by Edmund White
Somewhere along the way Fox had slept with Bob Constantine, a composer in his forties who wrote cerebral, twelve-tone music and taught at a famous university and did nothing from dawn to dusk but camp it up. Though Bob was fresh faced, red cheeked and, outside the classroom or concert hall, always in jeans designed to throw his massive farmer’s rump into high relief, nevertheless his conversation, at odds with this healthy peasant look, was all drawled Mae West or snappy Bette Midler repartee. Bob Constantine introduced Fox to Homer, the ninety-year-old acerbic dean of American music, who was looking for an assistant to prepare his papers for Yale, where he expected to sell them to the Beinecke Library for half a million dollars. Homer hired Fox. They got along like an old Southern couple, for Homer was from Mississippi, though he’d lived in Paris and New York for the past seventy years.
Homer was a sly dogmatist, a slightly Dada authority on every subject who had a dry, sometimes cracked opinion about the arts, literature, France, Germany, President Carter, women’s clothes, household pets, marriage and food. He would announce these opinions as though he were reading them off stone tablets. After riffling through my Japanese novel and my Baroque novel, he said to me, “You’re far too fascinated by theory. You want to be an innovator. But a writer must be primarily interested in the world around him. You need to become a sidewalk artist, going for quick likenesses. A constant stimulus from outside is essential for a long, happy career. Otherwise you’ll do your best work by forty and afterwards become sterile.” I took his words to heart, I who was just two years shy of turning forty.
He warned Fox against me: “Charming guy, a real seducer, but his métier, after all, is writing about love, and for professional reasons he can’t stay faithful.” This warning only fed Fox’s voracious jealousy.
Homer was deaf—and not just in an ordinary, cotton-wool-in-the-ear sort of way. No, the devil had devised a special torture for him as a composer: all the notes above the C over middle C were transposed down a fifth, which resulted in converting everything played by the right hand on the piano, say, into grotesque cacophony. Listening to his own music was purest torture. Like many deaf people who remain socially active, he dominated the conversation. When it turned from him for more than ten minutes he fell asleep.
Everyone put up with his bad manners and his dogmatism because he, like Balanchine, was a living link with the glorious past. Homer’s past had been formed by the neo-Romantic composers of the 1930s in Paris, such as Henri Sauguet and Francis Poulenc and the members of Les Six. He’d written two operas that were still performed all over the world and were as simple as hymns, as eternal as plainsong, as chic as the latest fragrance. For the last twenty years he’d dominated the musical life of New York as a daily critic, not a composer; now his deafness had ended both careers. He had a lover, a painter, who was just seventy-five and had a full head of hair. Nicholas still rode a motorcycle cross-country and, as Homer swore proudly, “He’s the only man of his generation who can still undrape becomingly.” He became the world’s oldest AIDS patient.
Homer knew everyone. He liked to cook, though sometimes he forgot to light his gas burners after he’d turned them on, and we all feared one day he’d go up in a major explosion. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel in a suite that had once belonged to the manager and had fine wood paneling. He introduced Fox and me to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Isherwood instantly became an acquaintance of mine as well, though we lived on opposite coasts and saw each other rarely. He urged me to write more directly and simply and to take on gay politics as a subject. When I would begin to praise him he’d laugh uproariously. Later I saw a play he and Don had written, based on Chris’s novel A Meeting by the River, and in that play the monks were always convulsed with the same laughter. Kevin had a small role in it.
Fox had many famous friends, including two Hollywood stars, several composers, a Vogue photographer who bore a celebrated name (which she’d acquired through marriage) and a whole host of novelists and poets, but he never introduced me to them. Nor did he present them to one another. He played with his cards close to his chest and if faced with an ambiguous situation that didn’t automatically call either for openness or discretion, he’d always choose to be mysterious. I didn’t even know how he’d acquired these friends—oh, the Hollywood stars, a couple, he met them, I suppose, during his acting days when they were all starting out. And he’d worked for the young photographer’s aged husband, a composer, before he died the previous year. But the writers, all of them gay, he must have tricked with.
