by Edmund White
I liked to walk down the street with this heroic Sieglinde to whom I was a smaller, darker Siegfried and when I realized other men envied me, my response wavered between fearing the competition and wishing it’d been I, not she, who had widened their eyes.
We were best when we were alone. I started spending more and more time at her place.
She’d lived the last two years in Italy. She might be a Baltic baroness but she’d traded in that title for simpler fare, the hot daily pleasure and vexation of being a big blonde in Rome. From her time in Italy she’d learned a sexier, more robust way of eating, laughing, joking and thinking about her body. She claimed she found the constant male harassment in the street “funny,” even “flattering.” Even now, back in New York, if she didn’t know the answer to a question, she’d respond with that explosive, rising monosyllable, “Boh,” the Italian verbal shrug to indicate unapologetic ignorance, a sound halfway between a burp and the bubble exploding from the mouth of a surfacing deep-sea diver. She’d stroke her cheek with the back of her hand, to dramatize the beard of boredom, press her finger to her nose to enjoin caution and when our taxi got stuck once in a traffic jam, she mumbled, “Menaggia,” with all the Job-like weariness of a Roman matron climbing the Capitoline steps.
All lovers tell each other their stories (La Rochefoucauld says people fall in love in order to have a captive audience), but the way they recount the past is never entirely candid, since the story of past lovers is necessarily a form of instruction to the new one. We complain of injustices endured in past affairs in order to convince our new partner to treat us better—or, perhaps, to re-create the same old débâcle. Christa told me of a man she’d known in Rome, an older Italian who was a Joseph Conrad scholar, was married but living apart from his wife, as so many Italians did in those days before divorce. He loved Christa’s beauty and called her “my Viking,” but when she declared her passion he simply pressed a finger to her lips and kissed her on the forehead, though he had to stand on tiptoe to do so. He wrote a column on books for the Corriere della Sera, yet she never saw him reading or writing; he gave lectures on Conrad and had even concocted an imitation of Under Western Eyes, but she’d never seen the book in a store or figured out when or where the lectures took place. He had a son Christa’s age whom he adored, a Marxist economic historian, but she never met the guy or even saw his picture. Even Marco’s Trastevere pied-à-terre turned out not to be his main residence, since he apparently had an old princely apartment, now dilapidated, on the Via Madama she was never allowed to visit.
After all this ambiguity Christa longed for honesty (she used the French word transparence) in her friendships; she wouldn’t make a distinction between friendship and love and I wondered if this semantic confusion was meant to create a no-man’s-land in which we could glide unnoticed from one dimension to the other—and back again if necessary, for she was so kind, so delicate, that she wouldn’t have wanted to hurt me or make things awkward. American frankness, courtly refinement, Italian playfulness all came together in this marvelous woman, who also had something soldierly about her. As a gay man I wouldn’t have dared to say that, but a straight guy at the office said, “Good old Christa, she’s a regular guy,” and this description stuck in my mind. She’d help me into my coat, she’d lend me ten bucks the day before payday, and in her unveiled eyes, her strong jaw, her upright posture and general “transparence,” as well as in her complete lack of humid, ensnaring coquetry, I felt an absence of everything I hated about women, the deviousness, the emotional blackmail, the musky, layered mystery. At this time I read Gauguin’s Tahitian journals, Noa-Noa, in which he said that in the Pacific he learned to love women again since the Polynesians were friendly, brown, naked, embraceable creatures unlike European women with their stays, their virtue, odors and schemes, and for a moment I convinced myself things might be just that simple. I, too, might love my Viking, my trooper, my giant blonde Tahitian.
And I was tired of men, as tired of their bulky, bristling bodies as I was weary of the despair they inspired in me. When I showed friends the novel I had written about Sean, I read it to them out loud to instruct them, through the coloration of my voice, as to exactly how they were to respond, but despite all my coaching they still found so much suffering lugubrious and exasperating. I needed to propagate the golden legend of my love in order to turn sentimental defeat into spiritual victory. I needed to demonstrate to other people that in the gay world in which men danced an allemande left and right with interchangeable partners I had chosen one man around whom to revolve in an endless do-si-do of devotion.
