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It was late July and New York sat in the lowness of an emerging summer. The smoke above the city line was turning orange at the edges, a portent of the season. On the other side of the street, a shopkeeper watched with lazy eyes as John cut between a cab and a beat-up blue Mini. He said something in Italian that John didn’t quite catch, hitched a sandwich board under his arm and vanished back inside.
The foliage was thick this time of year. The leaves shimmered everywhere, like scales. Even the beggar who lived on the corner of 72nd was quiet and depleted—his feet were bare, their soles dry and brown. Most people were occupied with their business, moving quickly between pools of shade with their heads lowered to the ground. Like always John stopped to fish a few bills from his pocket, enough money for a hot dog and a pack of cigarettes. Their hands brushed very briefly, the tip of a finger, his knuckle.
New York had given John anonymity, his child, and the distance from England that he coveted. It was everything gorgeous in his life, the closest thing he had to winning back the freedom that he traded away as a young man. In a way he was in debt to it, like a long marriage for which you have made many sacrifices in the name of commitment. The time had long since passed for uncertainty, regret or longing. This was the thought that he worked hard to avoid, that hovered at the edge of his mind more often when the baby slept and Yoko was as distant to him as a prisoner. Dark suspicions brought on by uncontrollable drifts of his consciousness; the undeniable fact that most things reminded him of Paul; his own tendency to reflect on the past.
He might be washing the dishes or kneading bread when some missing piece of the puzzle would slot into place. Something he said to Paul or even George years ago, or they to him, things he had spent the better part of a decade stewing over. It was a new, unwanted clarity, the opposite of cathartic, to see everything in such a different light. In flashes so vivid they could have been hallucinations he would see himself, his past, as if he were someone else, detached from his own tangle of emotions. It was indescribably terrifying to suddenly understand, to know so suddenly the extent of his own mistakes and remain powerless to change them. Today, it had flushed him out of his apartment in the form of a looming threat: the presence of Paul in John's city.
The new version of Paul, wearing his hair longer, always with his guitar slung across his shoulder, asking to be let inside. John was running out of reasons to deny him. Running out of reasons even to himself, sometimes, like an addict years out of rehab telling himself that one hit couldn't make a difference. Paul had appeared on John's doorstep alone every day for the several weeks since he arrived in town, for once no Linda or kids glued to his side. And now with Yoko in L.A on a business venture John was immediately, painfully vulnerable.
Paul would leave tomorrow. He had made sure John knew, dropping it into the conversation pointedly every time he stopped by. Their time was running out. All John had to do was keep his distance until the flight left, just a little longer, and Paul would be gone.
The afternoon stretched before him, free from the shadows of his past. He craned his neck back and looked up at the blue bowl of the sky, the impossible height of the buildings, containers of so many unknowable people, until he felt dizzy, and someone shoulder-checked him hard enough to bruise.
The man who owned the bodega knew his face but not his name: John was just the English fella who liked French smokes and always left a little extra change. He keeps the AC on and lets John use the shop phone to check on Sean. (“He’s eating his lunch right now,” the nanny said, “Tell your dad what you’re having.” Sean had learned how to say soup and demonstrated this to John proudly.)
When he ran out of minutes it was still empty inside the store. The teller had vanished into the back room, plastic flaps gently waving. Briefly John pictured a teenage version of himself stuffing as many cigarettes and food items as possible into his pockets and making a dash for it. The image was comically juvenile, enough to make him smirk, and at once feel a jolt at the incongruence between the past and present; the uncertainty of when it happened, exactly, that he became the kind of person who would no longer do that. It seemed to him as if he should have been able to pin down a specific moment, a cross on the map of his life where his inner self had altered.
With sweat cool on the back of his neck, he wandered over to the produce section and considered some of the more beautiful tomatoes—how perfect and smooth they were, like Sean when he was a newborn—and then to the snack aisle where he gathered chocolate biscuits and tins of cat food. The low noise of the fan began to lull him into a stupor. In truth, he could hardly see what he was going to do by himself in the city for the next few hours. In terms of reading material, it was slim pickings, just the usual selection of dirty magazines and tabloids.
As John thumbed through a series of increasingly far-fetched headlines (Elvis Slims Down for Comeback tour! The King’s New Diet and Plans to Rock the World Again!) he began to feel a sense of despondency. Nothing had stood out, no bolt of inspiration had struck him where he stood. The shine of potential he had glimpsed earlier was already fading. It was so much harder now than it used to be, to hold on to even his smallest, most private dreams. Everything became water in his hands, his desires, his songs, every tiny certainty. It was as if the years spent propelling himself to the top, and the violent way he had to tread water to stay there, had used him up completely. Burned through everything he had before he even knew it was his.
