by Edmund White
I hadn’t seen Gabriel for several years. When I saw him getting out of his taxi below I rushed down to help him up with his bag. As soon as I got a good look at him across the street I said to myself, “Oh. That’s it,” for his face was covered with acne, the deep, red, quilted kind. I thought, No wonder he lurks in the basement and only emerges at night. He doesn’t want anyone to see him.
I embraced him and brought him upstairs. He looked exhausted. His nails were black and ragged and he stank of cigarettes. Kevin was nowhere in sight. I took Gabe on a tour of the apartment. “You may notice it’s seriously underfurnished,” I said, smiling at him. I was glad he wasn’t handsome, at least not for the moment, given his acne; I won’t be attracted to him, I thought, and won’t have to fight temptation.
We sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. He didn’t take off his overcoat, a heavy grey and white tweed that looked as though it had been picked up at Goodwill. His hair was dirty and matted on one side, where he must have slept on it in the plane. I decided I wouldn’t fuss at him in any way. Nor would I forget that he must be intimidated by the big city, freedom, me. My plan would be to challenge him slowly and through the smallest possible increments urge him to return to life.
I gave him an omelette and salad for lunch; he barely touched the eggs and completely ignored the greens. Always afraid of gaining weight I never ate much during the day, but the day before I’d stocked the fridge and cupboards for the first time ever.
“Where’s the TV?” Gabriel asked.
“We don’t have one. Do you want me to get you one? I mean, do you have to have one?”
Gabriel looked at me as though I were mad or maybe teasing him. “In the bughouse all we do is look at TV I’m sick of it. I like to read, anyway.”
A remark designed to ingratiate himself with me, I thought. I noticed that he said, “In the bughouse all we do,” not “did.”
He said he was tired and wanted to lie down. I drew the shade (there were no curtains) in his room.
My secretary, William, arrived and I dictated the Mexican-American war. We didn’t take our usual sex break; I’d told him my nephew had come to live with me and was in the house now. I was constantly aware that this kid was sleeping under my roof, a thought that elated me. Only now, looking back, do I recognize that I was patterning myself after my parents but hoping to correct their faults. I wanted to be as solid and responsible as my father but more generous and less angry. I wanted to be as matter-of-fact and brisk and basic as my mother without her hysteria and bragging. Like her, however, I believed in the importance of sleeping and eating well and performing well the most ordinary chores such as dressing and cleaning one’s nails and washing up the dishes. Not for myself; when I was alone I sank down through seas of depression and self-neglect and had as sketchy a sense of time as a dozing dog. But for Gabriel. He’d gone too far, touched bottom and didn’t know how to push off and swim back to the surface. He needed a strict, totally ordinary regime and I would provide it. If he detested his father and stepmother and rebelled against them, then with me, his uncle, he’d cooperate, since he knew I had no legal or conventional reason to support him. He was here because I wanted him; he couldn’t rebel against me.
I was afraid that if he slept too long this afternoon he’d never be able to sleep tonight. Around four I took some tea in to him, even balanced the tray on his chest so he’d have to sit up and take charge. “Aren’t I awful, waking you up?” I babbled. “I remember Nanny—” Gabriel’s word for his grandmother—“would sing out on school days, when it was still cold and dark outside, ‘School bells are ringing,’ and I wanted to wring her neck.” Yes, clearly, I saw myself as Gabe’s mother, I thought sourly.
When I went back half an hour later he’d put the untasted tea and the tray on the floor and was sound asleep. I thought that he must be full of that antipsychotic medication that had so brutalized Sean.
For the first five days he was in New York I never once made him leave the apartment or even do any chores. I’d hear him in his room, door closed, strumming his guitar and singing in his high, hillbilly voice. He had to raise his eyebrows in order to sing and lift his head high; his face turned red from the effort and the veins on his neck popped out. I liked his voice.
I sent him across the street with the laundry on the sixth day. On the seventh he walked the ten blocks to the supermarket and back alone and successfully bought the list I’d given him.
