White Girls
Page 7
Once, as another kind of joke, the always formally attired and layered SL—being colored, clothes were his other complicated language; trying to be “normal,” or white for a minute, I complained to him at one point about the layers black men wore, even in the summer, and he said: Son, we didn’t wear bikinis in the desert—put on a pair of Mrs. Vreeland’s blue jeans and walked around a parking lot. On Mrs. Vreeland’s videotape of the occasion, you can hear her husky laugh. But the truth is we were both enthralled by SL’s irreducible visual sense and language. There was nothing like it. We tried to imitate his photographs when he gave us cameras or lent us his own. We tried to sport hats as jauntily as he did, but our heads seemed to miss the point. We tried to go to as many movies as he did, but fell asleep in them. We tried to do with as little sleep as SL seemed to live off, but had to dream and be hurt or happy in our dreams. We tried to speak with his authority, but could only manage to blow baby bubbles. Once, by way of illustrating Mrs. Vreeland’s frustration and fascination with SL’s powerful linguistics (he enjoyed frightening people with his speech, sometimes, or putting them to sleep), SL told me that they were having an argument and he used a word she didn’t know and she said so. He suggested she look it up in the dictionary and she cried: You have all the dictionaries! In 1988 and 1989 and 1990, as their love grew—they didn’t officially break up until Mrs. Vreeland, per her usual program, found someone else in the mid-nineties; in any case, none of us broke up, really, until 2007, when she died; I haven’t seen SL in a long time now, but he never broke up with her, even after she died; I knew there was no way he couldn’t identify with her until the end, and beyond: she was a white girl—my happiness for their fate and in their fate was often marred by the way they sounded. For a time, their language was indistinguishable; they used the same words and phrases—“Did that feel well?”; “Yikes”; “I love you”—that drove me mad: they were becoming twins. Did that preclude my twinship with SL? My twinship with Mrs. Vreeland? It was maybe a year or two after they got together, and Mrs. Vreeland and I went to a record store near her home to ask after a recent release. We were living in an rpm world then. And if this was 1989, we were probably looking for De La Soul’s first album, 3 Feet High and Rising. Or if it was 1991, we were probably looking for De La Soul’s second album, De La Soul Is Dead, because without articulating it, we loved those boys best because of their SL-like language, particularly when, on 1989’s “D.A.I.S.Y. Age,” we heard this:
This is Posdnuos
The president of a paragraph
Paragraph, president
President preachin’ ’bout the on-tech
Known for the new step
Stop and take a bow...
Fill you with my vocab
Hope you have a spoon...
We ate any version of SL up. At the store, and for no apparent reason, a group of teenage boys of color, three or four at the most, started to circle me. I didn’t feel threatened so much as I felt the energy of an exchange with them I didn’t understand; they were animals responding to another animal while Mrs. Vreeland, a white girl, stood outside the circle. The whole event was profound, inexplicable, and silent. Afterward, as Mrs. Vreeland related the experience to SL on the phone, I felt myself in her: those boys looked at me not as one of their own, but as something as familiar and foreign as a white girl. And in terms of how people responded to us—they either wanted to fuck or fight us, someone said—Mrs. Vreeland and I were the same and even though I thought it was impossible for SL to love us the same, he did until he didn’t.
I was away on a reporting trip in 2006 when Mrs. Vreeland’s body started to fail her. She was as conscious of her body as she was fearful of it; in short, she was a woman. In the letter she wrote me about her condition—tumors, she would not say cancer, she would cure it all homeopathically, homeopathic medicine was her faith—she sounded just like SL in his letters; even though they hadn’t been together in about eight years when Mrs. Vreeland left to find another house, and leave her suitcase someplace else, the body of his language was in her. Which was the feeling I had when they were together: they were more themselves together than they were apart. They were twins. And, as such, SL was equally interested in Mrs. Vreeland’s language. Indeed, he loved her literal transcriptions. He had her write words out on pieces of paper and he then put those pieces of paper in his films, and in his photographs. Looking at Jean-Michel’s paintings, SL swore he saw Mrs. Vreeland’s distinctive handwriting in some of the work. I could believe it. Just because she was SL’s twin doesn’t mean she hadn’t been someone else’s.