“But he’s maddening, this character of yours,” Jamie said, knowing the character was based on me. “He has no pride. It’s sickening!”
I said, “But what of the medieval knight who kept one eye shut the rest of his life after he’d seen his lady for the last time? Isn’t there something beautiful about that?”
“Beautiful?! A jerk.”
“Or what of this Colombian poet I heard of,” I persisted, “who was in love with a lesbian and had a sex change just to please her.”
“And?”
“And she rejected him because he was just one more ugly dyke. But the gesture—”
“Loser. Grotesque loser. Anyway, there are so many other people in the world.”
No, there aren’t, I thought. The true lover is monotheistic.
In this remnant of a life I have left, I thought, I might as well find comfort with Christa. One long spring we spent together, shopping for food and cooking together, reading and reminiscing and listening to re-recordings of old Italian café songs from the turn of the century (“It was raining and I was crying,” Christa translated). That spring was cold and bleak and raining but we were happy together inside her studio with the vast skylight sloping on an angle, wet gingko leaves pressed to the glass. I thought to myself that she was more beautiful than Sean, that if she were a man she’d be the handsomest man I’d ever known. Women liked me more than men did; at least the women I attracted were a cut above even those men who thought they were too good for me. I wavered between saying women had lower standards or insisting they were more interested in character and charm than in beauty and might.
Christa’s whole interest in me seemed to be to make me feel good about myself, which she accomplished without resorting to flattery. We’d lie naked in bed, she tall and lean and adorned in nothing but a big summer hat heavy with cloth cabbage roses. She’d make a mushroom risotto when the skylight would dim and Sunday night would depress us with the thought of a return to work Monday morning. We played at being depressed because it was a different mode of coziness. I was so—not happy but peaceful with her that I thought, How ironic, just as I’ve finally managed to finish my gay novel I’m ending up in a woman’s arms.
One day at breakfast she said, “I keep talking about transparence but I haven’t told you about Gunther.” She said that until recently she’d lived with him, a chemist from Hamburg, but that things hadn’t gone all that well with him and besides, “I wanted to be unencumbered in case there was a chance of you and me getting together.” She spoke in a high, soft voice with her head lowered and her eyes closed and I saw how embarrassed she was, especially since she must have known that if I spoke so often of the distant past it was to avoid talking about the recent past or the future and if I dwelled on childhood fears it was because I didn’t want to tell her about my adult anxieties.
“I have something to confess, too,” I said. “I’ve had quite a few affairs with men.”
I let a long silence hang in the air and looked out the window.
“I never would have guessed it,” she said. Then, in a firmer tone, she added, “It doesn’t make the slightest difference.”
But it did. I didn’t dare tell her that many of these “affairs” had not been the twilit, star-crossed romances she might imagine but had rather been conducted kneeling on the floor of a public toilet, my vows exchanged only with the red unsheathed fury o
f the third penis of the afternoon. I had no tattoos or piercings but my nipples had a history, they were enlarged and they stiffened when brushed by a callused hand, just as my ass arched and filled out in my skintight jeans under a man’s admiring scrutiny and my cock stiffened after the third glance back, a heliotrope trained to follow the light emanating from male eyes only.
When I was alone with Christa, as when I’d been alone with Maria years before, I could imagine myself at ease, the two of us happy. But one cold wet night after work, Christa and I took in a movie in the Village, then ducked into the Riviera Café on Sheridan Square for a bowl of chili. It was an island of boisterous heterosexuality in the flood of gay male life that flowed around it and I’d chosen it precisely because there, stupidly, I thought I wouldn’t be tempted. And yet as we sat on the glassed-in terrace I saw wave after wave of handsome young guys go past, their voices ringing out above the rumble of subways passing under the sidewalk, their powerful young bodies, pale faces and black, slicked-back hair materializing in the mist rising from the grate, only to vanish into the dark of West Fourth Street, one man’s hand around another’s waist, a star of complicity glancing off a smile or eye, and I wanted to be with them, I felt I was trapped with my mother. Poor Christa suddenly looked much too adult and dowdy and her conversation sounded fatally innocuous.
