In the end, the political threat in combination with the personal one was enough to make me conclude I had no better choice than exile. Americans do not like to believe that their own would ever feel compelled to flee. Most cannot conceive that law-abiding citizens might find themselves in a moment when logic seems to have twisted inside out and everything we think we know about our country appears no longer true. Overnight, a nation so recently an ally had become our enemy. The ideology it followed would become a crime in a country that claimed freedom of religion and freedom of speech as its highest principles. We had smashed through the mirror and into the darkest wonderland we could collectively imagine.
I caught myself staring again at my reflection in your wall of glass. A man not yet middle-aged, still with a slender body and a full head of sandy-red hair, sat naked except for your silk dressing gown, which I had swiped from the chair where it lay in your bedroom. The irony was not lost on me: although sleeping with one of the studio’s leading men I was rewriting his lines in the middle of the night because the Head of Production said it was too risqué to suggest an ex-serviceman might want to go to bed with his wife’s sister. I had written the part especially for you, hoping it would give us a thicker layer of insulation, that the performance of Orph Patterson’s virility would convince any who might have cause to doubt – gossip columnists in particular – that you were no less interested in women than one assumed men like Gregory Peck or Kirk Douglas might be.
Beneath the scene heading the new page was blank, glaring white under the lamp. I reread the previous one. On paper the dialogue you would speak flowed, the progression of scenes made sense given the changes Porter had forced me to make, the narrative logic was intact. The shit was fine. The shit would do. Most days it scarcely mattered what quality of shit I put on the page because the director, or actors, or Porter or Leo Krug would rewrite at will without touching a typewriter, cutting and adding as if they knew my business better than me. Sometimes you did so yourself, and I never let you see how much the liberties you took lacerated my pride. John Marsh, although my friend and collaborator, was among the worst offenders. He would stand on set and tell you not to say the line I had written because it now struck him as unnatural, and rather than asking me to come up with an alternative, offered one himself, a phrase either hackneyed or homespun. In the case of the film we were then trying to finish, John had already claimed half-credit for the script without writing one line. Ideas were enough. Conversations about plot and setting. Half-drunken arguments about the structure of a character’s arc. What a certain kind of man calls ‘spitballing’, throwing ideas in the air and seeing what sticks to the ceiling. That was John’s idea of writing. When I came to Hollywood from New York I quickly learned that this was the way: words attributed to me in a film’s credits were never entirely mine. The name Desmond Frank hid the labor of a dozen women and men typing furiously in the Writers’ Building, and most of the time they were never, any of them, making up original stories, just adapting the ideas of people too principled to sell out and migrate West.
Days come upon me now when I wish I had never made that journey, when I think I would have been better off staying in New York, that if I had done so I might never have been forced to leave America. Then I look up at my library here in Florence and see one of the photographs of you in your youth, one of the dozens of reproductions of your face that decorate my walls, you in all your multiple selves, archiving the faces of your own ancestry (even, I like to think, archiving the history of our love for each other), and the regret bends into a feeling more complex, less polarized. Light and shade. Day and night.
I have never stopped loving you, Myles, even as I have been forced by the choices I made a lifetime ago to seek out the love of other men, not one of whom has burned as furiously through my heart as you did. What you do not know, what I never had the heart to tell you, is that you were not my first love, nor my greatest. By the time you and I met, that love was long dead.
In the years before I moved to Los Angeles, having returned from Ithaca to Manhattan, back to my childhood bedroom on the Upper East Side because no one expected I would actually look for a job, I passed most afternoons escaping to the baths to find some relief from my sadness, and in the mornings wrote The Argosy, the novel that made my name. In writing about two college rowers from opposite sides of the tracks who fall in platonic love only for their friendship to end in the histrionics of tragedy, I was trying to tame the grief I felt. I took the problem of our both being men and turned it into a story of friendship thwarted by class, even as the characters were undisguisedly me and the boy I had loved, the feelings and affection between them legible as romantic for anyone with the sense to look for such things. When the studio paid me a small fortune for the film rights, that windfall propelled me westward from my parents’ home and ultimately to you, Myles, the second greatest love of my life.
On that morning after we had fought, as I sat looking out at your swimming pool in the dark, I was certain The Argosy would never be a movie. It had been years in development and, as you may remember, no one could conceive of how to make the story play on screen without adding a female love interest. Faggots, was what Krug said the last time I had spoken to him about it. Without a dame, everyone will think it’s a flick about faggots. It went without saying that such a thing was impossible. I had tried several times to write the script myself until Krug had decided I was not up to the job and took me off my own project. I don’t believe you’re man enough, Mr. Frank, Krug said, and ordered me to get the hell out of his office.
The dismissal struck me as ironic. Although I knew that I was male, I have always struggled to think of myself as a man. That is not to say I have ever been effeminate, or would prefer to be a woman – by accident rather than design I have tended to present myself to the world in a way that is not obviously queer. What I mean is that when I walked down the street in 1950 people may have seen a man but inside I felt no different than I had at eighteen, even sixteen, as though still trying to find my place in the world, brokenhearted and terrified of the risk you and I took every time we were together. Even now, at this great age, the disjunction between the face I see in the mirror and the self that I actually experience whiplashes my mind.
