by Edmund White
We had but one article of faith in common. We were both Socialists although of the anguished puritanical sort who waste more time on wondering whether to give alms, translate Mallarmé or kill our rich parents than on discussing concrete steps toward social justice or taking power. Butler’s parents weren’t even rich and his imaginary sacrifice of them to the revolutionary firing squad was a form of social climbing. We wanted to imagine personal sacrifices worthy of a saint and cruelty worthy of Saint-Just. China’s great Cultural Revolution, begun in 1965, thrilled us as we dimly heard echoes of it, because we liked the idea that intellectuals must endlessly examine their conscience and submit to work in the fields beside the “people,” that entity we idealized in the abstract and despised in the particular, especially the funny-smelling, hard-drinking, unsmiling, racist members of the proletariat we were meeting in New York.
WE MAY HAVE discussed the faraway Cultural Revolution; what we didn’t see was that a gay revolution was happening under our very noses. More and more gay men were telling me their stories, as though the main pressure behind cruising were narrative rather than sexual. “So many stories, so little time to tell them,” might have been a T-shirt slogan back then. The silence that had been imposed for so many centuries on homosexuals had finally been broken, and now we were all talking at once. Sometimes we’d rather talk than fuck; perhaps we fucked so that we could indulge in the pillow talk afterwards. We talked and talked about our lives and even very young men could sound as though they were ancient as they recounted their stories. “Oh, that was years and years ago,” they’d say, launching into tales about home, church, school.
Not all the stories inspired me with sympathy. One night after I left Butler’s and Lynne’s apartment I cruised a guy my age on Broadway who invited me home with him. He was tall, thick, hairy, his chest operatically wide under a straining white T-shirt, his hair wiry and long, pushed back behind his ears. He had a three-day beard. His dodgy green eyes protruded from his pale boxer’s face, itself unhealthily attractive as though he’d just nursed a bruise with a piece of raw steak.
He spoke grammatical English with a thug’s slur and in a low, resonant voice, a voice from the balls. He said, without a smile, “Warm come to my place and get furk?”
“Sure,” I said, getting hard, frightened he might be dangerous. We walked side by side, block after block, heading down toward Riverside as an old Chevy with a broken exhaust pipe and good radio putt-putted past, swirling us in richest Motown, a falling gospel wail sustained by a sudden updraft of doo-dahing. In the darkened canyons of buildings only one window on the twentieth floor released a sulfurous yellow glow, and for some reason I thought of the words “half-life,” something I imagined that rotting carbon emits. The Hudson, beyond the strip of park and the West Side Highway, exhaled a colder, damper breath into the hot night, like a trace of sweat perceived as the black stain through a blue shirt. Neither of us spoke, as though afraid to cut the sexual tension with mindless chitchat. He looked straight ahead but must have been aware I was side-swiping him at every step with another glance, calculating the flab at his waist, the heft of his hands, the girth of his calves. Was he clean? Was he a cold man who could express tenderness only in bed, or would there be no bed, just him backed up against a wall, cock jutting out of his jeans in the darkened hall, eyes squeezed shut, his mouth clamped shut when I would try to kiss him?
His apartment was in a 1920s building on Riverside overlooking the park. The rooms were all one step up and two down. There was a sitting room in a round tower lined with small beveled glass panes. The furniture was heavy and dark, heat-cracked leather club chairs, a roll-top oak desk, a frayed Oriental rug, a brass reading lamp with a green glass shade and, as soon as he’d poured us a whiskey each in a crystal tumbler, there was a contralto voice over all the hidden speakers in the six or seven rooms, a voice as ambiguous as a countertenor’s but its opposite, for if a countertenor was neutered she was as fully gendered as an angel, consolation and authority joined in one voice.
At first I thought he must be a guest in the apartment of a much older professor, this place with its thousands of serious shelved books, the volume of Aristotle on the work table open to the Nicomachean Ethics, the voice on the sound system singing Handel with a pathos that seemed more noble because not quite human. I pictured the pained open mouths and tearful closed eyes of angels in a Bellini entombment as small hands lower into the ground the cadaver with its old, dark wounds in the hands and skinny side.
