Von Slyke shook my hand, simultaneously bussed my cheek and shoved me into the car, before scurrying off into the house.
I’d driven halfway back to UCLA when I looked at the set of keys in my hand and realized what had happened: these were the keys to Damon Von Slyke’s house. I was in.
‘… so, you see, in “The Yellow Room”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was doing more than writing a psychological tale of a nervous housewife’s breakdown, she was prying open a dialogue about the place of women in American life that was already an issue in her own day.’
The seating in the classroom was arranged so it faced west. I could see over the twenty-two heads to where, from this second-story window in Royce Hall I had an unobstructed view across campus split by a half-dozen verticals from sixty-five-foot cypress trees planted years before, flanking the terrace and partly hiding Drake Stadium. It was a breezy, lazy summer morning, the air flavored by salt from beaches only a few miles away, where I was certain more than one of my listeners would be headed after class.
I went on: ‘Let’s remember that this story was written in the years before the so-called Great War, during the height of the Suffragette Movement, and that the central focus of these early groups was obtaining the right of women to vote. The deeper problems of a woman’s place and worth and future in our society would require another half-century to come to the forefront again. When we read Jewett, or Edith Wharton or Willa Cather, even Dorothy Parker and Pearl Buck, always keep this underlying feminist emphasis in mind as contextual background.’
During the last speech there was a noticeable if almost subterranean shifting of sneakers and sandal soles against the wooden floor. Only a half-hour in the faculty lounge the day before classes had begun confirmed what I’d heard from several grad students: in previous summer sessions the course I’d taken over had been considered a ‘cinch’. Professor Fusumi was known as a sweet man who loved American literature and didn’t believe in failing grades. He usually held the class in the nearby Rolfe Hall auditorium, where some sixty to seventy-five students would spread out in the dimly lighted fan-shaped room to nap, work crossword puzzles and do other homework. Word had gotten out late that Fusumi had been forced to return to Okinawa to care for a dying father, and that an upstart named Ohrenstedt had taken over. Despite that lateness, the class was one-third its normal size and I’d moved it upstairs, where I could see the students and where they’d have to remain awake. It wasn’t lost on me that at least a quarter of the faces belonged to upper-class jocks so out of the loop they were now stuck with a course where they’d have to actually read. Half of the rest looked like English or language majors who’d already read much of what we would discuss, and the remainder were out-of-department with a passing interest in books. Naturally, it was the jocks scattered around the room that I went out of my way to provoke.
‘Next class we’ll be discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Please have it read by Friday. Any questions? Yes … bear with me, I’ll learn all of your names soon, I promise,’ I said, checking the seating chart. ‘Mr Rice, is it?’ Here I was play-acting. I’d noticed him from the minute he’d walked into the class a week before – a rugby player’s lean body, alternating knots of muscles and planes of long bones, an undeniable physical presence in his ’80s polo shirts and overwashed jams, topped by a square head, brooding unshaven face, fine facial features focussed on his dark eyes, abundant ebony eyelashes and bushy eyebrows, the whole framed by the current trend: an overgrown helmet of jet-black hair. ‘Raymond Rice?’
‘It’s this reading list you gave out.’
‘What about it?’
‘You said that we’ve got to choose one of the authors to do a term paper on.’
That in itself must have been a horrible surprise to him and the other jocks.
‘You’ll also need to have read at least one author from each page of that list to discuss on the written-essay portion of your final exam …’ I added, introducing yet more future horrors.
‘Right!’ he said, and while big basketball-playing David Ben-Torres in the back row let some books fall to the floor in undisguised surprise and disgust at this new turn of events, Rice gamely went on, ‘Well, what I wanted to ask was, and I don’t know if I was the only one who noticed it, but how come all of the last page of the list, the last two decades of the twentieth century, it’s all … well, lesbian or gay writers?’
‘Will anyone address that?’ I asked. And seeing a hand raised in the same lateral row as Rice, ‘Ms Agosian?’
