by Edmund White
“But, darling, I want to invite people to dinner and we have a whole dining room.”
“A loft. We have a big, airy loft, or did until you—oh, how could you?”
One night I came home at midnight and Kevin was stoned and pushing the furniture onto the landing outside our apartment door. “You’ll see,” he said, with a wacky grin, “it’ll be much nicer without furniture.”
“You’re stoned.” I was angry and started shoving the furniture I hadn’t even paid for yet back into the apartment.
Kevin snapped, “Have it your way, doll,” and left on his bike for the Village. At dawn, when he came back, his hair smelling of beer and cigarette smoke, I told him I was sorry.
“No, you were probably right,” he said wearily. After that I felt he lost interest in the apartment and decided to live in it as he would have lived in a hotel.
Like me, Kevin drank a lot and was often drunk and stoned, but for him it never appeared to be habitual. When I got stoned I was so consumed by my desire for him that I assumed he must share it. Every cell in my body was magnetized by him. It was a religious frenzy that forced me to my knees before him. “You sick cow,” he’d say, laughing, “stop looking at me like that.”
Can it be called lust if it’s a longing to be owned by someone, to write his initials on every chromosome of your body? I was haggard with lust, if that’s what it was, idiotic with desire, certainly cretinous and repentant and humorless with longing. We’d be standing in the hallway, stoned, grinning, talking about something, and I’d suddenly sink to my knees, a vassal to love, as though I were a boyar (shaved, wigged and perfumed in the newest European fashion) who still wanted to kiss his tsar’s foot.
“What are you doing?” Kevin would complain. “Girl, get a grip.”
Perhaps as a hustler he’d known all too many men who’d longed for a bigger, crueler fantasy looming right behind him, someone Kevin was standing in for but couldn’t entirely embody. What he wanted from me was something more affectionate and offhand and palsy; I should have played his Sister Eileen, and every time the subway detonated under our apartment I should have rushed into his arms for a chorus of “Why-Oh Why-Oh Why-Oh, Why did we ever leave Ohio?”
Instead he had to live with my heavy penitent’s tread up and down the house and my absurd genuflections, as though he were one of the Stations of the Cross.
One night he surprised me by staging a sex scene with me—of course! Why hadn’t I guessed that he could be stimulated only by sex-as-performance? He turned off all the lights, blindfolded me, left me naked with my hands handcuffed behind me in his bedroom. He fed me a joint, speaking quietly to me all the while. He led me, gently, like Antigone leading the blind Oedipus, down the hallway. There I had to kneel again. I knew that recently he’d been seeing a guy who practiced “sex magick,” who, apparently, treated an orgasm as just one incidental part of a long propitiatory rite complete with chanting, incense and a record of Steve Reich’s Drumming. When Kevin released my eyes and hands, there he was, naked, erect, lit from within like a thick altar candle in which the wick and flame have burrowed deep into the flesh of the beeswax. He ordered me to suck him as one might take Communion. Only now do I realize that the performance, far from exciting him, was designed as an offering to me.
I was social in a robust style, he in a glancing way. He’d drop in on one of my dinner parties and as Ludmilla who, for complicated reasons, had an English accent, spoke of one of her passions (Nixon, child psychology, Balanchine, documentaries), or as Joshua railed against Max or Butler, laughing at their foibles, fulminating against their effrontery, Kevin would just perch on the edge of a chair, curious, smiling, but too stoned to follow the charged vocabulary, the complex syntax, the livid reactions so at odds with his own cool detachment to everything. “Nixon?” he’d say, blinking, “the President?” asking it in a tone of disbelief, dumbfounded that anyone would bother with someone so remote. Rebecca would say, “No, not the President, the man” because she found a subtle distinction lurking behind Kevin’s question, unable for a moment to imagine he was really so dopey or doped.