Standing alone by the rows of glossy pages, there was a brief spark in his chest, a moment of weakness—a longing for someone to talk to—which flared and was gone before it could alight. The shop bell rang; the teller was still out. He saw a shadow slide across the floor from behind him and vanish as the person moved into the next aisle.
There was a squeak of rubber on linoleum, the telltale sign of a well-waxed floor, which made John glance up. Absently he registered the low hum of the refrigerator aisle and the faintly sweet smell of ripe bananas. The stranger had rounded the corner into his aisle and came to stand about a meter or so away from him, his head angled slightly to reveal his profile.
There was a time in his life where he could honestly say he hated Paul, but equally—and there were days now where he even found that it was easy to admit—there was a time when he had truly loved him, wholly and uncomplicatedly, more than any one person really had the right to be loved. The sweet, soft Paul, the one who belonged entirely to a different version of John. The Paul who wore leathers his dad hated just to impress him and who ran away with him to Paris; who endured in John’s memory as a force of nature, an otherworldly creature with his spidery eyelashes and whorls of hair on his arms and legs like dark forest undergrowth.
Something about this Paul against the backdrop of the grotty bodega was almost obscene, an image directly deposited from the deepest corners of his mind and into real life.
He stood with his weight leaning effeminately on one hip, coltish with the long legs he was only just starting to grow into and his open, curious face. Paul was in no hurry, spending what seemed like ages rifling through several different magazines, not particularly focused, just looking. So strange and out of place in full-body leather, like a ghost from a faraway time. His eyebrows were knit in concentration, completely oblivious to John’s presence as his fingers slid casually over the magazine covers, pausing for a fraction of a moment on one with a bare-chested blonde splayed on the front. John’s breath slowed, watching the casual precision of Paul’s movements, the way his lips quirked just slightly.
John stole glances at him in bite-sized increments, the determined attempt at a quiff in his hair, the innocent white curve of his cheek. He wanted, with an urgency so violent it surprised him, to get closer, the desire to do so immediately burning him up.
As he watched, Paul licked his thumb to turn the next page, just a little slip of a pink tongue, a little wetness shining on the tip of his finger. He was such a tease, and most of the time he probably never even realised, or at least he hadn’t back then. Even when he wasn’t consciously exhibiting himself, there was just something to his movements. He used to make John feel crazy, completely tied up with desire, punching and spitting every chance he got just to try and exercise some of it. Like putting water on a burn, it only ever relieved it for a second before it came back: that pulsing, raw feeling.
With the barest intake of breath, John took a half step closer, his hand tightening on the edge of the magazine rack. Paul folded the mag he was holding in half with a flourish and slipped it under his jacket, smooth as anything. It happened so fast: he turned to leave, and as he did he looked at John, like he had known he was there the whole time. With a final wink, he vanished out the door, the shop bell ringing in his wake.
For a long moment, John felt like had jumped from a cliff and made contact with the ocean, the punch of his body hitting the water before he sank and the world became soft and bottomless. I was the one who taught him how to do that, he remembered with a start. It was me. As quickly as it happened he was left alone again, the door slowly spinning to a stop, the magazine beneath his hand stuck slightly to his fingertips in the humid air. Paul still half imprinted on the back of his eyes, just the vague sweet shape of him, the soft lingering blur of his body.
It was Linda of all people who put it best, one night not long after Sean was born. She and Paul had blustered their way into the Dakota with an expensive bottle of wine, determined not to take no for an answer. They promised a short visit and of course, they didn’t, couldn’t possibly deliver, not when the wine had to be finished and the baby was sleeping so nicely. All at once Paul left to put the kettle on and Yoko excused herself to check on Sean, so it suddenly became just him and Linda, the latter of whom was dangerously wine-drunk. John could tell because her faux-English accent had all but vanished. Upon John pointing this out, on the edge of cynicism, she only laughed—a big, careless sound that filled the room like an extra person, blonde head thrown back and her mouth a vivid, wine-red O. “Well,” she said, wiping at her lips, “when in Rome.”
Paul’s wife, on John’s couch with all her Americanisms on display. She always touched a place inside John that he could never put into words, a deep distaste mixed with something that wasn’t quite admiration. In that moment she seemed about to fall asleep, eyes hooded and voice slow and gravelly. He was relieved by the silence. He had never felt anything close to a desire to get to know her.
