Well, take it easy then, cowboy. You won’t want to miss Bergdorf’s and Saks, laced with white.
Be still my heart, said Louis. All this beauty! Let’s walk.
But he stopped and turned back to his angels. More shots. Then they walked—out in the middle of the avenue, where the garbage-truck plows must have come through an hour or two before. Here there was only a foot or so of snow; the curbside banks were five feet high already from the first run of plows, the parked cars like strange white burial mounds.
They shuffled past the Plaza on their right, the GM Building on their left; then FAO Schwarz; then the Grace Building with its curved sweep into the sky, aptly white with snow-dotted dark glass. Nothing moving, not another soul to be seen, a gorgeous post-apocalypse-empty Midtown. Louis snapped here and there; George said nothing. Louis too was silent—what seemed to George a hard labor for him, saying nothing. The silence, though, was of religious proportions; it filled the space. They labored through the snow and the loudest local sound was their own breathing.
Louis, at 55th Street, said: This is exhausting. Beautiful but exhausting.
You gotta get in shape, George said.
Are you in shape? Louis said.
No, George said. My fucking legs are on fire.
Let’s go to 50th and then, I know, we’ll catch a cab!
George looked at him.
Okay, we’ll walk over to the train on Seventh, Louis said.
If we make it that far. Otherwise they’ll find our remains, after the spring melt, leering skulls with matted remains of hair, huddled in some filthy massage parlor doorway.
If we die, said Louis, I want to die in the doorway of Tad’s Steakhouse.
Do as you will, George said.
I need to perish ironically, Louis said.
Louis said he was impervious to the cold, which was not his usual thing. He complained about it endlessly most of the time.
I guess beauty alleviates discomfort, he said. Adrenaline. Joy. Good to know.
He stopped. George looked at him.
I just need to stand here for a minute, Louis said.
You okay?
I’m more than okay, Louis said.
And goddamn if he didn’t start crying; the tears were dropping from his eyelids and rolling down over his cheeks and that, George believed, had to be cold.
Hey, man, George said. He clamped a hand on Louis’s shoulder. He was aware of being notably manly about it.
I’m not sad, Louis said. This made them both cough out a laugh.
Yeah, said George.
Louis said, as if reading aloud, I’m not sad, the chubby playwright gurgled. Then he started laughing for real, with the snot and tears running down.
And I’m actually not, he said, when he’d collected himself, used his handkerchief.
Sometimes, he said, you feel the irreplaceability of a moment in time—its perfect ephemeral uniqueness. Yes? You know?
George said he thought he knew.
Maybe that is timelessness, Louis said. That recognition. A soul-photography. But you’re caught on a time train racing past it. All this beauty. In a few hours the plows will come and the cars will come back and the curbs at the crossings will turn to gray lethal slush, and men in bad hats and women in bad coats—because believe it, the fashionable people will still be inside or down on the islands and it will all be the usual ugly driven thing, the blindness of life as we actually live it. Look at all this—
And he swept his arm from left to right across the street scene: the façades laced with snow, the snow in little mounds on the hoods of the traffic lights, three each, red, yellow, and green, the snow like pencil erasers on the tops of the light poles, and at street level, the immensity of it, two and a half feet or more of snow—final count, thirty-four inches—dumped as a child would dump a sand pail over the center of one of the most populous cities on earth, stilling the place, silencing all. The brightness of the night when coated in blinding white. The colors. The muted foggy darkness beyond. Three in the morning.
Let’s walk, George said.
Do you think St. Patrick’s is open? Louis said.
You’re asking the wrong Protestant, George said.
* * *
IT WAS, IN fact, open, the Cathedral, because of the snow, and the people stranded, and the people who needed to offer prayers against an icy apocalypse. And there were people in it—the first humans they’d seen, more than a dozen, perhaps fifteen or twenty, spread around, many of these with heads back in the pews sleeping. People curled up, scrunched up, but no one, that they could see, lying down. Getting prone in the pews was discouraged apparently, even on long nights snowed in. The air in the place was somehow as damp as that outside, but with a sense of old stone and wood, candle smoke and bodies. Dark too, unlike all the blinding white of the avenue. George and Louis walked the length of the nave to the apse, ran their hands along the brass of the altar rail.
I can see this moving people, Louis said.
I can’t, George said.
That’s because you’re a Protestant, Louis said.
If that means not medieval then yeah, I guess so.
He was lying though. The quality of quiet here was different from outside. Out there it was exotic, here it was intrinsic. A place to kneel where prayer had been valid.