‘The lion’s share of the books on the last page of the list were written by members of a group called the Purple Circle, which more or less created and perfected gay literature between 1975 and the second millennium,’ she said in a most professorial manner.
Her polished delivery clashed with her appearance, which was pure Neo-Valley Girl. Given her tanned-to-perfection olive skin and undyed-looking cornsilk blond hair worn in a single off-the-shoulder pigtail, she seemed to be third-generation Armenian and something else, Danish or Dutch perhaps, with voluptuous hips and small breasts barely restrained within a trendy faux-foil parachute outfit: not pretty, but sexy.
‘In English One,’ she added, ‘our professor said the Purple Circle is considered to be a major crystallization of fin-de-siècle American lit, with far-reaching implications for our time.’
‘Thank you, Ms. Agosian. If you’ll recall, Mr Rice, the subtitle of this course is “The Outsider as Insider”. Each author we’ll be reading and discussing represents a gender, ethnic, racial or geographic minority that produced a substantial body of its own literature, which in turn illuminated all American life and mores. Women, African and Asian-Americans, Southerners –’
‘What about Fitzgerald?’ Rice refused to stay put. ‘We’re reading him next and he wasn’t a minority writer.’
Pamela was raising her hand, so I simply pointed to her and she took over. ‘From our day and distance, we think of Fitzgerald as part of the ruling hegemony, a white male Midwesterner. But in his own day he was an outsider, barely assimilated out of Irish immigrant status, and only by his father’s self-made wealth and his education at Princeton.’
I watched if that stuck in Rice’s Irish-American craw.
‘Maybe so,’ Rice argued back at her, pleasing me by his tenacity, ‘but Fitzgerald didn’t write about Irish immigrants living in slums. He wrote about people who lived in big houses, worked as stockbrokers and had lots of money.’
‘Ms Agosian?’ I asked.
‘It’s true that Fitzgerald mostly wrote about what he considered to be his audience but what many critics believe is his greatest literary creation, the character of Jay Gatsby, breaks the mold. Gatsby is an immigrant, Jay Gatz, born in Eastern Europe.’
‘He’s still not an Irish immigrant,’ Rice insisted.
‘No,’ she countered, ‘but Fitzgerald suggests he might be Jewish: the ultimate American outsider of the time.’
‘Yeah, but –’
I interrupted. ‘In every case, Mr Rice, class, it was the outsider’s perspective that cut most deeply into the national psyche. And by the end of the last century, while much assimilation had taken place for women, Native Americans and African-Americans, lesbians and gays remained the most evidently disenfranchised group. So it is that they – and especially their leading edge, the Purple Circle -produced the books many of us turn to today. Aaron Axenfeld’s Second Star from the Right and Dominic De Petrie’s Adventures of Marty are perennial sellers, especially among teens, not only because they’re entertaining but for the depth of the questions they ask about what constitutes self-identity and the honesty of their answers. How many of you have already read them?’
More than a dozen hands were raised. ‘You see, Mr Rice …’ I let my case stand. ‘That’s why we’ll be discussing this group in some detail. I suggest you read their work …’ He’d raised his hand again, on his face I read a look of intransigence. ‘You’re not going to tell me y
ou have some reason not to read them, some religious beliefs, say, against this material, Mr Rice?’
‘No,’ he quickly replied, ‘but when my male parent saw it, he went Q-bomb on me for an LA minute, you know what I mean, asking if I was planning a transgen op and all.’
‘I condole with you, Mr Rice. But isn’t one function of a university to broaden education? If he has a problem with your reading list, your parent may address it directly to the Languages Department head and the Dean of the college. Both approved this syllabus.’
Rice, now the unwelcome center of other students’ attention, was more brooding, embarrassed.
‘Or perhaps, unlike most young men, you’re personally squeamish reading about sex?’ I mischievously suggested. And before he could answer I gave him a hand-up. ‘You realize that even the most socially heterosexualized among us can pick up tips from these books.’
The class laughed.
‘No, no.’ He retreated into his dark, closed-face handsomeness. ‘I’ll read them.’