MY NOVEL was at last published. It struck me as strange that publication, which to me was as momentous as the canonization of a saint, took place so simply, even humbly. I suppose even the cardinals must trudge into their chilly chambers on a November morning to vote for or against that Chilean martyr who’d whipped herself in her parents’ garden so many centuries ago; in the same way this book, which I’d composed on Fire Island six years earlier and which existed in my mind as a chord that took two hundred pages to get resolved, now existed in the world as a quire of flexible paper bound in harder paper.
I’d been presented with a cover design that I’d rejected (hadn’t my contract said I had “cover approval”?), but it was used anyway: a seashell dripping a blue tear. Max wrote a “blurb” for the back cover that mentioned Freud and Darwin and pronounced on the saving powers of forgetting. I was thrilled and told him it reminded me of when at fourteen I’d written a few bars of music which a professional composer had played on a grand with crashing chords and rolling arpeggios: I hardly recognized my broken little tune. Max was generous if he could be proprietary, although unlike most great men he did not require that his disciples resemble him artistically. He had a grasp, a very wide grasp. Perhaps his moral study of the history of art and artists made him avoid the usual pitfalls of genius; he resented Goethe’s failure to sponsor Kleist and blamed him for the young man’s suicide. “Goethe liked only his imitators, the feebler the better,” Max said, “not like the Master—” by whom he invariably meant Henry James “—who recognized the genius in everyone from Flaubert to H.G. Wells, the ingrate!, and if he missed Whitman the first time around at least eventually he made up handsomely for his regrettable original misprision.” Max had no respect for the minor virtues (he could be shockingly rude) but he honored the one he took as major, even sublime: generosity.
The New York Times Book Review published a well meaning but confused review of my book; the reviewer, a novelist I’d never heard of, treated the story as a mystery and years later I’d still find the book in remote public libraries under “crime fiction” or “tales of the supernatural” or just “mystery.” There were few other reviews except one I recall from a local New Jersey paper with Catholic tendencies: “Every year New York flushes its intellectual sewers and down floats another load of crap like this pretentious doozy. C’mon, guys, can’t you put together a good, old-fashioned plot for once? How about an honest day’s work?”
I never saw the book for sale anywhere, I never saw anyone reading it on a park bench or in the subway, and within a year the publishing house had informed me it had sold just five hundred copies of the two thousand they’d printed. They were pulping the rest. Five hundred sounded like a lot to me. I was delighted when I imagined a room full of five hundred people who’d read my book and allowed their minds to be tattooed by my needles.
Because my affair with Kevin was going so badly—in fact Kevin referred to me as his roommate—I had all my evenings free for Joshua, as many as he might want. Occasionally he looked at me with big eyes, with the very same anticipation I directed toward Kevin, but most of the time Joshua held himself in check. That first winter after I stamped my foot he was sometimes harsh and chiding with me, but only by flashes.
We went to spend a weekend with Eddie in his New England village. Eddie read to us a poem he’d written to his goddaughter, the plump one-year-old child we could hear laughing and talking to herself in her playpen on the landing below, as she batted at the fish mobile dangling above her pillow. Fifteen years ago her father had been a handsome evzone in a white skirt, with a narrow waist and strong, hairy legs. He and Eddie had met in Athens and every stage of their love had been celebrated in poems with titles reminiscent of Cavafy or Rilke, a blend of heart-piercing nostalgia and a throbbing angelus of narrative and allegory. Now the Greek was a portly, balding family man of thirty-five and he and
his wife and daughter lived downstairs. He was the janitor and caretaker and he also worked in a nearby pizzeria Eddie had bought for him. Once a month he came upstairs, tool in hand, to give Eddie a tune-up. His wife probably didn’t suspect a thing. She stayed inside, grew broader, smiled shyly, knitted baby things against the winter cold, made Eddie the lemon-rice chicken soup he loved.
