by Edmund White
I never lived on familiar terms with Sean, doubtless the reason I can still refer to him as a god even though I watched him crack up before my very eyes. He wept, producing long gleaming sheets of spit and snot that clung to his face and hands like a placenta or a pupa’s chrysalis, except his metamorphosis was not toward something lighter and more beautiful, but heavier, bloated with medicine, stunned with grief. He spent six weeks on the psycho ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, then was shipped home, fat and bewildered, to relatives in Minnesota. In my mind he’d been the powerful young man who’d rejected me and I’d wept many times a day over his defection, but to him my love had been just one more intolerable demand, on the same level as the need for good grades or the fear of ending up penniless—or gay.
If I remember Sean so well it’s because he made me suffer so much. I lay on my bed for hours and hours writhing in pain, thinking about him. I’d picture his holding me and kissing me by candlelight before the mirror; I’d masturbate; then, as the sperm dried on my hand and the candle-wax in the memory congealed, I’d start to cry. Without the piston of my fist driving it, the whole vast locomotive of my imagination stalled. I cried until I was exhausted, then I’d start to fall asleep. I’d awaken with a start, sitting up, unable to catch my breath. I was stifling. The blood pounded in my ear so loud that I couldn’t sleep on my side. I found that the pulse was louder in my left ear than in the right, so I trained myself to sleep on my right. I’d cry so long I’d become exhausted; my esophagus ached; I felt as warm and snotty as a baby—would a psychiatrist say that I cried in order to feel like a baby, that my reaction to Sean’s departure was a search for infantile comfort?
Or was that too ingenious? Perhaps I should have just accepted my loathsome dependence on him and recognized that nothing could be done with it. It couldn’t be psychologized in some redeeming or even interesting way, nor was it the cornerstone of a philosophy—or even of my own brand of folk wisdom.
I suppose all of my life has been led in the aftermath of this love; I wish he’d burned his initials into my ass, at least I’d have something to show for all that pain. I’d entered into this passion for him half-jokingly, quite aware I was playing a love-sick role. What I hadn’t bargained on was that my little self-conscious smile didn’t immunize me from the deep infection that was inexorably changing me from inside, molecule by molecule. By the time the smile began to fade my bones and ribs and inner organs had all been thoroughly invaded and reconstructed.
Love—real, violent love—makes other people impatient. Heterosexuals didn’t want to learn about the intricate domestic topography of Sodom; they preferred to draw a big X over the entire land. Anyway, all the world hates a lover. Friends are jealous, adults irritated, children unengaged, readers bored (the few I could round up to listen to my bulky manuscript). I’d trick friends into listening, not to my novel, but once again to my obsessive chatter by claiming I’d just had a startling new insight; only halfway through the same old circular story did their attentiveness surrender to frustration as they realized not one detail had been changed. With the long shot of indifference they’d say, “It just takes time, you’ll soon be over it and off and running after some new piece of trouser.” What they didn’t realize was that I felt that if my thoughts of Sean faded at all I’d be guilty of sacrilege; he was the Israel I’d promised never to forget. Memory and the repetition of our story was a way of defeating their cure-all, time.
When Sean left New York the whole city began to fade. Each skyscraper lost three floors, the taxis slowed down, the disconsolate vagrants stopped panhandling, the Hudson ran backwards, salty with tides of tears. The only thing that increased was the steam issuing from the manholes, since it was an endless exhalation of lonely desire.
My trip to Paris and the bout of hepatitis set a term to the first agony over Sean. He refused to communicate with me; it was as though he’d become a silent Cistercian. Now that I no longer had any contact with him (his grandparents, polite but firm, murmured, “He’s not allowed to speak to his New York friends,” and hung up), I began to elaborate his life, our life, in my novel. His blood turned into ink, his pale face became my blank page, the first three lines his deep frown. The power of this disease of love to devastate a spirit surprised me, materialist that I was. I who understood how Troy could be lost because Helen’s nose was a centimeter longer than other women’s, had a hard time comprehending this rotting away of a soul from within just because of something that wasn’t there: a lack, a refusal, a departure, silence.
