Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  And yet, if the lavender truth of the past was off-bounds, Gert was no less thrilled to see how the Stonewall generation changed the rules forever. She adored hearing stories of my gay and lesbian friends, for whom being out of the closet was a necessary passage to living life for real. Gert worried about the backlash, having an instinct for the savageries of which religion was capable. Did I really think the Catholics and the Baptists were going to sit back and let our pride go unchallenged? Didn’t matter, I said, because we would win. But she wasn’t so sure, was still uncomfortable when I spoke of Roger as my lover.

  “Can’t you just call him your friend?” she wondered aloud on more than one occasion. “Lover sounds so …” She paused, at a rare loss for words. “Don’t you think friend is more intimate?” As a matter of fact, I do, today. But at the time I liked the shock value of “lover,” my whole life having been recast since my long-belated exit from the closet. For a while there, shock was my favorite value. What we did agree about, Gert and I, was the thrill that came with a growing sense of community in the tribe. Indeed, our kind were everywhere now, and if Gert was more voyeur than participant in our new-found ubiquity, nevertheless she partook of the pride with a secret satisfaction.

  After that midsummer visit with Craig, I only saw her two or three times a year, especially after Roger and I moved to California. Because of her wizened countenance and her bad habits, I never knew if I’d see her again. There was always something poignant about that last wave farewell, as we left each other outside Sardi’s and got into separate taxis; an inarticulate worry that maybe I hadn’t said enough, hadn’t probed deep enough. I don’t think Gert shared my young man’s anxiety of incompletion. She was very unsentimental about death, and fierce in her commitment to the right of self-deliverance. You did what you could with the present, just as you did with the past: no regrets. And the last thing anyone needed to stand on was ceremony.

  Is that why I gave her so much leeway to counsel me? I remember I sent her my first book of poems, plus a manuscript of my second, a group of dramatic monologues. When I came to see her at Sneden’s Landing, she said she had read them all straight through, and managed not to make it sound like going to the dentist. On the contrary, she found them brilliant. Just one thing troubled her: “Exactly who reads them?”

  I hastened to reassure her that they were doing quite well among the little magazines (which suddenly sounded positively Lilliputian). And then of course there were my fellow poets, following one another’s work—or was it just one another’s careers they followed, bristling at the fellowships and sinecures that should have gone to them?

  “You should be writing for more than that,” she observed. By which she meant not more rewards, or even the chance of a wider audience, which she knew as well as anyone was mostly a matter of luck. Rather, she sensed a kind of constrict-edness and self-absorption in the work, an overdetermined reach—strain, to put it bluntly—for the perfect image. All of which struck fertile ground, for I was beginning to question my own place in the ranks of the silver-tongued poets. The voice wasn’t mine anymore.

  “You should write a play,” said Gert.

  But I was writing a novel instead, which I assured her would have the same effect, unfettering my song. She gave me her most enthusiastic encouragement, all too aware that theater was an uphill climb, a world that had undergone sea-changes since the halcyon days of Miss Cornell. I think she was also nattered to hear what an influence she’d had on the femme d’un certain age who stood at the center of my story. Gert was certainly first in line to read the galleys when the book reached print at last.

  To celebrate, she had me to lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club, a ladies’ club straight out of Ruth Draper. A palm-court dining room chockablock with women of a certain age, all of whom wore ice-cream-sundae hats as if in tribute to the Queen Mother. These were the selfsame ladies, Gert confided drolly, who would fill up the matinee performances in the old days; so genteel. Turned out today in a vintage black suit of her own—“my funeral duds,” she called them—Gert was distinguishable from the flock only by her blue glasses and bare head. Yet she clearly thought of herself as a kind of renegade among the ladies who lunched: with them but not of them. This was just one of the curious paradoxes of her tightrope walk between bohemia and a minimal gentility.

  “And they’d all faint with shock if they read this book of yours,” declared Gert. “I was a little shocked myself,” she admitted with a deep-throated laugh. “So many sweating bodies!” I think she had rather relished the shock, unaccustomed as she was to sex that was rated X. And then she asked, seeming more fascinated than disapproving: “Does it have to be quite so gay?”