You’d damned well better read them if you want a passing grade and a spot on next year’s team, you little bigot, I thought, but smiled serenely instead.
‘If that’s all the questions, till Friday, same time, same website,’ I added, which got an appreciative titter.
One of the lit major students, Danielle Tsieh, stopped at my desk to ask if I’d consider looking over something she’d written. In a previous term’s course on twentieth-century journalism, she’d done a paper on the relationship of the Purple Circle to the rise of the lesbian/gay media of its day, and her professor had sent it off and it had been accepted by an academic quarterly. All she had to do was expand it. Could I vet the piece before she sent it off? I said I’d be happy to.
The basketball guard, Ben-Torres, was outside waiting for me when Danielle and I exited last out of the classroom. ‘I’m holding down a job this summer,’ he said, mentioning a famous old CD shop a few blocks away on Gayley Avenue. ‘It’s the only way I can afford to take summer classes. An’ I don’t know if I’ll be able to do all the required reading.’
‘Gatsby’s only 120 pages,’ I replied. From this close up, the skin on his hollowed cheeks and below his lower lip was quite pitted. The same hormones that had raged throughout his body a few years back, causing sudden growth to his height and girth, had plagued him with acne. His eyes were surprisingly pale, gray-green, his lashes as naturally lavish as a made-up girl’s.
‘I know, but I read slow. I’m not dyslexic or anything. It’s just that it doesn’t always sink in … Last year, I read some books that could have been on your list,’ he offered, ‘I remember them, and I could go back and refresh my memory. Can I use them instead?’
‘Which books?’ I asked.
‘Capote’s In Cold Blood and the one you mentioned in class, De Petrie’s Adventures of Marty.’
‘Did you like them?’ I asked. I was guiding Ben-Torres along the corridor toward the metal-railed stairway, feeling a bit like that energetic, ambitious little tugboat in some kid’s book from my childhood trying to steer the big ocean liner into dock.
‘Well … I couldn’t say I enjoyed the book about the murders,’ Ben-Torres replied.
We so-called verbal types make fun of the seriousness of those who are less Ariel-witted and I’m usually no exception, but I felt his words were thought out, measured, not so much portentous but as though each word counted, meant something to him.
‘It was shocking. Except it explained the two guys a lot better than the movie. I read the book after I’d seen a video,’ Ben-Torres explained. ‘I’m kind of slow sometimes and I didn’t really understand what made those guys tick. I figured if I read the book … I guess that’s why you have to read …’
‘Exactly!’ I encouraged him, ‘And the other book?’ I asked, even more curious how he’d explain De Petrie’s romp through sexually liberated 1980 gay Manhattan.
‘Parts of it were funny – and weird! I thought someone should make a video of it too. But I guess it’d be too pornographic …’
‘Well … erotic. I hear it’s under film option. How did you come to select that book?’
‘My roomie here at school made me read it. He’s gay, a really neat guy, and he said it would help me understand him.’
Well, maybe, I thought. Ben-Torres’s roommate wouldn’t have been the first to use Adventures of Marty for sheer titillation, or as an aid to seduction. But I didn’t want to say so and spoil their relationship.
Just then three male students tore past us, barely touching the steps as they flew down the flight of stairs, onto the landing and out the building door. Two were screaming, ‘Motherfucker!’ at the first, who kept puffing out, ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ as he fled.
‘I’d say you’re a neat guy going out of your way like that for your roommate,’ I said, and touched Ben-Torres’s huge bicep.
He blushed, lowered his Maybelline eyes and all but said, ‘Aw, shucks.’ I could see how all of this might have driven the roommate into masturbatory fantasies, seduction plans, ecstasies of anticipation. I wondered how far an acne-pitted jock would go to keep dormitory peace.
We’d reached the bottom of the stairs and, like the superb young gentleman I now knew he was, Ben-Torres held the door open for me. As soon as we got outside, I heard familiar voices, around the corner, on the other side of the building, where another little porch was placed off another entry: Ray Rice and Pamela Agosian were there, and they were still arguing. It looked as though, inadvertently, I’d thrown them together.
