Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  Always, on whatever beach we visited, he roamed until he sat reluctantly to see the sun fall, following the birds and their eccentric doings and picking up shells on the sand. He bought cheap plastic buckets in which to bleach his acquisitions, polishing his conchs with a toothbrush as he lay back on the bed with a cocktail balanced on his belly, checking to see if he had gotten them shiny enough to display on his desk at home.

  If my father knew how I had been spending my time on the island and elsewhere, he would have been brokenhearted, and that bothered me so much in South Carolina that I couldn’t enjoy myself and was not disappointed when I was called back to New York.

  In the 1990s, I worked at Vanity Fair, a magazine so slick that its pages were perfumed. Finished copies tended to send me into sneezing fits. At the office there was always drama, some kind of crisis—a writer in the midst of a breakdown, a must-have piece on an heiress who had axed her in-laws. I left my parents with their disappointed looks in the rented house they had been proud to show me and ran out quickly when the taxi came.

  Graydon Carter, the editor in chief, was apologetic about the interruption of my vacation, and as we sat in his office he offered me a Marlboro and told me how much he appreciated my work. Soaking in his flattering words, I noticed—as I always did—how remarkably his hands and thick fingers resembled my father’s, though his were tanned, whatever the season, and always acquired whatever they reached for.

  My father’s hands did not.

  Graydon was on the rise, and usually had a bespoke suit awaiting pickup in London if a writer happened to be there. At the beginning, he had a way of making me feel brilliant and talented in a way no one had before. I took it all in eagerly; I was a little desperate. With Graydon, I was still just a hungry kid.

  . . .

  “I don’t like the way you sound,” Betty would say on the phone. “I don’t like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

  “I am fine. I am fine. What about Daddy?”

  She never answered. She was worried too, but that was the sort of thing she never said out loud. I think she believed that the sound of her voice articulating her concern was enough to provoke the worst to befall us.

  . . .

  At Vanity Fair, the contributing editors included a roster of killer reporters: an English aristocrat (“Lady Kitty’s daughter”) who had hung in Mustique with The Rolling Stones; a fashion director who muttered imprecations in various languages (Honi soit qui mal y pense!); an assortment of devious Brits; the Marquis de Torregrosa; an elderly Italian doyenne who referred constantly to the preferences of Count Laszlo, whom I believed to be an aristocrat until I discovered that he was actually her aging pug. Before the parties and dinners thrown by Graydon, tears over the suitable position of place cards were not uncommon. The seating of Edie Wasserman or Mrs. Reagan within a mile of the kitchen at Morton’s was an offense worthy of capital punishment.

  Every morning I rode up in the elevator at 5 a.m., hoping the day would pass without some disaster in which I would be implicated, and there was always dread before I walked through the doors. People who passed through these halls monitored one another, carefully assessing whose stock with Graydon had risen or fallen, who was in or out. Some left his office with smiles and Prada bags; others exited in tears. Anyone could plummet out of favor.

  When the stories I supervised put me in Graydon’s good graces, I was jubilant, but after failure, when it was possible to wait endlessly outside his office for a brief and chilly audience, I could do nothing but worry and obsess over the rejection.

  I lived with a succession of bizarre stomach ailments, always in terror of failing. For weeks I disappeared from polite civilization for trips to East Hampton to wage war during at-home editing sessions with a political reporter whose name drew readers despite her indifference to deadlines.

  It was Condé Nast. It was big-time, an environment hermetically sealed to block out signs of aging; the poor, charmless, and unslender; and any vestige of reality. I bought new clothes, edited pieces on presidents, movie stars, murderous heiresses, and warring Hollywood executives. I worshipped Graydon for his creativity and eye for the subtle treacheries of Manhattan’s stylish power brokers. He saw the hidden strings that held his world together, but he was boyish and mischievous, delighted by glamour and fun, the first to pummel the pretentious. An effortless raconteur, amusingly ironic, he was also surprisingly vulnerable, judgmental in the extreme as he tallied up style offenses, lapses in etiquette, imagined slights from employees, sushi deliverers, or celebrity handlers. He was, I still believe—outside of Betty Hodgman—more attentive to hair-related error than any human I have ever known on Planet Earth. “After thirty,” he told me, “a man should never change his hairstyle.” I took it in.

  I craved his regard. I wanted more. A little bit was not enough. I wanted what those hands could deliver, what my father’s shaky fingers could no longer give me: a place that felt certain. I hated it when they were occupied with pursuits beyond my sphere.

  . . .

  On the island one summer, I kept running into a nice-looking man—a cheerful-looking guy of the type I thought I should find. We smiled at each other when we were out with people, or buying groceries, or lying on the beach. His appearance was reassuring; he didn’t wear Lycra or spandex and looked like someone who had grown up in a leafy suburb and had his insurance policies in order. He seemed comfortable in his skin. I needed a rock. There was something; I sensed it. It was one of those times when something sparks without a second of conversation, though—because I was high every time I saw him—I thought it was probably something going on in just my head, the kind of private show that occurred there, confusing me and making me reluctant to believe that any attraction could ever be mutual.