  Oh, indeed it did. The gayer the better. I launched into my half-baked credo, invoking the name of Forster, the writer to whom I was most in thrall, and the one who had failed me the most as well. When Forster decided he dare not publish Maurice, for fear of the scandal and what his mother would think; when he locked that manuscript in a drawer for fifty years until he died, he silenced much more than himself. He put up a wall that prevented us, his gay and lesbian heirs, from having a place to begin. He had written an unheard-of thing: a queer love story that ended in love fulfilled. But we would have to make do instead with the obsessive torments of Giovanni’s Room and the broken flowers of Tennessee Williams. It wasn’t just my book, but a whole new generation’s worth—Dancer from the Dance, Rubyfruit Jungle, Nocturnes for the King of Naples—that would speak our passion without any compromise. No matter what our mothers thought.

  Gert was unaccustomed to hearing me on a soapbox. She nodded gravely, ceding me the argument, then permitted herself a quick half-smile: “Sometimes you remind me of Shaw, do you know that?” Shaw the haranguer, not Shaw the playwright. And I remember wondering even at the time, between the fingerbowls and the pink parfaits, if I’d gone too far. Did she take it as veiled criticism of her own generation, with its locked drawers and sealed steamer trunks; the truth about whom they really loved held hostage to their need to be discreet before all else? But if it struck her as any sort of accusation, she never let on. She always spurred me forward.

  And in return, have I done the wrong thing here, spilling the secret that was second nature to them all, for the sake of a politics of openness of which they could scarcely conceive? I’m pretty sure Gert could have handled any revelation about herself, but she also would have drawn the line at Kit. After all, what do I have for proof but gossip, however high-toned? Hardly the stuff to withstand the scrutiny of history. Instinctively, I feel that the veils shrouding our collective past should be rent, that we must claim as our own the Melvilles and Willa Cathers and Cary Grants. For God’s sake, I managed to study Whitman for two years at Yale without it ever being pointed out that he was queer. Whitman! (Begging the question of what a dunce I was for not figuring it out myself; but that, as they say, is another story.)

  During the next few years I was madly busy, churning out screenplays for Universal with one hand, up half the night writing fiction with the other. It’s a wonder I didn’t collapse, I was so driven. I certainly wasn’t thinking much about what I was writing anymore. It didn’t matter at Universal, where an army of underlings let not a comma go by without demanding a rewrite. And the novels, increasingly cerebral and unreal, seemed to have lost their compass. I was far away from completing Forster’s vision of love fulfilled and unafraid to shout its name.

  Gert never tried to steer me any differently. She didn’t remotely understand how the movie business worked, beyond the adage that the writer was the lowest of the low in Hollywood. She gave me all the slack I needed, her fingers crossed that one of my antic scripts would get lucky and reach the screen. I was very full of myself in those years, fancying that I was developing a reputation as a wit, and that soon I would claim my place as a sort of latter-day Noel Coward, dry and effortless, skewering pretension.

  It was somewhere in there that I visited Gert up at Sneden’s, the trees on the r
iver slope flaunting their gold in the sharp October light. We had birthdays just a week apart, and this was by way of a joint celebration: my thirty-two to her seventy-three. I think I was already starting to crack under the strain of my double career, with a half dozen scripts languishing on various desks of people with less and less power—Hollywood’s one-way ticket to Siberia. But I insisted to Gert that I was still in the game, determined to battle the odds till I produced a script as sublimely funny and sophisticated as Private Lives.

  “But that was a play,” Gert retorted mildly. And then she gave me a very Gert look, wry and penetrating, the ash of her upheld cigarette precariously long. “You know, he stood right where you’re standing once,” she said, and it took me half a beat to realize she meant Coward. “And he said, ‘I don’t know that I ever really had love in my life. Not the way I wanted it.’” Gert had been stunned, partly because she knew the two men who’d been Coward’s longtime lovers, one and then the other, and they certainly had seemed to love him. Besides, Coward was the bard of romantic love: half the civilized world could whistle those songs of wistful longing for the perfect mate, “If Love Were All.” Now it turned out that maybe even Noel Coward wasn’t Noel Coward.

