"Intimacy, Six Feet Apart"
by Yoojin Na
March 1st was a cold, bright Sunday that remains pristine in my memory. I was on a second date with Graz, an Italian man with mesmerizing hazel eyes and dry wit. We brunched at Hole in the Wall, an Australian café overlooking the East River, and then strolled hand-in-hand to the Morgan Library, one of my favorite places in Midtown. There, we spent hours putting our magnifying glasses up to the intricate, quixotic drawings of Jean-Jacques Lequeu.
Born in 1757 in Rouen to a long line of master carpenters, Lequeu did not let his provincial, working-class background temper his ambitions of becoming a celebrated Parisian architect. But the French Revolution thwarted his dreams and he spent most of his adulthood as a government surveyor.
Fifty-something Lequeu lived in a garret, purportedly above a brothel. He must have known by then that not another brick would be laid because of something he conceived. Yet, rather than seeing his failure as a constraint, he embraced it as an agency of creative freedom. The result was a collection of drawings both playful and awe-inspiring.
When Graz and I walked into a gray-blue room with parqueted oak floors that housed Lequeu’s exhibit, we noticed first the self-portraits bearing grotesque expressions. Then, we studied the architectural perspectives of Wes Anderson-esque structures—a fire-breathing Masonic temple, a cow-shaped barn, a mausoleum reminiscent of a concentric wedding cake—all limned in ink and soft watercolors. But what really gave us pause were the frames in the inner sanctum.
One rendering shows a young nun, bearing her breasts while staring straight out at her beholder. Another depicts a sarcophagus decorated with a sleeping maiden reaching out towards a floating snake. Even the plans for his own memorial evoke a sexually charged scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The nymph Arethusa seeks refuge inside a grotto while the river god Alpheus, represented by the surrounding cascades, relentlessly pursues her. Lequeu places his tomb on a cliff, overlooking the chase.
“He seems obsessed with two things—sex and death,” I said to Graz.
“Aren’t we all?” he replied.
He was right. Despite all our advances as a species, we still fear death as much as we crave sex. We still need that most intimate expression of human connection to stave off the dread of the inevitable. Are sex and death inseparable?
*
The following Thursday, I walked to Graz’s apartment with an armful of red tulips, their heavy heads bobbing gently against my chest. It was finally spring, I thought, a season of renewal and hope, the beginning of beginnings. That night, I felt lucky as we shared the mushroom risotto he made from scratch, yet a small part of me remained distrustful of this new happiness.
Three days later, I noticed I didn’t feel quite right. It started out as an itch in the back of my throat and grew into a dry cough. I felt cold one minute and then hot the next, though I had no actual fever. The day after, I lost my sense of smell and taste, but the rest of my symptoms begin to subside. Later that week, when I was cleared to return to work, I found that the world had not changed outside my small perimeter of self-isolation. People were still going to work and to bars, retail stores were still open, and reputable sources were still telling the public: “only the symptomatic are contagious,” “not everyone needs a mask,” and “the mortality rate in South Korea is only 1%.” Yet, somehow, my life had changed. My social calendar was suddenly as empty as the toilet paper shelves at CVS.
Our fourth date was supposed to be at my favorite restaurant in K-town, but we decided instead to meet at my apartment. I made him rice-cake soup that Koreans typically eat around New Year for good luck. It was the first time in over a week that I was sharing a meal with someone. I felt so grateful for his presence that I did not know what to say, so we ate mostly in silence. Afterward, when we did find the words, we spoke them slowly and softly so that we wouldn’t get crushed beneath their weight.
We agreed not to see other people while acknowledging we didn’t actually have a choice in the matter. The pandemic had narrowed our options. We could either face the uncertainties of the coming months alone or meet them together. We decided on the latter, not knowing precisely what it would entail.
The following week, I was the first doctor to work in “Camp COVID,” our nickname for the triage tent set up in our ambulance parking lot. Its opening coincided with more bad news about the virus: Even those who were asymptomatic could spread the disease to others. In other words, our enemy was far more insidious than we had imagined and left no one invulnerable. The tent quickly filled up with people wanting to be tested.
In between swabbing patients, I received a text from Graz: I want to see you. It was a declaration of a wish, a subjunctive posing as an indicative with tiny pink hearts. I couldn’t help but smile, but my happiness quickly turned into anxiety. I looked down at my protective gown and wondered if I would be able to take this off without getting any viral particles on myself. If not, how many of them will I take home? How many of them will make it onto my skin?
