Grief Triptych with Squeaky Hinges

Jessica Hatch

The morning I met him I saw an old man kiss a bumper sticker. At first I thought it was of the Virgin Mary, but on closer look the decal was made from an old photograph. To my knowledge no one has ever captured the Mother of Christ on celluloid.

Ostensibly the car it was on was the old man’s and ostensibly the sticker was of someone he had loved very much. He trotted down to his car and kissed the sticker before he got in, like he did this every morning, or like he had done this once there was no longer a cheek to kiss, and I felt sad.

So my mind was primed for grief and loss when Gian’s van came down the via and my life changed for the better. I hopped through the door and closed out the irrational fears I’d had moments before—that this was all a con, the workshop wasn’t new but nonexistent, no one was coming to pick me up from my hostel, and I’d have to change my travel plans with my tail between my legs.

But Gian was real and Chelsea was real. Gian was a big, burly presence with a scruffy beard and scruffier voice. I was the first student they picked up, and I chatted with Chelsea to stave off anxiety. I said I was a freelancer and I’d been editing a lot of lesbian romance novels lately. Gian made eye contact with me in the rearview mirror and said, “So not a lot of sex scenes then,” nudge-winking at the stereotype of lesbians living celibate ever after. I had no witty comeback, so I was relieved when we picked up Paul, then Becca, Alex, and Lauren. I could fade into other conversations and watch Rome give way to graffitied industrial silos around its airport, then the autostrada and the sprawling mountains beyond.

The villa’s castelletto was in shambles, and when we toured it, we had to climb through the dusty kitchen ceiling to get to the roof. Gian handed me up. From the rooftop, which we chanced bearing the weight of all seven of us, you could stare out over the western wall, over the hills and valleys of Latina, and see the Mediterranean, a mirage on the horizon.

The first picture I took of his villa I posted to Instagram with the caption, “Cults are all about the real estate.” But the best cults, boiled down, are always about their leaders.

The last exchange we had was on Twitter. He joked about how he’d ditched his FSG internship when he first came to New York. I replied that I would have been the buttoned-up intern in awe of/intimidated by his coolness, and he liked my tweet. I hope he knew it was lack of confidence, not of interest, that kept me from connecting to him. I like to think he saw me despite my best efforts. Maybe not.

A day after he died but a day before I knew, I caught myself remembering the gorgeous meal he had driven us to in Roccagorga. Course after fairytale course of antipasti, bread, bazzoffia, fresh-made pasta, olives, meat, until you couldn’t eat anything else—okay, just one more bite—all accompanied by wine as golden as the light, as deep-dark as a garnet. That night, I dreamed Gian was Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia and I was Lucy Pevensie. I came to weep over him on the Stone Table and he asked, “Who are you again?”

Who indeed? Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us imposters, now and at the hour of our death. In the liver of the city of Sperlonga there was a piazza. Its south side held a gelateria where he bought us ice cream, and the west held an old church. Inside the church was a statue of Mother Mary. One baby shoe lay on her plinth. I figured someone’s kid got fussy and kicked it off during Mass, but Gian’s husband, Giuseppe, explained that parents left the shoes of their lost children at Mary’s feet, asking her to intercede for their baby souls. This was easily the seventh or eighth church we had visited that week. I snapped a picture of other people’s grief and did not write about it in my journal.

How can you expect someone to bond with you if you can’t show them your true self? If you haven’t shown yourself your true self?

This hinge will be hard but necessary to write. I have to explain how I frittered away the opportunity to know Giancarlo DiTrapano as a friend and how that makes me feel. (Sad.) He is a ghost on the perimeters of this piece because I made him a haunt in the short time I knew him. I was scared to be vulnerable around him, so I learned valuable craft lessons, got all the hot goss about Gordon Lish, but learned nothing about Gian as a person.

Grief over a mentor, not a friend, is parasocial at best. It feels performative, untrue, like a mockingbird making its home in a blackbird’s nest. When there was the opportunity for friendship after all, it feels worse.

I am appalled when I reread my workshop journals. There’s so much focus on appearance and the opinions of strangers that there’s no room left for connection. From an entry written in a Roman bookstore: “I’m convinced everyone here thinks I’m crazy. I’m just searching for a functioning electrical outlet to charge my phone, but it requires a lot of bending over and hunting under tables, so I’m pretty sure I look like a crazy person.”

But Gian essentially told my imposter syndrome to fuck off. He thought my workshop piece was “wild” with four i’s. He said he wanted to read my novel when it was done. And Chelsea told me he couldn’t stop talking about a line I’d written during a free write. I sopped up that praise. I’d been groomed for male approval—the cliché, my dad’s; then traveling to New York from Virginia to get in good with the coordinator of a competitive publishing internship.

I didn’t think I deserved men’s attention without impressing them first, but Gian was different. I didn’t have to work so hard for his approval. I realize now I’d already earned it by getting into the workshop—who lets a gaggle of twenty- and thirtysomethings crash his family home otherwise?—but I realized that only in retrospect.

The day his family announced he was gone, I scrolled for hours through Twitter, learning how afraid of nothing I’d been this whole time, how generous and congenial an editor Gian was, how writers who had known him only as long as I had traded emails, jokes, pieces with him without fear. How could I have seen him as anything but generous when he gave so freely to us that entire week?

All of life, I’m realizing, is how you felt in a moment and how you feel about it now. I realized too late I could’ve maybe had that bond with him, but at the time I slept in his house and ate his food and accepted his handwritten feedback and did a load of laundry in his washer/dryer and refused to even consider it a possibility.

In my journal I wrote, “The light is golden. It’s truly fall here. It has that golden feel of nostalgia [happening] in the moment, and it is beautiful.” That’s the light I see Gian in: sun-dappled, dozy autumn light; the time of afternoon you switch from espresso to a Spritz.

Gian drove us to Terracina on one of the last days of our workshop and bought us Spritzes at a hotel on the lido. The sun seduced our jackets off, then our shoes and socks to walk on the sand, until half of us were bathing in the sea.

There I was, stripping down to my underwear and walking into the Mediterranean. It was one of those moments I’d journaled about, nostalgia happening in real time, so that you mourn the moment even as you step into its icy shallows. There was a sense of this is awesome, right now my life is awesome, it never will be this level of awesome again. But Gian didn’t waste time wool-gathering. He and the others were already out there, plunging beneath the mirror-ball waves.