But then he started to tell me everything about his life. He’d been the last child in a poor family of nine. He’d grown up in western Pennsylvania, where his father worked in a filling station repairing cars. “I was intelligent,” he said, “but I couldn’t think because I didn’t know any words. Middle-class people like you have no idea, but with a minuscule vocabulary it’s as though you’re trying to pick up blobs of mercury with tweezers.” That he knew I was middle class seemed either dismissive or clinical; that one had a class identity at all seemed to me, an American, novel and threatening, for though I was a Socialist my principles could be applied only to other people. I myself was a pulsing, energized vacuum, I was an Artist, all potential, a capability entirely negative, a field of dangerously unattached and whirling neutrons.
He’d moved to New York, lived in the streets, turned tricks and one day hustled a guy who turned out to be a Columbia professor. “He seemed to recognize I was bright. Anyway he moved me in and started to teach me everything he knew at a breakneck pace—German, history, Hegel, Freud, Marx. Into two years I was able to compress ten years’ worth of study.”
He said that those two years had been the most exalted of his life. He’d been the wolf child, his teacher the Enlightenment philosopher, and I pictured the bedroom light gleaming on the student’s fangs, the professor’s well kept hands tangled in the facial fur as he whispered wisdom into one cocked ear.
Throughout those two years, recordings of this contralto singer had played night and day. “I came to think of her as my guardian angel, this singer, entering me with that penetrating voice. There is something sorrowful about that voice, not the Virgin Mary’s lachrymose compassion but the tragic realism of …” He smiled. “Of Brünnhilde. Doesn’t she sound like a warrior?” He told me he became obsessed by her. “I read a little book of tributes by various conductors and soloists and friends that had been put together after her early death—she’d died of throat cancer.” He found out that she had a twin sister whom she’d always lived with. “They were inseparable and she was serene all her life, almost saintly, except for one brief period of six months when she was married. Then she was a bitch. She cried all the time, seemed always to be on the rag. Finally she left her husband and went back to her sister and resumed a sort of unearthly gentleness, even during her horrible last illness, a gentleness so unassailable that as I lay here night after night smoking joints I started to dream up certain things about her. I realized that she and her sister must have been lovers.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked.
His powerful hand and thick legs were under the warm light shed by the lamp beside him but his face was eerie in the green halo cast by the glass shade. I felt a delicate unspoken decision was being taken: the more he told me about his life the less likely it was I was going to get fucked. We might end up cuddling like brothers but the mystery that goaded his sexual nastiness was being dissipated word by every word. “Figure? Well, I figure,” he said, swiveling the floor lamp away from him so that now his entire body was subaqueous, “I figure that the only way somebody can be so saintly is if she has no needs, no emotional needs, no needs for anyone outside the closed circuit she and her twin, her identical twin, make up. Just think: if you loved and were loved by someone you’d known all your life, from whom you had no secrets, could have none, someone who had the same mole on the same place on the left hip, who laughed before you finished the joke, became ill with you after the same meal, whom even your par
ents couldn’t tell apart after they’d not seen you for a few months—hell,” he said, sitting forward, dangling one hand into the pink light under the green lamp, and I saw that hand (which he pulled back until it became vernal again) as my last vanished bid for sex that night, “I learned that her twin was living down in Philadelphia and I began to correspond with her, I even took the train down for tea, she was this nice old English lady who put a tea cozy in the shape of a Beatrix Potter rabbit over the pot. We talked about tessitura and the Danish broadcast during the war and she had me pegged for just another opera queen but I had to know if they’d been lovers so I invited her to New York last year, remember that’s when Bergman’s film about the lesbian sisters was playing, so I took her to that, she didn’t know what to expect, and I could feel her tensing up beside me in the theater and when we got outside I pushed her up against the wall and I said, ‘That’s the way it was between your sister and you, wasn’t it?’ and she said, ‘Yes, yes,’ but of course I already knew I was right and I left her sobbing there in Times Square, boy, was I pleased with myself.” It never occurred to him (or to me) to feel any solidarity with this woman as a fellow homosexual. No, she was an “old dyke” whom he’d gleefully tricked into revealing her secrets.
