by Edmund White
One day he made me look in the mirror and list all the things I liked and disliked about myself. Surprisingly the likes outnumbered the dislikes, even though the dislikes were deeper. Another day he focused a camera on me and later he played back ten minutes’ worth of film. I said, “God, I sound like such a sissy,” and he said, “All American men say that, straight and gay. It’s because the real men in the movies—cowboys, criminals—make no gestures and speak in a low monotone. Any expressivity comes across as effeminate by that standard.”
I came in with a dream about being trapped in a mummiform coffin with my father’s face painted on it, which was positioned down a long processional row of statues of Anubis. Abe said that from everything I’d told him he thought that I was afraid of dying inside while going on living outside—as my father had obviously done. I no longer thought about my father nor did I have any contact with him. I hadn’t exchanged a letter or phone call with him in two years. When I was a boy I’d wanted to be his lover; he’d never come through and now I hated him with a cold, denying hatred. I imagined him wondering why I never phoned and feeling too aggrieved to mention it even to his wife, despite the fact she fed his resentments whenever she could.
My mother still received her small alimony from him every month, enough to tie her to him, and my sister drove down to Cincinnati to see him occasionally, but when she asked him for money after her divorce to go to graduate school so that she could eventually earn a living, he refused. She cried at yet another proof of his indifference. He lived in his fourteen-room house with the two new Cadillacs under the car port and the chain-smoking, hillbilly maid and looked down through acres of landscaped grounds at the Ohio River, but he couldn’t afford three thousand dollars a year to send her back to school (she wanted to earn a master’s degree in social work so that she could be a psychotherapist). I earned only twelve thousand dollars a year, but I ended up paying for her education. Daddy had always seen Anne and me, no doubt, as nothing but a potential financial burden whom he’d contracted in the divorce agreement to help until we reached age twenty-one or graduation from college, whichever came first. When Anne had married he’d presented her with an itemized life bill, a fiendishly detailed document of every expense, no matter how minor, he’d ever incurred on her behalf; the object was not to demand reimbursement but to warn Anne of the forbidding cost of raising a child, lest she begin breeding heedlessly. Once I’d left university to come to New York, he’d never advanced me another nickel. I’d done everything myself, but my survival, rather than making me proud, caused me to feel lonely.
I wanted to define myself as my father’s opposite. Where he was tight-fisted, I’d be generous. Where he was cunning, I’d be guileless. Where he was cautious, I’d be reckless. Where he was intent on preserving his reputation as an upstanding citizen and moral paragon among people to whom he was entirely indifferent, I would lay myself bare in full public view through my exhibitionistic writing.
And yet I could feel his expressionless, self-centered face hardening over mine like a plaster death mask. The humiliations I was suffering almost daily over Kevin had sapped my confidence, unmanned me. I was like a troublesome tooth that a dentist desensitizes by killing the nerve. The tooth continues to sit tranquilly in the mouth, resembling the adjacent teeth, but it is dead. Perhaps I’d suffered so much I’d died.
Abe said that everyone was always going on about cruel heterosexual fathers who reject their gay sons, but he asserted that more frequently the gay son, who wants a kind of gentle, half-romantic love that his bewildered heterosexual father isn’t programmed to provide, ends up by rejecting old ineffectual Dad. I didn’t know when or exactly why I’d rejected my father, but I hated him now with the cold, abiding resentment of the jilted lover.
Even though Kevin was small and boyish and looked no more than sixteen, even though I was the one who paid the rent and ran the household, with him I was once again hoping, as I’d always hoped with my father, to squeeze a bit of love out of a distant man.
At least that was the sort of thing we discussed in therapy, Abe and I, although now it all sounds both pat and unconvincing. I could just as easily have said, I now see, that I was impersonating my father and Kevin me, but with a new twist: now it was the son who was denying his father love, not the contrary. Or I could have said that no one was playing anyone and that the drama between Kevin and me wasn’t a restaging of roles but rather a re-enactment of certain tensions created by crossing the themes of money and love when I was a child.