In 1981 Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Arroz Con Pollo, a big picture, dominated by yellow and white. The artist made the work when he and Mrs. Vreeland took a holiday together in Puerto Rico, she had to pull the canvas in off the balcony of their rented house because after Jean finished it he left it outdoors, and it began to rain. I love art the artist wouldn’t mind getting disappeared. But Arroz Con Pollo exists still; it’s outlived both subject and artist. The painting is a kind of double portrait about aesthetic and political twinship; both Jean and Mrs. Vreeland were Projection A’s: Jean was a black man in America, let alone the primarily white art world, and Mrs. Vreeland was interested in men of color as much as “ordinary” white girls pursued white men with real power. It was only recently that I noticed in the painting that Mrs. Vreeland is baking a chicken. Later the same year—the year she went to Puerto Rico—Mrs. Vreeland spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. This was after she left her job at the bar, and after that Dutchman left New York to return to Amsterdam. It was 1981 and I was living with relatives in Brooklyn, ostensibly finishing college, but mostly what I was doing was mourning a first love that wasn’t really love, which turned out to be the only kind of love I knew for a number of years. The phone rang, and everything changed; Mrs. Vreeland was on the line. Why not come to Martha’s Vineyard? Why sit there more or less by yourself? The sky here is ooggboogasensationalughalicDe-Kooning! And unlike myself because she was unlike anyone else and sometimes one is enough of a person, I found myself on a boat within a few days after her call and then there she was on the other end of that journey wearing a white shift, her dark hair darker still under her straw hat; the shadows made her face dark but not her arms, and they were reaching up and up and everything was amazing! Amazing! Amazing! And I got off the boat and she said, by way of greeting: Come on, let’s go to the supermarket and get a chicken.
Mrs. Vreeland didn’t love white girls. And she let a colored girl live in part because she was colored. But, as a rule, Mrs. Vreeland spent her time with boys, most of whom I did not like in part because they were the gatekeepers at the arsenal of culture that would not let SL in. But perhaps gatekeeper is too strong or butch a word. Handbag carriers standing near the arsenal of culture? With no talent of their own save a talent for survival, those boys, some white and some black, became the nastier version of their female superiors, a variation on this old, tired theme: We hate white girls because we are white girls and that’s what white girls do. That Mrs. Vreeland lived somewhere in that milieu let alone mind-set was a great sadness to SL and me, and to our we. But whereas SL, the unreconstructed nineteen-seventies lesbian, would trudge further into Mrs. Vreeland’s consciousness around her various female-related “issues,” while calling her on her shit and she on his, it was a marriage—once I lived in a perpetual state of disbelief: How could one be a white girl and hate it? Wasn’t she—whoever she was—everything the world saw and wanted? When I was in high school I fell in love with a white girl. Her name was Marie. She wasn’t technically white—her mother was Puerto Rican and her father Jewish—but she looked the part: camellia-white skin and blond hair. Looking back, I think of the Dorothy Parker line “the assisted gold of her hair” when recalling Marie’s beauty. And then I think of Prince and his love of Dorothy Parker, another white girl, in his 1987 song “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”: “Dorothy was a waitress on the promenade. / She worked the night shift. /
Dishwater blond, tall and fine, / she got a lot of tips... / (Dorothy Parker was cool).” Marie wasn’t tall but she was fine. We met in our “specialized” arts high school in 1974 (we graduated in 1977). At that school we studied acting. Reading a script, Marie’s skin would look translucent; as she read, she was becoming porous, letting the character in, whereas I could never find myself in another character; I liked to improvise, which was a form of writing. Marie wrote with her body.
She was my first real we, or my first real we, desire. My heart was always so filled to bursting with love for her. Would she leave me? She lived in a big building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her father was a celebrity of sorts: he broadcast the news on a local television station; Marie adored him. Her relationship with her mother was somewhat more complicated; Marie wasn’t free of the feelings Mrs. Vreeland had toward other women. What I saw: Marie’s very beautiful and hardworking mother, an excellent social worker who was prone to weeping, and to laughter.
Because Marie saw herself in her mother she couldn’t see who her mother was, Marie made herself a character, the eldest of four kids with a commanding presence and assisted golden hair who could create drama just by sitting down at the dinner table and, oh, the tears. She came from a family of women—the same family I came from, with one less kid. After Marie was born, in 1960, her mother had two other girls, and then, finally, a boy of great beauty. Marie lied to get what she wanted in the midst of all those sibling limbs and bodies. One of her lies included pretending she was an only child. This was easy enough since she was the only one who had her own room in that long, messy, not sprawling and delicious-smelling apartment. Marie was a child of privilege because she felt that was the least she was entitled to. She alone could charge makeup at the family drugstore. I felt so much about her. She wore ropes of white beads a Santeria had given her. In her room: flickering candles, prayers for the dead, Santeria-blessed waters. Sometimes she sprinkled the waters on me. She made my soul happen. In the movie of my life, just out from SL productions, she could have been cast as one of the obeah women I had grown up with if audiences weren’t so narrow, seeing white for white, even when that person’s feeling colored. Marie felt every cell of her Jewishness, and every cell of her Rican. Her family celebrated Passover, and I with them. After someone opened the door for Elijah, Marie’s mother would serve a pork roast.