That night back home I went to sleep alone curled up beside an imaginary Sean. In my dream he couldn’t stop fucking me, he bent me into dozens of different shapes but he had to stay inside me, otherwise he wasn’t happy, he apologized if he was hurting me, but I understood, didn’t I, and I did. In my sleep my asshole felt sore, it ached way inside and burned near the lips but when I woke up there was nothing wrong with it.
———
AT WORK I was assigned a new researcher named Christa von Bernsdorff. In my office all the journalists were men and all their researchers women. The man was encouraged to take bold stands, exaggerate to the point of parody, besmirch or exalt reputations and simplify the truth until it took on the lineaments of narrative. The woman was enjoined to clip his wings and hold him to the facts, a prudent Athena, daughter to a headstrong Zeus. She had to find a “primary source” for each of his assertions, write its name in the margins and then put red dots over the words she’d verified and initialed. This system, though never described as such, was probably meant to be the perfect marriage between male creativity and feminine practicality. If it worked at all it did so for very different reasons. Since journalists enjoyed a fairly low status, the male writers were as haphazardly educated and as quick as most of their readers to caricature other people and over-simplify world events, whereas the women, who’d be working only until they made brilliant marriages, were debutantes with top grades from the best schools. They’d been beautifully trained for sixteen years to locate information, analyze facts and weigh arguments. Men on the same social and intellectual level as these women were all off getting rich as brokers or corporation lawyers and were certainly not wasting their time as hack writers.
The system, whatever its faults, suited my personality since a writer was neither a reporter nor a researcher and was never expected to step out of the building but rather to style the information culled and transported by one person that would later be assayed and corrected by another. This detachment and irresponsibility accommodated my slothful nature, unpredictably fearful or aggressive.
If I was as disorderly as Bacchus—arriving late to the office hung over, staring out the window and chain-smoking, talking to everyone for hours on the phone with my automatic concern, rehearsed gaiety, factitious charm—then Christa was as tall, beautiful and composed as, if not Athena, then Artemis. I rang hollow, she solid. I could easily imagine her suddenly appearing, grey-eyed and helmeted, beside a fallen warrior and arming him with supernatural strength. She was four inches taller than I, her nose was so long and pointy that the tip turned bright red on winter days and she had a natural beauty disdainful of all artifice. She didn’t wear any makeup beyond a faint pink lipstick. Her cheekbones were dusted with a blonde down visible only in a cross light. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was held back with a cloth barrette that spanned her head except on the days when she wore her hair up off her long neck. On those days she suspended old, heavy Baroque pearl drops from lobes velvety with blonde baby’s down. She was determinedly cheerful despite an underlying melancholy, and though she was obviously superior to us all, she made a conscious effort to schmooze with everyone during coffee break. She seemed lonely.
Because of our work we’d spend hours in a huddle, talking and talking, until slowly I’d pieced together her story. She didn’t especially want to tell it. Or perhaps she had no gift for storytelling. She told it so badly that I knew she’d never served it up before. Her father had been a Russian aristocrat of the Baltic nobility with an estate in Estonia. His mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the last Czarina. After the Revolution he had studied at Cambridge, then eked out a miserable living in Paris translating things for the émigré press. There he’d met Christa’s mother, a nineteen-year-old Providence Brahmin who’d been so tall and awkward and terrified of society that she’d warned her parents she’d make her debut only if they would promise to send her to Europe immediately afterwards for a year abroad. In Paris she’d met her Russian prince and bought him a Schloss just east of Potsdam.
I didn’t respond with confidences of my own. I wanted her to like me; I was afraid she’d be repelled if I told her I was gay. Jamie was my only colleague who knew the truth about me.