Or I could have said that I loved Kevin, as who would not, and he didn’t love me, which was reasonable. The story was just that simple and any effort to extenuate that unacceptable fact was pathetic.
While writing my history textbook, I’d been polishing my novel about Christa. I’d spent five years writing it, most of that time occurring before the long-delayed publication of my Japanese-Fire Island novel. Now, having put the finishing touches to it, I submitted it to the same woman who’d published the earlier novel. She wasn’t too sure about the new book. She asked for extensive revisions; by the time I’d done them she’d changed her mind and rejected the manuscript. “You tried the most difficult thing of all,” she said, “to make a passive woman your heroine. Good try, but you didn’t pull it off.”
Kevin was so stoic in facing his own almost daily defeats during auditions that he set me a heroic example. I didn’t complain, although I registered in my marrow every one of the twenty-three rejections the book subsequently garnered. Kevin and I smoked so much dope and dropped so many pills that we were in a constant confusion of creativity. He disliked my solid, bill-paying side, even though he depended on it, but he warmed to me whenever I’d tell him about a new book I was planning or whenever I’d listen as he told me about his plan to memorize backwards the whole first-act balcony scene in Nöel Coward’s Private Lives.
An older poet whom I’d met through Joshua told me he’d been to see an ancient Jungian famous for curing blocked writers. “What did she tell you?” I asked eagerly. “She asked me to give her the schedule of my typical day and I said, ‘Well, I wake up and get up,’ and she interrupted me right away and said, ‘But you must never get up. You must pee, make coffee, then go back to bed right away before you’ve spoken to anyone and contaminated your mind with chatter and then write for just half an hour a day. That way you’re close to the unconscious and the universal language of dreams, and your defenses are still low’ ”
I don’t think the poet ever followed her system, but I did. I had such a crushing schedule to follow with my U.S. history textbook that I felt the only way I’d ever write fiction again was by doing a half hour in bed every morning. I hadn’t reread my Fire Island novel since I’d written it five years earlier, but a few people had praised it for its “Baroque” quality so that now, in my new book, I began to write in that complex, ornate style; for me, at least, a Baroque style is one that sets every element in motion, that confuses religious sentiment with sensuality and that makes little distinction between ornament and substance. Despite the fact that those early readers of mine had been wrong and my Fire Island-Japanese book may have been surrealistic in its vision but quite chaste in its style, I was now in the process of imitating their mistaken impression of my earlier work.
But my new book wasn’t altogether healthy; I confused my fantasies with reality, replaced the simple past with the past-subjunctive of wish fulfillment. I turned my boring father into a satanic playboy, my hysterical mother into an operatic madwoman. My narrator was Kevin twenty years older, who regretted that he’d rejected his patient, wise lover (an amalgam of Frank O’Hara, God and me). I feared I was beginning to lose my mind. One morning I knelt in the hallway outside my bedroom door and prayed to God, but when I opened my eyes He was standing there dressed in full saturnine leathers.
At noon my secretary would arrive. Through a friend at the gym I’d found William, a smiling, deferential, painfully thin man in his mid-twenties. He was an as
piring actor who, I gathered, lived with a lover (in those days people would admit almost apologetically that they had a lover, as though it were a bad habit or the survivor of an earlier, less enlightened age). He would sit patiently while I shuffled through piles of Xeroxed historical articles and the cut-and-paste outline. Then, suddenly inspired, I’d begin to dictate pages of my textbook. I feared that if I didn’t have someone sitting there whom I paid by the hour I’d never get around to writing Changing Eras.
Of course we ended up talking a lot about our lives. William even invited me to catch his performance at the Upstairs at the Downstairs. I went one evening and was surprised to see him in chains, alternating tap dancing and a humorous monologue in which he spoke about his childhood in New Hampshire, his desire to be dominated and his struggle with diabetes. Part of me was shocked by such candor; I still believed in Virginia Woolf’s distinction between art and self-expression. But another part of me recognized that every dare William made against propriety generated a spark, and that energy I was almost certain could be called aesthetic. To me, a work of art is a performance of a certain length that generates interest. Hovering just over the divide between invention and reportage struck me as inherently interesting, especially when what was being reported was a whole new world of experience.