On the eighth day, a Monday, I just handed him the card of a dermatologist on Park Avenue. I told him to make an appointment and get there and back on his own; I had far too much work to worry about it. I didn’t mouth the word dermatologist. I could see that Gabriel would never be able to bear a conversation about his skin.
Soon he was boiling up sulfurous concoctions twice a day and pressing them to his skin. He took antibiotics regularly.
I went with him to my barber and at Brooks bought him a sports jacket, two pairs of slacks and four shirts.
He began to speak like me, so much so that my mother mistook him for me. And my mother and sister, despite my warning them specifically, told Gabe, every time they talked to him, that he was becoming exactly like me. Of course I hoped he would, a bit; I even had a fantasy that he might change his surname (take his mother’s maiden name), but though he had nothing good to say about his father he greeted my proposal with horror, and I immediately withdrew it.
We spent hours and hours together, but I didn’t want to “hang out” with my nephew. I wanted him to read, which he began to do obsessively. He said he hoped to see a therapist but I told him, briskly, that he’d had quite enough of that. “I can’t afford it,” I said. “Anyway, it never works until you pay for it yourself. You’ll have time enough later, when you’re grown up. Your problems aren’t psychological so much as practical. You need to get back into school and catch up with kids your own age.”
I took my nephew with me to San Juan. We stayed in a cheap hotel two blocks off Condado Beach I’d heard about, more an apartment than a hotel room since there was a kitchen where we could cook. I had only three hundred dollars but I thought the sun might be good for Gabriel’s skin.
We’d lie on the sand and he’d talk shyly about which girls he liked. If I talked too crudely about big tits or the outline of a vagina seen through a swimsuit, Gabe would say, “Gross,” and look at me pityingly. He had very romantic ideas about Spanish-speaking women. He told me that back in the psycho ward he’d fallen for a thirteen-year-old girl called Ana, a Mexican-American who was beautiful and royally fucked up. Her father was a drunk and violent and her mother had a heroin habit.
I was a bit in love with Gabriel. I could see through his swimsuit that he had a large penis, much bigger than mine. With him I wanted to be a buddy, another teen, even a straight one, and soon enough I was looking at girls, too.
In a way my relationship with Gabriel was a continuation of the love I’d felt for Giovanni. At night, our faces burning from the day’s sun, we’d walk through Old San Juan down blue cobblestones that Spanish galleons had brought over to the new world as ballast—Spanish stone to trade for Peruvian gold. Gabriel encouraged me to go off on my own to a gay bar, but I enjoyed being with him. I never thought of Kevin, or even Sean. Gabe knew how little money I had. He was grateful that I was sharing what I had with him. He said, “You don’t really seem like a grown up. You look so young and you know all the latest dances and pop songs, more than I do, I’m not really into pop, more folk, and you just live from hand to mouth but always seem to be having fun, drinking, getting high, getting laid, but you get your work done, too.” I thought that maybe I’d taken the curse off growing up for Gabriel, but I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just saying what he thought I’d like to hear. He was a bit of a con artist, the result of therapy and his Maoist school and his overly analyzed mother.
She seemed jealous when we called her from San Juan. She said, “I don’t think Gabriel needs or deserves expensive va
cations in the tropics. He needs to be thinking about the serious business of getting back on the straight and narrow. Life isn’t all laughs.”
But I thought it should be. In the weeks following our trip Gabriel picked up what he called my “aristocratic” code of never pontificating, never seeming to struggle, never complaining or speaking fearfully of the future. Now that his face was clearing up he began to dress fastidiously. I said, “Oh, God, I’m sick of always having my nails look so dirty and urchin-like. I’ve broken down and bought a manicuring set and a brush, though it makes me feel like my father, the cold, old narcissist endlessly buffing his nails.” Instantly Gabe began to take care of his nails, as I’d planned. He barely knew my father, but he’d concocted a myth about him. He decided that in his nocturnal, misanthropic splendor Daddy was “cool.” Perhaps I couldn’t serve him as a model since I was gay; my father at least had the virtue of being heterosexual.
