by Edmund White
“But why?” I asked, not joking at all. My seriousness sprang him out of his joshing.
“Because I can’t live without a girlfriend.”
“You’ll find another.”
“No, I won’t. You have so many tricks—gay life is so promiscuous—”
“I do not. It is not.”
“—that you don’t realize how hard it is for a straight guy, especially one who’s not so great looking—”
“You are good looking,” I said, trying to make my paternal praise sound more plausible by adding as a joke, “at least good enough for straight life. Women have such bizarre values.”
But it was too late. I could see he was panicked by the prospect of living alone. He left New York with Ana. In Chicago they split up. She was married two years later to a Cuban boy who’d dyed his close-cropped hair a greenish-blond. “You’ll love him, Sunny,” she wrote me. “He has a beautiful body and can wear all my clothes.” They divorced three years later when Ana went back on drugs. Only fifteen years later did she join AA and go back to school and remarry.
For the entire time Gabriel had lived with me I’d felt I was hauling water in a leaking bucket up a hill to fight a brushfire that was quickly spreading. Every day had brought a new crisis—he’d lost his afternoon job or he’d slept through a crucial exam or he’d put his new suit in the washing machine—and I had automatically thrown myself into going back down for more water.
Now he was gone and I didn’t think about him. I found I had too much free time at first, but the phone started ringing, there was a new disco to visit, a new crop of novels to read, new people to meet, for New York does not encourage a quiet, deepening appreciation of a small circle. I couldn’t understand this sudden shift in my interest. Perhaps when Gabe was living with me I’d labored under some feudal sense of responsibility for a dependant, a primitive code of patronage or hospitality that absence dissolved.
Gabe went back to live with his mother and her new girlfriend and attended public high school for his senior year. Two weeks before he was to be graduated my sister discovered some beer cans in his closet and threw him out of the house because he was a threat to her sobriety. He moved into a big, noisy communal apartment where he stayed up all night and didn’t study. He didn’t get his diploma. I was angry with my sister as though she’d carelessly knocked out of my hands the brimming pail I’d been carrying for so long.
But there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t that I’d washed my hands of him. No, I’d just rinsed them lightly in the waters of Lethe.
KEVIN WENT ON a national tour with his play and I’d go see him in cities that weren’t too far away. We had a romantic weekend in Baltimore, but now that he wasn’t under my roof I was gradually able to let him go. The entire time I’d been in therapy with Abe I’d wanted to free myself of my obsession with Kevin and find someone who loved me. But I couldn’t end it on my own, this obsession, not so long as he was living with me. Because I wanted him and he didn’t want me, I hated myself. I felt my heart turning to stone a bit more every day, as though Kevin were the gallant young Perseus holding aloft a gorgon’s head of my own twisted, ugly passion, something he didn’t look at but that petrified me.
In Baltimore we lay on twin beds at dusk and watched the thousands of starlings haunting the old stone battlements of the hotel wheeling through the sky like ashes blown off a fire in high wind. Our fire was dead, the log cold, the starlings the last scattering of my love. We lay there, very peaceful, and Kevin was exquisitely sweet with me. Maybe he felt that I needed a reward for having made the trip. Maybe he could tell I was slipping away from him and he wanted me back, not as a lover but as a brother or a friend—a landmark, really, in the shifting uncertainties of his life. Or, just possibly, when he didn’t have my hangdog devotion served up to him every morning over breakfast he could remember he loved me, at least sometimes, at least a little bit.
But after his year and a half on the road he headed to Hollywood to make his fortune. He was gone and I resolved I’d never shed another tear over a man. For years afterwards I felt a bitterness towards him. Sean had been too crazy for me to blame for not loving me, but Kevin had withheld love perversely, I decided. When I’d write about him (and he kept showing up in my fiction, sometimes even as a woman), I couldn’t resist picturing him as a cold careerist whose flinty heart kept him from succeeding as an artist. Or I imagined that someday he would come to regret the way he’d spurned me.
