by Edmund White
I got out of bed and knelt beside the gas burner. I turned on the gas without lighting it. I inhaled deeply. I wanted to die. Finally I lost my nerve and turned off the gas and got dressed.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER my sister’s second suicide attempt my mother phoned to tell me that my sister’s oldest child, Gabriel, had been put by his father and stepmother into a mental hospital because he was cutting classes and had even run away for a week after having stolen seventy dollars from his father’s wallet. “The poor boy, he’s become violently anti-social,” my mother said, “he just lives in the basement like an animal, he won’t bathe or obey his father. He sleeps by day and won’t go to school. Of course it’s all your sister’s fault for having put him in that Free School where the kids do nothing but read Mao’s Little Red Book all day and where the students, if you please, voted math out of the curriculum as being too bourgeois and just a capitalist tool. I’m sure the Russians have many fine mathematicians. Now poor Gabriel is just fourteen and he’s out at the Lakewood Facility and the doctor is a total tyrant who acts like one of those religious cult leaders, those nuts, and he lives there with them, and the kids study nothing, they just sit around in those morbid group therapy sessions all day and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes.” My mother burst into tears. When she recovered herself, she said, “Willie wasn’t far wrong. Remember how she’d say, ‘Don’t smoke or drink’?”
‘“Drank,’ ” I said. “She said, ‘Don’t smoke or drank’ ”
“Don’t make fun of her. She was a simple country woman but a lot more on the ball than—”
“I’m not making fun of her. I loved her. And poor Gabriel. Have you seen him?”
“When I think I have a daughter and a grandson in the asylum at the same time! Honey, what is the world coming to? We need Willie’s good old-fashioned values. My, she was down-to-earth. Do you know that the day she died she laid out her dress and shoes and even chose her brooch, the things she wanted to be buried in?”
When I hung up I thought there was no choice between family life with its squabbles and sordid melodramas and single life with its melancholy pleasure seeking. I knew young mothers who dreamed of a few minutes in which to write a poem; I had vast acres of free time and not much heart to fill them. I could mope around the house for hours, berating myself, wilting onto a sofa or strumming through an insipid book, lighting up for a long, juicy phone call, then sinking into a hot bath in the middle of the afternoon with a pack of cigarettes and a pot of tea on the floor beside me, my eyes unhappy with the wall paint that had been slopped over the tiles although I would never have spent the ten minutes necessary to scrape them clean.
Outside, in the great world of Manhattan, a few lesbians and gay men were fighting for our rights. I was sure that for them the conviction of working for a community spared them both the squalor of family life and the stale narcissism of artistic isolation.
Of course I filled my free time with New York friendships—exigent, hysterical, invasive. I had many friends I saw once every week or two and long parts of my day were devoted to lunches, dinners and phone calls. The calls could be rapid-fire reports (“Howard’s really done it this time. I think it’s all over. I’m off for an emergency session with the shrink. I’ll call later”) or in themselves, long therapeutic sessions (“Okay now let’s get this straight. You were talking intimately with your father—and your mother dared to pick up on an extension?”). Joshua would call up to read me the John Ashbery poem he was working on (“Don’t you see the tide, ‘Soonest Mended,’ comes from the saying, ‘Least said, soonest mended’? Except here nothing’s mended and the voice is endlessly self-renewing. All those loose, sloppy connections, John’s ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch’ sort of construction. Last night at John Myers’ cocktail party, there was a kid who asked John Ashbery what was his own favorite poem and all three of us—John, Harry Mathews and I—we all said, ‘Soonest Mended,’ in the same breath. Isn’t that somehow … marvelous? Not to mention reassuring, given how … nutty John’s work is?”).
Through Joshua I met Lillian Hellman and, a week later, her archenemy Mary McCarthy, over for a visit from Paris. Through Max I met Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s widow. Of course none of them would have remembered me half an hour later. Joshua took me to a party at George Plimpton’s where I saw Norman Mailer, small and thuggish, grey hair curling on his neck. But most of my contacts with the celebrated were at one remove. An art critic I had worked with was one of Warhol’s best friends. They’d talk on the phone to each other late at night while each, at home, was watching the same television program.