Of course I had lots of explanations, all suitably self-derogatory. I had chosen Sean precisely because he was unavailable. I apparently was unable to accept homosexuality into my intimate life; if I dreamed of a man every night but awakened every morning alone in my single bed, then I was still somehow indeterminate, neutral, available for a still undecided future.
(Another part of my mind objected, “But I thought he would love me. If I’d known in advance that he wouldn’t, then I would never have suffered so much. A miracle, yes, if he’d loved me, but it was a miracle I was counting on.”)
Or I said he was like my father, a cold, unfeeling man I longed to seduce. At night when I was thirteen I would sit outside my father’s bedroom door in the darkened house, hugging my knees, and imagine entering and taking my stepmother’s place beside him, a desire I pictured so clearly that I was afraid I might find myself actually doing it. What if at last I could seduce this sleeping, snoring man, who would wake up to find my legs, not his wife’s, wrapped around his waist, his hard sex deep in my butt, the sharp dilation of surprise in his eyes quickly clouding over with pure pleasure?
(But another part of my mind objected that I didn’t want Sean to be my father—nor did I long to be his child bride but his mate, two nearly identical pairs of jeans tossed on the floor, the trouser legs intertwined.)
Or I said that as a writer I would find a live-in lover too close for comfort. Didn’t writers prefer to suffer alone and conjure up the cruelly absent beloved? Writers needed time out to work up their stories. Certainly I needed room and time to elaborate all the ways in which I was not loved, all the happy days together we’d missed out on due to that time I’d pressured him to say what he really felt, or that time I’d taken his hand on the Staten Island ferry deck, embarrassed him and lost all the ground I’d gained by my week of calculated indifference. Love and childhood are the writer’s two great themes because they are the only seasons during which every object takes on a glow throbbing with meaning. A song can evoke tears; a balding teddy bear, with its curious woody smell (could it be stuffed with pine chips?), recalls solitary hours with such poignancy that the whole mental stage is plunged into a new, queer light. I was almost thirty but I was marinated in suffering as acrid as that I’d distilled during my lonely, desperate childhood. Sex and love with Sean had seemed a way out of that isolation; when he’d abandoned me I was left holding the dirty bag of my own unworthiness.
But it was all much simpler than that: ever since I was a kid I’d wanted someone beautiful to belong to me, a man who had beautiful hair, teeth, hands, skin, loins, bones, a beautiful way of walking pigeon-toed, of lifting a spoon seriously, simply to his lips, of scratching his neck, of pissing a full, hard stream, of plunging off a diving board forthright, without fear, of sleeping, one hand cast back, someone with full, plush lips, who had a fine dusting of gold hairs on his stomach and longer, darker, silkier hairs around his scrotum, whose leg muscles were flat and suggested even in repose the power to hold, to clasp, whose skin was warm to the touch as a clay pot left out in the sun, someone so beautiful he’d never had anything but romantic sex, someone who’d never made the first move, whose palms were callused and neck burned from manual labor, someone whose breath was sweet and so warm it fogged up the window on his side of the car, while the other passengers sat beside shamefully clear glass, someone who knew instinctively how to turn up the collar of his blue cashmere coat or to leave his white cotto
n pajamas unbuttoned to show his scabbard-flat chest, someone blessed with a driving intellectual curiosity so that he’d never had much interest in his own beauty, whose hair was as heavy, thick and straight as a cord that separates a masterpiece from the public.
TODAY when I came back to our apartment (I must learn to say “my” apartment, now that Brice is dead), I had a message on my machine to call James Assatly, a former student of mine who lives in Boston. He was high on morphine, he said the CMV had made him blind and now was in his spinal cord and was slowly paralyzing him.
“I’ve stopped eating or taking Acyclovir,” he said. “It’s my way of bowing out without committing suicide. I’ve met a priest, Father Phil, who’s going to bury me. I was feeling terribly isolated until I met Father Phil, who told me it’s my church, I must not forget it belongs to me, too, and that I have a right to be buried beside my family.”