Of course I disliked my father even if I remained hypersensitive to the faintest signals he emitted. He told my sister that he thought it was admirable the way I was looking after my nephew. He’d even said he admired me for paying Anne’s tuition. I found such “admiration” shocking. Why should I have to worry myself sick, digging into a very shallow pocket, when he was so well off? Of course I was also gratified that he recognized what I was doing. I suppose my gratitude betrayed my slave mentality.
In influencing Gabe so indirectly, I wasn’t trying to manipulate him; the truth was that I wanted him to love me. To please him I introduced a chapter into my Baroque novel, one set in Spain. I even invented a character named Ana in order to titillate him. He was delighted by my literary compliment.
Every morning I’d lie in bed and write, waiting for the day to come rushing down on me—Gabriel’s needs, especially his need for company, the phone calls from Josh and Max and Butler and Maria and Lou, the secretary’s arrival and the necessity to shop and cook and clean. While I lay in bed, I could feel the day, just outside my door, coiling to pounce. My novel became my “little” novel, a secret journal, and if the language was overworked that was because I needed to prove to myself I could still write. And not so secret either, since I read it to Gabriel every morning.
At first Kevin kept his distance from Gabriel except if he ran into him slumped over coffee and a cigarette in the kitchen. Then Kevin would exclaim, “Yogurt! Steamed vegetables! Lots of fruit!—this is Miss Jean Brodie warning you!” Gabe would just smile feebly, sleep sand in his eyes. He didn’t catch the reference but he was willing to be amused and stared at Kevin as a Siberian prisoner might stare at a Balinese dancer. Kevin looked much younger than Gabe, though he was ten years older. Gabe slept, smoked, strummed his guitar and masturbated (I could see the shadow of his thwacking hand through the crack of the bathroom door), whereas Kevin was almost never home and was usually off somewhere on his bicycle or at classes or auditions. Some nights he worked for a gay caterer who did large parties.
But one day Kevin, triumphant and a bit shaken, announced that he’d just been cast in a big Broadway play, a psychological thriller, and that he’d be playing the juvenile lead, a crazed teenager. Suddenly I noticed that Kevin was drinking my nephew in with narrowed eyes, noting his strangely mechanical walk, his mirthless laugh, his rigid neck, his way of folding up into himself when he was seated and alone. The performance that six months later earned Kevin a Tony Award was based on Gabe. Never for a moment did Gabe resent the exploitation of his pain. It certainly wasn’t doing him any good. Besides, Gabe himself was by then writing a novel and studying both of us.
Kevin changed overnight from a bored profligate with a cutting tongue into a serious, home-loving professional. The play was a monster hit and he quickly became entirely subservient to it. The director was a vile Englishman who called women “slits” and who thought that an actor’s ego had to be broken down before it could be reconstructed in the proper way. Worse, the star, one of the most famous men in the world, was recovering from a seven-year binge and couldn’t remember his lines. He’d be moving easily along in one of his first-act monologues, thrilling everyone with his plangent voice, the only voice I’d ever heard that spoke in the minor key—when suddenly he’d be off and running in a second-act speech (one key word, used in both monologues, must have served as the hyperspace button). It was Kevin’s job to herd old Wet Brain slowly and seamlessly back into the proper first-act lines.
The action called for Kevin to be fully nude at the end of Act One. Nine tenths of the audience was seated in the normal fashion but a symbolic few, usually students, were placed in a half-circle on the stage, perhaps to suggest that this “serious” drama appealed to earnest young minds and not just to the usual well-heeled crowd of bored expense-account executives—the “carriage trade,” as it was still quaintly called.
