by Edmund White
Now all that was in the past. I was nearly forty and no longer at a formative age. I’m sure he was glad we were eating at home—he wouldn’t have wanted any of his acquaintances to see him with the long-haired weirdo that I was. In his eyes even my cigarettes and wristwatch counted as effeminate (as opposed to cigars and a manly pocket watch), and the fact I lived in New York and worked as a journalist suggested a character disorder, perhaps even Communist leanings.
But age had mellowed him. He enjoyed telling me about the neighbors, about his sister (the old maid who’d married late, her husband full of useless get-rich-quick schemes) and his brother: “Poor guy, he became bald as an egg. Everything he attempted failed, you remember that barbecue joint in Dallas?”
“Great barbecue,” I said.
“Sure as hell was, but he couldn’t run it worth a damn. Then he was selling crap door-to-door, poor old Hank, had loads of charm, folks liked him, but always thinking too big, soon as he made a few bucks he’d hire a replacement and start running after the women and drinking. He could knock ’em back.”
“What happened to him?”
“Well, he got a screw loose and couldn’t stand loud sounds. His wife and two daughters, lovely women all, well, he drove them out, or rather he got himself a trailer in a trailer park and a rifle, and if the little kids next door started hollerin’, well, old Hank would come out with that gun like he was fixin’ to fire it.”
“Didn’t anyone report him to the cops?”
“You’d think so, but no. But then I could see he was dangerous, out of control, and not even eating properly, and all the time he complained about the terrible pounding in his head, you remember that accident?”
“No.”
“You don’t? Well, he had run into a tree one night in his old Ford pickup, guess he was tight, that never stopped old Hank.” I could see my father took comfort in this simple explanation of his brother’s insanity.
But as he went on with the harrowing tale of Hank’s hospitalizations, his isolation from his family and eventual suicide (“The pounding in his head just became unbearable”), my father was obviously relishing the story as a narrative. I saw that like me he was a novelist. Or he had become one when every other love (money, sex, power, especially the power to intimidate his family and employees) had given out. The story remained, the story of how Hank’s life (and his, yours, mine) turned out or would turn out. He seemed to see his own life as irreproachable, and keeping his record clean, I gathered, he thought was an admirable activity. Just as certain literary critics end up by esteeming poems and novels which one can say nothing against, in the same way he’d applied this standard of unexceptionability, more worthy of a modern monarch than an actual living, breathing human being, to the trajectory of his own experience.
Other people’s lives, however, as long as they didn’t touch too closely on his, he preferred to be colorful, shameful, even tragic. He steered us away from my nephew because he must have feared any prolonged discussion would end with a plea, no matter how muted, for help, for money.
What struck me was how abstract—and how powerful—this meeting was. I hadn’t seen this man in seven years and if, in the interval, I’d thought of him at all it was only as the malign magician of my childhood, the dull but often wonderfully angry source of all power, money, menace. I certainly hadn’t wondered how he was doing now. He wasn’t, in my personal drama, someone who developed, nor did he ever act out of character in my imagination. Now I was faced with this reality—reduced, almost pathetic—that had slowly been taking shape in the forgotten alembic of time. He seemed smaller, he was certainly frailer, and he’d developed this late, utterly unexpected taste for gossip, which at the end of a life coincides with a sensitivity to history. Why should I have cared so much for this boring, isolated man in Cincinnati, Ohio, who’d not even heard of my books, much less read them?
And yet, of course, I did care. I never even stopped to wonder if or why I wanted to please him. I wanted to please him so much that tears came to my eyes, as they had done years ago whenever I’d dared to correct him—tears that then had expressed not so much my fear of enraging him as my sorrow that he wasn’t infallible.
IN SEPTEMBER I rented a house and Fox and I went to Key West for several months. Next door there was someone who played the Hammond organ every afternoon at three. Fox’s two cats would hide in the crawl space under the house and he’d go crazy shouting at them to come out. His Southern accent deepened. Across the street there was a Spanish-language Pentecostal church.
We no longer slept together. I’d ended that—Fox’s jealousy was too much. Surprisingly, he didn’t resist my decision. Perhaps I was releasing him from an obsession he, too, disliked. I never knew, since like most couples we chatted constantly about every peripheral concern but never breathed a word about what we were living through together, the clauses and riders we were constantly adding to our invisible but tangible contract.
If our sexual life with each other had ended, Fox was no less possessive of me, but now as a writer, as a personage: he was Prince Albert to my Queen Victoria. He insisted we meet all the other writers on the island (there weren’t very many in those days) and used Homer as our celebrity bait; he thought such “connections” might someday help my “career.”
We both went on the Scarsdale Diet and in two weeks I was thin, tan, clear headed (since the diet included no alcoholic drinks) and Fox’s ears stuck out like a kid’s—or my father’s—and his eyes grew enormous in a face as long, thin and triangular as his white cat’s.
