But here was a pretext to approach it and see where it might lead. Where that might be, I preferred not to consider. A sexual involvement was out of the question. Bill had already told me that fortunately all his sexual desires had vanished completely, and even I was not stupid enough to even entertain the possibility. What I probably half hoped for was some degree of renewal of our emotional intimacy. I even thought that he himself might retrieve some measure of our distant beginnings and the memories might soften and make less difficult his present condition. I wouldn’t be just a friend; I would be a loving friend. A pretext introducing this absurdity had presented itself and I had accepted the opportunity. Now it was up to him.
His response was simple. What I had said was obviously of no interest. It deserved no elaboration. It wasn’t even deserving of a dismissal. A dismissal would have implied consideration. In effect, he hadn’t even heard me. His thoughts were elsewhere and he felt no need to articulate them, much less to involve me in their development. Upon reflection, this was the preferred resolution. No demands. No expectations. All foolish, stupid, and preposterous impulses must not only be resisted, they must be completely avoided. And if I didn’t like it, well, as we used to say, tough titty.
It’s said that animals, pets in particular, have a sense that makes them responsive to a “master’s” physical or emotional condition. Mr. Dog, who had seldom been allowed upstairs from the basement and had always been put outside at night, began to come around less and less. Bill attributed this to his inability to play outside with the dog the way he used to. And now he had even passed the responsibility of feeding him on to me, which was hardly a chore.
I claim to be a dog lover, but Mr. Dog, a German shepherd mix, and I never managed to, as they say, “bond.” True, I never threw a ball for him to fetch, but I did pet him and tickle him behind the ears. He was not responsive. Once in a while when he sat next to me as I read in the backyard, he’d nuzzle his snout under my hand, lifting it so I could give a couple of strokes along his neck, down along his back, and pull his tail, but not all that often.
As had been his habit from the beginning, he would wander off most of the day and appear erratically. When Bill had been going through a time that required more bedrest, I let Mr. Dog upstairs. He raced up the basement steps and into Bill’s bedroom. He leaped onto the bed. Bill, thrilled to see him, laughed and laughed until he was almost screaming. Mr. Dog dove under him, around him, licking his face, whining and whimpering in ecstasy. He crouched on the blanket at the foot of the bed, then lunged forward and dug his snout between the pillow and Bill’s right ear. Bill yelped with joy.
I watched. I was jealous. Of a dog.
Eventually even my shouted calls in the yard, “Mr. Dog! Mr. Dog!” failed to summon him. Day after day, evening after evening, my words went out for the entire neighborhood to hear, but no Mr. Dog bounded up to me to accept the bowl at my feet. My shouting sessions became a sometime event. Then I gave up. “He’s not my dog anymore,” Bill said.
Gradually I got to do things few Manhattanites get a chance to do. I cut the grass. The so-called lawn mower was, to me, a strange implement. It had no wheels, no blades. Powered by a thick electric cord that snaked its way out the basement door and into the side yard, it was a handheld rod with string at the tip. Turned on, the string whipped in a blurred circle with a ferocity that, without mercy, lopped off the top of any blade of grass grown too tall to be tolerated. Its whirr made a single-note low nasal whine, warning the hapless grass of its approach, vengeful beyond appeal and pitiless in its execution. I very much enjoyed cutting the grass.
I shoveled snow. The sidewalk wasn’t that long, but this was yet another exotic exercise available to homeowners, and I appreciated the opportunity to become reacquainted with what had been an unappreciated childhood chore. And the cold fresh air was invigorating.
I did the laundry, which didn’t demand any of the coins required by the laundromat I normally dealt with. And Bill’s machine featured sophistications I didn’t know were possible. It could wash sweaters. Slowly, gently. Bill had a lot of sweaters. I dutifully ran them through, then, on a bedsheet placed over newspapers spread on the floor of a vacant upstairs room, I’d lay them out carefully so they’d dry without losing their shape.