I want to light a candle, Louis said.
C’mon.
I’ve always wanted to light a candle in a church, Louis said. It’s like porn, for a Jew. Do you have a quarter?
You have to pay? George said.
Oh, honey, Louis said.
* * *
LOUIS GOT GEORGE into bed, quite how George never remembered, but he would forever associate Jim Beam in a pint bottle with his only male blow job. George was in a state his mother’s generation had called tight, but not in the way they meant. The alcohol had merely beveled the edges of the speed, and the speed made him horny to a degree he was always surprised and delighted by. Louis, a wise move, had rubbed his cock extensively before trying to kiss him. When it got down to business George wanted to shave him before he fucked him in the ass; George did his back and ass and told Louis to cup his balls and started to do his legs and the Norelco gave out, choking on all the hair.
Oh my god, look at my leg, Louis said, twisted around to see. He had two long tracks of white hairless skin down the back of his left thigh, all the rest hairy.
And you broke my Norelco!
George lay back.
Clean it and it will revive.
Like you, Louis said.
He traced his tongue down George’s torso. Then up from bed and back with a bottle of oil, warm.
George raised his head. How’d you get the oil warm, he said.
I keep it beside the radiator, Louis said. Smart, right?
He worked George’s cock.
You really are a good-looking white man, Louis said. Big beefy white guy.
Shhh, George said. His eyes were closed.
Don’t come yet, Louis said. I still want you to fuck me.
Afterward Louis said, I’ve always been a little in love with you, you know.
I thought you were in lust with me, actually, George said.
Well, that. Umm. Yes. But I do actually feel fond of you too, he said.
That’s not love, George said. That’s genial lust.
After a lingering silence. They were looking at each other. Louis said: Are you freaked out lying here with a guy? In the afterglow?
A little, George said. Less than I’d expect. Probably because I’m a little stoned and a little drunk and speeding my brains out.
Yet for a few minutes he slept; it wasn’t like sleep but like a trance state with dreams. He came out of it with his cock in Louis’s mouth. Louis was better at sucking a cock than anybody he’d ever been with. Meaning women. It was like a whole other experience. On the other hand, George looked down and saw a man’s head bobbing toward his belly. With what was called, without malice, a Jewf
ro. And a hint of bald spot. Just a hint. The smells weren’t right either. He had to look away quickly to suppress his dismay. He closed his eyes. Just felt the feeling. Hands on his thighs. Interesting. It was more intense somehow—more intimate? Not exactly. He was being distinctly served, out of admiration: that’s what he felt. He felt Louis’s hands appreciating his legs. He didn’t sleep with women who behaved that way, who were into servicing a man or into the distinct erotic possibilities of his body parts—who were erotically gratified by touching him, or by looking at him, as a body. They were gratified by these things socially, emotionally, but not erotically. He was gratified by those aspects of a woman; it was never anything he detected the women feeling. They responded to some core of his masculinity and identity, to its foreignness, perhaps to its fearsomeness, or to the genuine affection that they had managed to elicit from him but had never won from their fathers, who feared them. Louis’s affection was simpler: it was almost entirely unpsychological. There was something so direct and uncomplicated about it. Of course the potential for complication is always there. Like hair.
* * *
LAVENDER SMOKE BOMBS at graduation; Gay and Lesbian Alliance. A glaring hot day in May. Media was there not for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance action but for a larger threatened demonstration, a walkout protesting the university’s investments in South Africa. In frustration, looking for some kind of attention and response, Louis threw a half cup of tepid Chock’s coffee at Jane Pauley—he hadn’t managed to reach her with it but security nonetheless hauled him off campus. George had the duty of reporting it for the Spec. According to Louis he said to the guards, I’m graduating!
Not in there, they said. She’s not pressing charges so just get lost…
He went to Chock’s for more coffee and snuck back on campus half an hour later. One of the local news channels spotted him and interviewed him: Why did you throw coffee at Jane Pauley, are you in charge of this demonstration—are you demonstrating for divestment? No, we’re demonstrating for equal rights for gay and lesbian people. End of interview. They couldn’t turn the camera and mic off quickly enough.
Louis told George, It’s funny. All that but—a phrase came into my head. After that nothing mattered. This is what writing is for me, a phrase comes and I feel compelled—sometimes I feel compelled—to create a system of other phrases to hold it. Today it was dreams of a rising sea. So then the Gay and Lesbian Alliance had one of its raucous and jargon-happy meetings—after the action. And all I wanted—I was the star, I threw coffee at Jane Pauley—and all I wanted was to get back to my apartment and work with dreams of a rising sea.
