ON THURSDAY NIGHT, Garcia had dinner at the Bryants’ place in East Hampton on Long Island. Ethan Bryant, despite this solid Yankee name, was actually a city upstart who had started his career doing various illegal things but had navigated the family into legitimacy. Tall, strong, with short gray hair and a handful of a chin, he was nouveau riche of the finest crust and had all ten of his fingers in diverse endeavors. Restaurants, theaters, travel, film. I suppose one could say he was an entrepreneur, but there was no industry other than big money that claimed Mr. Bryant. His wife, Tilda, was the consummate socialite but privately restless. Tilda would often do very rash things, like buy tickets to some unknown Francophone Caribbean island and disappear for months on end. She very obviously indulged in affairs, including a fling with Eric Clapton, and it was said that Ethan knew but did nothing about it, concerned as he was with important phone calls, reviewing bottom lines, studying The Wall Street Journal. Like most things in East Hampton, their home was expensive yet somehow dull, dreary, and ordinary. A gray shingled colonial in the typical saltbox style, it was protected by looming hedges. Any such home in Merry Old Britain would be seen as a quaint but rather aged and boring estate, but its presence on the end of Long Island ensured its status, its secure place in the safe and ongoing transfer of European culture to American shores. These were the Bryants. They had everything and were admired. They were also deeply, deeply unhappy. Garcia showed up at the Bryant residence wearing a white suit he had tailor made in the Orient. He supposed to them, he looked like some kind of martial arts star. Of course, being a top travel photographer gets one invited anywhere in the Hamptons. Brunch with Gwyneth Paltrow. Afternoon tea at Roger Waters’ place. Even Dick Cavett begrudgingly had Garcia over once or twice, though in the company of people far more important than himself. The trouble with the Bryants was Tilda, and the trouble with Tilda was her zest for fun living. Tilda Bryant was a voluptuous society lady with gold hair and exquisite tastes. She was also more charismatic and engaging than her at-times slink-away husband. While eating, Garcia, a handsome Spaniard if ever there was one, looked at Tilda the wrong way, because Ethan chewed his food slowly and accidentally knocked his knife on the floor. Then Garcia must have looked at her again the wrong way, because Ethan dropped everything, stood up, and stormed out of the dining room. “Don’t mind Ethan,” said Tilda stroking Garcia’s arm. “Things have been so rough in the stock market these days.” Garcia was rather shaken and asked to be excused and found his way down the hall to the toilet. It smelled like old toilets smell in old colonial houses and the floor was covered with wrinkled stacks of The New Yorker from the Nineties. While he was in there, he could imagine Tilda going to either scold her husband or rub his shoulders as he gazed out the window at his trimmed East Hampton hedge. All this money, all this money and his wife still fucked Clapton in Antigua. Even if he bought himself a new woman, it still wouldn’t be love. Money was a prison. He had built himself a monied Hamptons prison. He had to keep it together though. Friday there would be a reception to support the East Hampton Library. Alec Baldwin would be there. While Tilda was meeting privately with her husband, Garcia wandered the crooked halls of the sad old house. Supposedly a witch had once lived here long ago, when it was also a tavern, but had become too powerful and the East Hampton town elders had her drowned in the village pond. At the end of the hallway, Garcia noticed a door was ajar. He looked in and saw their twentyish daughter sitting on the edge of an old antique bed, swinging her feet aimlessly. She had returned from the Boston Conservatory where she had been studying the violin. The violin case was at her feet. “You must be lonely,” she said looking at Garcia. “You have that lonely look of lonely men.” “That’s always nice to hear,” Garcia said sitting down beside her. “You even smell lonely,” she said. She had dark hair and was as captivating as her parents. Her name was Enid. Garcia reached over and pulled a book off the shelf. It happened to be Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin: Explorers on the Moon. The rocket was about to launch. On board were Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, and the research engineer Frank Wolff. “I like the illustrations,” Enid said. They read the book together.

IN THE SPRING last year, I finally got my hands on a new bicycle from a shop on Kaalu Street in Viljandi, the one located above the laundry. It sat patiently for me in the corner, just the right proportions, just the right price, and inscribed with the tantalizing word Adriatica. The Adriatic is the sea between Italy and the Balkans, and it so happens that my forebears came from the coasts of these turquoise waters. That is how the bicycle spoke to me and we reached some agreement. Cash between me and the owners quickly changed hands. Adriatica was now mine.