It was the regular laundry, the sheets especially, that gave me a particular pleasure. Not the washing, but the drying. I’d hang it all out to dry. On a clothesline. With clothespins. In the fresh air, preferably under a benevolent sun. The scent of sun-dried laundry is one of the more beatific smells available on this earth. I can’t describe it. I won’t even try. It has to be experienced. (My introduction to the phenomenon came on one of my earlier visits. Bill had brought in the dried laundry from the yard. I lifted one of his white sweat socks to my nose. Bill said, “I don’t remember giving you permission to smell my socks.” My answer, “I didn’t think it was necessary.”)
Together we planted some flowers along the side of the house. I noted that he’d chosen sweet William to bookend the row. My favorite was hyacinth. In bloom, it gives off a scent almost as inviting as sun-dried laundry. And I found it a more reliable effusion (for want of a better word) than that given off by a rose. A rose is undependable. Hyacinth never disappoints. I’d bring a blossom into the house and have a sniff whenever the urge asserted itself.
For all of Bill’s love for flowers, he felt nothing but annoyance when a huge bouquet arrived with a card signed by Marilyn, the former student who’d committed the unpardonable error of letting Bill know how much she loved him. “They look like something you’d send to a Mafia funeral,” is what he said.
Because the flowers were delivered by the florist, no thanks were offered at the time of delivery. Bill didn’t even want them in the bedroom, where, by then, he was spending more and more of his time. He had me put them in the living room, out of his line of vision. When Marilyn phoned and asked me—Bill was sleeping—if the flowers had arrived, I not only told her that they had, but that he was thrilled by them and had them next to the bed.
There were entertainments. On the TV we watched The Golden Girls. We also watched old movies, the two of us propped up in the bed with pillows at our back. Bill introduced me to a lesser, but fascinating, Anna Magnani film called Bellissima about a Roman mother who tried to get her little girl cast in a movie being filmed at Cinecittà. The mother, by coincidence, sees the director, the producers, and casting staff watching the child’s screen test. The little girl is crying, helpless, frightened. Those watching find it hilarious. The mother, outraged, lets the unfeeling film people have it—Magnani style—the scene that justified the movie’s existence.
Another movie we saw was Airplane—a satire of catastrophe movies—the first in a genre that would later include films by the Zucker brothers and the Naked Gun franchise.
From my friend Ron Sproat, a film enthusiast, I borrowed My Cousin Vinny, When Harry Met Sally, and, on another level, Odd Man Out. The first two, intelligent and enjoyable comedies, made for some very pleasant evenings. Odd Man Out was a less felicitous choice—for reasons that became more obvious while we were watching it. A man (James Mason), allied to an organization (not specified in the film but obviously the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland), helps carry out a successful robbery but is shot before he can make it into the getaway car. The film then becomes the tale of a man wounded, dying, searching for someone to help him, to take him in.
His political attachment makes him an untouchable. No one dares help him as he tries to find his way to his friends. Near the end, he poses for a mad artist who had taken him in for the grotesque purpose of capturing on canvas the face of a dying man. As we watched, I realized: not a proper choice.
Bill, rather than dismiss or resent it or allow himself to be notably affected by the film’s content, concentrated on the camerawork, commenting with genuine admiration for the imagination and expertise of the director and came
ramen.
I also read to him, mostly from a book of ancient Chinese tales set down centuries ago and recently translated. I learned there and then where Saturday matinee movie serials came from—each episode ended with the main character or characters imperiled beyond rescue, a rescue that would begin the next episode.
The tales were enchanting and I had the added pleasure of sitting on the bed next to Bill as I read. (One time, with reference to no incident in particular, Bill said, “I can smell you on the pillow next to me.” “Does it bother you?” “No. I like it.”)
