by Edmund White
I’d read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, an eleventh-century Japanese court diary full of anecdotes, lists and jottings about daily events. The writer, like my hero, was an unapologetic snob who included in her list of “hateful things” a curious item: the sight of beautiful snow on the houses of poor people. At the court, women seldom married but were free to choose lovers, even on a rapidly rotating basis. The men never actually saw the women until the (still obscure or at least dim) moment of erotic encounter, a moment oddly violent and brutish, although preceded by courtship poems and followed by poems of regret and longing the next day.
But in fact every moment of the day required the production of such “spontaneous poems.” I remember once running up to Jamie at the office and saying brightly, “Have you ever thought what it would have been like to live at the Heian court at the time of The Tale of Genji?”
Haggard, he stared at me and said, “A nightmare.”
Suddenly I saw Fire Island as an exact analogue to medieval Japan—an idle and gossipy court society, profoundly hierarchical if superficially egalitarian (didn’t the islanders all dress alike, wear the same sawed-off jeans and ripped T-shirts, though back on the mainland one was a bank president and the next an ailing and penniless hustler?). Just as the courtiers had replaced ethics with aesthetics and worried more about matching the colors of superimposed layers of sleeves than about the fate of last year’s favorite, in the same way the islanders were capable of watching a fire destroy a house in which people were dying and judge it a pity the flames weren’t bluer. Even the contrast between decorous social life and brutal sensuality seemed to be a common denominator, as did the disposable sex partners and the unchanging terms used in speaking of them. Every night I’d bring someone different back to the house, find another hand prying open my ass, another mouth engulfing my penis, and no matter how eccentric his pillow talk or behavior, the next day I’d call to tell a friend, “He was a hunky number, well-hung, very hot to trot.”
And yet, I thought, what Heian Japan hadn’t known was that Fire Island specialty—the endless Saturday made up of hours and hours of walking up and down the beach cruising (even here our hedonism had its practical side, since kicking through the surf was intended to build up our calves and the burning reflection of sun on sand to hurry up and even out our tans). Stripped of clothes and yet dressed in our expensive haircuts and Speedos and gym-bought muscles, our feet pumiced smooth by trudging through miles and miles of sand, we felt the freedom of breasting water and wind, of slipping a hand around an ocean-clammy waist, of kissing a shoulder tasting of brine if smelling of coconut oil, of exchanging glances and, if the glance lingered, of detouring behind the dunes where a moment later we’d be ambling up a path redolent of sun-hot pine needles, an erection poking its sticky red head above a loosened drawstring. If we were each by chance on the same cycle of the same drug, our blue lips and twitches and paranoia at last surpassed and evened out toward universal love, we would touch each other with childish awe, we’d lie naked in the sand for hours, white loins burning pink, and we’d hold two penises in one hand, dumbstruck by this new member’s heft and heat, or we’d lick the closed eyelid, fluttering like a moth caught in a hand, or lick inside each nostril, tasting its concentrated, snail-like saltiness, or explore the earlobe, surprised at its marsupial thinness and its delicate, ramifying veins transporting blood even to the most farflung periphery….
Nothing in Japan, surely, ever equaled this intense, worshipful intimacy, when every sideswipe of a hand would awaken a glissando of mental music, the sweet yearning as you (or I) would hitch this big, erect man a millimeter closer, though he might already be glued to you, his nose pressed against yours, his mouth feebly sipping kisses from dry, swollen lips, the toes of your feet digging into the cold sand. As the sun began to sink and a slight chill to set in, you would walk, sad as refugees, back down the beach huddling close together for warmth, your thick-thighed, small-headed shadows becoming elongated Giacometti versions of your compact Canova bodies. “I love you,” you might say, “but what’s your name, anyway?”