Proust’s law is that you always get what you want when you no longer want it. Just the other day I had lunch with Kevin in New York, one of those Village coffee shops where you sit in deep, comfortable armchairs before a thrift-shop table originally designed to support a sewing machine. He’d asked his fine-boned, forest-creature Israeli boyfriend not to come along since he, Kevin, wanted to be alone with me. He was now deep into his forties, slender and well-built but no longer intimidatingly beautiful. He said that for fifteen years he’d had sex with the hottest numbers in New York but that now his luck had run out, except occasionally he could still score; I told him that even the real dogs went howling in the other direction when they saw me coming.
We laughed. He let me talk for an hour about Brice. “I have the worst amnesia about him, about our years together, which I suppose is a normal analgesic,” I said, “although for a novelist it’s scary, especially an autobiographical novelist like me. I’m supposed to remember everything.” Kevin assured me that all my memories would come back when I started writing about Brice but that for the moment they were held on ice (the cryogenics of the unconscious).
I had my doubts, but I appreciated his gentleness, his sweetness. He, too, had begun to write about his past, about his coming out that first summer in New York when he was an acting student from Ohio and had met the famous Hal, star of a big Broadway musical (everything in the story was accurate, even Kevin’s sniffing contempt for the musical).
Suddenly all the bitterness I’d ever felt against him vanished. I was glad I’d lived long enough to forgive him—not through any deliberate act of generosity but through the involuntary wisdom conferred on all of us by time, as though with age we all become morally as well as literally far-sighted.
I REMEMBERED that back in the 1970s Ross Stubbins had kept calling our number, even though Kevin had left New York; I was now the one to talk dirty to him. Did he even notice the change of personnel? He started coming over to the apartment and having sex with me, although he drank so much he was usually impotent and just talked and talked and talked. Once we called Kevin in Los Angeles and had a telephonic three-way with him.
One night I ran into Kevin’s beautiful lover Dennis at the Candle and invited him home with me. I was surprised he accepted, since I felt he must be two or three erotic classes above me, as indeed he surely was. We smoked a joint and made love by candlelight on Kevin’s large foam cube of a bed. After sex he showed me how he did aerobic exercises. I felt appallingly guilty and swore Dennis to secrecy and he only told Kevin years later, just before he, Dennis, died from AIDS. Kevin said to me, “Why didn’t you ever mention it? I couldn’t care less, frankly.”
I still looked young, my face unlined even if my eyes were ringed with dark shadows and the fingers of my right hand stained yellow with nicotine. For ten years I’d worried about getting older, too old to score easily and frequently with the hundreds of men I required annually, but age was held off, frozen, in abeyance. Was it because I didn’t have to trudge through the rain while it was still dark on my way to an office? Was it because I was never bored? Or at least never used the word boredom? Was it because I’d suffered so little—or rather, suffered intensely but only over abstractions such as lovelessness or unfulfilled ambition, whereas my married friends worried, year in and year out, over the practical family problems I’d faced only while Gabe and Ana lived with me?
I had no wrinkles, no grey hairs, nothing sagged, my hairline was receding only slightly. I was proud of my youth, which had been ex
tended ten years longer than I’d ever expected, but I also saw it as an empty honor, a sign that I was like wax that had not yet been sealed, that had, perhaps, become too cold and hard to take an impression.
I moved downtown, back to the Village, or rather to the Colonnades, a rickety old terrace built in the 1830s by the Astors for remote relatives who wouldn’t be inheriting. The Colonnades was in the no-man’s-land between the West and East Village, an area that ten years later would be teeming with boutiques, restaurants, gyms, bookstores and bars but that then, at the end of the 1970s, was tentatively being called, half as a joke, NoHo (North of Houston), and that local residents thought might someday become prosperous.
I had a beau named Leonard who’d arranged everything. It was he who moved me into the Colonnades. I’d met him at the gym. He was tall, lanky and blond and he worked out every night with Billy, his constant sidekick.