Close to an entire afternoon (or so it seemed) was spent listening to tapes Bill had made of songs by Rodgers and Hart and by Cole Porter. What distinguished the tapes—aside from the genius of the songwriters—was that each song was sung no fewer than three times, with a different singer and a different arrangement, exploring the song’s interpretive possibilities.
Fortunately, Mr. Hart and Mr. Porter were the chosen lyricists. The vaunted sophistication, the wordplay, the ingenious unpredictable rhymes, the boastful cynicism, as well as the surprising diversity of interpretation, rescued the repetitions from being the musical equivalent of Chinese water torture (think Philip Glass, etc.). Still, it was a long, long tape, seeming at times to have no promise of an ending. Bill enjoyed himself immensely, sitting there in his chair, at times tapping his toes or crossing his ankles in dance steps of his own invention. I could have done with a little Mozart spaced at regular intervals. This was not to be.
Bill loved those songs. His devotion was absolute. His appetite for their inimitable treasures was beyond satiation. I remembered Charles Ives, Bill’s obsession, the time we devoted—I mean devoted—to listening to record after record of his incomparable compositions.
Where was Ives now? Where were Piston and Sessions? Even Barber and William Schuman? The pantheon had been emptied. New occupants inhabited it now—Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter. As I’ve already observed, Bill’s enthusiasms were so intense, so absolute, that they could not possibly be sustained. Relief was necessary, change inevitable. How well I knew. How well I knew.
Lorenz Hart turned up again at a later date, even more necessary and appreciated. Before I’d moved from the mattress in the storeroom to a quilt at Bill’s bedside, I was awakened one night by the sound of Bill singing to himself. I considered going to him, but these seemed sounds of easy contentment, an assist in passing some wakeful moments that had interrupted an otherwise uneventful night.
I mentioned the singing the next morning. Bill had had, he told me, a nightmare. It consisted of nothing more than the sight of a stretched gray line. But it had terrified him to the point of waking him up. To ward off the terror that had followed him into his waking state, he’d decided to sing to himself the lyrics of Lorenz Hart. That’s what I’d heard. That’s what had happened. Hart had been present and ready to help. Bravo Lorenz!
It wasn’t often that Bill showed me his photographs. When he did, none was current because he wasn’t doing any photographing, nor, as far as I could tell, had he done any for quite a while. This was uncharacteristic of the Gale I’d known. Photography was central to his life. It was how he defined himself. Now, however, the house with the finished apartment upstairs, with the flourishing garden outside, with the plans to build a personally designed fence—with all this, a darkroom had not been included among his achievements or among his plans, which dated back a few years. I never introduced the subject and he never referred to it. However, the photographs he did show me may hold some clue to his neglect.
His pictures from India, from Benares and Calcutta, had been published in a slim paperback book. They were extraordinary because they were quite ordinary: the Indian people doing what Indian people do. Pulling carts, selling their wares, avoiding ambling cows, sleeping in public, diving, swimming, staring into the camera. The pictures were free of an agenda. He had been documenting no previous conceptions; he had no interest in politics or protest. Poverty in India was rampant, but it didn’t seem to be of concern to those he photographed—the poor themselves—and he made it of no concern to himself. Not from personal indifference, but from an artistic standard that made no allowances for melodrama or sentimentality. Bill’s own humanity was free of self-dramatization; he responded empathically, it seemed, to those who neither demanded nor expected special attention. As with any artist, knowingly or not, he revealed himself in his art.
There had been a fairly reliable possibility that the photographs would be published in a deluxe edition by a highly respected house with a foreword by Raghubir Singh, the noted Indian photographer. It would have established Bill as a photographer worthy of attention, important to an ascendant career. Nothing came of it.
In his will, Bill deeded his cameras to qualified Indian photographers who couldn’t possibly afford them, probably chosen by Raghubir Singh. In a ceremonial moment arranged by Bill’s brother, the American ambassador to India handed them over to the Indian ambassador to America.