Kevin and I were both passionate admirers of Ross Stubbins, the avant-garde theater director, but he seemed to us as unapproachable as all other celebrated people. We were certain that he held no brief with the New York commercial theater, nor did we, although Kevin kept auditioning for it and I kept writing for it; during the preceding ten years I’d written five full-length plays, which were meant to be attractive to a Broadway producer, since they required only a single set and no more than six actors and were intended to be funny and topical, but I never had the energy or confidence in my theatrical skills to push them. Nor had I ever admired a play I’d seen on Broadway.
Stubbins didn’t seem to have financial restrictions. He would put on a three-day play with a cast of two hundred at a festival in Casablanca or Aix, and in New York he had his own foundation, his own school of acting and an association with a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery, where he sold his costume sketches at high, conceptual-art prices. He had a fascination with The Beauty and the Beast, which he’d adapted and staged in dozens of different versions, variously mixed and crosshatched with Spanish religious processions, textbook explanations of ballet or a largely effaced script of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf.
I’d met a man who claimed to have been his roommate in an Oklahoma madhouse twenty years ago, when they’d both been of college age. This man had even written an article in a learned journal about Stubbins’ obsessive arranging of the coffee service on a tray. Since Stubbins’ staging was all based upon the elements of the set being juxtaposed to one another according to the most minute calculations and those proportions reflected in the actors’ movements, the article about these arrangements provided a key to Stubbins’ mysterious but apparently rigorous staging.
Kevin and I went night after night to see Stubbins’ current play. Usually we smoked some marijuana, occasionally sprayed with a hallucinogen or a horse tranquilizer—we scarcely knew which—and once we ran into Brewster, one of the White Russians, with his wife covered in brilliants. Kevin and I, in our T-shirts and leather jackets and dirty, ripped jeans, clung to each other like two little kids lost in the adult world. We giggled at everything Brewster said and I was incapable of responding conventionally to Brewster’s hard-edged, insincere show of seeming “interested.” I laughed and laughed, certain that Brewster himself was in on the joke and playing a role just to amuse me. I could imagine what Brewster and Muffy must have thought, for even though I’d fucked Brewster years ago, before his marriage, now I’d gone from what he would have called “decadent” (i.e., stylishly, mysteriously bisexual) to “raunchy” (poor, obvious and no longer redeemable).
Stubbins was able to attract Village gays as well as Italian art dealers in their dark glasses, baggy, expensive suits and grey-striped collarless linen shirts. There was even a sprinkling of uptown millionaire collectors in search of new thrills. Ten years later in New York le beau monde would reject all other groups and would become as narrowly exclusive as their parents had been, but in the aftermath of the 1960s they’d momentarily lost their confidence and thought the way to be chic was to be promiscuously social and arty.
Kevin was thrilled one night when he picked up a dark, muscular, nappy-haired guy who danced in Stubbins’ plays (he simply walked, in place, or backwards and forwards, for hours on end). At last Kevin had met someone who was intimate with the great Stubbins—how intimate Kevin learned only during the long, druggy, talky night when Maurice confided he lived with Stubbins and had been his lover for years.
Kevin gave Maurice his phone number on a scrap of paper and half-hoped he’d hear from him. After two weeks without a call, Kevin, disappointed, said, “Gee, I thought the sex was great and we sure had a lot in common, but my mistake was that I made him dork me. Have you ever noticed you only get a call-back when you’ve done the dorking? No, I’m serious, it’s absolutely a rule.” (Call-back was the show-biz word for a second audition.) Kevin also worried that Maurice might have looked down on him for being the type of actor who was still going to “cattle calls” (open auditions) for Broadway plays. On the other hand, Maurice had told Kevin that Stubbins didn’t despise the commercial theater but had just found that everything on stage happened too fast. “Everyone was speeding around in such a brisk, artificial way, making entrances and exits like birds in an overwound cuckoo clock, and Stubbins thought any five minutes would be good if it was slowed down to five hours.”