“They don’t really mix,” she said suddenly, startling him. He was unsure at first if she was even speaking to him, staring as she was at the bottom of her empty wine glass. “New York and Paul.”
“Oh,” John found the wherewithal to reply. “Yeah.”
She looked at him in a proper way that made him wonder if she was really as drunk as she seemed. “It was clear, you know, the first time we were here together. Heather was still really little.” Her smile was small, self-deprecating. “I wanted him to see how deep it all ran, it’s aliveness, I guess. The noise and the movement. We took her to the park and he just played with her for ages. Both of us felt like real parents. A real couple.”
Against his will, John saw it in his mind’s eye: the two of them looking on together, Paul beautiful and woolly with his dark beard and his new blue peacoat. Linda, probably holding Heather’s hand, both of them watching Paul throw leaves into the air or crouch to fix the buckle on her shoe. He looked away from Linda as if by doing so, he could banish the image.
“I remember him saying right then that he couldn’t live here. Just doesn’t feel like home to him. It never will.” She blinked and offered John a soft, lazy smile as if they were old friends trading conspirational stories, and together they had stumbled into some kind of shared truth. “He doesn’t really like to stay here too long.”
He found the notion that he and Linda might have something in common disturbing—and thereby elected to put it out of his mind. But it came back to him in full force as he paid for his groceries and re-emerged onto the busy street. It was true that Paul had never taken to America in the same way John had. Not the first time they saw it, conquering it together only to discover that it smelled like piss and cigarettes, and definitely not the last, the horrid Apple trip where they could barely stand to look at one another. New York was a city against everything that Paul stood for: it rejected intimacy; it swallowed you inside it and then spat you out so you were nothing more or less than everyone else.
John turned left at the next corner, letting the crowd nudge him along. The air smelled of car exhaust and something frying, tangy and cloying. New York and Paul don’t really mix. He stopped at a crosswalk, the red hand flashing insistently, and watched the blur of faces around him. Everyone was moving, hurrying, weaving through each other. He found himself seeking out the young, slender dark-haired ones with his eyes on instinct. As the lights changed and he began walking he crossed paths with a girl carrying a guitar case slung over her shoulder, her steps quick and determined, and for a split second, his heart skipped. He shook his head, brushing it off. Like Pandora’s bleeding box, John thought helplessly. That’s what Paul is.
Ducking into a nearby doorway, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lighting it with a flick of his lighter and inhaling until his lungs burned.
It used to be all he could do, sometimes, not to take Paul by the arm and drag him somewhere safe and private, where no one else could look at him, enveloping him with his jacket like a makeshift cocoon. He wanted to shadow him, possess him wholly. Standing in the doorway, he watched the crowd move past him, unease stirring in his gut. He flicked ash into the gutter and shoved the cigarette back between his lips, his fingers twitching. It wasn’t fair. Paul didn’t even like this city, didn’t belong to it the way John did, and yet here he was, haunting its streets all the same. Paul couldn’t be his, but John could never have anything that wasn’t also Paul’s, not since he was sixteen, not a city or a memory or a feeling of his own. It all fell into place around Paul whether he wanted it to or not.
He walked a few more paces down the street, looking above the stores and restaurants at the brownstones and full-leafed summer trees. He felt somehow injured by the raw eggshell blue of the sky and the clamour of traffic, like a mollusc without his shell. Linda and her pale, wistful eyes; the thing that passed between them that John had been powerless to stop; the mutual desire for Paul to understand and the prolonged acceptance she must have seen mirrored on his face.
It settled over him as he walked, a heavy, unshakeable weight. What he really needed, he realized with a sharp pang, was to shut it all up.
There was a bar a few blocks away that attracted the right kind of crowd, fags and drunks, no one who would have reason to care about him. It wasn't long before he found it again through muscle memory alone, vaguely remembering something about the corner of 75th. The place looked unassuming, especially during the day time, unwashed and slightly faded, the neon sign unlit. Inside it was dim, leopard patterned wallpaper and reddish lighting, like a strip club that was pretending it wasn't.
He slid into a stool silently, muttering for a whiskey in a voice barely above a whisper. The bartender acknowledged him with a nod. John looked around, noticing there were a few people—a laconic looking man slumped at a nearby table, some people playing cards and talking in low voices and a few more in the shadows, most likely homosexuals. The seediness of it reminded him in a vague way of Hamburg, and yet not. There was none of the energy, the desperation. Someone had put oldies on the jukebox, his parents' type of music.