That morning in your house, however, I understood that I had reached a moment when I could no longer allow myself to think as a boy, in other words with all the idealism and hopefulness and optimism we tend to ascribe to the young. To make such a change required accepting my time in America had reached its end. If I did not leave, I was certain to face summons for doing no more than my birthright, thinking and associating freely, trying to imagine a better world. The only solution was to escape somewhere I could become anonymous, recommitting myself to books and turning my back on the movies forever. That is what I had decided while you were asleep upstairs, ignorant of all that I planned. But as soon as I thought of leaving you behind, parting seemed as impossible as staying, and the struggle between these two impulses tore at my heart until it was nearly dawn and my fingers collapsed on the Remington’s keyboard. The last work I would do for the studio was finished and my hands began to shake as I stacked the new pages together. I knew what I was thinking without wishing to own the thought.
In the face of two impossible choices that each seem destined to present a future too painful or dangerous to bear, there always remains one solution. The idea kept coming, bubbling up, almost physically present, like a hemorrhage or cardiac event, even when I resisted holding it in my consciousness, and the force of that idea, the strength of the intention, sent me to the sliding door. I opened it and crossed the terrace, slipped out of your dressing gown, stepped into the water at the shallow end, waded across the pool and allowed my head to drop beneath the surface until I reached the deep end where I sat, fingers typing across the concrete as angels circled above me screeching, beaks plucking insects from the water, all those synchronized swimmers, Esther Williams and her rubbercapped cadres
splashing around before finding themselves in midair and dangling from the talons of Republic XF-12 Rainbows dispatched to return them to some central processing unit of military intelligence where their costumes would be searched for red understitching on a blue suit, what subversive costuming, male stunt doubles in pink frills and headpiece!
The temptation to open my mouth and breathe the water into my lungs came upon me.
Because of the burden of secrecy and obfuscation, the toll of living publicly a version of the self that lacked so much of the greater self, which had to remain hidden, I had been imagining what it might be like to kill myself for more than a decade. And because for me the disparities between the public and private self were not only about desire but also about belief, in the years since Congress grilled the Hollywood Ten, all friends of mine, I had been thinking about killing myself more frequently. In the days since the Supreme Court had dismissed the appeals of the Ten and doomed them to time in federal prison I did it almost hourly. I had these thoughts when I was inside you and you were inside me. I fantasized about killing myself even when I felt happiest.
Under the water, my chest began to ache. A stream of air escaped. A few seconds more and it would all be over, but then the thought of you or Helen or Barbara finding me face-down in your pool stopped me. It would be impossible to cover up a scandal like that. Gossip columnists would suggest a love nest and ambiguous couplings and the last thing I wanted was to complicate your already complicated lives. If someone was going to suffer or sacrifice, it should be me alone, and alone meant doing whatever I must away from here.
You see how I thought. I worried about your secret. I thought always of protecting your reputation. It did not occur to me that finding my body would be anything other than a problem to be managed because it was too dangerous to believe you might truly love me. If I believed that, I could never have left.
I pushed myself back to the surface and gasped. It was the closest I had come. Closer than almost swerving off Mulholland two nights earlier or nicking my wrist with a paring knife in the kitchen three days previously. Closer than taking twice my usual dose of sleeping pills over Easter weekend. I watched as a light came on in your room. My head bobbing in the water, arms and legs churning to stay afloat, I told myself I should go get into bed with you, let you open me up, make love one last time before our story was over. Instead I climbed out of the pool, stood wet in the morning air, put on your dressing gown, and went back inside to look over the pages I had rewritten. Light skimming over the mountains struck through eucalyptus boughs, casting a red sheen across the waves to the west that developed into a faint ruby glow on the living room walls. Interior – A house on a cliff. Pacific Palisades. Dawn. In the distance, a horizon of water caressing sky, two dark bodies approaching without ever meeting.
When I looked up from the pages you were standing next to me in khaki slacks and a white T-shirt that grazed your torso like gauze across stone. I wanted to put my hands all over that dark open brow, cover your hunted eyes, lock you in a room, never let you out. You’re all wet, you said. Do you remember how I stood and parted your lips with my own, or the way you pulled away after a moment, as if you already knew? Maybe I recited a line of poetry, Frühling, Geliebter!… Unendliche Schöne! Maybe you asked me what it meant and I said it was just a poet you wouldn’t know, my infinite beauty. If that’s what I said, forgive me. I withheld knowledge not because I doubted your intelligence but out of a selfish desire to preserve your innocence. Now you should know, it was Goethe on Ganymede, the loveliest of mortal men, abducted by Zeus to preserve his beauty among the gods. You relaxed as I held you. Through the dressing gown I felt the dampness on my skin penetrate your cotton shirt, and wished, despite myself, that one of us could be reborn, bury ourselves in solid ground, one body pass through another and emerge anew, a woman, so that the world would leave us alone. But there was no consolation in fantasy. I pushed my body against yours but you said we were out of time, and I wondered how you knew.
