Theory of Slavery | Hamilton

VIII

"Whenever you see I'm having a good time you want me to go home!"

"Never heard anything so selfish in my life."

"Well, we were the first ones to leave!"

"Technically we were not," Hamilton said as he had me seated, kicking my feet, on the bed. "The orchestra left an hour earlier."

"Would it bore you so much," quoth I, "Would it bore you so much to stop being such an old fart? Move away now, will you, I shall undress."

"For God's sake, don't."

But I had already begun to shed my rude clothes, unable to bear the heat of my own limbs, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging in my veins. Perhaps I had drunk a little too much. Perhaps I made a fool of myself. Perhaps the afternoon ended with a struggle, and I was dragged, by Hamilton, into the car. I remember nothing. From the doodlings I had traced around this page before writing I'm trying to recover the memory of that day's jitters, but to no avail. Maybe I needed to get roaring drunk in order to relieve my anxieties. But I couldn't even remember my anxieties. They were completely overshadowed by what followed them and seemed to belong to a segment of time to which I had no access whatsoever. And so I found myself in "our" bedroom– the tragedy of dusty snuff boxes and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps– clad in my underwear and without a memory of the intervening hours, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, perhaps important, perhaps not.

"You need to sleep," Hamilton commented, unsuccessfully trying to catch my elbow, "Oh, my god, I should have remembered you were an alcoholic. Lay down."

"Yes, an alcoholic," I sang, my soft distorted limbs sprawled on the bed, "I am a drunkard, absolutely filthy in thought, and possibly a homosexual. Did you know?"

"Whatever you had today I ought to have asked for a sip."

Our position was thus: I lay with my curved spine to him, and could hear him undressing, brushing his hair, perfuming his armpits, checking the pill vial in his pajama pocket. I could almost see him do that. It made me think of a habit, or of a gesture, which happens to be totally accidental the first time but becomes intentional the second time and more so yet the third. It made me think of the way I would make "our" bed every morning, first by folding the top sheet over the blanket, then by folding the sheet back again to cover the pillows on top of the blanket, and then by lifting the mattress and tucking the sheet in. Today we left early, and I didn't get to do any of this. With a sudden sharp sense of unfamiliarity I pulled at the sheets piled up to the south of my stone-cold feet. Could this be the reason for my discomfort, which began to eat at my soul and seemed to define itself ever more clearly the more I became aware of incipient daylight through the blinds? Hamilton had already placed his knee on his side of the mattress when I turned my head and looked at him.

"It's broad daylight. Why are you trying to sleep?"

Hispanic face was white and motionless as a plaster cast, and the upward angle from which I looked at it made his nose seem triangular, like a beak.

"I'm tired. For goodness sake, go to bed."

He heaved himself onto his narrow margin of bed and put two pillows under his head; a band of pale light from the window made a cut across his throat.

"You're cra-azy", I said in a drawl.

Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Hamilton turned away. For at least two minutes I waited and strained on the brink. After a while his breathing still couldn't retain the rhythm of sleep. It was probably the alcohol, but something unexpected seemed to clear away between us, and, for a second, it seemed to me there was absolutely nothing strange about two men sharing a bed. I loved the perfect familiarity of the moment. I even loved the stale, stifling feel of the bedroom, which was littered with things that belonged to him but not me, never me– books, humidors, fountain pens, hats, cufflinks, myself.