by Edmund White
Suddenly I interrupted myself and said, “Sean, would you marry me? It’s been ten years now that I’ve courted you. We’ve both been through a lot, you especially, but you’ll never find anyone as devoted to you as I am. Now that we’re entering our thirties, devotion—the longevity of my devotion—should count for something, surely.”
He was smiling, charmed by my proposal, which wasn’t at all campy; there was no suggestion that I wanted him to be my “husband.” He’d heard me often enough rail against the “bourgeois institution of marriage,” which in those days we pronounced as though it were a single conglomerate German denunciation. What I was proposing, he must have recognized, was a rite to commemorate a relationship that went beyond (as I hinted) mere passion and that was more permanent than the vagaries of desire. If he was always afraid that I lusted after his body alone, now I was reminding him that no lust could endure a decade. If he was susceptible to the appeal of ceremony, I was invoking one of the oldest. If he was lonely, I was here beside him.
“May I consider your proposal for a while, kind sir, before replying?” he asked, smiling, bowing his head in polite obeisance. We talked of other things until we parted.
Everything seemed damned and I stumbled through the rest of the evening with only the greatest difficulty. Now I know that this catastrophic feeling of hopelessness falls over me whenever I fear rejection, as though I’ve already anticipated the worst and suffered from it. But then I did not yet know how to interpret (and discount) my despair. I let it wither and kill my sentiments; the gold that played through my fingers smelled a moment later of ash.
If I remember that one evening out of all the hundreds I’ve forgotten, it’s because that was the night I buried my adolescence—not an easy moment for a writer to say good-bye to. Sean was the great love of my life, not because of what we shared; we shared nothing, not even an idea, never an apartment, only a few times a bed. No, he was the fulcrum where the weight of my loneliness was balanced by the weight of my hopes—or should I say their weightlessness, since neither one existed except as an absence: I was lonely because I had no one and hopeful for a life I’d not yet started living. If I hovered so nervously around him, the trembling empty pans of regret and longing seesawing in the slightest disturbance of the air, I was able to do so because I never understood him. Love is a child who wears a blindfold and shoots an arrow; I was both sightless and the target, and I was certainly childish enough, in the triple sense that I never accepted that the slightest distance should separate us; I refused to study Sean to discover his tastes, habits, limitations; and I was certain that the force of my will alone could render the impossible possible and make him mine in a frozen instant of eternity.
After that night I never phoned to find out if he’d marry me or not. I never saw him alone again and only spent one more evening with him, and that years later. I was afraid to know the truth, no doubt. But also the slightest chance he might accept my proposal spread a salve over the inflamed wound where the arrow had pierced me.
Perhaps I suspected that I’d no longer be content with—well, I won’t say the love he had to offer, since I knew nothing about his love, nothing concrete about him as a functioning person, whether he winced with fear or awakened with a smile, worried about his diet or panicked about money. No, what I no longer wanted was the dream of love he represented—or rather I could no longer wear his grey habit and vow myself to a life of perpetual adoration.
When I thought of Sean I’d remember when I’d first met him. We’d walked for hours at night in what was then called the “Warehouse District,” an area of Civil War buildings that presently, in the early 1970s, was becoming fashionable SoHo. Back then the Village had been quieter, simpler, poorer, although even then, ten years earlier, on a summer Saturday night, the streets could become so thronged that only the roof was lacking that would have permitted us to call the whole thing a party. I tagged along behind him. I avoided mirrors, which would have proved to me I wasn’t his little brother. He’d cooked me lentil loaf, talked about the Latin language, read to me his overly serious translation of “Lesbia’s Sparrow,” made love to me by candlelight before a mirror I looked into, with fear and shy delight, as one might look into a dream renamed reality. Then we showered together in a tall, narrow, sentinel box of a shower stall, as narrow as Forrest Greene’s lifeguard tower. The shower was in the kitchen and Sean had lit the burners to warm up the room. The blue flames glowed through the translucent shower curtain. All my memories of him can be reduced to a paragraph and I feel unsure of each element in it, especially the lentils. Did he really cook lentil loaf or was that some other guy? I never kept journals and for years I drank too much. Even unaided, time itself (thirty-five years of it) wears away at memories, like pollution eating away the detail of the Carpeaux sculptures in front of the Paris Opera House, the blackened Bacchus with his raised tambourine sinking into a soot-stained circle of dusky, high-breasted revelers. And yet if a few scratches on a wax cylinder are enough to keep alive Caruso’s voice, let these words, these few, faint memories, constitute Sean.