What he didn’t like about me was my exuberance, often unfocused, and the copious compliments which I handed out to everyone and which occasionally misfired. Most of all he feared and detested my gossipiness, my embarrassing questions, my saucy sallies. I attributed his sense of proportion to his having grown up as a member of a prominent family in one small, traditional Southern city, whereas I’d been the son of a wicked divorcee who’d moved from city to city every year and I, like she, longed to make an impression even on strangers—especially on strangers, since waiters, taxi drivers, other passengers on the train or elevator were perceived to be judges, infinitely more powerful and promising than mere friends. These strangers weren’t “the public” whose opinion one risked “offending.” No, for my mother or me, they were potential biographers, benefactors, bosses, lovers; they were people only now being initiated into the wonderful wide wild world of our personal circus. Perhaps this sharp, even painful, need to please everyone constituted our sole form of optimism, though it usually turned us into buffoons.
Because of his work for Homer, Fox had developed a passion for filing. He spoke constantly of his archives, and saved every scrap of paper, even the most inconsequential note, that he received from an artist or writer, no matter how young or how obscure. I can picture him bare-chested in his khaki shorts and sandals squatting beside his twelve big boxes of files; he slipped into them a photo, a sketch on a menu, a letter or drafts of his own stories or journal entries, even press clippings about a man eaten by an alligator or a mother who’d baked and served her children to her husband, items that he thought might someday generate a short story. Anyway he liked grotesque things, which made him whinny with laughter.
He was oddly unsure of himself and assertive: aggressively insecure, I guess you might say. He’d start to explain something he felt (about me, about theater, about Homer) and he’d get caught up in tangles, then, pushing his face right up into mine, he’d keep asking, “You understand? You see what I mean? Huh?” His nose moved with his mouth as he spoke, as though it were part of his upper lip. He was so persuasive, so charming, that he quickly convinced his interlocutor to accept everything he was saying or doing, but if certain moments had been frozen in a photo—when he stood very close, bugged his eyes, jabbed at the air, flexed his big nose—he would have looked certifiable.
He was much more the hip New Yorker than I and he knew five or six young men (none of whom, of course, he introduced to me or to one another) with whom he’d huddle over coffee or on the phone for hours on end. He was proud of his friends; they were his capital. He’d work at cultivating them, though work didn’t convey his patience, his energetic casualness. He’d speak so softly on the phone I couldn’t understand anything more than snatches, but I was impressed by the way he crooned into the receiver, laughed intimately, kept egging on the guy at the other end (“You did? Like how? Details!”) or feign an encouraging astonishment (“No! She said that! You’re exaggerating!”). Around him I felt egotistical and indifferent, formal in my boring indifference, for if I was good in a crisis I was nil as a habitual schmoozer. I could sing the arias but I stumbled through my recitatives. I didn’t complain or have much patience with other people’s schreiing (the Yiddish was infectious in New York). I was given more to kvelling (crowing with triumph) over my friends’ successes, even my own. If people were cozily unhappy I instantly doused them in the cold water of a pep talk. Unfocused reports of dull daily activity I ke
pt probing for the lesson to be drawn or at least the anecdote to be distilled. Fox could groan and sigh and revolve slowly through the tiresome, convoluted plumbing of everyday life.
Outside New York he was much less sure of himself. I got us a gig from a short-lived glossy magazine to do a profile of Peggy Guggenheim, story by me, photos by Fox. Although he criticized other photographers all the time he was far from sure of his own talents. He wanted Joshua, who was already in Venice, to pin Peggy down on a precise day and to make her commit herself to a two-hour photo session, but Josh, as a man of the world, knew that Peggy was bored, loved publicity and would do what we wanted but only if her decision was made on the spot. Fox hounded me every day in advance and was so nervous he shook all the time. But his pictures turned out well, Peggy took us out in the gondola, and the article was published, although no one we knew ever commented on it or probably saw it.