We had cool, distant artistic gods—the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the nearly silent Samuel Beckett, the painter Jasper Johns and, in France, remote, dandified thinkers such as Roland Barthes (whom I had belatedly espoused)—but as New Yorkers we also needed art that wasn’t eternal, that was hot and ephemeral. We ran off to all of Warhol’s movies, even now that he himself no longer made them. We saw Sondheim’s musical Follies; Joshua and I, after yet another romantic disappointment, would sing “I’m still here!” We bought expensive, whacky, certainly tacky clothes. We grumbled about the propagation of Black English in the schools, which we feared would deny black students access to ordinary jobs. We visited an art gallery where Vito Acconci was lying under a raised boardwalk, masturbating while imagining the people walking above him; he collected the sperm and sold it under the name “Seedbed.” Robert Wilson and Philip Glass had taken over the Metropolitan Opera to present Einstein on the Beach; Kevin and I attended, so high on acid that soon we were weeping from the flood of revelations rushing over us, and I wrote a review for Christopher Street, the new gay magazine, comparing the event to the premiere of Parsifal. We spurred each other on to exaggerate so that we could feel at home in our own era and could convince ourselves that New York was truly the center of the world. If so much was going on around us, then we, too, must be about to do something brilliant.
I WENT to Venice in June to visit Joshua. He told me that if I could pay my way over he’d pick up all my other expenses while I was there.
I took a boat in from the airport. It threaded its way past abandoned islands and pylons bound together like asparagus held upright in a steamer so that the stems cook faster than the tender heads. I thought that if I were a painter I’d paint this vast pale blue dome—streaked with pale cirrus clouds and gently quaking with unreleased light—which fitted over and joined the dark blue scumbled sea below, and on the low horizon line I’d place all the interest, just the finest band of minuscule towers and flashing windows and thread-bright flags.
In the big water taxi I was seated staring up at a teenage boy who was a crew member: he wore the regulation dark blue trousers and T-shirt. The T-shirt was beating violently in the wind. He ran along the gunwale and then hung out over the waves, his back to the sea, holding onto nothing but a guy wire. His skinny tan arms were as long and improbable as a colt’s legs. His nose was shiny, his chin slightly red and sprouting stubble, his hair tea brown with apricot highlights. His stare was as intense and puzzled as a deaf man’s.
Now the horizon line was thickening and filling in with fantastic detail. We could see the pure spire of San Giorgio on the left, the lifted gold ball of the Dogana gleaming straight ahead of us and over on the right all the layered complication and panoply of the Riva degli Schiavoni, the church where Vivaldi was composer, the house where James finished Portrait of a Lady, the hotel where Georges Sand and Proust stayed, the Oriental filigree of the Doge’s Palace, suspended over a low, columned walkway, the soaring monument topped by a saint and crocodile, behind it the green-roofed ten-story brick campanile and, just to the right and beyond, the great clock with its two Moors striking the hours, both with bare asses and big dicks. And as the drone of our motors shifted softer, the hollow roar of thousands of milling human beings flowed in on us, the tumult of voices and shoes striking stone, the muffled busyness that suggested an undressed opera stage where a director was r
ehearsing a crowd scene with extras in street clothes. Guides with raised, colored umbrellas were trying to keep their different groups together (Joshua called them the pecore). Faintly, in the distance, an out-of-tune café orchestra was playing a palm-court version of “Strangers in the Night.”
As we approached the landing a dirty old lady, thin and wren-like, with famous blue eyes, wearing dirty sneakers, her hair styled by an eggbeater, cried out, “I’m lost. I can’t remember a word of Italian.” Panicked, she looked at us all, one after another. “I lived here years ago and now I’ve come back to die but even though I once spoke Italian as well as English now I’m like the girl in Three Sisters who can’t remember how to say ‘window’ in Italian and I have a reservation at the Ambasciatori Hotel but I don’t know how to get there, I’m utterly disorientated.” She spoke in the fluty accents of an English duchess. Her voice and her scatty non sequiturs made me realize that she must be an aristocrat, but the Italians were all laughing at her and suddenly I hated them for their beastly conformism. All they took in was a crazy old woman with Luna Park intonations and eccentric, soiled clothes. Their duchesses, I thought sourly, are surely as well dressed as a tailor’s dummy and as well behaved as prize fowl.