* * *
Outside her apartment building on a summer’s day in 1976 or 1977 or 1975, Marie smoked a Newport. Her white-blond hair, styled to look like Dorothy Hamill’s, was made whiter in the white sunlight. In that world, Marie’s whiteness was a kind of decoy. The Puerto Rican and Dominican men who leaned against their cars that lined the avenue in front of her apartment building, listening to merengue, to salsa, to Latin disco, waited for her to walk by so they could make rude comments in Spanish as she passed. And those same men fake fainted against their cars when she said, flashing her flat Jewish ass, something equally rude in boriqua Spanish. Did I love her or want to be her? Is there a difference?
What Wallace Stevens taught us in “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”: the muse is as open to suggestion as the artist who learns from the muse’s receptivity, her no-big-deal willingness to be available to whatever you, the artist, might feel. (I wonder if SL felt this about me. I certainly felt it about him.) The first writing I ever did for an actress was for Marie. It was a play, very much influenced by Jane Bowles’s piece about two sister puppets, “A Quarrelling Pair.” In my play, a brother and sister sat in separate rooms and expressed their innermost thoughts and feelings about the other to the audience. The part I concentrated on most, or the part I loved best in that script, was the sister’s. She was Marie—her hopes, fears, judgments—but as seen by someone else. Not to dwell too long here in the thick woods of metaphor-land, but would my love for Marie have existed had she and other white girls not existed, and had they existed would I have learned what I knew about love by the time I met SL, who had loved and been disgraced by and fed and nurtured and disgraced and loved white girls? They were everywhere. We thought the world of Diane Keaton in the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and I especially identified with her when her character asks the married professor she’s in love with why he doesn’t like her anymore, was her sex too rough, or too soft, did she use the wrong deodorant, what was it? And I especially identified with Diane Keaton in that role (and so many others!) when, looking for love, she took a backseat to the professor’s wife and let him make a mess of her body with his nonlove, and then abandoned her, unceremoniously. I knew something about that, and the yearning she felt for him, and I understood, too, the hatred and despair she felt for wanting, a despair so great that Teresa gets her tubes tied, no future generations of this, what was the point of hoping? Taking the subway back to Brooklyn, a day or two days spent on the Upper West Side with Marie—I could not smell her enough; eventually my mother would call, insisting I come home and attend to her own life, oh, I meant to write mine, come home and attend to my life, we were that close, twins after a fashion—I’d read what mattered to me then: Paule Marshall, the Village Voice, J. R. Ackerley. As I read, three or more things filled me up at the same time: the subway rattle and lights—the lights felt like another set of sounds, rising up, then fading—before going on to someplace else—and then there was the book or newspaper story I was reading, and then the memory of being close to Marie’s body. I wanted her more than anything; her whiteness or, more accurately, her misleading whiteness—the blond mistaken for a gringo by Latin men; the Jewish girl mistaken for a shiksa by Jewish men; a white girl mistaken for a white girl in my colored world—felt not unlike myself and not like myself all at the same time. Marie’s visual outsiderness was the corollary to how freaked she felt in the world, and even though it never occurred to me then that what I looked like let alone felt like might incite something more than catcalls, I couldn’t see it. I saw the subway lights, and the words on the page, and what Marie went through in the world, but not my I. She—whoever she was at that time and later—was more important. SL was the same way, but to an even more dramatic degree; part of his art was his Negro self-abnegation. Or so it seemed to me, since others said the same thing about me. Once, as we were walking down a street on the Lower East Side, we thought it might be fun to stop by the home of a woman SL was seeing. This was in 1999 or so, we were walkers in the city, especially at night when the world’s ills got mixed up with darkness, and we couldn’t see the world very well and it couldn’t see us so couldn’t hurt us very well. We got to the woman’s house late, around midnight, but she wasn’t alone, she was in bed with another man, and instead of getting angry about this, SL sat down and had a measured and sweet conversation with them both. Walking away from that scene, I berated SL: Why did he do that? Why didn’t he lay those guys out with his exceptional tongue? Why didn’t he claim that white girl as his own? Nothing had ever been his, including my unconditional friendship. As I continued to berate him, SL went more and more silent; I knew he would not and could not take what I considered his—that white girl—because to his heart that would mean there