Joshua and I read the new poem for Cassiopeia, worked our way through its elaborate astrological conceits and consulted with each other. Finally Joshua, despite an admiration that bordered on awe, dared to say to Eddie, “Isn’t it … a bit … cold?” Eddie slapped his forehead and said, “Of course! I forgot to put the feeling in!” He rushed upstairs to the cupola that served him as a study and fiddled with the verses for an hour before he descended with lines that made us weep, so tender were they, so melting and exalted. That night, when we were alone, Joshua whispered, “A rather chilling vision of the creative process, I’d say. We must never tell anyone about this, since how many people would understand and forgive the heartless, manipulative craftsmanship of great art?”
The village, for Eddie, was a repository of good stories. For him the walls of the houses were transparent and inside he could picture the drunken wife beater, heir to an automobile fortune, or see the spinster sister pulling aside an inch of curtain to peek outside, or overhear the tireless wrangling of the celebrated mother and daughter, novelists both, one a Romanian baroness by marriage. Greek Revival houses were the settings for Gothic passions. In such a small world, over-observed by fine minds all keeping detailed diaries, every bon mot was treasured. When Eddie came back from Italy with an antique clock for Gloria, the ancient novelist who talked like Mae West, she said, “I don’t want a clock. I like things from Gucci. When Mary came back from Rome she brought me a lovely handbag from Gucci.” Eddie murmured in mock exasperation, “Oh, Gloria, sometimes I have the feeling that for you Italy is nothing but the shores of Gimmegucci.”
With me Eddie was kind in a deliberate way, as though he’d written himself a reminder. Perhaps he’d realized how wounded I’d been the night he’d said nothing after I’d read him the first chapter of my book. Eddie was a bit like a royal prince who’s naturally shy, even slightly cruel, who’s been trained to recall that his slightest remark or smallest gesture can crush one of his subjects. He sat with me one afternoon for a quarter of an hour in the living room while Joshua considerately went out for a walk. He told me he’d read my novel and liked it, then asked me about my plans. He suggested I apply for a grant from his foundation. “Of course I’m not the only member of the jury—there are four others—but I’ll be plugging for you.”
It struck me that Eddie had resolved brilliantly the problem of being an artist with inherited wealth. He worked hard, revised constantly, won all the prizes and in no way bought his celebrity. Since his other friends were all poor poets, he had set up his foundation to help them out with small sums; they couldn’t ask him directly for handouts, nor need they feel beholden to him for grants given by five jury members. Money was never allowed to poison his relationships with other artists. Since Americans admire wealth and have no ideological hostility to it, Eddie’s legendary family fortune only added to his splendor. Everyone always assumed that he’d endowed his foundation. What no one knew was that every year he was bankrolling it out of his own pocket and that he was quite literally sharing his wealth with his friends. Perhaps because my father had been prosperous if not rich, money held no mystery for me. Nor did I think of myself as poor. Certainly it never occurred to me to resent someone rich.
Having read every line of Eddie’s considerable œuvre out loud with Joshua, in long, drunken evenings of appreciation, I now found myself, for a few days, living with the great man, drinking his tea, returning his smiles, listening to his quips, which only one time out of ten became airborne. I came to realize that meeting a writer, knowing him up close, in the hope of better understanding his work, was a useless, even destructive exercise. In his poetry Eddie was quicksilver, not only funny and irreverent but also compassionate and wise, and he tilted from one mood to another word by word with an unprecedented fluidity But if he was all at once Dante (the law-giving man) and the Marschallin (the sad, civilized woman in Der Rosenkavalier bidding farewell to love), an Ariel of wit and a Caliban of sensuality, nevertheless this composite self, this kaleidoscope of roles, gained nothing by being experienced at first hand.
When I told Eddie that I knew a young poet who wanted to meet him as well as Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell, Eddie laughed and said, “But he’d only be meeting empty shells propped up around a table.” He was exaggerating. Eddie’s living, breathing body was not extinct. But he was right that to the degree a writer has metamorphosed his blood into ink his is an abandoned body. Or if the writer still has a personality, it is full of sharps and flats at odds with the tuned melody emitted by his writing.