“Here you are,” the bartender said, breaking his thoughts. “Enjoy.” He smiled at John, lingering for a second too long before walking away.
He had never overly identified with most of the queers he had come across, both in Hamburg and later. It made more sense to think of himself and Paul as being in their own, private box, like the way they were with so many other things. If he thought about it he could probably recall dozens of times where he had felt a sexual desire for men who weren't Paul, but it rarely ever manifested beyond a fleeting thought, something he could relieve just by touching himself or finding a willing bird. No amount of time with Paul—touching, kissing, talking—was ever enough. Whatever he felt was never stagnant: it ran deeper than he could possibly see, the widest and wildest of rivers. And distance, he was beginning to realise, could only ever keep it at bay for so long.
The second whiskey went down smoothly. He barely tasted the third one at all. By the fourth, he began to lose track of time. The bar's dim red light seemed to seep into his skin. He caught the bartender glancing at him again, and this time he returned the look with a smirk before tipping the glass back to his lips. He was all too aware of how miserable the sight must be, the ageing John Lennon with a drink for his only company, hiding out with queers just to avoid looking his ex-bandmate in the eye. A decent man would probably have just punched Paul by now and gotten it over with.
He wanted another drink, and a shag. Wanted Paul to walk into this bar and take him home. Wanted to be seventeen again, to grow wings and fly far away. The laminate bartop was cool on the edge of his forehead, and when he opened his eyes he was entirely unsurprised to see Paul nursing a drink a few seats away.
No, he wasn't a mirage at all, he was real. John was certain that if he could touch him the leather of his jacket would be warm. He couldn't speak, couldn't move, frozen by every detail of him, his hair so dark it swallowed the light; the blackened green of his eyes. His front tooth, not yet crooked. Longing roared in his chest like a wave of sickness, crashing over him, rendering his voice useless. He tried to link to him in the dimness of the room: Come find me. Come to me.
Paul drummed his hand absently on the bartop, his whole body sort of tilted towards the music in the way he always did, like he couldn't help it, a sunflower towards the sun. Like it might pull him apart if he resisted. He drank slowly, his eyes moving slyly over John, holding his gaze for a moment before ducking his head.
John wanted to hold him, to pull him onto his lap, kiss his pink mouth and see if it was just as sweet as he remembered.
“You weren’t always this much of a bastard,” he mumbled as he ran his finger around the rim of his glass, not even sure if Paul was listening. “Least not when you wanted something from me.” John shifted in his seat, suddenly very aware of his body—the heaviness of his limbs, the slight sway of his vision and the burn in his throat from whiskey.
He didn't wait to see if Paul was watching him as he knocked back the last of his drink and made his way out the door, only remembering his bag of groceries at the last second, a little unsteady on his feet. Immediately the heat and noise of the city enveloped him like a living thing. He blinked rapidly against the light as he walked, wondering if the sun would ever set, or if the afternoon would last forever: if he would be here forever, alone, haunted by someone he had once called his friend.
Friendship, Paul, and John. Another thing that had never mixed very well. Like on the phone, before, days or weeks ago, there Paul had been, all sing-song: I’m back in town, did you miss me? There had been a pause that made the hair on the back of John’s neck stand on end. Didn't sleep a wink, he said eventually. Paul had laughed, and there was another silence before he spoke again, some strange thing like a challenge in his voice, You been keeping the kettle on?
Mhm, was all John replied, feeling suddenly self-conscious. When what he had really wanted to say was that the kettle wasn’t actually a kettle, it was a box, and if he opened it the thing inside might hurt him more than he could bear.
It was around four in the afternoon. The shadows of the world were lengthening as the edge of an evening chill started to creep in over the city. Rubbing the gooseflesh on his arms he let himself walk without intent, the whiskey warmth in his stomach burning like an ember. Every tree seemed familiar in his drunken mind; every face was his mother’s face. Everything broke his heart, the light going, the distant bending note of a saxophone travelling across time and space. It was everything he wanted and couldn’t hold on to, both too much and nothing all at once.