was the possibility that people were to have and to hold, the marrying kind, and that would mean he was complicit in that, that he wanted to be a wife because he wanted to be a husband, a coupling that could, conceivably, lead to a child, one who, like his father before him, would stand on European soil considering the worms while his parents fought, like two howlers barking at the moon. SL couldn’t bear to imagine any of that, and as my stupid language of possession rose in the black-man dark of night, SL looked like every white boy, or nearly every white boy I had ever loved because they weren’t me, they were white boys, and different, among other things. Catching a glimpse of SL at my side, he looked like Andy, an elementary-school friend who had black hair and pale skin. I loved looking at him, particularly during nap time, oh, the flush of his cheek, that boy sleeping spittle. Then there was Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Once, SL said I
looked like Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched. Given SL’s proclivities, I considered this a compliment.) More love: Timothy Bottoms in The Last Picture Show, particularly in that film’s final moments, when he returns to the woman he’s loved and left once before and she can’t believe it, he’s turned up again, why did he leave, did he hate her because she was old and ugly? Timothy Bottoms’s character says nothing as his face says it all: this is life, this is resignation. And who could forget Bud Cort in Harold and Maude, but especially toward the end when, after Harold learns Maude’s died, the actor turns away from the camera and faces a wall. Has any contemporary male performer expressed grief more beautifully? Probably Robert Downey Jr. in almost anything.
* * *
I berated SL about his girl that night-thick night because that’s what twins do, we were just the same: I could never claim anyone outright. At fourteen, at thirty, at forty, I felt I didn’t have the right to say I treasured Marie most, or SL, or Mrs. Vreeland, or the boy they almost put in a garbage bag because, swear to God, it never occurred to me that I was an I in Marie’s presence. Her presence—that was the thing. SL and Mrs. Vreeland’s presence—that was the thing. But human beings are put on God’s green earth for at least one reason: to consume and be taken up and consume other people. (SL said it best when he said, early on in our friendship: What is there but other people?) What kept me from joining the reapers? Not being a white girl, a black man, a Chinese longshoreman? To claim my object of choice with a kiss, or a hand on a thigh during a film’s end credits, was impossible. During the Marie years and for some time after, I looked at physical love like an anorexic looking at food: I did not understand how to consume it while I wanted nothing more than to consume it. Like everyone else, I required love’s nutrients—its touch—but didn’t that spoil love? To put one’s body in it? To not claim it—to not grab it by the short of the hair, or by its wit—was, to this Simone Weil of the ghetto at least, the greater good: why could we not rise up out of the world of bodies? Rise up and be holy, holy, holy, in the oneness of love. “I love and I must,” Purcell wrote. By the time I met SL, I still retained some of this attitude. And it killed him. After all, he had grown up with his parents. But my resistance to my I had something to do with the times as well—“I” was a game I would not play. SL and I met during the heyday of racial and gender politics, when black women with bad hairdos or turbans were telling us how he felt, and dwarves with splintered toenails were telling us how they felt, and the world was full of complaint about dead white men, all masquerading as “practice,” or “conversation.” That was the fashion. But SL saw that shit for what it was: shit. Just pitiful, egomaniacal folk trying to get more: more stage time, more TV time, more time with publishers. The noise of the marginal and the marginalized rising up because they believed what white people had to say about them in the first place. The fact that they were rising up for a primarily white audience—the gatekeepers were opening the doors, but just a smidge—was especially so. For a while, I refused to accept SL’s point of view. All I heard in that rising up was that we were all alone until one or two of us wasn’t. But that was my problem. As I’ve said before, for a long time I felt every black woman writer should be my sister, and every gay black male artist should be my brother. Was the colored world not my twin? It killed SL to watch me try to make those feelings true for other people. (SL was, in effect, a European, and didn’t have such blatant feelings about anyone, let alone black people. In any case, SL felt that, in his life, white people had been kinder to him than most blacks. Upon hearing that, I wanted to ask: Had I not been nicer to him than any white woman? But I didn’t. I was always so desperate for his approval I feared contradicting him most of the time, but sometimes there was anger there because I didn’t, and sometimes there was anger on his part, too, because I did. But being colored, neither of us could admit any of this.)