This spring, I have used Adriatica to explore Viljandi, this town in which I have been anchored for all of the crisis. Days turn into weeks which turn into months and then turn into years. My children ask me questions like, “Do you remember anything that happened in April?”  I have my favorite routes. I know that if I take the bike down the hill to the lake, and then ride it all the way down to Huntiaugu at the foot of Männimäe and then back, my mood will improve. Even if I see some small town tragedies. Once I saw a Russian man sleeping in the grass, drunk. He was still clutching his mobile phone. Two Estonians passed him, discussed whether or not they should give him a hand and then decided to do nothing about him and walked away. 

I didn’t feel like doing anything about it either. 

If I take the bike into shady Uueveski, down streets like Lembitu or Ilmarise, my mood depresses. There are personal reasons for this, but it’s also harder to navigate in Uueveski. Uueveski also has more foliage, and so even on those few sunny days, it is dark in there.

A recent route has been through Uueveski and into Peetrimõisa, which is still unexplored terrain for me. The road into Peetrimõisa is dangerous, but if you hang to the side of the road and stay focused, you can turn quickly up streets like Sõstra or Kreegi. These streets are fun to explore. The neighborhood has both a rundown shantytown feel, but also is the site of relentless renovation and improvement. There are greenhouses where locals grow their own produce, ancient rusting Soviet trucks rotting in backyards. At one intersection, swings have been hung from a tree in a public park. Every other yard features a trampoline or batuut, the status symbol of any Estonian family. You must have a trampoline if you are going to pretend to be someone. 

There is no other say in the matter. 

On the weekends, when the Estonians are out, they try to find ways to occupy their time. We are told that life is short and time is of the essence, but it seems they have to find endless ways to entertain themselves with overly ambitious renovation projects that go nowhere, or just the never-ending act of burning brush, so that the streets are filled with the sting of white smoke. These scenes I encounter from the perch of my bike, which seems somehow decadent here. Shouldn’t I also be fixing or burning something? How can I waste my time just cycling around?

But I live in a town apartment, you see. The only thing to burn is old paper bags from Rimi.

From Peetrimõisa, I cycle up and around toward Karula, pausing at that old German graveyard down by the lake, the one with the mossy crosses and mossy stones. Du bist meine rettung. “You are my savior.” All this talk, all this talk about the Soviets and the Soviet era, and all through it these Germans have been sleeping here watching wistfully over Lake Karula, dreaming in eternity. No one minds them, no one thinks of them, and their graves are a mess. 

From there, I take the road back into town, past a military installation and some car dealerships. This angle of town also makes me feel lonely. That wind is blowing through and there is hardly anyone around until you get to Uku Keskus, that former prison that now brings so many people such joy. During the lockdown, if you waited and watched, you could even talk your way into Hawaii Express to pick up a bicycle pump, if you needed one, though technically they were only on call for orders. I remember how I used to come up here last year during the last lockdown and wear rubber gloves and a mask, as if I was doing maintenance on the International Space Station. Marek Strandberg had a YouTube video about how to decontaminate products. People were afraid you could get the virus from touching a magazine. I’m not as careful now. Maybe I should be, but in any case, I get back on Adriatica and ride.

I go to Paalalinn too, sometimes, to get some good dark chocolate from the supermarket there. I tend to avoid Männimäe, but not for any personal reasons, but because it’s not on my route. There is also Kantreküla, which yields surprises. There is always a street or house you somehow missed all the other times you have been through it. So much packed in a small town.

Then it’s down to the lake again, where I cruise along that cluster of modern houses in what I have been told was once a sheep pasture. I call this neighborhood “Little Reykjavík” because there are almost no trees there and it looks like the suburbs of Reykjavík, Iceland, that I’ve explored. Seldom do I see people in Little Reykjavík, and only if I peer through the windows can I see a family watching the news from a big screen TV, or maybe a man tinkering with a leased car. By the lake one day I encountered some Finns who were camping. Finns always seem a bit more robust and even a little eccentric. They are like the Estonians’ weird cousins. “Oh, yes, don’t bother with him,” they say about them. “Always been a little strange.”

There by the lake, I look up at all the houses on the hill and wonder if I will ever get back to the real Reykjavík. The hot public baths, the volcanoes, the funny cafes, the tasty soups, all those pretty girls. I suppose I could go, but it still seems complicated and there is always the danger that you might not be able to get back so I’ll have to settle for Little Reykjavík for now. 

It’s really not so bad here in Viljandi. We have the lake and we have our bikes. Sometimes I wonder if there is any difference between being there, here, or anywhere anymore.