The other series he showed me he kept in a sort of scrapbook or photo album. They were pictures of the more famous composers of the day, taken in places familiar to them: the woods near a country home, at the piano, walking a dog. Almost casual, deceptively so. The revered without the reverence. Homely almost—in the true sense of its root word, “home”—without an effort at being homely. Copland, Piston, Carter, and many more.
The nonportraits had been intended as part of a book—Bill’s photographs with a text by a well-known authority. He never named him. In any event, the project fell through. The text writer’s dilatory or waning interest somewhere along the line, the publisher’s, the editor’s? Who knows? Not I.
What I can’t help wondering was (is) this: Could Bill have become so discouraged by these disappointments that he suffered a photographer’s equivalent of writer’s block? Although his San Francisco series—1960s hippies of Haight-Ashbury renown—had been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, his subsequent series had been ignored: Myrtle Avenue before the El was torn down and the Village-like neighborhood destroyed; the Appalachian family that would—after his death—be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art (150 photographs in all) to a very favorable reception. There were other series of which I’m unaware. He was now well into middle age. Even though he had no instinct for self-promotion, he did have—I don’t doubt—a sure sense of his own worth and the artistic value of the work he’d done. There is no way to verify this speculation, but it persists. Posthumous regard is all well and good, but a little upfront might have been helpful from time to time. Don’t forget, artists are people, too.
At times Bill would talk about some friends (or lovers) who had at one time or another been important to him. On this subject, Bill once spoke of an extremely satisfying six-month involvement with an Italian-American who had since moved to California. I asked Bill if he wanted to get in touch with him. His answer was an oft-repeated phrase when referring to past acquaintances: “He must be dead by now.” The epidemic was like that.
If this memoir of mine gives the impression that Bill, by whatever private means, had stoically accepted what was happening to him, that impression should be slightly altered. True, he showed little bitterness and less self-pity. He occupied his days with activities for as long as he was able: his house, his garden, easy companionship with colleagues like Nina Prantiss, Peter Bellamy, and other friends from Pratt. Later, reading, music, movies—all with little or no complaint.
On one occasion, however, he touched on a serious subject, but chose to make fun of it. One morning, when I was giving him his pills, he mentioned that he’d recently considered swallowing all his prescription medicines, bringing the whole difficulty to an end. Then he said, “But with my luck I know I’d just wake up with one big headache.”
On other occasions, an obviously suppressed rage erupted and gave some measure to his deeper turmoil, both of them questions to which there w
ere no answers. “Why wasn’t I born a eunuch!?” And closer to the end, “Why can’t I die!?” As there were no answers then, there are no answers now. Exclamation points as well as question marks. That’s the way he said them—angry, bitter.
Medically untrained and uninformed by the attending doctor, I had no specific knowledge of his prognosis other than that AIDS was eventually fatal. In the doctor’s defense, I never asked. Something the nurse said suggested that the cancerous sarcoma had attacked his interior organs, as opposed to its relentless attack on that exterior organ, his skin. If so, the word “attack” should be amended to “nibble”—a slower, more insidious assault, a quiet feeding rather than a savage gnawing, less apparent but no less effective. Still, the suffering was there, the unappeasable discomfort, and the palliative care he was being given offered very limited relief.
So much of the time I was concentrating on what had to be done that I could be unmindful of what was going on, what all this was really about: Bill’s dying. Yet there would be moments when the full force of reality struck with a blow for which it was impossible to prepare. One such moment occurred when, late at night, Bill woke up (I was sleeping on the quilt on the floor at his bedside by then). He said he wanted to sit up in his chair in the living room. I had to remind him that I was no longer able by myself to give him the help he needed to move that far. So advanced was the illness that he was all but immobilized. I’d have to carry him. Or drag him. The first I couldn’t do; the second I wouldn’t do. He persisted. He wanted to sit in the chair and nothing else was acceptable. I tried to be as persuasive as I could, but to little effect.
In the Shadow of the Bridge Page 13