Fox could be very harsh about other gay men, whom he dismissed impatiently as “these queens’” in a perfect spondee of irritation. He approved of older, celebrated homosexuals who’d never “made a fuss” about their sexual identity, just as he liked younger ones who were cleanshaven and career oriented. About this time the sidewalks around the East Village started to be stenciled with slogans, “Kill a Clone” or “Death to Disco.” From talking to Fox I saw how younger gays identified my generation with unreflecting conformist machismo, with greed and consumerism, with white supremacy and sexism. “You guys were just pissed off you couldn’t have all the same perks as your heterosexual white male friends, so you created gay liberation to make that one small adjustment and let the rest of us—dykes, niggers, drags—go to hell in a handbag.”
I tried to tell him that a fight over sexuality would never be a small one in Christian America; Anita Bryant, the orange juice queen, was leading a fundamentalist crusade against gays throughout the South and Northwest and getting pro-gay city ordinances overturned. “Save Our Children” was the name of her group. She was using the sophisticated argument that precisely to the degree that gays were respectable, attractive people they could mislead impressionable youngsters into their infernal lifestyle. Since gays don’t reproduce, they must recruit, was her idea. Or I could have said that the assertion of the clone look had originally been a political act, a way of signaling that gay men did not have to be sissies, arch and bitchy caricatures of middle-class women of the past, the very ones commemorated in the camp classic, Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women. Just as a woman of my mother’s generation would have thought a “hen party,” a dinner with other women, an admission of “old maidishness” and social defeat, in the same way the gay bars I’d first glimpsed in the fifties had been temples to despair, where self-mocking queens danced and “rubbed pussies” with one another before they got up the courage to go out in search of the real thing, a bit of rough trade to rob and beat them. The clone look was a tribal look, a way of saying to one another, “We’re brothers. We’re the men we’ve been looking for.”
But Fox would glaze over the minute I started talking politics. He was too interested in the artistic events of the city around him—the imminent visit of the Polish director Grotowski or the premiere of Penguin Touquet—to give much credence to my harangues.
I envied Fox’s cultural confidence. Perhaps because he was cataloguing Homer’s memorabilia from Paris in the 1930s he was certain that New York in the late 1970s would be just as artistically fertile and brilliant. Now, almost twenty years later, I can see Fox’s hunch was a good one. New York gay life, just before AIDS, was both unprecedented and without sequel. In 1978 six or seven gay novels, including Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, were published on the East and West Coast, discussed on all sides and sometimes even read. The Theater of the Ridiculous, John Ashbery’s poems (all about starting out all over again and crossing a gigantic plain), Robert Wilson’s operas without music, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, Robert Joffrey’s dances—all appealed to the sensibility we were fashioning.
In New York and San Francisco there were now so many gay men living openly that not only the genus but even aberrant species thrived. One could socialize, if one chose, only with other opera-loving sadists or only with cat-owning bibliophiles into urine. Straight members of the public saw the enormous gay parades of dykes in work boots and drag queens and the grinning, bespectacled parents of gays, but they never caught a glimpse of all those homosexuals who didn’t want to participate: the doughy clarinetist scuttling from a lesson to lunch with a lesbian musicologist or the doctor who, since he was busted for prescribing Quaaludes too often, never emerged from his apartment, or the Asian teenage woman holding hands with her Puerto Rican girlfriend in the park late at night.
Even if New York gay life was a ghetto made up of minorities, all contradictory and severally exclusive, nevertheless Fox was surely representative of that moment. He was aware that we were making history of some sort. He saw the links with an older generation (Ned Rorem’s, Frank O’Hara’s) and even Homer’s much older generation, but he could also glimpse how the present was preparing a new youth of wild, loud, totally freaky anarchic kids. Fox worshipped high culture, especially when it was wrapped like a shawl around the shoulders of men and women he knew personally (Homer’s ancient friends, whom he had met on a trip to Paris that he’d taken with the old man, were as real to him as the New York boys he murmured to over the phone every night).