I offered my services as cavaliere servente to the old lady, got her calmed down and led her to her hotel. “You’re my angel,” she cried. “I prayed for an angel and here you are.” The handsome adolescent crew member was laughing at us as we left and I thought he was as flawless and ignorant as the unwounded must always be.
Joshua was there at the café where we’d agreed to meet, wearing a lapis-blue shirt so tight that when he sat down it buckled between buttons to reveal little moon shapes of tanned flesh. He was bronzed as Pontiac, his hair sun-whitened, his manner so relaxed it was almost Dada goofy. He was eating a raspberry gelato that turned strawberry red where he licked it.
That evening I saw the handsome young sailor washing down the taxi where it was moored in front of the Salute Church. We spoke. His name was Giovanni. Now he was barefoot and wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt and shorts. He told me he admired the way I’d helped the crazy old lady; the flat, neutral way he said pazza and sporca (“crazy” and “dirty”) made the words sound like colorful but not particularly judgmental adjectives.
And then I began a new life battered by channeled water and wild, unfocused sunlight. Joshua put me in a storage room converted into a bedroom on the ground floor beside the front door. In the small hours of the morning the water’s rhythm slowed down so much that it seldom lapped the mossy steps; it sounded like a domestic animal so tranquil it was in danger of dying. The wind died down and an eerie stillness stepped in as though the melodramatic princess had at last been transformed into the dull girl stirring the cinders.
Comforting, acrid smoke lazily lifted away from the small burning eye of the anti-mosquito coil. I dreamed I was a slave held belowdecks in a cage; the ship was marooned in the hot horse latitudes. I was being slowly smoked, like bacon….
When I awakened, children were running up and down the narrow stone walkway beside the rio just outside my window and two workmen were unloading tiles from a small barge. They talked to each other in the thick, blurred accents of the Veneto, voices that slowed and ran down at the ends of sentences like a record on a wind-up Victrola. I couldn’t understand a word but the voices sounded childish, wheedling.
Joshua was transformed by Venice. In New York he was so blind he was always frightened crossing a street or walking through a dubious neighborhood at night (and which neighborhood wasn’t dubious?). But in Venice cars were banished and the steps were bordered by little white stones. He and I wrote in the mornings, the air redolent with espresso. Joshua could never sit still more than five minutes, nor could I. He’d be out on the back balcony inspecting the indigo-blue morning glories; for Joshua, their delicate beauty was contrasted with the military vigor of the Italian word for “climbing,” rampicante, which he loved to say. He had to hold the local Venetian paper, Il Gazzettino, an inch away from his eyes in order to read it. Or he’d show me the “disgusting” photo of the Pope with the count and countess, the owners of the apartment, who let it when they went away every summer to the Dolomites.
I dropped my ballpoint and it rolled downhill; the marble floor was cracked and it tilted dramatically away from the Zattere side and toward the Grand Canal. The ceiling was low but painted a greyish-white and faded pink; the vices and virtues were ensconced along the cornice above their names in Latin; interchangeable and bored maidens alternating with amusing male caricatures stuffing their mouths or dozing or lustily grabbing a wench. The lesson to be learned was that vice was active, fun and individualized, virtue impassive and impersonal.
Joshua would adjust the heavy shutters, their hinges unoiled and complaining; for a moment he’d be a dark shadow pressed against bars of light, like a cat stretched out on piano keys.
We’d eat a green salad, wedges of fontina and gorgonzola and translucent slices of prosciutto, red and thin as a hematological slide, and dark, wind-dried beef, bresaola (so hard for us to pronounce with its gentle growl of unfolding vowels). Sometimes we’d laugh ourselves sick pretending to be middle-class Italian matrons who could scarcely stand each other but elaborately feigned mutual affection (“Carissima!”). I think the idea was that we were fiercely competitive—and conformist—housewives, each sure that her kitchen was even more casalinga than the other’s. It wasn’t as though we were satirizing women we actually knew; we were simply performing a vaudeville routine ad nauseam (the nausea, too, made us laugh).