Leonard was from Florida, he had a job as a secretary for the New York State Council for the Arts, he knew no women socially and he loved the company of men. He was six foot four but slightly hunched, as though he disliked being so tall, so conspicuous. He ate enormous quantities at all times, hoping to gain weight.
He had a loping walk, a shifty glance, blue-white skin and a speaking voice he’d forced down from tenor to bass. The arts of life—conversation, food, clothes, holidays—left him indifferent; perhaps he’d never thought about them. Talk was either grunts at strangers or a halting, sincere confession to his two or three intimates. Food was just grams of nourishment to be consumed according to a schedule for maximum weight gain. Clothes were gym clothes and sweatsuits and parkas and second-hand overcoats for warmth.
But he was involved in a grand remake of his external experience and even his character. He went from being a timid, skinny kid to a loud, smiling, lordly man in the space of three years. When I first picked him up at the gym he liked to talk dirty while I sucked his big, silky dick. The rest of the evening he’d tell me about his childhood and his plans.
He’d grown up in Florida in a trailer camp. His father had been a high school football hero and, later, a drunk in his twenties, always going on a bender every weekend when he was through working as a garage mechanic. Leonard was still just a scared little kid, malnourished on margarine and sugar sandwiches, when his father had a bad car accident and lost both legs. After that his dad would just lie in bed all the time drinking. Every time he saw Leonard he’d call him a creep. Leonard shot up, played a bit of basketball badly, studied hard, played in the Gainesville band, and his father hated his kid with all his heart. “You’re a fuckin’ creep. Look at you, lurking around the house, fuckin’ nose in a book, like a faggot creep, blowing on some shitty instrument at halftime instead of playing sports. You’re a fuckin’ nerd, the kind of creep I used to beat up in high school.”
Leonard finished at Florida State with top grades, his father’s voice in his ears. He came to New York because there he thought he could be a faggot, a nerd, a creep in solitude. But once he arrived in New York he met Billy, ten years older, an equally shy boy who played the piano, read poetry, was in arts management, drank to excess. He was the one who found Leonard his job and launched him into weightlifting.
Billy was small and passive and profoundly indifferent to women. Because of his work he’d met some of the most celebrated painters and poets and directors of the day, all gay men, and they called him in the middle of the night to go out drinking or invited Billy and Leonard up to a cottage in Vermont or to an island in the Caribbean and so their humdrum life, which consisted of work, brown-bag lunches and workouts, would suddenly be shot through with a glimpse of ermine or flamingo pink, that is, black and white Vermont or Technicolor St. Bart’s. For most of the successful older men they knew were every bit as strange as they—paranoid or cruel or alcoholic or profoundly self-hating—and they liked these two Southern guys, one tall and one short, one fair and one sandy haired, both taciturn and socially awkward, both fiercely cultivated.
But Leonard benefited from a brief historical moment, the triumph of clone culture at the end of the 1970s. He became a huge man with a massive chest too hard to sleep on, shoulders as wide as a Jaguar’s fenders, a back so bulked with muscle that his spine had become a very deep indentation, and a butt you could have balanced a martini on. His legs stayed skeletal and thousands of squats under a bar so loaded that it looked as though it might snap in two did nothing to beef them up. He trudged about the gym as though his shoes were made of lead and cement and he belched like an active volcano.
The landlord liked him and asked him to supervise the construction of two major gay venues. First he wanted Leonard to draw up some plans and oversee the total facelift of a sauna that had been a foul-smelling steambath for half a century. I used to visit that place with its come-slippery tile steps, its green pool growing slime, its steamroom decanting fifty years’ worth of toe jam and ear wax, where saurian old clients flickered into life only once a century. In its place Leonard put speakers wailing Diana Ross, grey industrial carpet, spotlights trained on minuscule grey-green tiles in the wet area, a state-of-the-art hot tub and dozens of private rooms sheathed in solid metal walls painted black or terra cotta.