  Within another year I’d hit the wall. I’d just finished writing a leaden script about vile people, called The Hamptons—suffice it to say that it paid the bills and made me feel like slime on dirty water. That summer my union decided to go on strike against the producers, demanding a cut of the video market. The six-month strike managed to derail all careers as marginal as mine, the kind that were based on fast talk and no screen credits. At the same time my editor in New York up and quit the company that had published my last four books. For the next three years I would try to peddle first one story and then another, on the strength of a hundred pages and an outline, only to find myself summarily rejected. Not hot anymore. By the end of that downward spiral I had a raft of rejection slips, enough to decoupage the walls of my study and then some.

  My lowest point was the fall of ’81, compounded by the end of a ruinous affair—two months’ obsession and general self-destruction on my side, an enervated dalliance on his.- And when it was over, I wouldn’t let it go. It was as if my hands were frozen on the steering wheel, my foot slamming the gas pedal, as I relived again the self-abuse of falling in love with straight boys. The endless crash-and-burn of my adolescent crushes, all the way up to my twenty-fifth year, coming round full circle and leaving me pining for a hustler. I’d thought my love for Roger would protect me from the heart’s careening, but it didn’t, not that year.

  I withheld the truth from him instead, figuring the least I could do was keep the pain to myself. But didn’t succeed at that either, only managing to blame my ashen countenance and sudden bursts of sobbing on the dead-end of my work. I went back into therapy, three hours a week. I can’t stomach rereading my journal of those months of suicidal emptiness. There’s nothing further to learn from it—except perhaps the tenacity of shame, still able to sting twelve years later. Roger and I came out the other side more or less intact, though the useless pain and grief took months to deaden. It was in the middle of all of that I finally wrote a play.

  I don’t think I even told Gert about it till after the first draft was done. In the beginning it had more to do with the mire I was in with Joel, the object of my fixation. He was writing a play himself, about Jews-for-Jesus, without the slightest anxiety about what he might face in trying to get it produced. I decided his was the proper attitude—that I’d spent too much time being channeled and second-guessed by producers and well-meaning editors, till my work felt like everyone’s business but mine. I would just begin: Act I, Scene I.

  Mine was a stubbornly old-fashioned play, as it turned out, a drawing room comedy set twenty years in the past. Did anyone even have a drawing room anymore? It didn’t deter me in the least, once I’d set my focus. I went back and forth to French’s on Sunset, buying single copies of faded comedies from between the Wars, plays stuck in the genteel past that nobody bothered to revive. They had butlers and cooks and intrusive in-laws, in and out through the French windows, all fifth business to the leading lady and leading man. And always a tart-tongued best friend for the lady, whiskey on her breath, as well as a smooth-talking troublemaker who snaked his way into Eden and turned the central marriage upside down.

  By the time I finished the first scene I was hooked, taking pleasure in the act of writing for the first time in years. How was I to know it wasn’t permitted anymore to write a play with eight characters, this being the age of downsizing? Bare stage, two or three actors—that’s what producers were looking for. I hadn’t bothered to scope out the system at all: the nurturing of playwrights in the regional theaters, a close-knit troupe of itinerants where everyone knew everyone else. The one thing that hadn’t changed since Gert’s time was Hollywood as anathema, at best a necessary evil as long as you didn’t make it a habit.

  I finished the draft in about four months and began to work with a director friend who has since abandoned the boards to work in soaps (an easy half-million a year and you get to live in New York). He was old enough to remember the fox-collar glamour of Kit Cornell and Ina Claire and the Lunts. He saw what I was trying to do with a long-abandoned form, saw it better perhaps than I, and didn’t let me get away with a wasted line. I worked another four months on revisions, tightening up and trimming the excess foliage, jettisoning one character (but careful to save his best lines and sprinkle them around among the others).