———
JAMIE’S SINGLE REMARK (“A nightmare”) had fired my imagination, as did another made by my friend Maria, who said one day, “Isn’t it strange the way intellectuals always think that art, in order to be ‘cerebral,’ must be grey? Analytical Cubism, for instance. Whereas, truth be told, there’s no reason it can’t be gaudy.” I didn’t dare tell her that an English friend of mine had referred to one of her paintings that I owned as an expression of “gaudy pessimism.” I wondered if the formula would offend her (certainly it was meant to be both affectionate and derisive). She went on to say, “Beckett’s books and plays are enacted by dying men on a plot of scorched earth, but they could be just as ‘philosophical,’ even as harrowing, if they took place in a palace.” Or at a seaside resort, I thought.
But I didn’t want my new novel to be cerebral so much as a verbal equivalent to Abstract Expressionism. If in my last novel, the failed one about Sean, I’d embraced hyper-realism as an avant-garde technique, now I’d be an abstractionist. During my prep-school years I’d listened to young painters at the neighboring art academy defend this movement and so imbued was I with their principles—the canvas was not a representation of something else but an arena in which actions were perpetrated and intentions formulated only to be toppled—that I kept wondering how to adapt these principles to fiction. Gertrude Stein had been an action painter in words but for her, as she admitted, the paragraph was the “unit of meaning.” She opposed one paragraph to the next, but such verbal microeconomics was fatiguing for the reader, who thought not in paragraphs but in stories, and whose attention was held by mystery and suspense, action and dialogue, rather than by the push-and-pull of syntax. In my new book I would float great shadowy panels of color and form, apparently the fragments of a coherent narrative, but in the end they wouldn’t cohere, except in the paranoid schemas propounded by my narrator. It never occurred to me that the reader would be frustrated by my failure to deliver what I seemed under contract to provide.
At this time in my life I was troubled by the question of sincerity. Was it even possible to be sincere? Years of psychotherapy had made me doubt all my feelings, especially the apparently benign ones.
In looking at those writers I admired, I decided they’d all tackled subjects they were in two minds about. Only dullards knew what they thought about every subject. I could find no theme that tormented me more than sincerity, since it was a term that applied both to art and to behavior, but unequally. All other things being equal, behavior that was sincere was necessarily superior to that which was insincere, whereas as an aesthetic quality sincerity certainly counted, but not as an absolute: if you could praise a novel for being “sincere,” you could just as easily admire one for its duplicity.
But back then sincerity tormented me mainly because I could never be sure I’d achieved it. I was so naïve that I imagined it must necessarily be delivered devoid of style. As I thought then, to accept the idea that a feeling could be communicated effectively or indirectly or humorously (the horror of those sly adverbs!) meant that a strategy was permitted to intervene between thought and act—and any strategy, any intervention, by its very nature abnegated sincerity, didn’t it? Or so I imagined. What I failed to accept (until a few years later when I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet) was that a distance necessarily separates any two people. Separation is the most human aspect of existence and to rail against it is puerile—or rather literally infantile, since it is the infant who abhors the slightest, epidermal distance between his mother and himself, teat and lip. Once that inevitable separation is accepted, then any further uneasiness about a knowing self-presentation is pointless. As Rilke suggested, the game now becomes one of taking pleasure in playing with the distance between any two people or between thought and action.
But this acceptance of an irreversible exile in the world would come only later. Now I took pleasure
in my seductive powers and worried about them. My novel was about an amnesiac who has forgotten quite simply who he is and how he is supposed to act; afraid to admit his loss of memory, he patterns his responses on the cues other people feed him. He becomes what they expect—an extreme dramatization of my own horrid adaptability. Only occasionally does he wonder whether his burning desire to please whoever happens to be beside him might not entail betraying his real if absent friends, even his real self-interest. His amnesia—which turns out to be self-induced or at least functional—is designed to absolve him of all responsibility for his deeds.
The book, however, wasn’t really so philosophical. It was born less out of debate than out of the sober days and long drunken nights, out of the intricate interplay between all the latest gadgets and fashions floating over from the mainland and the unchanging serenity of the adjacent wildlife preserve, the sudden crash of a deer through the brush.
At nine in the evening, after a nap, I’d prepare a steak and salad for myself. By eleven I was at the bar, by one in the morning at the disco, by three I was coming home with a big man in tow.