When we were alone again in her apartment I sank into the eiderdown comforter of her love, but I felt something shameful about it. I wasn’t a real man, I could barely keep it up, usually not at all, but despite my inadequacy Christa looked at me with such affection and admiration that I feared growing accustomed to it. Male indifference was bracing, Spartan, whereas female indulgence was corrupting, Persian. When I was with a woman I felt good, but was that realistic, advisable? I dreamed I was a coyote looking from a mesa down on a cheerful fire. I was cold and lonely, but if I approached the campsite it would be to kill or be killed.
I thought of Butler and Lynne; although they seemed happy enough, I imagined Lynne must always be afraid of losing Butler to another man. There was something hectic about her vivacity that seemed a continuously chanted spell to ward off just such a defection. Not that I wanted to deny the possibility of bisexuality, which suited my conflicting feelings for Christa as well as a novelistic craving for complexity. Everyone had been talking about “androgyny” for the last seven years and even the dimmest suburban barbershop had hoped to improve its clientele by advertising in bold letters on a prominent placard, “Unisex.” And yet the long, straightened hair, the necklaces and finery and the newly fashionable skinniness affected by straight guys had only been new window dressing for the same old actions and attitudes. Gay men who dated women struck me as even less innovative. My stepmother’s best friend was married to a gay man who’d always been a tyrant with her and their three daughters, one of whom had repeatedly attempted suicide. Once a year he’d gone on a “hunting trip” with his “best friend,” but the other fifty weeks a year he was an angry force locked up in his study at the top of their huge house (he’d married his wife for her money).
The only two choices, it appeared, were marriage, cruel to the wife, stifling to the husband, and gay promiscuity, by definition transitory, sexy and sad for the young, frustrating and sad for the old.
What haunted me most now, however, was the idea of Gunther, a straight man as tall and blond as Christa, according to the description I forced out of her. She told me nothing of his character, but I fancied him too gruff to be pleasing during courtship but firm and loyal in wedlock. Christa was rejecting him because I was amusing, une âme sœur, but in the long run more sœur than soulful, perhaps, at least more than she bargained for. Of course I was sure Gunther could make her happy as I never could. Gunther was a real man, one I’d fashioned to be good enough for her.
I didn’t want to be just a friend to my wife; she deserved love as much as I did. I certainly didn’t want to be her rival, not even once for a fraction of a mental second; there were a few ways in which I wouldn’t disgrace myself. Nor would I enter a marriage with the idea I could always divorce if it didn’t work out; for me marriage remained a sacred institution because until now I’d seldom thought about it. It remained a pure form contemplated from without rather than a familiar interior requiring radical modifications.
I knew I was going to ruin Christa’s life. If I left her now she’d go back to Gunther and be happy forever after.
Our project at work came to an end. I stopped seeing her for two weeks. One day Jamie told me she’d gone to Italy for a month. I timed my vacation to start when hers ended. When I came back to New York I found a heavy, embossed cream envelope in my mailbox. An inner envelope contained a coroneted invitation announcing Christa’s wedding.
I let a month go by, then invited the new couple to dinner. He was indeed tall and blond, but tortured, balding, with a rictus for a smile and hand-rubbing courtliness. He was stern with Christa, given to bouts of nervous irritation.
A year later they had a child. Christa found a better job with a different company. Maria ran into her from time to time over the years. She never lost her hushed, precise, sometimes pained way of speaking, of shyly biting into her words as though they were stale bread. Her husband was too ill to work—something indeterminate or at least unpronounceable, a malady of the nerves, or was it something like Crohn’s disease, a slow rusting of the intestines. The daughter, Maria reported, was superb, less stately than Christa, more awakened. She must now be just three or four years younger than we were when we first met.