He and I assumed there was going to be a future and that it would get more and more extravagant. We saw gay men as a vanguard that society would inevitably follow. I thought that the couple would disappear and be replaced by new, polyvalent molecules of affection or Whitmanesque adhesiveness. I was having sex with a sleepy-eyed Native American I’d met through Kevin. He and I would make love to a blond steward from Norway—and sometimes with a hairless translator from the French who affected a crewcut and policeman’s shiny shoes. At other times we were joined by a Kennedy-like gay political leader who’d rush in wearing a white shirt and rep tie and would have to keep checking his messages.
We were friends and lovers, more friends than lovers, and our long evenings of pasta, Puccini and sex felt as mellow as vintage Bordeaux held up to a flame and as exhilarating as a hit play in previews. In the warm weather we’d leave the huge windows open at my new place and listen to the sound of laughter and cutlery on plates welling up from the garden restaurant just below. We were inside, naked beside a candelabrum blazing with twelve candles, the long silver marijuana pipe from Morocco passing from one sun-tanned hand to another. The Indian was completely crazy; he had a paranoid fantasy about a cult of Hollywood actors who wanted to sacrifice him to the devil. But in our stupor, each guy’s head resting on the next man’s stomach, we’d sometimes start quaking with laughter in spite of ourselves when the Indian’s plot became too impossibly convoluted.
When we were all shaking, the Indian, Tad, would catch himself: “Okay, fellows, believe it or not, laugh all you want, but I swear—” and at that point we all lost it and writhed with the pain of our laughter until Tad began to blow out the candles one by one and then, when the room was dark and the needle had lifted from the last record, he’d kiss the steward, then the translator, then the Kennedy, then me with his big warm mouth, juicy as a pear so ripe it’s already turning brown, and he’d begin to murmur incoherent, fatherly reassurances in his baritone voice. He’d wrap us in his arms, the arms of a wrestler who’s taken on a winter weight he’s about to shed though the bulk can’t hide the strength that lies just under the skin. His skin had the not-unpleasant smell of Cubans who live on black beans and saffron rice (maybe that’s what he ate) and his big uncircumcised penis lolled so lazily, so majestically on his balls, like a river god on mossy rocks, that we four gathered around him with the vulnerability and clustering affection of smooth-limbed daughters. If in the dim light bouncing up from the paper lanterns strung through the trees below my window I saw Tad’s dark hand on the white of my ass, I felt he was growing a beard, I
breasts and, after the mad excesses of his Hollywood Satan story, he re-established his dignity through the simple authenticity of his body. We were still boys, even I at nearly forty, but Tad at thirty was so fully a man that only he among us need not fear aging. Our laughter melted into moans as we eased back into making love again.
I HAD TO HIDE my nights of Whitmanesque camaraderie from Fox because the more he loved me the more jealous he became. At first I found his jealousy reassuring, even exciting, after my years of hopeless love. Fox stared at me with his hyperthyroid eyes, which bulged out of his head in order to see more of me, even my slightest, most inadvertent and peripheral gesture.
After that first night when we’d met at the Slot and I’d fucked him, he never stopped fucking me. I’d lie on my back with him between my legs and he’d stare and stare at me as he’d fuck. If I’d groan with pleasure or pain (I could never distinguish between them) he’d redouble his efforts. He acted as though, if he shoved a little harder, inched in a bit deeper, he’d finally own me, take care of me. He was staring so hard at me not because he was melting with tenderness or because he wanted to transmit a thought but because, like an eagle carrying off a lamb, he wanted to see if there was still some life in me, something that might kindle in me a will of my own and inspire me to run off, head for safety.
I’d leave Fox’s apartment to walk home and the phone would be ringing when I came in. “What took you so long?” Fox would ask. “Don’t try to fool me—you usually make the trip in fifteen minutes. Today it took twenty-eight—nearly thirty!”