No wonder I can’t bear smoky urban clubs now; I was spoiled forever by the Sandpiper. There we’d dance under colored gels beside tables covered with white linen glowing dimly in the candlelight pulsing through cut-glass shades. The beach was so omnipresent that sand had even blown up over the steps leading into the restaurant. The floor-to-ceiling windows had been flung open and a cool briny breeze flowed across the harbor and its spotlit yachts. At one table sat men in white shirts, blue blazers, white duck trousers, silk ties, while beside them was someone who’d never made it back home from the beach this afternoon but who’d been waylaid by various cocktail parties and progressive dinners concretizing and dissolving on one deck after another. He was still barefoot, dancing in his swimsuit and a T-shirt advertising the Canal Street Hardware belonging to the most recent party-giver he’d visited before ending up here. The clear spotlights over the bar and entryway were angled to parody the inconsequence of desire, since they would illuminate only what an eager eye might fetishize—a small brown hand dwarfed by a starched white cuff, a thick neck rising out of powerful shoulders, a pair of hairy legs emerging out of well tailored pistachio-green linen shorts.
If the smell of poppers and the clamor of music became too heady, I’d hurry down to the beach and the pounding waves, for every human pleasure was contrived to appear as insubstantial as possible beside the eternal verities of sand, surf, sky. The matchstick houses posed on pylons, the slat walkways suspended over scrub brush, the evanescent voices calling out in the dark—everything evoked the impermanence of our arrangements invaded by the tides and the rolling fog. In the city, laughter, smoke, exchanged glances and music can saturate a closed space, but here every space was open and all our energy and fire were dissipated by the dull thud of waves on sand, by the august disdain of remote stars and by the constant wind, metonymy for the inexhaustibility of desire, but also its cool negation, the good currency driving out the bad.
I went to Rome because I was intimidated by Paris.
My thirtieth birthday was approaching when I decided I’d have to make a break with New York and my job. I’d finished my Japanese-Fire Island novel and typed it up and one of the most respected editors in New York, the head of a prestigious publishing house, had read it and was trying to come to a decision about it. The prospect of being published was the only thing that I could imagine would make me authentic, redeem all the small defeats and lost nights. I ached for print, in the way someone else might ache for a new roadster or true love. All of my moods—my despair as well as my elation—could be keyed to even the slightest tremor on the Richter scale of my ambition.
Sean phoned me: “Hi, I’m back.”
“I’m so relieved. Where are you?”
“New Jersey. I’m enrolled as a grad student in comp. lit. at Rutgers.”
“I’ve been so worried about you. I’ve never gone through such anguish.” I thought, He doesn’t want to hear about my suffering, which he’ll perceive not as friendly concern but as amorous blackmail. Anyway, he’s the one who’s been put in a straitjacket and drugged and been sent home virtually under arrest—my anguish is inconsequential beside his. And besides, how presumptuous I’m being. I said: “And now it’s all over.” But what if it isn’t? I don’t want to rush him into health. “I knew you’d come out of it with flying colors.”
“You did? Really?” Sean’s voice, the aural equivalent of a frown, tightened; he was always so at sea about what he was feeling that he would embrace any interpretation proposed by someone else, no matter who, no matter what, although a moment later he’d be suspecting it.
“How long have you been back? When am I ever going to see you?” Instantly I didn’t like the way I had asked the question, almost as though I was challenging him to disappoint me.
“Well,” he said, “school’s just started and I’m occupied as the devil.” I’d forgotten his slightly old-fashioned, high-falutin’ locutions and smiled now as I was reminded of them. “Angel—” he pronounced it in the Spanish way, On-hell, “Angel and I don’t get into the city very often.”
“Who’s Angel?” I asked, disdainfully emphasizing the strange name.
“My lover. Angel Rodriguez. He’s Puerto Rican. He’s doing a degree in contemporary Spanish literature. And he’s a very prominent Nuyorican poet.”
There, I thought. That’s the surprising but idiotic conclusion to the story. I’d thought if he’d ever admit he was gay, Sean would come back to me. Now I saw he needed a new, exotic lover. If Sean can even refer to another man as his lover he’s changed completely. And when did he find time to meet him, much less seal the matrimonial bond? I’d longed for Sean for so many years now (six years) that I’d almost forgotten he was real—a real person with options, not just a tragic fate. And I’d forgotten that history, gay history, was rattling along around us like a cannon rumbling over cobbles.