  One night, at an AIDS benefit, I felt a hand on my shoulder at the bar, a hand attached to a classic monogrammed cuff, and there he was, the man from the island—maybe a lawyer, or someone who worked on Wall Street, or a businessman, the old-fashioned type who never got flummoxed. As it happened, he was in advertising, his wardrobe a way to offset his industry’s flash. I discovered all this during the course of the evening when I received every second of his attention, though the room was crowded with others easier to engage than me, someone too uncomfortable to converse while standing and hyperconscious of my inability to meet his eye.

  Flattered, I felt drawn to him, and was happy to return to his apartment where, after discovering my unwillingness to engage in unprotected sex, he threw me out. It was fast and unexpected, but these things happened in these times. My friends spoke of the same experience. I wasn’t the only one and they let me know I didn’t really have the right to feel so badly treated. I had no right to linger on this. People were dying. They were right.

  After I left the apartment, I went back to my place on East Tenth Street and, though it was very late, got high, wishing I had checked in with Missouri earlier that Sunday because I felt that there was something my mother was not telling me. This made me need to get even higher. They never told me if anything was wrong, but there was nothing I could do at that hour, with the sun rising, so I did more drugs because there wasn’t time to sleep and I needed to be alert in a few hours.

  . . .

  “I don’t like the way you sound,” Betty said on the phone. “I don’t like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

  “I am fine. I am fine. What about Daddy?” I answered.

  “He’s okay,” she said. But I didn’t think he was and felt terrible receiving attention that should—with his increasing weakness and difficulties getting around—be aimed in his direction. My problems were easier to focus on; she could always tell herself she was only imagining them. He was right there, failing indisputably in front of her eyes. She hated to see him weak and pushed him to get up out of his chair and do more, get out of the house.

  “Get up a
nd let’s do something. Get out of that chair.”

  She wouldn’t see what was happening.

  “But what about Daddy? I don’t think he looks too good.”

  “You don’t sound right,” she said.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  . . .

  There was a song we loved on Fire Island, a song they played when the crowds on the dance floor thinned and the breeze from the ocean blew in. Morning music, they call these soft, late-night songs. This one meant something to us. When it played, we came together and did not let go. It was called “I’ll Be Your Soldier” and was about standing with, staying with your friend or lover through whatever happened, whatever trouble. It seemed to sum up our days and for years I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find it, though I don’t think I really want to. Hearing it would be too bittersweet. None of us who danced together ever speak anymore. Several in our house on the island were HIV positive, and this lent an undercurrent to every moment. So we danced together. You didn’t ever have to speak. I learned to love to dance, for that reason specifically. Late at night, we guided one another’s trips to abandon. When someone flew too high or low, another was there to scoop him up. If you found yourself, in the middle of everything, lonely or afraid, a friend would appear to sit beside you until it was all a little better. But nothing lasts forever; the breakup of our camp was inevitable. There were tensions festering. Men compete.

  I really did not want to feel this. I had gotten a taste of closeness and wanted more. But as more members of our group tested positive, a division between the haves and have-nots became more apparent. And then there were the drugs—at the beginning a diversion for all, but gradually a danger that some could draw away from while others grew more and more attracted. I was in the latter party. I could not stop if I started. I never wanted to go back to feeling merely ordinary.

  At High Tea one weekend, I recognized a familiar face—Eric’s. There he was, standing on the deck in Topsiders, leaning against an older man who did not rate as likely boyfriend material. The man’s hair was gray and it seemed as though he was looking after my old friend. I sensed the situation immediately. He was older and I knew that he was Eric’s soldier, the one who had hoped to love him but had settled for steering him through everything we had never imagined happening. Eric didn’t look sick yet, just drawn, tired, and older than he was.

  When we began to talk, Eric apologized for being so quiet on the day we visited the quilt, but he had just a few days before tested positive for HIV. He said he had hoped we would run into each other. He actually said he always thought we might wind up together. I looked at him. He had sensed my little dream of our getting together all along. And here he was, dishing up the fantasy I had come up with and serving it to me for his own benefit. He was just as bad as that man who threw me out. He was just the same, I thought, feeling that he was trying to use me. He wanted me to come back to the place where he was staying, said that it would be all right, that I wouldn’t get sick, that I didn’t have to worry, but I didn’t want to be manipulated. I was dubious, having been through a few confusing battles. I didn’t want to find myself walking back home along the beach feeling bad about what I had or had not done.

  I think I wanted, this time, to be the one with the power, the one to decide.

  The man with the gray hair, who had been looking bereft, seemed relieved when I disappeared.

  Later, I wanted to go back, change it, the way it turned out—my coldness, his disappointment, the look on his face as I hurried across the room after just a few minutes. But I could not.

  . . .

  When I left our house on Fire Island, when it all fell apart and everyone was harboring little grudges and telling tales, I was a full-blown addict. It took a lot of drugs for some of us to feel free. I boarded the ferry back to the city, carrying my carpenter’s bag from the lumberyard with cocaine tucked into the inner pocket and little sense that my departure was regretted by anyone. I started to go out on my own. I didn’t ask for much, didn’t want it. No longer drawn to the college-boy type, I was not interested in anything like a relationship. “Would you just go?” I had learned to say, even to those who might have been willing to linger. My love was drugs.

