Rhinebeck NY

    I was shooting a film no one's ever seen in a mansion half a mile above the Hudson. A view one literally would kill for.
    The house belonged to a man named Sam. He'd made a fortune writing soap operas. He was tall, strong, well- fed. He looked like Rodin's Balzac. Not a handsome man but striking: one people gathered round, with the forehead of a Russian chess player, eyes that either undressed you or kept your secrets. Or both.
    Sam took me to a party. We parked by the gate of a place you couldn't see from the gate. Halfway across the lawn we met another man, wearing the most beautiful shirt I'd ever seen, untucked, flowing around him, blue grey like a canvas.
    "Hello Sam".
     The man's face didn't change when he glanced at me.
    "David, I want you to meet Jasper."
    Later that afternoon at the party in Jasper John's house I listened to a thin, cigarette sodden man talk about the Christ child's cock. When, in the portraits of the baby diety did you see it, Jesus's penis, or not. And what that told us about the times in which the painters lived.
   Women I would have killed for sat around him, listening in poses out of a seraglio.
   I asked him, is it true oil paintings take a century to dry?

    He said of course, isn't it erotic? The scent, the stench of what you make, of what you love most, isn't that what we all want in life, all around us, smeared on us?
   The women smiled. Yes.
   As in Ulysses yes? when Bloom takes a shit in chapter four and reads the paper and thinks about his wife fucking another man and his daughter also come to maturity, the ink of the paper and his own stink rising, the meal he'd just made the Kippers fried come to their natural end, and then he takes the "paper" yes, like the language we've been listening to and wipes his ass. Genius, no?
    I nodded. Sam laughed till he coughed. You're so full of shit Victor. Victor inhaled- Exactly!
    Johns asked me to hand out some snacks. His cocktail napkins were a bright Caribbean blue, I remember. Half the guests thought I was the help. Or one of his Johns. The art historian turned out to be one of the world's foremost art critics. The women, his students for the summer.
   Sam told me later, on his wide porch, the Hudson laying out below us, that he was thinking about marrying the woman who lived in the mansion behind him, which one couldn't see from his yard. I said I didn't know 80 year olds got married again, or had affairs, or sex.
   Of course David, what the fuck else is there? This ? and he pointed to the house and the grounds that I would have killed for ..."but I'm afraid our rigidities don't match. A shame. She's lovely. Paints all the time down in her place by the water. Doesn't chatter."
   She has another house?
   Yes, a boat house. Says the light's better there than in the manse.
   Sam, aren't you gay?
   Have been. Mostly. After awhile it doesn't matter as much, where, you know, how. Just who. I do have a son, remember, so I ....remember.
    Ha.
    Doesn't speak to me much, but there you are. Strangest thing - they don't tell you-  your children stop being your children and become anyone else. It's as much their fault as yours, eventually. Odd.  But a relief.
    The film never came out. The Director and the Producer refused to use a two page version of the final 10 page scene that we had to shoot and had no time for, because the actors, not they, had cobbled it together. Half way thru the 10 page sprawl the other Producer shut down the set and sent everyone home. We were blamed.
    The Director came back months later and tried to film a patch work scene- some Hail Mary, Frankenstein piece of writing to make saleble sense out of his mess-  on Sam's property, and Sam met him at the gate with a shotgun.
   I have rarely loved a man more. I keep that image of him in my head to this day. Grand Colonial estate, grass flowing down to the trees along the great river, the abandoned docks, the rail line, the Adirondacks grey in the distance, a tall man in impeccable dress. A shotgun.
   He died a few years later. I came back to see him just once. I was doing a play at a workshop in Poughkeepsie -which sounds like the opening of a stand up routine but there you are- I came by and we had a drink on his porch. He hadn't married his neighbor. The house was in decent shape and though his son was writing more often he didn't want to leave it to him.
    For some reason, I can't remember the segue, he started talking about WWII.
    For some reason it hadn't clicked in my head. Of course, he was the right age, he must have, and he did, serve.
    Combat, somewhere in Europe. I don't remember the facts, the name, the places which would give this story some non fiction gravitas. But he landed close to D Day and saw terrible shit. Boys died next to him. He wasn't a clerk.
    I said oh you should read Paul Fussell's book on his..."I know Paul, he's an ass." And Private Ryan had just come out so I said "They say the sound effects in the beginning are exactly like- " And why would I want to hear that again David?
    He had a stillness about him, I remember. He didn't move more than he needed to, and even less. His eyes didn't give much away. He smiled rarely. When he did laugh it was usually at someone's expense and he could stop a conversation completely with it. He had you, more often than not. He was the one you watched in a group. If he'd had a favorite hat, if it had blown off he would have stood there and watched it tumble down the street. What do they say, with a bemused air.

  If I've ever been in a bemused air, it was with him.
  Letters. That was the segue. It was something about letters, the texture of them, the feel of an actual letter, not the new fangled emails his son was trying to get him to open.
   He said the stationery the army gave you was completely singular, he'd never felt anything like it since: light but raspy to the touch, a militant onion skin, a material one couldn't imagine could give any pleasure at all but that nothing in his life had ever been so important as opening a letter from home at the front. The stench and the brutality surrounding him, sitting in a killing zone, and then his mother's voice or a close friend's coming up off the page.
  I think that's why I became a writer, yes, that's what I was trying to do, he told me.
  The light was just right, it was near sunset -he probably knew that- and he knew exactly which way to lean to catch the glow, but his eyes when he spoke about the war changed completely. Like my best friend's, getting out of the car he'd just driven into the side of a truck and lived, staring at me. My brother's when he told me his remission wasn't gonna last. My mother's when my brother stopped breathing. Even these are weak approximations. War. The deepest crime. And the one we send all our sons to commit.
  Sam. My war hero. Was 20 years ago this week I met you. Godspeed. And a shotgun.