THE NEXT MORNING I spoke to my mother long-distance for half an hour, a luxury I could scarcely afford, but I was so relieved to find her convalescing at home. “Honey, thank you for flying out here. I needed that. And your sister has been an angel. If I can be grateful for one thing it’s that my operation made Anne and me get back together. You see, it was a blessing in disguise. I’ll be back at work next week.” She chattered on in her bubbly way. What amazed me was that she could be so self-absorbed and yet so sweet. She never asked me anything about myself and yet she seemed to care about me. My mother was in a fever of self-promotion but curiously she took in every detail about me and my sister.
As soon as I hung up Max called me to tell me that my novel had been sold to one of the best known publishing houses in New York. “At last,” I thought. While I covered him with thanks in a warm babble, some determined, frantic little person in my head kept repeating, “At last. At last.” I was afraid of crowing like the cock of the walk; I affected casualness. A muscle that had been holding on for so long I’d stopped noticing its existence relaxed. I sat deeper in my chair, my lungs breathed in and out, fully, smoothly. Enfranchised. Legitimate. Never once did I wonder if I’d become famous, nor did I daydream about what I should do to promote my product. I was simply relieved that I’d passed over from that vast army of those with dog-eared manuscripts to the small elite of those with printed pages between boards. I felt that after waving my arm for hours, the teacher had finally called on me.
Max and I went out that evening to celebrate. I was too poor, especially after my ruinous trip to Chicago, to invite him to a restaurant, but he took me to an “Inn” on a quiet street in the Village we liked because of its shabby gentility—its deep booths, pewter chandeliers and its clientele of old women eating hot biscuits and gravy-covered meat loaf, this battered parody of respectable, rural New England in the heart of the kicked-out, bohemian West Village.
From there we went on and on, deeper and deeper into the night, reeling from bar to bar, stopping only at eleven to look at books and at twelve to buy a few records before heading back to the gay bars to drink till four in the morning, closing time. In those days on Eighth Street there was a bookshop many stories high where one could browse for hours, ascending from the new hardcover fiction on the ground floor to the poetry mezzanine and on up to the paperbacks about sociology and political science and philosophy. Friends ran into each other there—or across the street at a record store that prided itself on stocking the oldest or most obscure recordings of early Italian oratorios or never-performed Bohemian operas or on novelties such as the only extant recording of the last genuine castrato, at the beginning of the century, who at the time had already been a very old member of the Vatican Choir.
In these stores Max was imperious. He’d recently affected a monocle, which he screwed into his eye when he wanted to size up some young man or upbraid a clerk. T
onight Max asked a college student shy to the point of surliness if they’d received the new edition of Aksakov’s childhood memoirs and the kid, perched on a high stool on the dais behind the cash register and reading a book, just shrugged and waved a hand vaguely toward the gleaming stacks of books all around us. Max nudged me and lifted his monocle to his eye, as though he needed its aid to quiz such a noisome insect. “Do you realize who I am?”
“Yeah, everyone’s warned me about you. Guess you’re one of the most infamous cranks who haunt this store.”
Max was charmed by the boy’s soft, breathy voice, such an inadequate medium for his scorn, and by the deep red color that was infusing his face and neck. “Tiens” he said loudly, “a rude homosexual, now there’s a new one for the books.” Like so many of Max’s insults it was flirtatious.
“New? I thought you’d cornered the market on that one,” the boy replied.
“Our respective positions are rather different.”
