CURT’S "OKAY" 　

One afternoon, shortly after Curt died, I walked up one flight of stairs to Bobbi Van and Stephen Greenberg’s apartment and knocked on the door. I heard a male voice say, "Howard?"
I answered, "Yes."

The voice said, "Okay." I assumed it was Stephen’s voice and he was on his way to answer the door. When Curt and I designed and supervised the construction of their loft, we added a second bathroom near the entrance door and it was Curt’s idea to tile the walls, as well as the floor.  Consequently, when you were in it and you spoke, it had the same kind of reverberation one hears when singing in the shower. The voice that answered me sounded as if it were coming from that bathroom. As I stood there waiting for Stephen to open the door, I wondered why he was using that bathroom instead of the master bathroom which was some distance away from the front door.

After waiting a few minutes I called out, "Stephen?" There was no answer. "Stephen?" I called again a bit louder. No answer. "Stephen, are you in there?" I yelled. Still, no answer. I thought, That’s very odd.I went back downstairs to our apartment and phoned Bobbi at work. When I told her what had happened she said, "It couldn’t have been Stephen, I just talked to him at his office in New Jersey."

"Are you sure he was in New Jersey? Couldn’t he have called you from home?" I asked.

"I called him," she replied.

"Well, if it wasn’t Stephen, who was it?" I asked.

"Do you think someone broke into the apartment? Should I call the police?" Bobbi responded anxiously.

"Bobbi," I said, "I would have noticed if someone had broken into the apartment. Come to think of it, I distinctly heard the voice say, ‘Howard,’ so even if Stephen was in the apartment, how could he have known it was me at the door?"

"You’ve been under a lot of stress. Maybe you’re imagining things," Bobbi said.

"Bobbi, I am not imagining anything, I know exactly what I heard. I heard a male voice say, ‘Howard.’ Then I said, ‘Yes.’ I am positive I said yes because Dawn, the girl I work with at Citibank, always says yes. I think yes sounds much better than yeah so I’ve been trying to get in that habit. After I said, ‘Yes,’ the male voice said, ‘Okay.’"

I wasn't sure Bobbi believed me, but after I hung up the phone, I came to the realization that it must have been Curt who spoke to me from behind the closed door. But if it was Curt, why did he just say, "Okay?" Why didn’t he say, "I’m okay," or "Are you okay?"

I woke up abruptly the following morning, about 3:00 a.m., got out of bed, walked directly to Curt’s bank of four five-drawer filing cabinets, opened one of the drawers, and my fingers went directly to a hanging file near the back of the drawer which contained a blank manilla envelope I had never seen before. I took the envelope with me into Curt’s music room, sat down on the only chair in the room, opened the envelope, and found six handwritten pages that had been torn off of a legal pad and stapled together.

It began, "I suppose that I should be studying - doing my reading assignments, writing papers due long ago. So in a sense, this is simply another procrastination. But I am seized, this evening, or early morning as the case may be, by a gripping urge to communicate with someone. Since no one is available, I’ll settle for myself. Curt, are you listening?"

The second paragraph began, "I have just returned from a walk which I forced myself to take. The time is 12:45 a.m., June 2, 1974." He had written this before we met, 20 days before his 22^nd birthday. He went on to write about his fears, his ineptitude and inadequacies, his "several personalities," and his battle with self-esteem.

Curt hated mornings and loved staying up late. If we had a workman come to the apartment, he would never make an appointment before 11:00 a.m. I thought it was just a quirk of his but when I read further I found out it wasn’t that at all: "The night is such an inspirational time of day for me. The world is asleep, rather the majority of the inhabitants are asleep. But the world, it seems to me, is so alive, so awake and so feeling. It is so sensitive at this time of the day when it is not being devastated by light and noise. I almost feel that the air listens at night, that the plants are thinking and feeling. Perhaps it is because, in this state of quasi-death, when the light is out, figuratively, I am forced to look for the light inside. The daylight prevents me from doing this; it is so obvious, so blatant, so easy. But the darkness radiates a spirited light all its own. The quiet, the dimness, the invisibility of the world is in itself a kind of illumination; it says to me that the appearance is not necessarily the reality. If I don’t see all the details of a familiar house at night, are they really there? Plato, I suppose would be proud. But he would make mockery of my sophomoric philosophy."

Upon finishing his letter, I realized that Curt’s "Okay" meant Okay, if it hurts you so much that I never shared many of my intimate feelings with you, I will lead you to the only thing I left behind that will enlighten you. At the exact moment of my revelation, I felt a surge shoot through my body like a lightning strike and I began witnessing something one occasionally hears about but seldom experiences. All at once, from very high above, I was watching myself still sitting in the chair, but the chair was now spinning and darting back and forth as if it had wheels.

Agonizing, hideous sounds poured out of me, sounds I could not control, moans and cries one usually associates with hurt or dying animals, not humans, as I moved from one grotesque position to another, intermittently grabbing and clutching my body as if I were being stabbed or beaten or both, and flailing my arms in the air in an effort to ward off an unseen attacker.

I have always considered myself to be squeamish to a fault. Yet, I watched that scene and listened to those plangent sounds with a feeling of curiosity rather than horror. I remember thinking that it reminded me of an overhead camera shot in the movie Snake Pit when Olivia de Havilland is placed in an insane asylum. I don’t recall how long my out-of-body experience lasted or how it ended. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of the music room the next morning. The pages of Curt’s letter were scattered about the room and although my body ached a bit, there were no bruises. Even though I have always felt everything I remember happening that night was real, if my screams were as loud as I thought they were, I could never explain the fact that no one in the building came to my rescue. I had never experienced anything like that before and never experienced anything like it since. Until now, I don’t know that I have ever mentioned this to anyone.