At breakfast in the corner of your kitchen you and Helen were brushed and sleek, two human tigers reading the trades as if industry news could tell us anything of substance about our standing in the world. What’s your call? Helen asked and you said it was eight. Men always get it easier, Barbara complained, biting into a corner of toast. Did you know Porter’s wife just left him? Helen asked. It won’t be easy to find another woman who hates herself enough to play Mrs. Cherry. He wasn’t always a monster, I said, and the three of you looked at me as if wondering what I knew.
It seemed so natural, the four of us coupled off and eating breakfast together. We imagined ourselves free inside the glass walls of your house, but what kind of liberty is such cloistered isolation? When I asked you this question the night before you shouted, Don’t play that card, and that was when things got heated. I had been trying to imagine a world in which one man might call himself the husband of another. It was neither semantically nor theoretically impossible. The original meaning of husband was the head of a household, so why could there not be two husbands of a single house, two heads being always better than one? But such a household was impossible when one of those hypothetical husbands was a man recognized on every street corner in a country that did not believe two men should share a house unless they were father and son, or two brothers, and even two brothers set up alone might attract the suspicion of such crusaders as believe the best job of a red-blooded American man is to marry and provide for a wife, from the Old English wif, for strong, once meaning only woman (and so, for the sake of Helen and Barbara, why not a household of two strong women and no head?). Husband became the name of a man wed to a wife hundreds of years after a wife had become a woman wed to a man.
You’re confusing me, you’d said. Randolph Scott and Cary Grant lived together once.
That’s in the past. No one believes in bachelor roommates these days.
Anyway, a word means what it means, doesn’t it?
I shook my head. A word often means more than one thing. Meaning was more malleable before codification and definition and setting down on the page. As long as language remained in the head, on the lips, it was more fluid, mercurial, ambiguous. Film recaptures some of that ambiguity, particularly when meaning has to be conveyed through suggestion and elision, when even the reminder of the origin of every man and woman on the planet, the simple navel, cannot be shown in American movies because it’s too like orifices lower on the body, never mind that anyone can wander down to Muscle Beach and stare at all the male navels they could hope to see. But not in the movies, and that is Joseph Breen’s doing, I said, Breen who thinks a navel too like a cunt or an asshole, who cannot abide the idea that men might have penetrable orifices as well as women, who wants us to imagine we were all delivered by storks to the cabbage field, every one of us a virgin vegetal birth, already saved because never touched by sin.
You screwed up your face in confusion. Forgive me. I never meant to lecture you.
At least you did not hold it against me. Even though Helen and Barbara were still there in the kitchen that morning you turned, put your lips against mine, pulled me into you, and said, Maybe we should go back to bed again.
No, better not. You and Helen have calls, and I have appointments. John wants to see the rewritten pages first thing.
What if this is your last day on earth? you whispered into my ear, and I truly wondered whether you knew, if I might have been talking in my sleep earlier that week. Or had you been watching me at the bottom of the pool, counting the seconds and calculating how long I had before my time was up? Your heart fluttered against mine. That was the moment I should have told you, the three of you, all of us together.
Instead I said only, It’s not my last day on earth, Myles, but it might be my last on the lot.
You laughed and sun broke through the window, gilding your hair so you reminded me of an altarpiece saint. You never had any idea how beautiful you were. Fountain of that stream…named Desire, overflows. If
I’d said it you would have asked me who the poet was and I would have had to tell you it wasn’t poetry, at least not the kind you imagined, but philosophy. You looked at my empty cup.
Would you like another? you asked, rising from the table and slipping across the room.
Square your hips, Helen said, your gait’s too sultry for a downon-his-luck veteran wronged by the fates.
But wasn’t that also the idea? In casting you as Orph Patterson, we were transfusing the ordinary with a dose of the divine so that men and women in movie theaters across the country would imagine for the space of ninety minutes that your character was a man just like their brothers and husbands and sons, a man come back from the war having seen and done unspeakable things that must nonetheless be suggested clearly enough to send a shiver down the backs of all those necks as you stared just off to the left of the camera’s gaze, as if probing the deepest fathoms of Orph’s imagined consciousness. What did you think in those moments when the camera recorded your expression? Did you silently recite the following line? Did you try to inhabit the life of the character I invented for you? Or were you always yourself, marking time until the next cue?
I assume that you must have sent Helen to talk to me before I left that morning because you could not bear to ask me what I was planning. She found me in the carport, my hair still damp from the pool.
How many times have I told you it’s not nice to leave without saying goodbye, Desmond? Helen had that way of raising her left eyebrow and pursing her mouth, which made her as ghoulish as Norma Desmond ready for a close-up. If you’re planning something, don’t keep Myles in the dark. He doesn’t deserve that from you.
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