“Yeah,” the kid interjected. “Mine is higher.” And he was miming the literal truth of his statement when Clive, the middle-aged, pipe-smoking manager, intervened. “Good evening, Mr. Richards, can I help you find something?”
“A civil clerk, for instance?”
“Did I hear you mention Aksakov? Right this way.”
Max explained to me, “This bookstore is as famous as a Chinese restaurant for its rude help, and their abrasiveness constitutes a considerable local sideshow that the cognoscenti like to visit in an always undisappointed anticipation of genuine unpleasantness.” Clive, overhearing the remark, removed his pipe as though to defend the shop but then thought better of it and put his pipe back in place with a smile. I felt a strong conflict between my normal meekness in dealing with clerks and my secret relish of the scene, just as at my age I half-identified with the arrogant youth and half with the offended adult.
As we went through the bookshop Max, his talk enlivened by vodka, hailed various titles as though they were charming eccentrics or delicious grandes cocottes he’d known all his life. “Here’s Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters. You don’t know it? Now I am shocked. It’s the Japanese Buddenbrooks, but touched by the delicate perversity of its author—not always so delicate since he takes as horrible a pleasure in describing physical pain as does Tolstoy. The description of sawing off a leg in Tanizaki rivals the same scene in Tolstoy’s war reportage. Here’s a strange trifle by Monique Lange, Kissing Fish, a story of a woman’s obsessional love for a homosexual. Lange’s husband is Juan Goytisolo, the great Spanish avant-garde novelist (and homosexual, one might add). Now here’s an Alexandrian love story, written just after the birth of Christ, in which a gay couple is played off against a straight couple, they’re separated and, just as in Candide, undergo many travails before they’re reunited in a double wedding—you don’t know it? How can that be? Here, let me buy it for you.”
At four in the morning Max and I found ourselves seated on a stoop on Charles Street. It was a strangely balmy night. The sky was still bright with rolling clouds and reflected light. A breeze, warm and briny, was blowing although we were in the first week of December; I swore I could hear gulls calling in the wind. Just down on the corner of Seventh Avenue the changing traffic signal released heat after heat of racing cars, but here, just fifty feet away, we were in a side paddock of parked automobiles.
“Oh, it’s so wonderful being here, Max,” I exclaimed affectionately “I missed you so much when I was in Chicago.”
“You did?” he asked, in an uncharacteristically small voice.
“Oh, yes!” I assured him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “When I’m with you I’m always so excited. You’re such a stimulating man.” Every time I moved my head it continued to describe a motion way out into space; I felt a lunar freedom from gravity.
Dimly I became aware of a small, vigorous activity beside me, as though Max were scrubbing diamonds and rubbing them dry. At last he said, “I’m crying because I’m so moved. Of course I longed for you, too. I dreamed, I dared not hope—oh, my darling!” He took my face between his hands, pressed his lips to mine and filled my mouth with his thin, muscular tongue—I had the impression that I’d bit into an overripe, nearly flowing persimmon and a lizard had darted out of it into my mouth. I suddenly remembered that Max had told me he was always the active partner in sexual “congress” and I wondered what being fucked by him would be like.
With a start I realized that somehow in my drunkenness I’d given poor Max a misleading signal and suggested I was in love with him.
Now I was too polite to clear up the mess I’d made. Besides, he was so delighted, so gallant, so touched that I couldn’t bear to cool his ardor. And, after all, he’d been the one to sell my book.
I hoped he’d forget our drunken love vows, but the next day he called me and spoke with a new diffidence. “My darling, did you sleep well?”
“Very well. I was so drunk.”
“And how’s your work going?”
“I never work, Max. That’s one thing you must understand. I can’t. I must talk to ten friends a day on the phone—”
“Oh, I hope I’m not intruding.”
“But I want to talk to them. I call them if they don’t call me. It’s as though I’m cold when I awaken, spiritually cold, and I must talk to everyone under the sun to convince myself I exist, even to refill my word banks. What does Madame de Staël say of the French—that, unlike the Germans, they’re addicted to conversation, which may be an art of civilization but also a disease, one that keeps the French frivolous, since they can never bear the solitude necessary for serious intellectual work.”