12
Autumn 1978. A sublet on Claremont Avenue. Anna told James, her current half boyfriend, about her childhood friend Nancy. Except there was no Nancy: Nancy was her but she didn’t want the story to be so raw, so direct. In this story Nancy was a cute and fleshy twelve-year-old, already developing, with dark hair, and she was walking one day to the market—why had she not taken her bike? We don’t know… Anyway she was walking to the market for her mother, to get milk, and there was a man sitting in his car, just sitting in his car. He said, Hey, hey. She stopped and looked at him. He said, Come over here a minute. She wasn’t sure—it didn’t feel right, that’s for certain—but she couldn’t just walk away, she wasn’t brought up that way. People were regular, people were nice, grown-ups were responsible and had authority that you didn’t question, it was a regular town, a nice town, working people, a factory town—they made candy in this town, for god’s sake—she went over to the car, and he said, Look honey, look at this, and his pants were open and he had his penis—yes, his penis!—in his hand and his hand was rubbing it, god it was big and purple, the most awful-looking thing she’d ever seen. Look, baby, he said. I’m gonna put it in your mouth. She turned then—she’d been frozen there a minute but she turned and she ran away! Ran and ran and turned down Cedar Street and then Poplar to get away, though she had to double back over on Elm to get to Willow Street, where she lived.
Oh, Nancy. Oh, Nancy. She came slamming into the kitchen.
Her mother had said, What’s the matter?
Nancy had stood there, getting her breath.
What happened? said her mother.
Nothing, Nancy said. I was just running.
Where’s the milk? her mother said.
Milk? Nancy said.
I sent you out for milk! her mother said. Oh, Nancy, for heaven’s sake!
That’s what Nancy’s mother said when she was mad: for heaven’s sake.
Nancy said, Oh. Oh. I forgot.
Her mother said, What happened to you? Because, you see, she knew something was wrong.
Nancy said, Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it, and she ran upstairs to her room.
The End.
Anna always said The End at the end.
James said, What about the milk?
Her mother had to go for the milk.
She left Nancy home?
Oh no, Anna said. No, Nancy was too traumatized to stay alone. When her mother left she ran after her and went with her in the car. They passed where the man’s car had been parked and she looked for it but it was gone. Or he was gone. Her mother said, What are you looking at? but she didn’t answer. She couldn’t actually remember what the car looked like. Her mother bought her ice cream. Her mother knew. She knew.
James, who dealt on campus and elsewhere, speed and acid and possibly worse, she tried not to know, was not a student, he lived down in the West 50s, and what she liked about him at this particular time was that he was depraved.
This really happened to you, didn’t it?
Oh, no, Anna said. Nancy.
Sure, James said. She smiled at him, a kind of admission. She didn’t tell him that his cock was kind of purple and ugly like the one in the story. That was what had reminded her.
* * *
IT WAS NEVER a good idea to fuck your girlfriend’s roommate; and not merely your girlfriend’s roommate, but her friend; and not merely your girlfriend’s roommate and friend, but also the lover of your own roommate, who was not merely your roommate but also your friend. So what should she have been called, this woman whom you should not fuck: your friend’s lover and your own lover’s friend? All roommates, more or less. Fucking that person and she eager, with ligaments and tendons taut and voice low-growling, fucking you back—you could look this up under not a good idea, it would be high up on the list. Top fifteen at least, after Don’t cut off your pinky finger with poultry shears, at least not for love—advice once offered ironically in a letter by William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg, who knew that Burroughs had done just that thing. A bad idea. But at a certain moment the roommate fucking was irresistible. And there he was, wrong place, right time, the moment caught him. Morning, mild winter sunlight, 116th Street, his girlfriend’s dorm apartment but his girlfriend, Marianne, was still sleeping; Eliza had let him in, he’d followed her into her room. Her nightgown; the light through it. It was quite early for him, a little before eight, he’d been up all night as he was often up all night, he’d taken some speed, again, which put him in a state of ceaseless arousal, again. He rose from the chair near the foot of her bed and went to her side: May I sit down? he said. He was already half-hard and getting harder, looking at her.
Yes, she said, about as quietly as it was possible to say it. After he’d identified himself on the intercom downstairs, she had come down that hall to the door and let him in, wearing only that nightgown; Marianne still asleep, unhearing. A long corridor with five bedrooms. Eliza had looked at him in the doorway and said hello.
Hello, he’d said.