He thanked me for making his last two years such a whirlwind, though I felt bad I’d not been able to convince an editor to publish his book. I told him we all admired him for showing such courage and stoicism and gaiety. “Really?” he asked, surprised. “Well, that’s what I tried to do.”
Then we said good-bye and we assured each other that we loved each other. Just two years ago we’d gotten stoned one afternoon in his apartment and I’d put the make on him but he’d turned me down.
Now he said, “I do love you. I’ve always felt bad about that time.” I told him it wasn’t important. Anyway, last spring, when his nose was swollen and black with Kaposi’s sarcoma he’d already said to me, “Now I know what it’s like to be turned down. I’m so sorry I did that to you.” He always had a tough, cool air about him; perhaps because he’d grown up poor, half-Irish, half-Syrian, he’d learned not to ask anyone for anything. Yet he asked me just now to write something to be read beside his grave.
I met a guy named—well, I’ll call him Rod, though I’m tempted to use his real name since he might be dead now and his ghost would appreciate a “mention” (as they say in gossip columns).
Rod lived on Bleecker Street with a girl and a dog. He had been a psychology graduate student at Columbia who’d been pushed out of the program after he said in a group therapy practice session that he was homosexual. They’d all been encouraged to be as frank as possible, but homosexuality was considered a perversion, oral aggressive, possibly sadomasochistic, definitely infantile, that would necessarily occlude the objectivity of a future psychotherapist. He had to go, though the program director never admitted that homosexuality as such had been the disabling cause. No, he was told, it was more a matter of a general lack of seriousness, of professionalism…. Now Rod was making light boxes, which he assured me would become the art form of the future, entirely replacing painting. Back then people were always insisting that the novel was dead, the theater outmoded, easel painting washed up, human nature about to be radically revamped. We read William Burroughs’ collage novels, eyes dutifully scanning page after page of repetitious, broken sentences. We saw group gropes of naked youngsters re-enacting Bacchic rites based on Greek tragedies, though denuded of the exalted language. Language was suspect, protest imperative, the tribe tyrannical, the author dying. Warhol had made the transition from canvas to screen. We watched hours and hours of his home movies, certain that the boredom was functioning to break down our conscious resistance, considered a bad thing. Of course the real fun was the audiences, the bits of mirror and velvet, the leg-of-mutton sleeves and bellbottoms, the flowing hair and curling cannabis smoke, for we were only slowly becoming aware that we constituted a new generation unlike any other before us in history.
After I had sex with Rod on the fold-out couch bed, his dog came bounding in and licked our milky stomachs clean. Today even a drop of sperm is rich with death, a mortal culture, but then porno magazines referred to it as a “soothing cream” and we liked to taste it, swallow it, smell it, rub it over our cheeks and murmur with a smile, “The fountain of youth.” If someone had a big cock we called it “The Dick of Death,” an expression no one would dare use today.
Adult men—all those aggressive, out-of-shape, heavy-breathing heterosexuals—might carry syphilis or at least gonorrhea in their bodies, we thought, contracted through their drunken, half-hard thrusting, the toil of making money, war, babies. But we were big, bucolic gay boys, and our brief transactions were redolent of summer camp, irresponsible as a groan heard in a shadowy forest or as transfiguring as the mystery of light glowing on a lake glimpsed through a rood-screen of leaves. We were engaged in a game of touch-tag far removed from the possibility of giving—or taking—a life.
Rod had a party at the end of every month, to which he invited the tricks he’d turned during the preceding thirty days. He threw all their numbers in a fishbowl and plucked them out and rang them up every fourth Saturday. Often they didn’t remember him or he them. It was his benevolent idea of society, which, as so often happens in America, was mixed up with an inclination toward charity. All thirty guys would stand around his small apartment and scowl at each other, appalled to observe the range of Rod’s erotic taste: black and white, short and tall, smooth-skinned and hairy, young and not quite so young, butch and twinky.