Curt was one of the most optimistic and seemingly in-control people I have ever known so the person he wrote about in his letter is someone I never knew. He loved to talk, had a very tender heart, and was never shy in verbalizing his love for me, which he expressed in a number of ways on a daily basis. Curt’s greatest emotions, however, were reserved for piano music, and in particular, the piano itself. I often joked that Curt was a piano.

Curt never discussed the seriousness of his illness with me and I found out, with one exception, that he had never discussed it with any of his closest friends. His good friend Cheryl Floyd told me he only mentioned it once when he asked her, "If this is serious, what’s going to happen to Howard?" That comment is the essence of the Curt I remember.

While Curt never spoke to me with his voice again, he began communicating with me through rainbows. When Curt and I met, as I mentioned earlier, I had a collection of rainbow books, greeting cards, pins, and small hangable objects. Shortly after we moved in together Curt gave me a present he made for me: a framed eight by 10-inch mirror, on which he had painted a rainbow with the words, "You are a rainbow."
Even though I’ve never been particularly religious, I once had a fondness for religious objects and I had a collection of crucifixes, small holy-water fonts, and angels. When Curt and I traveled to foreign countries, we also collected small souvenirs that could be hung on the wall. I created a large, horizontal oval approximately six-feet wide by hanging all the objects on the only wall of the dining area. It was quite spectacular and first-time guests to our apartment never failed to rave about it.

One day, while I was talking on the phone to our attorney Sidney Moskowitz, who adored Curt like a father does a son, a small diagonal slash of a rainbow, perhaps five-inches wide by ten-inches long, slowly began to appear on one of the crucifixes. As Sidney and I continued our conversation, the rainbow slowly disappeared. Then the rainbow began appearing on one of the angels. I was transfixed. When the second rainbow slash disappeared and then reappeared for a third time on yet another crucifix, I said, "Sidney, you’ll never believe what’s happening on the wall of the dining area," and I told him what I was seeing. He asked if I wanted to get off the phone so that I could watch it alone. I said, "No, Sidney, Curt is communicating with us and I’m sure he wants me to share this with you as it happens." I continued watching and describing everything I saw to Sidney until the rainbow slash had appeared on every religious object, without ever touching any of the objects we had collected during our travels. It was mesmerizing. Afterward,
I was puzzled by the fact that Curt would choose to communicate with us in that way because he, like me, was also not particularly religious.

When the rainbows finally disappeared, the only thing I could figure out that could explain their appearance was that a multifaceted crystal paper weight, which Curt’s Uncle Paul had given us as a Christmas gift, had been catching the afternoon sun and reflecting the rainbow images onto our dining room wall. The next afternoon, and many afternoons after that, at the same time of day, I waited to see if the rainbow phenomenon would occur again, but it never did, at least not by appearing on those religious objects.

Curt, with the financial backing of his pupil Thelma Dinkaloo, had opened Curt Swidler Artist Pianos, a 3,000-square-foot showroom on 57th Street, just over a year before he died.  The cost, including the best pianos money could buy, ended up costing three million dollars but Thelma was an extremely wealthy woman and had great faith in Curt expertise, enough to name the store after him. 

Having sold our loft and with packing boxes all over the place, the men arrived to move his two grand pianos back to the store that beared his name.  As they did, two mammoth rainbows, unlike the small slashes, appeared on the ceiling of the entire dining area. There was no sun in the room that afternoon so they couldn’t possibly have been created by the paper weight.

Once I left New York and our apartment on 17^th Street, I tried recreating that oval of objects in the next three places I lived. But I was so angry at God, or whomever was responsible for taking Curt away from me, that I couldn’t bear seeing those religious objects on a daily basis. I finally felt the need to rid myself of them altogether and I placed my collection in a consignment gallery in San Diego. The proprietress of the store was dubious that they would sell. Two days later, she called me and wanted to know if I had more because they were selling like hot-cakes.

Curt continued communicating with me via rainbows for years afterward. I became accustomed to seeing them on special days like birthdays and anniversaries. The last one Curt created for me was on January 13, 1977, eleven years and eight days after he died, in response to my emotional plea that day begging him to send me some kind of signal that it was "okay" for me to finally say good-bye to him.

The above was originally written about six years ago for my planned memoir called "WILL THEY LET ME DANCE IN HEAVEN? which I later abandoned.  I am publishing this on April 26, 2012.  Curt and I were together just over ten years.  Curt died January 5, 1986 at the age of thirty-three.  Four days ago, on April 22, 2012, we would have celebrated his sixtieth birthday.  Curt majored in English literature and was the smartest person I have ever known.  Without his constant correction of my grammar, which I welcomed, I would never been able to write as well as I do and for that I am forever grateful.  .

When all is said and done, life does have its way of going on.  Two days ago David Greenberg, the son of Stephen Greenberg whose voice I thought I heard behind that closed door almost thirty years ago, and I celebrated our 14th anniversary.  June 26th of this year marks our fourth wedding anniversary.

If anything, LIFE itself is tricky and strange and sometimes too unbelievable to be true.  In this instance, however, it is exactly that... true.  "Believe it or not."