Here and there, scattered among the couples, were a few gay men who’d come for the nudity—as well as for the hot and cold splashes of hysteria and wisdom, an invigorating bath that Tennessee Williams had first drawn for them. These older men, their conservative tailoring so at odds with hair colors never seen before in nature, would pull out opera glasses at the crucial moment when Kevin would go berserk and rip off his clothes. Then they’d be able to see if Kevin had the smallest pimple on his ass. The kids on stage, used to looking at television actors who couldn’t hear their remarks, would comment audibly on a blackhead—or, just once, a love bite on his neck (“No wonder he’s so neurotic if he’s getting mauled by a vampire”). The director, vulgar and hateful as he was, had never asked to see any of the actors auditioning for Kevin’s role nude. In fact he saw Kevin’s body only during the first preview. Kevin was vexed that the tension of being on stage made his large cock shrink; “Why don’t you come backstage and fluff it for me, doll,” he said to one of his boyfriends. The size of Kevin’s penis was the unspoken point of the first-act curtain.
There was one man in his sixties who attended the play three or four times a week, often with an attractive group of younger guys. He’d half-doze but at the moment of truth he’d sit up and focus his high-power binoculars, even though he was only in the fifth row and could see perfectly well.
His name was Tulsa and after twenty performances he started sending mountainous bouquets, fruit baskets and kilos of Belgian chocolates to Kevin’s dressing room. At last he came by after a matinée and shyly introduced himself. I happened to be there and he instantly latched onto me, whom he correctly diagnosed as the high priest of the cult and much more approachable than the god himself.
I needed a job. I wanted to send Gabriel to a private school, the Rockford Academy, in which “problem” students were taught all day long, one-on-one, by tutors. Kids who’d been ill or living abroad or in a madhouse or prison or who’d just been goofing off could catch up with their age group through accelerated courses. Gabe was eager to attend. In fact he’d become almost alarmingly motivated to re-enter the middle class. The only hitch was that the school cost each semester half of what I earned in a year, even if I did bits and pieces of journalism on the side. Kevin paid all the rent now out of his Broadway salary, but I was still far from coming up with the tuition.
Tulsa offered a solution. He was a consultant for several corporations and found me a job in the publicity department of a big chemical manufacturer that had its headquarters on Madison Avenue. My salary was generous, although after deductions my paycheck looked pretty measly; I felt I could supplement it if I labored every night on the history book.
I was back at work in an office after a five-year hiatus of getting stoned, sleeping late and working long days in little snatches. Jane, my boss, the token woman on the board of directors, made it clear that I was expected to be at my desk twelve hours a day, from eight to eight.
I had to buy two new suits, which I saw as an investment in my corporate future. The job itself, like every other position in this old-fashioned company, was devoted entirely to passing the buck. If I sent round a memo asking for “input” on t
he corporate report, the memo would pass from office to office, always being referred on to someone else whose “expertise” coincided with just such a question. The vice presidents were twenty well fed men in their fifties who were fiercely protected by their female retainers. Everyone was white.
I had a variety of assignments. I was asked to make a twenty-page condensation of The Coming of the Post-Industrial Age for the chairman of the board; I received high praise from the chairman himself, which threw Jane into a panic of insecurity and resentment. The company had major investments in South Africa; I was asked to explain how such investments were in no way abetting apartheid.
It was all too clear to me that having a child cost dear—in hours, money, compromises. I recalled one of my buddies from the sixties, who’d published three novels in his twenties, had never written another word after marrying at age thirty and becoming a father. With my day job and my night job there was no chance I’d ever get back to my “little” novel, which I abandoned. Our apartment had gone from a place of casual sex, irregular hours and constant creativity to one where we kept normal hours, ate ordinary meals, remained more or less chaste, never wrote fiction or painted, drank little, did our homework.
I figured out that when Kevin had not been acting he’d needed to stage daily erotic adventures in which he’d perform for an audience of one. He’d invented new personalities for himself and tried out new sexual techniques. Most important, he’d dazzled man after man. As “Pete” the hick or “Ivan” the Latvian gymnast or “Clarence” the English runaway Etonian, he’d tried on the new roles. As a hustler he’d intuited his clients’ fantasies and starred in their private dramas. He told me, “One day I was on a call and I walked into a hotel room and there was Tennessee Williams. I had a choice. Either I could gush and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Williams, how you’ve enriched my life!’ or I could march over to him and say, ‘Lick my boots, dog.’ I chose the latter and I could sense he was deeply grateful.”