“Very witty. Quite brilliant!” Max exclaimed. “You’re quite right to bring us all back to Madame de Staël whom we’ve been neglecting far too long. ‘Stahl,’ dear, is how it’s pronounced, in spite of that distracting useless umlaut. Remember that her husband was Swedish.”
He invited me for a weekend on a farm in New Jersey that belonged to his friend the publisher who’d printed my review of Tom’s poems. When we arrived I realized that Max and I had been assigned the guest cottage on the other side of a pond from the main house. The three other guests were all in their forties or fifties.
During the weekend we went to a neighboring farm to visit a famous old gay couple in their late seventies. One of them had been a brilliant writer of late-Jamesian prose in the 1920s and ’30s and had lived in Paris. Although his sexually neutral if erotically charged writing had been much admired back then, it had been largely forgotten since; now the writer, Ridgefield, had become all caught up in the workings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There was the question of whether a higher and a lower house should continue to exist or, more democratically, whether they should be “conflated” into just one body. And then there were the committees—Ridgefield headed the Citations Committee—and the luncheons, not to mention the star-studded spring awards day, open to an invited public.
Now that I knew my novel was going to be published I no longer feared being introduced to other writers, but I still felt I was an outsider—a status I clung to.
We were sitting in Ridgefield’s old stone farmhouse at the edge of a wood. His brother had married well; Ridgefield’s house was on a vast estate dominated by the brother’s mansion with its eighteen-column façade.
A fire was crackling on the hearth. Despite Ridgefield’s twenty years in Paris, there was no trace of anything French in the room. Everything was rigorously Colonial or English, from the fox-hunting prints to the rag rug on the wide-board wood floor to the gleaming drop-leaf table and Duncan Phyfe chairs. Piles of books and literary reviews in several languages were neatly centered and graduated, largest book on the bottom, smallest on top. Tangerines from some warmer part of the world filled a blue and white Chinese bowl.
Max had shown me pictures of Ridgefield taken in the 1920s by his aristocratic Russian lover of the time, a famous fashion photographer in Paris. It was hard to acknowledge that this twittery
old man in a tweed jacket with the big, red, Scotch-nourished nose and fluty voice had once been the scrubbed ephebe with the prematurely deep widow’s peak and the skin that looked as though he’d swallowed a light bulb, an inseam of light rising from each corner of his mouth toward the narrow shadow cast by the sundial of his long, straight nose. In his dark suit he’d looked like a boy going to his First Communion, inconceivably young and fragile (he’d been just twenty-two), incapable of holding a pen in his hand or a plot in his head, much less of writing a book about rural life in his native Ohio (the fictionalized memoirs that had won him his small bit of celebrity). Nor in his mid-Atlantic tones could one detect any trace of his Midwestern past.
For some reason the conversation turned to Jean Genet and Ridgefield said, “Oh, I knew him. That was a nasty piece of work.”
“Rough trade?” Max asked daringly.
“My dear, a bit of fluff, I would have said, in prison drag. No, seriously,” and he passed his hand over his face to wipe away his faint, wicked smile, and his expression, as announced, emerged perfectly serious, “I met him several times and he was a crafty peasant—I know the type. After all, I’m a farm boy myself!”
Everyone mumbled well bred chuckles of protest against the farfetched humility of this grand old man of letters who was as proud of his contact with the soil as the Duc de Guermantes yet who sported in his lapel the purple and gold braided rosette of the American Academy.
“No, what I object to most,” Ridgefield continued, “was not his way of lying systematically or lifting his hostesses’ antique silver demitasse spoons …” Again his hand effaced a tiny smile, as though he were a judge who’d forgotten the dignity of his office and its objectivity. “No, those are mere bagatelles, worthy of gossip and nothing more. What I object to most is his way of wallowing in his perversion.”