I DIDN’T WANT TO GO swimming, but it did so happen that I had my swimsuit and a towel (and a bag) and no reasonable excuse not to. When I came out of the apartment complex, I noticed that I was on the other side of the town, far at the end of the lake toward the river delta. There was a long sandy beach, faced by colorful villas, a mix of the south and north. Toward the mouth of the delta was a small island, cut away from the shore by what looked to be a stream. As I ventured closer, I could see the current here was much stronger and few swam in it, except for some kids who had dipped their legs in the waters. I could see the stream wasn’t so deep, so I walked across it and hoisted myself up on the other bank. Here I encountered an abandoned guard outpost, made of weather-beaten logs, broken windows. There was another man there, and he told me he had thought of buying this island and developing it into a small summer restaurant, but that he no longer had faith in the project. “Everything here is wrong,” he said. Down along the coast, I could see there was a white citadel. I walked along the beach and came over the drawbridge. The citadel was maintained by a Chinese aristocratic family of ancient lineage. Their name was Lo. Out of politeness, I was invited to dinner, which included a rich bisque. After dinner, I was invited to a reception upstairs, where I was a guest of honor, alongside Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. I was surprised, not only because Paul is, at least as of this moment, deceased, but because Grace looked young and was dressed in black. She was kind and we got to talking. “But what am I doing here?” I asked. Grace grinned and said, “Don’t you know? You’re back in San Francisco with us, man. You’re back in San Francisco.”

THE LETTER ARRIVED YESTERDAY. Why it pains me, I cannot say. Only perhaps because the youth’s voice reaches through to me in a way that few can. She writes wonderfully and I love that. It echoes previous messages though. Riding my bike through a back lot, I remembered another day many years ago, seeing another woman walking her own bike past the brick facades. She was about to leave for abroad, and it was my secret hope that she would find a good man there, settle down, raise a brood, and I would never have to see her again. Then she returned to my life, only to regard me as, I don’t know, a non-man, not a man, not a man worth considering as a man. She would sit on my couch and complain about how a good man was so hard to find. Then, maybe, a glance in the mirror. A smoothing of the hair. Attention to a manicure. Behold, smoldering femininity in its bare grotesqueness. Yet we love them and forever love them. When they send letters, they are like arrows made of crystal. The wounds they leave are cold and incisive, not hot, tropical, festering. As taboo and strange and wrong as it is, this one knows I love her and therefore can treat me with such indifference. I’ll always be there to carry a box, or remedy some inconvenience. “Hold my bag!” You can’t expect a man though to cut off parts of himself for the sake of others. It doesn’t work that way. The very parts that bring you passion, warmth, happiness, and joy. One collapses into piles of coiled ship’s rope without hope. You can’t seriously expect another human being to be that self-denying, as it suits your fancy. Can you? Can you? I never started these things on my own. Something was always given to me, passed along, like a glowing gem. And now you want it back? At the café, yesterday, another one now. A woman dressed in blue with a long lion’s mane of gold hair. She was looking at me. I was looking at her. We looked at each other. Oh no. It was happening again. Oh no.

— Images from Keskpäevane Praam (Midday Ferry), a Soviet Estonian film, 1967.

IT WAS NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO when I met with some colleagues from a partner company at a business conference in Gothenburg, Sweden’s west coast capital. Known for its waterfront, architecture, and openness, Gothenburg sprawls along in an ever-welcoming air of freedom and tolerance, watched wisely over by a big nude statue of Poseidon at Götaplatsen. 

It was there that I met with several colleagues from their British office, including Nicola, a senior ranking manager, and Martin, the head of marketing. I encountered Martin at check-in at the conference, where he was telling his loved one Alex that he had arrived safely and that he would call him back. “Talk to you soon, babe!” Martin is married to Alex, you see, and they are both men. Night after night, we all went out together. As everyone else in our entourage was straight and female, that meant that I was the only person who was attracted to women.

This made for a wholly interesting experience.

Each night in Gothenburg degraded into a succession of restaurants and bars, and more alcohol was always just a snap of the fingers away. Such is the nature of international business meetings. It was amid this Scandinavian bakgrund that Martin, a spectacled, good-natured, gray-haired fellow of about 45 years who begins each morning with a jog, began to reveal the stories of his life. His awakening to his true nature began, of all places, in a public urinal in the Midlands sometime in the 1980s. He was about seven years old. By his account, it was amazing.

“How cliché,” he remarked. “Of all the places to figure out you are gay, I was in a men’s toilet.” 

It was a curious tale, to be sure, and it had me rummaging through long-discarded memories in the attic of my own childhood. When had I first realized I was attracted to women? Was it watching Madonna prance around to “Lucky Star”? Surely, I hadn’t come to the realization in any kind of public lavatory. Men’s lavatories smelled bad and were full of hairy men. It seemed the least “amazing” place I could think of. Because of this early encounter, Martin progressed to his membership in this alternative clan, the men who love men and not women. He showed me photos of a resort in the Canaries where only men dared venture. There were beaches and cafes where there were only men. Men swimming. Men eating. Men hugging. No women.

