Free The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman Page B

tears. It was so comforting. His building was his boyfriend, that was all there was to it. That’s how it was going to be.

Chapter 6
    E arl’s joy carried Bette through the evening. The potential for his suffering to end would be so freeing to both of them, a great relief that she very much wanted to feel. She looked forward to the loss of an ongoing worry that he was always endangered.
    A new chapter.
    Just imagining the change unleashed other passions in Bette. Her mind floated and then lingered on faraway forgotten things, elements of the past like the smell of honeysuckle by the road behind her girlhood home. That had never happened before. She cut open an orange and brought it to her nose. Ah, delicious. Frank would do that for Earl. With kindness. She knew he could.
    What is love?
    Bette had wondered for most of her life. Her conclusion?
    When both see the other as real.
    What is real?
    When both understand the feelings and perceptions and desires that the other holds, as precious, pungent, and meaningful as one’s own. Their realizations are as powerful, and their deprivations are as grievous. To notice. To care. That he is listening, and she is listening. That one is not more important than the other.
    What is listening?
    What you say to each other is a promise, which becomes remembered, and then enacted. The spoken is transformed into the lived, deliberately. And the mechanism for this is cooperation. That is to say, the relationship.
    What is a relationship?
    To be awakened to the other, as though leaving a dream.
    What do we want from life?
    We wish the responsibilities, opportunities, and realities of the new day to be more delightful and enticing than the escape of sleep.
    This is what she wished for Earl.
    As for Bette, herself, she was quite a different type.
    Bette loved her chair. She loved her cup. She loved the plant growing tall in the corner and the freedom of the evening before her. Everything had come through her labor, her imagination, her commitment, and now it was all in place. She loved the records standing strong on the shelf and the chance to both own and choose music without impediment. She was balanced, she had Earl to care for, and she had a job that didn’t mean a thing. So she had feeling and relief from feeling.
    After some thought, Bette selected the recording of The Threepenny Opera that Earl had gotten as a giftfrom Marc, the show’s translator. They’d met at one of those actors’ parties where the exalted and their subordinates drink the same beer. Earl said Marc “had a thing for Negro men.” There had been a tryst in the man’s apartment, but he would not let Earl stay the night. Too intimate. Instead, he’d signed a copy: To Earle, Yours, Marc Blitzstein , misspelling Earl’s name and thereby nipping any potential romance in the bud. Earl felt that a person should take the time to learn another person’s name. And he was firm on that matter. Bette had spent her early life being called “Betty.” But, ever since Of Human Bondage made Bette Davis a star, citizens of every country and in every walk of life had known how to pronounce it.
    Bette and Earl had gone to the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street to see the production of The Threepenny Opera , and both loved it. It was so sophisticated. The story was about the poor and their own version of society, rich in passion, deceit, and dreams, just like the rich. But making dreams come true when one is a prostitute or petty thief is hard because they don’t really know how things work, and live in illusions that something might go their way. That it might all be about luck, when actually most fates are predetermined, she knew, just by where and how one is born. The music was dreamy, eerie and evocative. Like the sound of mist. And they both loved the words, which were deadpan and deep and frighteningly true. It kind of summed up the historic moment: complexity explained with