is no longer returning my phone calls. The sex we have while his mother is here is multidimensional and very satisfying, like a lozenge on a sore throat.

"This is not exactly what I mean," Laura Riding wrote, "any more than the sun is the sun."

June. His mother flies out of JFK, giving me this weird, wooden hug. I felt embarrassed when it is the three of us. I want to explain how uncomfortable their coldness makes me. I'm not writing very much these days. It feels like my life is my writing, and my writing is my life, a state of affairs Levi-Strauss referred to as a "double-twist."

l am a bit tired, I start to think, by the time I spend with him. We have grown closer, it is true, but it is the kind of interdependence I have never sought from other guys. My friends tell me that they miss me, and suddenly I feel the same. I am not this kind of person to be so wrapped up in someone else.

Before I do anything, I try to talk to Simon about it. He is placid, then excitable, like a child who has never had to defend his playtime. (Somewhere in there he cut his hair down to a low buzz.) My therapist says this behavior was probably returned to him by his mother's visit. It scares me that someone I care for is so transparent.

With a start one night, I recognize the taste of the herbal tea his mother drank at every meal.

"We spend all our time in my apartment," I say. "Don't you think that is strange?" Cowed and dutiful, he finally agrees to take me to his hotel room. Drawings and whiteboards are everywhere. Plates of eaten and uneaten food. Stack of burned and bruised pages float on trays and underfoot. It is a mess, the kind you would not know how to start cleaning up. "I have another week here," he says, and reclines on the bed, his eyes darting back and forth like ping pong balls.

July. This is the month that I end it.

Before that, I let him keep everything salvageable in boxes within my apartment. A few of his friends show up to help him move; a Bangladeshi girl who could have walked right off a runway, and a medical student named Artis who chuckles when he sees the scene. "This is nothing," Artis tells me. "You should have seen what burned."

I am surprised at how much these two know about me; his mother barely remembered my name. We sit down for dinner in a Burmese restaurant where no one comes in for anything but takeout. Janet shows up unexpectedly, practically jumping into my arms. When I tell her that I missed her she says, "Yes, me too. Second place is the first loser."

Once Simon finds a new apartment with a roommate who is a lawyer in midtown, I tell him how things are with me. I force myself to breathe. I think he might cry, but he never does, just watches the people walking by, swiveling his head to get the full view.

August. By next week he has taken it in stride and asks if he can still see me at all. I hesitate - those last few times we had sex resembled a light frenzy, like the last burning off of a storm's horizon.

A few weeks later he wants to know what they all want to know. It is the word that haunts every romance that has never been witnessed by others, that remained hidden from view. Something that is half a secret is still a secret. If he doesn't know why, Simon says, he will never know how to grow from this. "How can I stop thinking about you?" he asks me. I tell him that I will let him know when I figure it out.

September. It is so hard to be alone again. Sundays are particularly unbearable. The only comfort is knowing I was right. Wasn't I?

I had to close the curtains because the trees lost their leaves.

October. Janet tells me that Simon has found a new girlfriend. Do I want to know who she is? At first I resent her for putting it to me in this fashion. It's not like I would have found out if she did not tell me. But I would have wondered.

So often now my curiosity is satisfied again and again. This constant satiation never happened in another age and time. I wish I did not know the end of every story, although I suppose I may never know what has become of Simon's mother, or why she came to visit her son at all if she was not going to touch him. I could write it myself, but I do not wish to do so, this time.

Simon's new squeeze is an artist, small and blonde, of intensely tiny paintings. In what Janet regards as a solid put-down, she informs me that they represent the size of the painter's world. She graduated from a New England college where she could not have amassed much more information about life than a squirrel does from living in one tree.

These are Janet's observations only. I go to see the paintings myself one morning when the gallery opens. Despite being of ordinary objects, for the most part, they are so finely focused I find myself staring in utter absorption before having to look away.

November. Simon calls me before Thanksgiving. He is living back in Brooklyn now, he says. He has a new place. Would I like to come over? The first time he asks, I manage to decline.

Almost everyone else I know has left New York to visit friends and family. I am not going home for Christmas. The city empties out, stores and restaurants are closed. The avenues are left to tourists. Wood floors in his apartment shine, newly buffed. He is not seeing Jacqueline any more, he says, if he ever was. She had another boyfriend, a businessman who travels a lot. The man promised to work from the home office from now on. His choice changed my life.