In Eddie the man I detected a perversity and snobbishness that he radiated in spite of himself, qualities he’d entirely transformed in his writing into impishness and humor. In life he had an age, a pear-shaped body, a maddening drawl; on the page he was eternally youthful, a charged field of particles, a polyphony of voices. While nothing that showed up on the page was unintended and everything was a pure product of the will, Eddie, like everyone else, sagged after lunch, generated a body heat, created an impression (of nervousness and effeminacy, in his case) that he himself was unaware of and that might not have been interpreted that way by someone who avoided appearing nervous and effeminate less strenuously than I. Or by someone less impressed than I by his mere mannerisms. Joshua, for instance, who’d gone to Harvard in an era of eccentrics and who’d also known Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, did not take any notice of such superficial characteristics, mere caste marks, that might have made Eddie into a figure of fun in a movie meant for the masses but that signified nothing special within his clan of mid-Atlantic artists and that wouldn’t even have been mentioned in the memoirs written by any one of his friends.
When Joshua, Eddie and I went for a walk after a dinner at the baroness’s and fell into whoops of drunken laughter, I changed my mind. No, after all, Proust had been right when he’d said that great artists make the best friends, for they alone are at once sympathetic to the life around them and sufficiently detached from it to see it. They may be unworthy of their work and falsify its values, but if writers are merely distracting as exegetes, they’re good value as friends. No matter how crusty or irritable a writer might be, in the right mood he or she can assume any age, remain open to everything, become at once satirical and kind. Certainly Eddie was that way with me, for if he found me by turns self-hating and pretentious and teased me for it, he also knew, as he said, that I’d been made to wait too long. “Your first novel, this so-called first novel of yours,” he said, “is so good it must be your fourth or fifth?”
“Fifth.”
“In another, better era you would have been encouraged and published from the very start. You were made to wait too long. Of course that means your work springs fully formed and armed from your mind—but that will only intimidate other beginners, no?”
I laughed, blushed and stammered, since I had never thought about such a thing. Eddie’s praise and understanding were the first I’d received from someone I admired so intensely.
“No wonder you have that whipped-dog look,” he said, “that fear of being ridiculed.” He scrutinized me closely, trying to take in the full extent of the damage. “We complain,” he said, “about paranoid writers, but look how we treat them!”
WHEN I RETURNED to New York I went to the Candle, a local leather bar on Amsterdam. I couldn’t afford leather chaps and a matching motorcycle jacket, nor would I have wanted to make such a commitment to a scene that back then was neither as acceptable nor as potentially ludicrous as it was to become. It was still frightening.
A raunchy, smiling guy close to forty in worn black leathers with a worn, leathery face and
quick, intelligent eyes came up to me and put his gloved hand down the back of my jeans. He cupped my bare ass in his hand. “Hey, you’re nice.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You, too.”
“Live near here?”
“Yeah.” I liked his speed, his self-assurance, so rare in gay pick-ups, which usually advanced with the slowness of an auction between misers. “Want to come home with me?”
“Yeah, and with ten other guys. Let’s get an orgy off the ground.”
“Great!” I said. Because I felt confident that this guy, Herb, was sexy, I had no hesitation in going up to someone handsome and saying, “See that guy over there, the guy with short black hair and a mustache and a silver eagle on his sleeve?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, him and me’s tryin’ to git a little group action off the ground. My place’s about ten blocks away—wannus to deal you in?”
“Yeah, I guess. Sure. Why not.”
“Don’t leave without us, you hear. S’goin’ to be hot. We got grass, wine, poppers, downers.”
When five guys and I walked into our apartment, it was after two a.m. but Kevin was still up, painting. He was stoned and he’d placed clip-on work lights all around the living room. He was listening to Phoebe Snow, whose bluegrassy voice, with its coppery inflections and guitar-string glissandi, negotiated treacherous jazz tunes with coolness and lightness. We listened to her day after day, night and day, because we only owned half a dozen records.
I brought my boys in to meet Kevin. I asked him if we could use his room, since he had a large foam cube for a bed. He said sure. I was afraid he would be angry at this invasion, but he wore a crooked smile and looked at my squirming catch with desire.