Bosie

Lord Alfred Douglas. “Bosie.” Seen here in middle age. Oscar Wilde’s friend, the ruin of so much and the hope of so much. He has visited my apartment over the years and I have learned to recognize him and ask him to leave when the jokes turn mean and his insecurity and need for approval and resentment of that need becomes too much. I can feel it just as it begins and I have learned to end it, having become, for myself, Oscar Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde, one of Ireland’s foremost feminists, an overwhelming figure who taught her son to overwhelm his adversaries when he could. The last Bosie to spend time in my apartment had been invited to lunch because of a certain vulnerability he’d shown on several occasions–brief but potent. Over the lunch I’d prepared there was discussion of this Bosie’s father and how, in the end, his father was a racist and and and how it would mean this and this and this if he had ended up with a black man despite his own views on the subject. I cleared the table more than once: of the nice luncheon debris, and then of Bosie’s words and body, which went out with the trash that I keep to remember that there is, in the world, such a thing as a type.