December. I say, "Some women want to know there is a specific type of future available, one that they can comfortably fit into. Maybe she did not think you were capable of providing that." Even as the words escape my mouth, I realize that they are meaningless.

His smell. One whiff is like the next day after you roast nuts, but just a bit sour. I cannot believe I was ever able to escape from this sensation of someone so fine, interwoven through and around me, an irrestible aspect of Linda. Without meaning to, I have impressed myself.

January. I turn him away when he comes to my door. At the end of my building's hallway, a mirror shows his despondent face. "Thought looking out on thought makes one an eye," offered Laura Riding.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. Experience our mobile site at http://thisrecording.wordpress.com.

Paintings by Edite Grinberga.

"Aluminum Crown" - of Montreal (mp3)

"Virgilian Lots" - of Montreal (mp3)

In Which We Are Saved By Something Unknown To Us

Must

by LINDA EDDINGS

David had a reputation on a dating website. He also had webbed toes on one foot, which I previously believed impossible. He pronounced sinecure incorrectly, and he used it incorrectly over half the time, which constituted a double whammy.

Charlie had wild hair and was a very fast runner. After we had sex three times he revealed he was a product of incest and things spiralled out of control from there. He wrote and shopped around a book about his life story and how he was saved by semi-pro lacrosse.

Marcus loved M. Night Shyamalan and insisted The Village was a work of genius. He totalled my car.

A myna bird will repeat whatever interests it. In the absence of sound, it will cry.

Theo drank Bailey's Irish cream in everything, even Diet Coke. I asked how he could do that and drive. He told me, "Bailey's doesn't have alcohol in it, right? What do you mean?" He died in 2007 during a stampede.

Jason used to blow bubbles on my stomach. At first it was semi-pleasurable and routinely led to oral sex. Eventually he only did it when he was apologizing: e.g., "Please forgive me. Blooooooo" on my navel. He is now married with two children.

I started to wonder if guys only talked down to you because you did it to them in subtle ways. I tried women, found them very similar in almost every way.

Diane remains a musician with a very irritating voice. If you got mad at her she cried, probably because her father was an English alcoholic who wanted nothing to do with her.

Mary-Ann's favorite musical act was Salt-N-Pepa. Each time she brought me to the point of orgasm she whispered, "Shoop." This was fantastic but she ended up clicking more with her Korean dermatologist.

Artis was an engineering lead who spent a lot of time in front of his computer. Sometimes I would feel I was observing a fish in a tank. On occasion he would take a break and meet my eyes, but only for a second.

Daniel took me to Disney World. We had a very nice time until he remarked, "The only problem with this place is the none of the pools are deep enough to drown."

Susan Minot acts like such a dick sometimes.

You know when you are really close, yes you are so close. The one thing holding you back from where you're supposed to go hovers at the periphery, it is saying the same words you heard as a child in a classroom: Behave.

Clifford was the most transparently pathetic adulterer in the entire city of San Francisco. He never lied or apologized, which was his only saving grace. Actually he had several other virtues: punctilio, joie de vivre, and a passion for Pinot Giorgio that defied all common sense and fiscal responsibility. He kissed with his eyes open.

Pascal was always coming from new cities, where he would bring small and delicate gifts and go into the bathroom while I opened them. It took me much longer than it should have to realize he was a drug mule.

They pick up on something that is so petty, and so reductive because they can't think of the real reason why it is over, and instead of being disappointed by the lack of perceptiveness at work, I am just as happy not to have my nose rubbed in it.

My fault.

A man (a boy?) who only sips from juiceboxes, who only listens to Buck 65 and J Dilla.

They want you near, in more intimate proximity than they have ever been to themselves. They want to go to the one place you have never been, in order for you to witness the event through their set of inhibitions, hang-ups and callbacks.

The most free I have ever been was one morning in Joseph's studio. He was breathing as he always did, through a sleep machine, and the rhythmic sound of the snore echoed through his only chamber. I knew that no matter what I did or said, he could not wake to answer. This is what I told his sleeping form: "Don't. Just don't."

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.