They’d walked down the hall and chatted, she in the nightgown with her black Irish hair in a braid down her back. No, she hadn’t been asleep. She was reading for Spanish. Juan Rulfo. Did he know Rulfo? He did not. You should, she said. Should. She had thin ankles and strong feet, very strong-looking, but the nails too long, slightly frightening. She’d gone into he
r room and left the door open, him right behind her, so he’d followed, more talk of Rulfo—a Mexican, the first of the magical realists, he makes García Márquez look like Dr. Seuss—no, that’s not true. But you know, she said. She knew he was enamored of García Márquez.
Axolotl? she’d said.
He’d said, What?
Cortázar, she’d said. Then: Never mind.
Now this. Somehow sitting on her bed. Unbraid your hair, he said.
I don’t want to, she said.
He held it in his hand.
Please, he said.
She sat up and stared at him and kept her eyes on him and pulled apart the strands, then shook her head back and forth like a stunning horse and lay back again. He arranged it around her, the dark hair against the white linens, and let the front tresses fall onto the lace at the breast of her nightgown. Such sheets she had; like his mother’s sheets. She just looked at him. In her face, permission. Some prevailing percentage of willingness. And dread: because she knew. That was the difference between some people and other people, some people knew where it was all going and, god help her, she was one of these. He touched her cheek, her neck, stared at her. Like a duchess from a Sargent painting, he said. Her eyes examined the compliment, liked it a bit, then pushed it aside: the eyes showed him her fear, her amusement, her defiance: he could see all of it. A woman’s face. Like a river, so many elements, unified but always moving, never the same one moment to the next but governed by underlying structures and contours of personality: a rockscape under the moving water that determines the riffles and eddies above. The absolute and ineffable, made fluid. What did his own face show? Awe and desire. And fear, a fear to match her fear, the two fears like puzzle pieces that one wants to put together but they won’t go, there being no comfort in fear.
I dare you to kiss me, he said.
Jon will be here soon, she said.
He put his face close to hers and whispered it: I dare you.
She came up slightly to bring her face to his. They both had eyes open, searching each other. Her breath was a little thick with morning. Their tongues touched; then she pulled away, turned her head from him, and lay silent on the pillow. He assumed she was angry. He touched her hair again. Her neck. She didn’t move. He was about to get up when she surprised him, came back to him, grabbed him with her arms around his neck and brought her face quickly to his and kissed him again, harder than before. His left hand moved down over the light warm cotton until he had her breast cupped; and found her nipple hardening under the cloth; and then her eyes closed and the kiss became more urgent and he smelled her skin, always that shock—the new smell of someone’s skin. The taste of a new mouth. He continued to watch her, watching her as he pulled her up to kneeling and watching her when he put his hand under the nightgown to feel her ass and her stomach and her leg and make his way between her legs where she was wet, her pubic hair was wet around her cunt—watching her until they pulled apart and undressed—she had nothing on under the nightgown. It was stunning to see her there naked: why was this always so amazing, such a gift? He pulled off his boots and his pants and then went for her with his shirt open and his coat still on, a thrift shop cashmere overcoat. He’d never fucked in an overcoat before. She was glorious against the sheets and she pulled him into her, she was gleaming wet, he saw it on her thighs as she lay back and opened for him, and she held him with her legs and ground against him from below. Her arms were around him inside the coat, legs outside. He moved right into her, all the way, and there was a moment, just then, when neither of them could breathe, mouths open, faces wrought, that look of agony that is not agony but a pleasure so close to pain it was largely history that guided the mind in knowing which was which, a pleasure beyond any other physical pleasure we know. They said heroin was better but he didn’t believe it. That moment when desire gets to burn on, right next to its fulfillment, instead of the usual hollow thing, where fulfillment kills desire dead. The unreal pleasure. He tried to fuck her hard but she clung tightly to him so it was a bucking and grinding without the long in-out of it. They wanted it over quickly, the conditions demanded it and so did their bodies, and it was over quickly—he came and he felt as if his head were exploding but he couldn’t cry out, she’d seen the howl in him and put her hand across his face, forcing the heel of it right into his mouth. He would remember as much as anything else later about their sex that morning the taste and feel of her hand in his mouth, a thought that drove him imaginatively right back to the moment, right back to the intensity of desire for her. She held him in and he stayed hard in her for a minute, maybe more. They breathed, he half on top of her. He asked her, Does Jon usually ring the buzzer downstairs? He meant, will we get a warning? And she said, Yes, most of the time.
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