“But he’s giving a reading at a Nuyorican café this weekend, so we may be in town. We could all have a plate of spaghetti together.” He said it less as an invitation than as a possible trap to be approached gingerly, at least feared. I’d never even heard the term Nuyorican before and was shocked by Sean’s quick appropriation of his lover’s life. Of course, I thought. Of course. These milk-fed Midwestern boys with their khakis and perfect teeth and small blue eyes, forget-me-not blue (and I won’t, can’t), they long to meet a Puerto Rican smelling of saffron rice and black beans who will fuck them to salsa music and make them feel it’s okay to be gay if you wear a thin, lizard-skin belt around pleated, aubergine-colored trousers hitched high, a guinea T-shirt and a white porcelain medal of the Virgen del Carmen on a brown, hairless chest and grow just a little tuft of a goatee smudged under the lower lip.
“We could,” I conceded. “But I’d love to see you alone.”
“You would?” Sean seemed incredulous, almost displeased, that anyone would prefer an encounter with just him to a chance to meet the fascinating Angel. Or perhaps he was merely wary of seeing me—after all, I’d been a witness to (possibly a cause of) his crack-up. Yes, he’d cracked up, been sent home bloated and medicated to Minnesota, but here he was, back again in a new incarnation, and I felt slightly offended by this, yes, literary impropriety, since after all he was my character and the last page had been turned on him staring into a void of madness, yet here he was, back again, lively, wincing with hypersensitivity. The novel I’d written about him now seemed inconclusive, kitschily downbeat. It certainly hadn’t called for a sequel, at least not a comic sequel, this grotesque update.
But I was too curious about my rival to resist the invitation. It was the first week of December and peculiarly warm. I took the bus from the Port Authority out through the New Jersey wasteland, looking back over my shoulder after we emerged out of the West Side Tunnel at the new twin towers of the World Trade Center, turning to golden stone in the late afternoon sun.
If I stayed in Greenwich Village month after month with forays out to Fire Island alone, I could convince myself that “everyone” was gay, at least that more and more people were living openly as homosexuals, that the person next to me in line at the bank or in the neighboring booth in a restaurant might be gay, even a friend. If I sat in a café on Waverly Place reading a paper, I could hear, without glancing up, the voices of passing gay men—voices with their over-articulation, their swooping and falling intonations, the occasional lisp or hiss, the verbal italics, the rich vocabulary. But here, on this bus, I was surrounded by grey, sagging adults, no longer on the make, their clothes a compromise between necessity and habit rather than an advertisement for the self, their conversation a desultory read-out of scattered neural impulses rather than a sharp comment on the revival of West Side Story or a much-rehearsed disquisition on a new lover’s sexual quirks (“Just before he comes he has to take over, he’ll pull it out of my mouth to jerk himself off, ever the control queen”). I’d gone from fearing in the 1950s that I was the only homosexual to believing in the late 1960s that we were everywhere, an army, the coming thing, but over Labor Day I’d visited my mother at her summer home near Lake Michigan and when I’d gone to the public beach I’d walked for miles through thousands of bathers and seen not one male couple, not one sharp eye, not one stylish swimsuit, not one starved, over-exercised or artfully tattooed body, not one person who’d ever heard of the Stonewall Uprising, which had occurred the preceding summer.
Sean was the same man he’d been when I’d first met him—the same dirty-blond hair growing low on his brow and straight and thick out of his skull, the same small grey-blue eyes wincing with complication, the same full lips, though now a half-shade less red, the same rangy, slender body stiffly maneuvered, as though manipulated by the long sticks of a Balinese shadow puppeteer. He gave me a vigorous, pumping handshake, then, seeing my disappointment, thumped me on the back with a hard hand. Angel was there, his hair already turning grey at the temples, his body unabashedly plump, his forearms as round and hairless as a cheerleader’s legs, his smile huge under a wispy mustache.