Only men.

For me, it was like a scene from a science fiction film or just an ominous bleak dream. A world without women. A sense of dread set in. Usually, in life, being alone with men was part of some kind of punishment. Organized sports, for instance. Or the army. Surely, at any moment, a belligerent coach or sergeant would appear and order these gay men to start doing crunches.

Other than drinking, Martin and Nicola would spend the evenings checking out men. Once they had their eyes on a particular waiter who wore a blue shirt and was in good shape. Nicola, a freckled, voluptuous Scottish woman, wore an open black shirt that left little to anyone’s imagination, with a silver sparkling necklace draped across the knolls of her breasts, as if to rule out any chance that they could escape my notice. Those breasts caused me real worry. How to avoid not looking at them? And yet my eyes were right there again, drawn along by their twinned magnetic tug. How could Martin not see this? Why was he gawking at a Swedish waiter when he was sitting next to this? Or them. Those. Her. You know what I’m talking about. Instead, he pulled out his phone to show me a photo of a royal guard he had taken in Stockholm. First he showed it to Nicola, then to me. “Just look at how beautiful this guard is. Isn’t he amazing?”

I didn’t know what to say. It was some guy in a uniform. The uniform looked uncomfortable.

“But what do you think about me?” I ventured. “Do I look all right?” They whispered to each other. “Not in that shirt,” said Nicola. “No one would be interested in a man wearing a shirt like that!” It was some black thing someone had gifted me ten years ago. I hadn’t thought anything about wearing it. Or anything else. They laughed harder. What kind of strange world did they live in? A world where Swedish waiters were sexy and Scottish bosoms were nothing to lose sleep over? A world where magic took place in public toilets? A world where shirts mattered?

It was Pride Month, and the trams of Gothenburg were festooned with rainbow flags. They shuttled this way and that, like imperial warships of old. One evening, Martin toasted the trams and rainbow flags with his beer. “One month, that’s all we get,” he said. “Eleven months out of the year, we live in shame. Some of our families are ashamed of us, even though they say they aren’t, and we’re also ashamed of ourselves at times. But each year we have one month.”

By this point, I was exhausted. I wanted to retreat back into my world, a world of women, a world of women who are neurotic and throw things at you even when you try to compliment them, or ignore you, or just do mysterious things you can’t begin to understand. The soothing motion of watery, emotional, curvy women. I was tired of rainbow flags, Swedish waiters, royal guards, men’s toilets, and ugly shirts. I wanted to feel comfortable in my own skin. In that moment, I understood how exhausted Martin must feel. As he said, for just one month out of the year, he could live openly in his world. The rest of the time he was forced to live in mine.

ONE THING I KNOW is that you write every day. You write every day and you’re on the sea. At the dawn of time, among the seaweed and mollusks, jellyfish and other invertebrates, in the yellow sand-wrapped prehistory, you were there under an ultramarine sky, with your cocoa skin and cocoa hair and cocoa breath and awful secrets, playing with small fish in the tidal pools, watching the light dance through the ripples like electricity, licking your fingers clean when the ice cream melted. In the gray spring I was there, standing aloof among the German graveyards, the lifeless lake waters, gray hobbled limbs of trees, gray weathered flowers of moss, cold and chill and grayed, thinking of the sands and of you and of your awful secrets and of the water. This is how we connect through time, like light dancing through gulf ripples, touching sediment and snails, then back up again, bearing sun and fossil fragments of eternity.

EVELYN WAUGH wrote a good novel, this is his first from 1928, and I especially enjoyed the first book within (there are three “books” or sections). His strength is dialogue and capturing the voices of his characters via dialogue. If the whole book had consisted of these lengthy dialogues, it would have been much the stronger. His descriptive writing can be grand, if restrained, but it’s more difficult to read on and on about, say, the house King’s Thursday, when really what we want is the dialogue between Peter and Paul, or Paul and Margot. Also, like Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night (1934), he picks up the tempo toward the end, and introduces some forgettable characters into rather forced and forgettable scenes that could have been left out or minimally recognized. How many characters can we grapple with then? Who was who, what, and when? All together, I enjoyed The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold a bit more, but I will in no way say I did not enjoy nor learn from Decline and Fall. I was relieved to learn that Waugh actually did teach at a school in North Wales, and this was all not just the workings of his imagination, but rather a satire on his real life.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Anyone who has been to an English public school feels comparatively at home in prison. It’s the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul destroying.”