Just last year Maria told me that Gunther was now well and back at work. Christa seemed happier than Maria had ever seen her.
ROD HAD his monthly party, this time a vernissage for his latest tricks and light boxes. There I met Jimmy, a famous eighteen-year-old ballet dancer. His fame, I suppose, was roughly equivalent to Christa’s title for me, a proof that these people (and my association with them) were esteemed by convention. Not that I thought in those terms. I was too intoxicated by their glamor since in the Midwest, where I’d grown up, celebrities had been as rare as aristocrats.
Jimmy was not the usual jeune premier, “all thighs and rose petals” as someone (Nabokov? James Merrill?) once said. I’m not quite sure what thews are, but he didn’t appear to have them. He was just a tiny kid dressed in a jacket that swallowed him, its sleeves covering his delicate bluish hands. He had a big, thin-lipped mouth ripe with a disabused sadness that condescended once in a while to be flirtatious, just to keep the whole game rolling along, no matter how wearily. He had an appealing way of touching (not tugging or holding) my lapel when he spoke to me. Like most young dancers he was painfully ignorant, though in his case he was just as painfully sophisticated. He seemed to have suffered an early defeat that had drained him of all hope—perhaps the defeat was his talent.
Certainly after a short time I discovered how he was merely an inconspicuous acolyte serving at the big, flashy altar of his talent. Whereas no two people, not even any two directors, can agree about an actor’s value, everyone, even the dopiest member of the audience, knows whether a dancer is good, better or best. Jimmy was the best. He could leap the highest and turn the most times without “traveling,” that is, drifting unwittingly downstage or to one side or the other. He was faster and cleaner than the other men. He could turn as easily to the left as to the right. He could turn and leap, turn and leap, following a perfect giant circle of grands jetés inscribed within the square of the stage. He could leap up and beat his legs together faster than a barber’s shears. His port de bras was elegant but not mannered, at once noble and unfussily American. He was too short to partner ballerinas convincingly, but he could do things no other man would attempt, such as kick the back of his head as he went flying offstage in an absurd rock adaptation of Vivaldi that had been especially concocted to show him off, a role so rapid and demanding that backstage assistants would clamp an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth before pushing him back in front of the audience.
<
br /> On stage he was a demonstration of nuclear fission, neutrinos flying, energy melting down in a frightening implosion, but in my arms he was just a frail boy laboring under a curse of melancholy I couldn’t forget that his legs were insured for a million dollars as he wrapped them around my back. I was afraid of crushing his body, so full of longing was I or perhaps so celebratory in this exuberant return to my own sex.
I was proud to ride beside him in the company bus as it brought the dancers back from Brooklyn into Manhattan. I remember sitting beside him and holding his tiny hand as the bus went around Washington Square. “Oh, look at the neat arch!” one dancer called out. “Didn’t we see an arch like that last week? Was it in Paris?” “Maybe Zurich.” “Oh, Zurich, I love Sweden!”
To claim Jimmy as a member of my sex seemed presumptuous since on stage he was so agile, so strong, so lovely, his extensions so improbable and lawless that he seemed as isolated and sacred as a hermaphrodite. Just as a great painting looks strangely small when you look at the wrong side and you can scarcely reconcile this unimpressive square yard of canvas and crossed stretchers with the complexity of the young woman standing at the window looking out into a blaze of light, her hand resting on the half-open shutter, in the same way his sleeping body with its childlike arms, a waist I could encircle with both hands and his pale glabrous chest seemed unrelated to the bristling sting ray he opened out into as he soared through the lateral shafts of colored light.
He told me how painful the dancer’s life was, both physically and emotionally. “You’re always in pain and you have to dance your way right through a strain or pulled ligament. Even the so-called moment of glory,” he said, “when you’re taking a bow, you can hear the other dancers behind the curtain hissing to each other about all the stupid mistakes you made.”