  . . .

  After my father collapsed after a coronary, the doctor discovered that he had suffered two silent heart attacks. No one had known, though I suspected one had occurred that day we arrived in St. Louis to see The Music Man when, angry and put out, he had carried all the bags up by himself and collapsed on a chair.

  His heart had been so badly damaged that there was no operation possible to repair it. The diagnosis was congestive heart failure.

  I went home, stood by his bed in the hospital, listened to the doctor talk, but his words were so carefully chosen and so buried in detail that I wasn’t sure my father was definitely dying, and it wasn’t like I could ask him if he had heard what I heard. He acted like nothing had happened.

  My mother was waiting for us to come back from the hospital. She didn’t ask me what the doctor said. She didn’t seem able to take in what I was trying to tell her, didn’t want to find out what she suddenly realized she couldn’t quite handle: losing him.

  “I’ll be all right, Betty, I’m okay,” he told her. We were all fine—fine, fine, fine.

  I felt like there was something I should say to my father and every time we spoke, I tried to, attempted to let him know that I loved him in some way that didn’t feel like some kind of parting gesture that would be too hard for us to manage.

  I kept waiting for him to reach out to me too, to say something, to let me know that I was okay, that I was all right as far as he was concerned, but there was nothing in the end like that. I guess he had stopped trying, or maybe he had seen enough of who I had become to just go quiet.

  He had looked up the Fire Island Pines on the map or read about it in some kind of magazine or tour book. “I know what goes on in that place,” he said to me on the phone. “I wouldn’t think of you there.”

  My father’s hands were letting go of me.

  . . .

  Late one afternoon at Vanity Fair, the phone rang and I heard my mother’s voice, excited, in a kind of unusual, keyed-up way. At a Christmas luncheon, she had met a woman with a piece of jewelry unlike any other she had seen, a bracelet purchased in Istanbul. She had to have one too. It was essential. Oxygen. She was racing, too driven, too wound up.

  She wouldn’t talk about my father. I could tell she was on the extension in her bedroom. She didn’t want him to hear.

  I was editing a piece centered on an interview with the mistress of a national political leader. Her quotes were mainly one-syllable words. It was a challenging effort to make it all seem revelatory.

  It was not long before Christmas; Graydon had gone to dine with a writer whose daughter—Graydon’s assistant—would, in the not too distant future, set the Dior-draped fashion closet partly ablaze while sneaking a cigarette.

  All day long, the company mail conveyance, which looked like a train in a children’s zoo, had delivered gift after gift to Graydon’s office. A photo by Annie Leibowitz of his family was propped up by his office, displaying the cherubic children in Santa hats and holiday pajamas, et cetera. So perfect and adorable were they that I would have gladly drawn a mustache just above the baby’s smile.

  Betty had convinced the bracelet’s owner to take a photo of the jewelry, which she was sending. Betty had decided that she would mail the picture to the American embassy in Istanbul and ask someone there to “run out” and get her a copy of it. It was all a little crazy. My mother seemed to feel that the State Department owed her some sort of favor. I guess she needed a little something; the bracelet appeared, something to hope for, something to change the way she was feeling.

  She never went out of the house anymore. She was scared to leave my father. She was caged.

  My job? To fin
d the address of the embassy and help word the letter. “That’s what you do,” she said, “you write. I never ask you to do anything.”

  She didn’t. I had to beg her to let me do anything for her. She was too proud.

  I said I was going nuts. I told Betty about the deadline. She wanted the bracelet. I told her about the mistress. “How,” she asked, “did you get mixed up with that?”

  Finally, I managed to get her off the phone. I was so busy; she was not one to chat, but this time she wanted to hang on. Was it really the bracelet she wanted? Did she want me to say that this was not our family’s last Christmas together, that my father was not so sick as she was finally letting herself see?

  For a solid month I had been shut up in the East Side apartment of the author of the piece, Tessa Neely—a famous reporter with a reputation for destroying lives, personal assistants, and editors. For many days I had desperately begged and cajoled her to actually write, while she, ignoring my pleas, worked out with her trainer and attended Christmas gatherings.

  Finally, we had a draft of what seemed hundreds of pages. Graydon, bored with it all weeks ago, had approved the piece but ordered it cut by thousands of words. Tessa was peeved, hissing.

  Now as Betty was reluctantly saying good-bye, all at the magazine were scurrying, though Tessa still refused to budge. This is “fucking history,” she cried again and again, jabbing my arm with the end of her pen but turning soft as a baby as she waved to Graydon on his way out. She was wearing a pink Chanel suit. It was getting later and later. The managing editor, Jan, was not pleased by all the delay.

  Everyone was irate at Tessa and at me for not being able to corral her. I was so angry that when Tessa went to the bathroom, I threw her pink jacket out the window. It floated down through the air like a big, colorful bird. Tessa demanded so much. Betty demanded so little. But the bracelet thing was crazy. Betty was worked up in a way that was so unfamiliar to me. The weather had been bad at home. She had been cooped up for days.