One night while we were eating a catered dinner together in the office, our reward for working late, she blushed like a child before she could stammer, “I brought you some of my baby pictures to see.” I couldn’t understand her reluctance about showing them until I’d looked at them. She extracted out of a heat-curled envelope black-and-white snapshots of an unfamiliarly small and nearly square format, though shot with Hasselblad clarity.
Christa and her four blond brothers and sisters, all naked and golden, were crawling over the lap of a man in a Nazi officer’s uniform. “The war came along and my father, as an aristocrat, was expected to serve as an officer,” she said in a rush and I understood that depending on how I responded she was prepared to gather up these cards and flee the casino or stay and place her bets. I didn’t say anything but hoped to radiate a neutral acceptance through a slight increase in body warmth.
“He was killed in battle in 1940. When the war came to an end my mother was really up the creek.” A bitter little smile underscored the irony of this Americanism. “The Polish servants hated her because she was the wife of a Russian, the Soviet soldiers hated her because she was a Russian baroness, the Germans hated her because she was American and the Americans hated her because she was the widow of a Nazi officer and a traitor. And she’d forgotten to teach us kids English. We were all rounded up and put in an American detention camp where we stayed for a year and a half despite all the efforts of her family back in the States to pull strings to get us out. I can remember at last arriving in New York and eating in this vast dining room in my aunt’s apartment on Park Avenue and I was in a threadbare dress and I couldn’t speak English and my aunt, who’s never had children, stared at us all with horror. We even held our forks in the left hand instead of switching it back and forth to the right. Our poor mother had had ten years of happiness with our father and now that was over and she didn’t want to live in the world ever again. As soon as she could put her hands on some of her money she moved us all to a Vermont farm where I grew up a complete tomboy, always on horseback, never in a dress, and our mother built a good imitation of a Russian Orthodox chapel and was constantly kneeling before candles and icons thinking about her husband.”
“Is she still there?”
“Yes.” Christa smiled when she saw the frown dawning on my forehead. “Now, don’t even think of suggesting she start a new life. Please, none of your bromides.”
I laughed, caught in the act.
“I didn’t even know I was a baroness until I read it on the invitatio
n to my debutante party, which was also virtually the first time I’d ever put on a dress. I went to Columbia and twice I had Jewish roommates who made a stink and asked to be moved out when they—well, I never found out if they knew my father had served in the German army or whether it was just because I had a German name. No one, of course, ever stopped to ask me about my own political opinions, which veer to the extreme left and are resolutely opposed to racism.”
One day I told another young woman who worked with us, “Christa is so great, so beautiful and so fascinating, but she’s got one tic that drives me batty, she’s always breaking off in mid-sentence and sighing.”
The other woman laughed. “That’s not a tic. She’s sighing because she’s in love with you.” I see from an old diary that that occurred on February 9th, 1969.
I reported this development to Jamie. I think he was so unused to direct statements of an intimate nature that he paused for a full five or even six beats, like a hammy actor determined to milk his next line, before responding to my remarks. I guess I left him nonplused most of the time, an effect I registered as wickedly amusing but also tawdry.
“Congratulations, old man, I think that’s positively ripping.” Well, he didn’t say that, but the words suggest the spirit of his reaction. He did thump me woodenly on the back and kept looking at me in a new way, as though I weren’t just a vulgar, friendly clown but a possible contender, as though I, too, might be up to the snobbish, duplicitous bisexuality of the White Russians. He might have offered me a cigar.
For me Christa was at once her glowing legend (double-headed eagle) and a sweet, unintimidating person I liked to be with. She was slightly dull, just as Jamie was dull and for the same reason; neither wanted to serve up an anecdote, illustrate a point, stay in character, rise to the occasion. For them there was no occasion to celebrate, no wisdom to be garnered, no roles to play. They cultivated a tedious dailiness; anything more dramatic or even focused would have embarrassed them.