America was a country of broad streets and well sprung automobiles, of sealed elevators emitting Muzak and huge shopping carts gliding on rubber wheels up and down wide supermarket aisles, but here we were crossing the choppy Grand Canal on a traghetto manned by a gondolier and queuing up at the pasticceria to buy half a kilo of fresh fettuccine and, at the drogheria, black olives, artichoke hearts in oil, bits of pimento and a crumbling block of grana. American life, it seemed, was contrived to minimize contacts with other human beings, whereas here Joshua and I were in love with the delicatessen clerk, a neat family man named Giorgio, slender, with well scrubbed hands, his body wrapped in a white apron as he sliced our ham or reminded us to take a small carton of heavy cream (Josh lingered over the double n of panna as though he were munching manna itself).
In the afternoons Joshua would dash across the curved, wooden Accademia Bridge and squeeze past the pecore on his way heading toward what the German guides kept calling “Sanmarkplatz.” He’d hurry along under the arches in the square toward the Piazzetta, on his right the dimly lit hand-painted rooms of a café, on his left the badly tuned orchestra sawing its way through a Viennese waltz. It was such a pleasure to live in a historic city, the most beautiful in the world, and to treat what Byron had called “the drawing room of Europe” as just another obstacle course. It was the ultimate luxury to be racing for the speedboat while the echoing voices of hundreds of people rang hollowly off stone. The Japanese gawked at the bell tower (no one had told them the original had collapsed early in the century). Storekeepers cranked egg-brown awnings out against the noonday sun, pigeons descended on a living St. Francis proffering bread crumbs who was posing for his picture, and the gilded domes of the Basilica hovered above the bejeweled mosaics in the three tympanums like the setting sun and a half-moon over sparkling waves.
Joshua was heading for the Cipriani pool, which was so expensive he could afford to invite me only two or three times a season. When I did go it was like entering a society hospital. Tanned, deep-voiced, friendly but discreet bagnini accompanied us like orderlies from Josh’s locker to the lounge chairs he designated. The boys draped the chairs in immense downy white towels. Waiters brought us iced drinks. We’d position ourselves away from the side of the pool closest to the changing rooms, the side reserved for South American dictators, Mafia godfathers, deposed royalty and Milanese millionaires. We were out among “the young,”
that is, those over forty but under sixty, the well exercised woman who ran the dress shop next to Harry’s Bar, the always amusing, relaxed curator of Peggy Guggenheim’s museum (he was from Oklahoma) and the divorced baroness who ran the “Save Venice” committee. There, standing at the shallow end of the pool with her diamond-encrusted hands resting on the edge, was an American woman burdened by the possession of a fifteenth-century palace her family had bought a century ago; her exhaustion from maintaining so much splendor seemed well expressed by her slim, heavily freighted fingers.
But most afternoons I had free. I roamed the city and tried to imagine myself into the lives of the family whose flame-shaped window framed a noisy canary cage or the man who sold vegetables off a flatboat or the waiter who sauntered out of Florian’s bearing drinks of every color and who always looked impeccable in black bow tie, white jacket and red epaulettes. At every turn there was a surprise, a walkway wide and gracious or narrow, laced through arches smelling of cat urine. Or there was a sudden explosion out into one of the few squares with trees, San Giacomo dell’Orto. The great patient herds of daytrippers plodded wearily along as their leaders barked at them through bullhorns, but I ricocheted off them into the wide, almost deserted square of Campo Santa Margherita, where I bought fruits and vegetables at several outdoor stands—blood oranges from Sicily, fennel bulbs from the Veneto (fennel, or finocchio, was the word for homosexual for some reason)—before I darted into a church to stare up at a huge painting on canvas glued to the ceiling, detailing in delirious perspectives the patron saint’s martyrdom. Or martyrdoms, since he refused to be killed the first several times Diocletian’s executioners went at him and only finally permitted his head to be cut off; his blood ran white as milk and the tree to which he was bound sprouted olives.