People kept entering. The front door led directly into the kitchen with its ratty linoleum floor and the tub in the center of the room covered for the moment with a board that served as a table to hold all the bottles of rot-gut wine the guests had brought. I’d offered a straw-covered quart of Chianti; my year of post-hepatitis sobriety had recently come to a reeling, jubilatory end.
Just beyond was the small living room, nearly filled by the bed when it was opened out though now it had contracted back into itself, a couch on which were seated a handsome young man and woman murmuring to each other in French. He had a red scarf tied around his left biceps, a romantic touch at odds with his glinting granny glasses. She wore nylons sparkling with silver chips. She was Black: her features small as an Ethiopian’s.
The only other woman present was Penelope, Rod’s roommate, a dainty little thing tottering by on very high heels and swaddled in a tight miniskirt. Her top had trailing lace sleeves. She was consoling Rod for some slight he’d suffered. Her tone was tinged with irony but the words were sympathetic, the compromise of a woman embarrassed to baby her lover in front of strangers and who tries to suggest this humiliating necessity may be just a game.
I swayed, bemused and a bit drunk, before the French couple. “Excuse me, do you speak English?”
“Of course,” the young man said, “we’re Americans. We just speak French to each other because that’s what we’re studying.” He had a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, not the bottle brush popular then, and a long, rangy body, intelligent eyes, a languid manner and a studied smile. Everything about him was studied, the work of someone who’d been friendless and unloved as a child and who now, with the zeal of a good student, has set about mastering all the social skills. I recognized the game; I was playing it, though I suspected I’d started my lessons at an earlier age.
“Are you a Southerner?” I asked.
“A Southerner?” he repeated, as though examining something dubious at the end of a fork.
His wife was nodding vigorously and saying in a barely audible aside, “He certainly seems to have diagnosed the case….”
We introduced ourselves. He was Butler, she Lynne. The word “brilliant” kept igniting the light box of my head—her brilliant smile, his brilliant glasses, her brilliant stockings, their intellectual brilliance. Lynne had the long neck and strong calves of a dancer, and the slightly obscene turnout; Butler folded back like the couch into himself, calm, poised, even elegant. His manner was lordly but intended to be accessible, like that of an Oriental despot vacationing at Saint-Tropez with just one wife. But if he appeared as though he were about to extend his beautiful large hand to be kissed, his facial expressions alternated complacence with a nervous critique of everything going on around him.
He seemed to have acquired
his expectations and standards from nineteenth-century novels; he was repeatedly shocked by the impertinence or unseemliness of the Village gay guys milling around us, who’d had a few drinks and were now talking loudly, at once members of rival gangs and potential lovers. They weren’t writers or even readers—they were just guys hoping to get laid on a Saturday night. Two fellows were even groping each other in the doorway and a small freckled hand had lifted a T-shirt to stroke a well turned brown waist. Was Butler really shocked by this tipsy, amorous rough-housing, or was he anticipating Lynne’s reaction in order to defuse it? Why had he brought his wife to a gay party?
Our dainty hostess kept casting bemused glances our way as an adorably sulky Rod stretched out on the floor and buried his unkempt head in her lap. He’d drunk too much wine and was apparently wounded that two of the days, or dates, in last month’s very rich calendar were merging in the bedroom, which Rod pretended was a violation of house rules, although the only rule it broke was his heart—or vanity. The dog was pulling on his shoe laces. Penelope crooned and whispered reassuring things to him—and soon enough was free to slip out from under the burden of his sleeping, smiling head.
She made her way over to us. “You’re certainly the most fascinating group here,” she said with a smile that projected good will and conveyed curiosity. Her articulation was perfect, like that of a school librarian, but I had the impression she wouldn’t have blurred her speech even if she’d known it was grating since everything about her—her cool, ironic regard, her high heels and hair, her somewhat Victorian fashion sense crossed with the reigning look of the bug-eyed, bedraggled moppet—everything seemed born out of a complex fantasy of her own devising rather than out of a desire to please or follow fads. Her self-presentation was as entranced and impregnable as someone else’s erotic scenario.