‘Read what you can this term,’ I said to Ben-Torres. ‘Keep me informed on your progress. You can use either of those books on your term paper and final. I’ll keep your work situation in mind when I’m making up final grades.’
Big grin. ‘Thanks Mr Ohrenstedt,’ and he loped off down the steps and into the quad, shouting out, ‘Hey, Ray! I’m going to eat. You coming?’ to Rice, who replied, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and loped off alongside him.
Von Slyke had referred to the state of his papers as ‘an utter bedlam’, and while his favorite dictionary gave the definition of the word ‘bedlam’ as the slang contraction of Bethlehem Mercy Hospital – the early mental institution famous in eighteenth-century London – and its second definition as any very noisy and confusing place, neither of which seemed relevant, his usage of the word turned out to be, after all, not that wildly inappropriate. ‘Chaotic’, ‘baffling’, ‘bewildering’ and ‘utterly befuddling’ are a few other terms Von Slyke might also have applied, as I found out for myself and nearly to my grief.
I’d assumed that some general order prevailed among the morass of paper upon those secret chamber shelves on which Von Slyke’s manuscripts and letters and notes had been lain. Possibly because I thought that once I’d gotten past the obvious messiness of their bestrewal, I would happen upon a more basic level of internal consistency, one reflecting first the steady growth and later the efflorescence of Von Slyke’s career and reputation. All I need do, I thought (foolishly, erroneously), was dust off each box, each rubber-banded group of papers, thumb through the pages to ensure they were all the same piece of writing, align the edges, note down what was within according to those aspects detailed in the bibliographic program I was using on my PC, then rebox or reseal the papers a bit more securely.
For perhaps the first five or six batches of papers I came upon, this was exactly what happened. These works represented the early years of Von Slyke’s career, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was first living in Manhattan, fresh from college in the Midwest. He’d been young, attractive, if photos are to be believed, at times slender, at others tanned and somewhat muscular. After flailing about a few years in part-time occupations and freelance work of low pay and no future, he’d secured a full-time job: ‘trainee’ as an insurance company statistician. But Von Slyke was already writing at least an hour every morning before work – a habit he would never entirely grow out of – as well as on weekends and vacations, penni
ng his first plays and stories.
Talented, hopeful and ambitious, young Damon was still completely closeted in his writing, but by no means in his personal life. During the first decade or so in New York he had three live-in lovers, various boyfriends and several of what he himself described as ‘physically active if emotionally hopeless’ love affairs with heterosexual yet experimentally inclined young men. (A sign of more naïvely freewheeling times, difficult to conceive of in this post-AIDS era.)
Naturally enough, since the Purple Circle hadn’t yet ‘created’ gay literature, none of Von Slyke’s personal life was reflected in the content of that first period of writing, except perhaps with the lightest of allusions, the most ambivalent of touches. As a result, Von Slyke’s first work, when it did appear in print, was welcomed with if not the proverbial open arms, then at least with semi-extended fingertips by what passed in those days for the New York literary world. (Although if one were to believe the unsparing journals of Dominic De Petrie and the gossipy correspondence of Mitchell Leo, Von Slyke’s personal charm and ‘sucking up’ to some of those literary lights might also account for the early notice his works received.)
Those more or less orderly packets of manuscripts and papers within my purview that first week of the summer I lived in the Hollywood Hills hacienda contained what there was of what we have since come to know as Damon Von Slyke’s juvenilia: nine early stories of various lengths in at least three versions apiece, two published in small, long-discontinued literary magazines of such short life, such minuscule subscription and newsstand distribution rates that even I, who’d studied the period’s ‘little mags’ and done a paper on them for a graduate class, had only heard of one – admittedly the one in which had been published Von Slyke’s best-known early tale, ‘Fantasietta on a Sad Pierrot’. All of these early stories had then been subsequently rewritten and eventually published during the Von Slyke ‘boom’ under the not altogether inappropriate collective title, Spun Sugar.
The Book of Lies Page 5