The morning after their one night together, Kevin had told Maurice over our noon breakfast things I hadn’t known. We were seated around a little brown metal table painted to look like knotty pine. The double sink was from the thirties and the huge stove and the fridge, with its rounded edges and big chrome handle, from the fifties. We’d scrubbed them to a gleaming white, and just painted the walls a shiny white all over. One night on speed we’d washed the windows with vinegar and newspapers, but the bright sunlight showed the unreachable smudge where the upper and lower sash panes overlapped. Kevin was saying, “I lived in London for two years. I told everyone later that I was studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but actually I just clapped on a cowboy hat and hustled. The English are so weird. In England a typical john is a married bank clerk who arrives with a briefcase in which he has a wooden cucumber he’s whittled and painted green for a month every evening in his basement shop and now he wants one to insert it into his not altogether clean posterior—they know nothing about douching.”
“I think I’d like that,” Maurice said, unsmiling, coolly exhaling smoke. “I’m into shit—not to eat, mind you, but … otherwise.”
I wondered if Kevin’s coldness, his degrading comebacks and snappy putdowns, might not be a remnant of his days on the street in Piccadilly. It was one thing to turn a paying trick from time to time in New York and another to hustle for a living in another country, to be exposed, day after day, to the resentment and stinginess of rogue customers.
We began to receive dirty phone calls from someone who identified himself only as “Jimmy.” I would have hung up on him out of unreflecting prissiness but Kevin grabbed the receiver and shooed me out of the room, miming that I was to close the door behind me. (His miming, unlike everyone else’s, was completely understandable.) Ten minutes later he strolled into my study, where I was dictating the crossing of the Delaware to my masochistic, tap-dancing secretary. “Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, “but that guy on the phone had a very sick and admirable imagination. He threatened me with the most refined tortures and ended up chaining me to a tree in the Rambles and strangling me with my own knickers. Verbally, of course.”
William smiled with that Mona Lisa smile variously attributed to the joys of pregnancy, the desire to conceal bad teeth or fatuous
self-regard (was the Mona Lisa Leonardo’s self-portrait?). In William’s case (was it Mona Lisa’s?), he was smiling with that mixture of slyness and shame with which a masochist recognizes a fellow sufferer. Even among otherwise sophisticated homosexuals a committed masochist must conceal his penchant. No one truly understands him, although friends are vulgarly curious or tell stupid jokes (“Beat me,” said the masochist. “No,” said the sadist)—jokes that reveal no understanding at all of the subtle reciprocity between master and slave.
Something about William’s smile—the guilty, dawning, What-Woman-Wouldn’t smile of complicity—excited me. Kevin left, I dictated a bit more and stood uncomfortably close behind William. He looked up at me with harassed, humorous eyes.
“Wanna go in the bedroom?” I said.
After that, every afternoon we’d continue our dictation in the bedroom for half an hour. William’s body was thin, his skin flaky, his hair long, fine and dry, but he was also supple and seraphically obliging. His face was pointy as stiffly beaten egg whites—a point for a nose, a pointy chin, darting, funny eyes with long, stiff eyelashes. They bubbled with sparkling wit and a knowledge as sophisticated as it was perverse. I felt a complete control over him that I didn’t think about very much and certainly didn’t question. After I’d come in his ass (William didn’t usually even touch himself or get hard), he’d smile the rueful, indulgent smile of the older woman humoring her vigorous young lover.
William had a lover he’d been with for years and I knew from a mutual friend that if with me he was awed and mostly tongue-tied, with his own crowd he was a chatterbox and hysterically funny. The thought that he had a whole life apart from me only reassured me. I didn’t have to take any responsibility for him. He admitted to me that he drank too much, given that he was diabetic, and twice in the last year he’d passed out. He could rarely get it up and explained, blushing, that as a diabetic he was intermittently impotent.