  At last I was ready to show it to Gert. I dispatched a copy to Sneden’s Landing, waiting two weeks before I followed it up with a call. I needn’t have worried: she loved it. So much so that she’d already called up two or three of her ancient producer friends to ask if they were in the market. A little while later she had to go into the hospital for minor surgery, and to have her regular confrontation with her doctors over the volume of cigarettes and vodka she consumed. Her niece, Merloyd, told me that Gert’s copy of just the Summers was the prominent item on her bedside table, in case she could pitch it to some old friend with moneybags who came by to visit.

  The old producers shook their heads. Marvelous play, they admitted, but far too many speaking parts and set in a world that was simply forgotten. Gert remained undiscouraged, no more willing to give it up now than she was the Camels and the Stoli. In the end I didn’t need her connections; I managed to draw a coterie of enthusiasts on my own, which led to a group of staged readings, the closest I ever came to being produced. Fifty folding chairs in a loft, but if you squinted you could almost believe you were in a theater, that the actors weren’t reading from scripts but living every line.

  It was years before it dawned on me that I’d written a play for an audience of one—and Miss Gertrude Macy was that one. Doubtless all of us writers are always out to please someone—Forster and his mother again—but Gert was something rarer than that. If I made it well enough to knock her socks off, then it would bear a seal of pedigree that went all the way back to the glistering streets of Broadway in its prime. Gert showed up at the loft on Ninth Avenue for the first reading, wearing her funeral duds, decades older than everyone else, and laughed her booming laugh at all the jokes she already knew. It was later that night that she took me and Roger to ‘21,’ when I asked if it went too fast.

  By the following autumn the play had a producer and a director and an improbable semi-commitment from Donald Sutherland to star. Thus we were suddenly locked into a Broadway production, raising our costs from the eighty thousand that would have sufficed for a ninety-nine seater to something over seven hundred thousand. It seemed an impossible gamble, but hard to resist. Our next reading was in a cavernous apartment in the Dakota, gargoyles peering in and a crowd of fat-cats in the folding chairs, possible investors. “You can smell the money,” murmured Gert as she leaned toward me.

  I was out at Sneden’s a couple of evenings later, still flush from the performance at the Dakota, with how mo
ving Sutherland had been as Julian, a man who’d chosen the closet in order to marry straight and rich. I remember Gert and I actually talking about individual theaters, which ones would work in the play’s favor, and incidentally what great plays had trod the boards there previously. I was very high on the dream that night.

  Around midnight we’d both stopped talking at last, a feat in itself, since the two of us could go on for hours. Gert was drinking her nightcap as we sat before the fire, while I puffed on a roach—a tableau worthy of a post-mod Candida. And when she quietly asked about this “gay cancer” she’d been reading about, I realized it had been on her mind all evening. This must have been the winter of ’83, before Cesar or anyone else I knew had fallen. So far it was all just shadowy rumors, an East Coast thing, I retorted with a careless laugh, assuring her it had nothing to do with Roger and me. The pinnacle of my earliest denial.

  And I remember it didn’t appease her, the worried crease only seeming to deepen in the firelight. But we let it go for the moment, for the sake of the circle of security we provided for one another. Only when I was leaving, as she dropped me off at the bridge to get a taxi, did she squeeze my hand and say, “Be careful.”

  There was one other time, a few months later. I was back and forth to New York quite a bit that year, having been hired to write a script about a model who becomes the billboard face of the moment. 15 Minutes, it was called, and I cared about it a lot because it had an up-front gay character who was the heroine’s best friend and roommate. I barely had time to talk to Gert on the phone, but managed to hold an evening open before my return to L.A. There was snow on the ground at Sneden’s, a late winter that stubbornly wouldn’t yield to spring.

  I can’t say Gert was in somber spirits, or any less ebullient to have me for an evening to herself. Curious, but she never seemed to age during that decade I knew her—never aged further, I mean, than the beautiful wrinkled terrain of the face I saw the day I met her. I would have said that night that she was the same as ever, indomitable; but then I was the one who could still laugh off the darkness about to engulf us all.