The lights were flattering and the sheets and towels impeccably white. There was no clock except at the entrance and time was banished along with any crack in the pleasure machine that might indicate whether it was day or night outside. Everyone looked tan, everyone was young—except now youth had been extended to include hot men in their forties. Hunky daddies as well as twinky kids. Beauty—facial beauty, fine bones, flawless skin, a full head of straight hair—was no longer important since a fighter’s mug or a lantern jaw could be a turn-on, the latest antibiotics and sun treatments ensured good skin and a bald head had just been deemed sexy.
The other place Leonard built was a disco—a huge high-tech dance floor installed under whirling lights and booming speakers, the whole inserted into a historic theater. I didn’t go often but when I did it was on acid tempered by downers and grass and I’d dance for hours, bare chested, my trousers soaked through with sweat, my body slipping against hundreds of other naked torsos. Some guys were wearing just silk shorts and whistles dangling from a cord around their necks. All week long these men would be pumping iron and swallowing vitamins so they could dance from Saturday at midnight to Sunday at noon on heavy drugs. They alternated five days of temperance with two of debauchery. The admission price was stiff since no one drank liquor—I’m not sure there was even any liquor for sale.
Around dawn I’d go up to the shadowy balcony where guys were stretching out singly or in pairs, smoking cigarettes and looking down through eyeleted metal sheathing at the domed dance floor and its orchestrated writhings. Sometimes I’d kneel between another man’s legs and suck his salty, sweaty cock. After a few months I realized I could skip the drugs and dancing and just arrive fresh and cool at six or seven in the morning and go straight up to the balcony and give some head to weightlifters who were starting to crash.
Freed from my parental duties and determined to take advantage of the Indian summer of my looks, I went to the baths or the balcony three nights a week. I wasn’t what I would have called a sex maniac. I had dinner with Joshua or Butler or Max or a beau every night of the week, usually in a restaurant. I never cruised by day, even though while I was writing my sex manual, working against a tight deadline, I became excited and frustrated. But late—toward two or three in the morning—I couldn’t distinguish between loneliness and horniness. Well, it certainly wasn’t simply loneliness, since if a friend had called after midnight seeking company I would have found it intrusive.
Leonard had built these two palaces, though I doubt he ever made much money from them. What he did obtain was the goodwill of the landlord, who became a rich man and who backed Leonard’s own gym. Leonard designed and built it himself in the same sober but chic industrial style he’d used for the baths and the disco. He outfitted it with the best and newe
st equipment and hired hot Cuban and Italian instructors who were so macho they never smiled and were even rumored to have girlfriends. The most famous gay porno stars took out memberships and the young professionals from Chelsea joined up in the early spring to prepare for the annual summer migration to Fire Island.
In the midst of his wheeling and dealing Leonard found time to create my studio apartment. An old man had died after living there for fifty years in the most primitive, rent-controlled squalor. Leonard had the place fumigated, the linoleum ripped up and the parquet restored, the ceiling lamp concealed, the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood shutters dug out of the walls and rehung, the white marble fireplace stripped clean, the walls painted a pale grey, a loft bed built over a walk-in closet and a new galley kitchen and toilet and shower stall wedged in behind a brand-new wall. The ceilings were fourteen feet high and the two noble casement windows looked out on a jungle of fire escapes, dirty back yards, glowing exit lights, gingko trees, twenty-story buildings and water tanks perched on distant roofs. When the East Side local headed downtown from Astor Place the whole building shook.
After years of living on the depressing Upper West Side with Kevin and then the kids, I was alone and back in the Village. Everyone in the building was gay—not the piss-elegant window-dressers in suits I’d lived next to uptown but young Village guys in jeans and bomber jackets and three days’ growth of beard who sometimes got blind drunk at dawn and fell asleep with the same record playing at top blast over and over and over. My apartment was burgled right away—someone just stepped in off the fire escape outside my windows—and after that I started closing the heavy wood shutters and barring them whenever I went out.