Central Park was quieter in the late afternoon, a few lingering families folded into the gingham squares of their picnic blankets, the light slanting low and golden. It made him miss Yoko and Sean, though it was comforting to be able to see the Dakota from a distance and imagine him tucked somewhere safely inside. He liked to walk deep into the park until there was nothing but trees in front and behind him. It was like entering another planet, a green world he existed in by himself, only the smell of the earth rising from the ground and the sound of his heart for company. It was one of the only things the Yogi did get right—how the world could fall away if you let it. He wasn't sure he ever quite mastered it, but this came close enough. The trees muted the hum of the city, leaving only the occasional bird-call or distant snatch of laughter. A part of him envied the trees for their stillness. I’m just a child of nature, I don’t need much to set me free. Underneath the mountain ranges, touch the windows of my soul.
It felt so distant now, that version of him who could sing about freedom with such conviction. So many times he was sure he had found it, through fame and LSD, Yoko and Paul. Always Paul. Since before he could remember he had longed for a rabbit hole to fall down, something to pull him into a place where everything made sense, or, failing that, where nothing needed to. Mirrors or wardrobes or cracks in the pavement.
He walked further down the path, glad for the burgeoning chill in the air. Summer would flash by as it always did: it was the season that couldn’t stay. It could never be again what it was when he was younger, an endless blue day where nothing mattered except for his guitar. Autumn would come, and then winter.
A movement in front of him, a pale flash in the dim light—John stopped and scanned the path ahead, trying to find it again in the dimness of the evening. The trees swayed lightly in the evening breeze, their shadows stretching long and thin across the ground. He squinted, searching for the source. Somewhere, standing still, just out of his sight. He strained his ears for a sound.
“Paul?” John called softly. It came again, faint but deliberate, the suggestion of a hand—or maybe just the play of light through the leaves. “Paul,” he tried again, a little louder this time. “Come on.” He could feel Paul’s eyes on him, feel their hearts beating in time. It made him feel gouged open, exposed and trembling like a newborn animal.
He willed Paul to come closer, to leave, to speak—anything. He took a step forward, then another. “Come to me.” His voice sounded raw, alien like it belonged to somebody else. “I see you.”
A few feet away, tucked half in a shadow. Paul’s was a silhouette John knew better than his own skin. So much time he had spent watching him, wanting him. He would have braided the veins in their arms together if he could.
"You're not here," John murmured, his throat closed up with the truth of it. "You're not really here."
Paul watched him silently, his eyes half-mast, black pools. He had the deep placidity of a large body of water, like something ancient and unknowable, dangerous. John’s heart clenched as he stood frozen, caught on the pull of wanting. “Paul, Paul.” How long had he held that name within him, the perfect swoop of it, four letters that had spelt half his life.
Paul stood for another moment, turned and then was gone, swallowed by the woods.
That night John went to sleep alone and dreamed of Sean, crawling toward him on the rug with a toothy smile—the ocean in Greece, so blue it made him cry. Paul and Linda in the cab, the time they saw each other on accident, leaning out of the window to shout across the road—then white sheets, the sound of the waves. Sun coming through the window and the pale plane of Paul’s back, leaving John undressed in their shared bed.
When he woke the morning was half gone. It was almost noon and the room smelled slightly stale, hot from the gap left in the curtains. He rolled over and pressed his face into his pillow, breathing the mix of sweat and his own cologne. He could hear Sean chattering to himself in his bedroom. It occurred to him that Paul’s flight had definitely left by now. The realisation was strange—to think of him somewhere in the sky, in a little plane, getting further away by the second.
He dressed, called Yoko and cut up some fruit for Sean, who went as he always did into the high chair with barely a word. The radio was on—Sean knew how to do that himself—predicting more hot weather.
When the doorbell rang his first thought was Paul. It was a split second before he remembered the nanny, but a second all the same. Irritated by himself, he touched Sean's head gently in lieu of goodbye and left to answer the door.
To see Paul’s face—close, almost nose to nose—see him as he was, faint lines on his mouth and broad like a man, felt upside down. Wrong. John wondered if he was dreaming.
“Me flight’s delayed,” Paul said. His guitar was leaning on the wall beside him.
John moved automatically to cover the doorframe with his body. He watched Paul watch the movement as if he were not inside himself, as if he were flying. “Right,” he heard himself say.
Paul tilted his head. The movement was so intrinsically Paul, so exactly as it should be, that it knocked John into the present. Into himself again. He blinked. “Thought I’d come by,” Paul was saying. “Missed you yesterday.”
He looked at Paul, his Paul, the one who hated John’s city but loved John still, who was here and would maybe stay if John let him. “Better come on in then,” he said, and moved aside.