I want to see you too, I replied, but I’m elbow deep in COVID.
I learned later that Graz wanted to see me because he was having a crisis of his own. The talk show he was producing went on hiatus, and he didn’t know when he would be returning to work. When he told me, I wanted to run to him and hold him. I knew that it’s what he needed, but I could not, in good conscience, leave the apartment.
*
Somewhere along the way, my life had begun to assume two distinct velocities. In the ER, too many things changed in not enough time. Each day was different than the last as we negotiated new rules to accommodate an increasingly-dire arithmetic—the number of beds, vents, PPEs, healthy staff vs. number of sick patients. But then, when I was home alone in self-isolation, everything came to a halt. Nothing happened, and each hour suddenly felt interminable.
The only times when life returned to its normal tempo was during our conversations. When I talked to Graz, I remembered that I was neither the hero nor the disease. I was simply a human being capable of desire. It was usually the reminder of these wants that broke the spell of normalcy.
When can I see you? we asked each other, but we really wanted to know, when can we be in the same room? When can we kiss, touch, and hold one another? How long must we emulate the sexless lives of hermits? A few more weeks, a few more months, a whole year? At what point do we say “fuck it” and stop waiting?
In his best moments, Graz was bold and fearless. “We all die,” he’d say. Then, just a few minutes later, he’d ask me, “What are my chances of getting sick? What are my chances of dying if I get sick?”
These were not questions I could answer for him since I had no idea how his immune system would respond to the virus, but I tried my best to quantify for him my own risk. I explained to him that N95 masks filter only 95% of airborne particles, that my own chance of exposure would inherently increase as more and more COVID-positive patients become sick and came to the ER, that, even if I had immunity from a prior infection, I could be re-infected.
I also tried to be honest about the chances of him getting adequate medical care. I told him plainly that the news reports were not an exaggeration. Even at the hospital where I worked, which was better equipped than the others in the city, we had daily briefings about numbers and ethics.
Then, I moved onto the ever lighthearted topic of mortality rates. Thankfully, Graz knew how to shut me up. “There is going to come a point where I don’t care about living,” he said, “then we can do whatever we want.”
I laughed.
*
For our fifth date, we met at Bryant Park and ate lunch at separate tables. We joked that we should have brought a ruler to measure out six feet, but we didn’t need to; the space between us felt wide and cold as the East River. To bridge the gaps that we could no longer fill with physical affection, we reiterated what we already knew. Everything from buying avocados at Whole Foods to meeting each other for a quick bite had come to feel dangerous and illicit. We’d become estranged from our own lives, and we did not know how to get back to normal.
As we talked, I imagined the life he could have had. If he had been locked into the pandemic with someone else, someone who didn’t work at a hospital, someone who wasn’t having a mental breakdown at regular intervals, he might have been happier.
Feeling guilty, I attempted to make space for him to leave. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to do this anymore. I wouldn’t want to date me either.” But he reassured me in the same way he’s done before. We did not have to figure everything out right now. For once, we had all the time in the world.
On our way back from lunch, we passed the rarely seen side of the Morgan Library. Unlike the elaborate brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue, the back was simple, modern, and starkly white—a clean slab. Its sight reminded me of the Lequeu pieces that were sitting inside. How sad was it for them that they had waited hundreds of years to be seen only to sit through another epoch of solitude?
For the rest of the day, one of Lequeu’s drawings, called Hammock of Love, lingered in my mind. It features a pavilion above a bed of wild flowers and two Assyrian apple trees that serve as pillars for a shaded swing made out of canvas. Inside are two lovers locked in a tight embrace. Interestingly, Lequeu did not give this couple the same brutal treatment as the others. They are filled in softly, kindly, without his usual obsession with anatomical correctness. The result was so uncharacteristically sweet that it made me wonder: Why did Lequeu draw this couple more lovingly than his other figures?
Then it occurred to me that the garden, the folly, and the hammock were all imagined, but the embrace was not. The embrace was something he remembered.
We make blueprints for things that may never be because we need hope, and hope is a place that expands in the narrowing of our present. Could our fledgling relationship survive the pressure of this pandemic? I didn’t know, but I decided then, that we would make our own hammock.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