I lay in a big double bed in the back room, bathing in the tepid slipstream coming through the window fan. I wrote and I read all the books I liked at the Key West Public Library. Eddie was down for the winter and lent me his library card. Here he was quieter, more relaxed, sweeter than I’d ever seen him before, as though in Florida we were all backstage and what we said didn’t matter. Eddie and I would bicycle through the sudden cloudbursts, visit the cemetery with its eccentric epitaphs (“I told you I was sick”), cruise the “Dick Dock,” as we called the wide pier jutting out into the algae-thick, shallow, warm water near the old bandstand. One day I told him how much he’d intimidated me the first time we’d met and he’d said nothing after my reading. “I was drunk,” Eddie said. “I used to drink myself into a stupor.”
Fox and I put the weight right back on in the following weeks because we drank more and more heavily: margaritas and beers and rum punches. The fall months were off-season and few tourists were around. The sun dazzled off the tin roofs of the old wood houses on White Street. There were gay discos and gay guest houses with their young gay staff members and older gay guests, but perhaps because I was drinking so heavily that competitive world of fit guys didn’t much attract me. I preferred going to the Papillon, a gay bar in a 1960s hotel that catered to locals. There I’d drink so many rum punches that I’d be almost too drunk to ride my bicycle home. I’d weave my way through the empty streets, past a cat sleeping in the middle of the cool pavement in the faint light of the moon. I made loopy figure-eights under a banyan that kept casting its roots farther and farther afield and multiplying its trunks. Air conditioners throbbed in windows. Behind mosquito-haunted bushes pulsed the dim lights emitted by old trailers on cinderblocks.
A sudden tropical rain would soak me through but a moment later I’d be dry. When I got home Fox would be shirtless, in shorts, sandals and black, nerdy spectacles, typing furiously in the front room, tearing one sheet after another out of his portable Smith-Corona. Or he’d be crouched beside the house, hissing threats at his deeply indifferent cats.
I’d shower in the dark outside, slip into boxer shorts, make myself a dark rum on the rocks, stand in front of the open fridge, eat some rock shrimp we’d steamed in beer, the inexpensive little shrimp with finger-cutting hard shells. They went down like popcorn. I’d lie on clean white sheets, read Chateaubriand or James Merrill. At four in the morning I’d finish one volume, only to pick up anothe
r in an exquisite luxury of timelessness. One of the cats, marked like a sea trout, would pay me a sniffy sort of call, like a beneficent lady begrudgingly visiting a poor relation, but if she’d stay for a while I’d draw her on a blank page of the notebook in which I was writing a novel about my childhood.
Sometimes, late at night or even toward dawn, Fox would come into my room, very silly, and do his chicken dance. It was based on a TV commercial, I think, an ad for Campbell’s chicken soup in which dancers strutted about dressed as poultry, but I didn’t own a television and had never seen the commercial, nor did Fox know the words, but he still liked to fold his hands in his armpits, beat his wings and cluck and feebly sing, with the sweetest smile, “I am a little chicken …” The words quickly petered out, he wasn’t even sure they were the right ones, but that tentative, erased jingle became the anthem of our new love.
If I was no longer the lightning rod for Fox’s demonic power, his typewriter now drew his ire. He’d pound at it noisily for hours on end—he’d written the first page of his current short story a hundred times. I was afraid that if I ever stopped to study my writing so microscopically I, too, would become paralyzed.
When Homer came for ten days I gave him the typescript of the first chapter of my new book to read. Since I’d told him it was a “gay novel” he was expecting pornography. When he’d read it he said, in his best Mississippi accent, “A lot of wash and not much hang-out.”
He’d stay in bed all day, making the most awful noises as he spat and hawked and snored and groaned, but at six sharp he’d emerge, impeccable, in a fresh shirt, bow tie, linen suit creased only to the right fashionable degree, and make us cocktails, usually daiquiris.
He was reading the memoirs of an ancient French grande cocotte who found God late, while gossiping with a society priest at a dinner party (“Our Lord shall be your last lover”). Despite her natural inclination toward lesbianism, she married a Romanian prince, much younger and shorter, did good works, said her rosary daily and remembered her glory days, all those delicious sins she’d so lingeringly repented of. “I never knew her—I could have—but I knew her crowd,” Homer squeaked, “and here I am, seventy years later, finding out from Mes Cahiers Bleus exactly who was deceiving whom.”
Over the previous summer I’d driven down to Princeton with a Russian friend and met Nina Berberova. I tried to get her to speak about her friendship in Paris in the thirties with Nabokov or of the brilliant novels she’d written then, but no, she was forward-looking, she was planning a sci-fi novel about the future. My Russian friend had explained to me how she’d emerged out of the rubble of Europe at the end of the war and arrived in New York in her fifties with nothing but a Chanel suit and Anna Tolstoy’s address. Within a year she’d learned English, how to drive, how to type—and soon afterwards she was teaching Russian at Princeton. She went on to write her memoirs, The Italics Are Mine.
The mailman arrived with a package from the Soviet Union, bulky, badly wrapped in torn brown paper. When Berberova opened it she said something in Russian and read the letter out loud.
Only when we were alone did I ask my Russian friend, “What was all that about?”
“Well, you just witnessed a minor historic moment. Nina was married to Khodasevich, the poet Nabokov considered to be Russia’s greatest of this century. When Mayakovsky committed suicide in the 1930s, Khodasevich irritated everyone by writing an article in the French émigré press denouncing Mayakovsky. Suddenly the Whites hated Khodasevich and the Reds hated him—everyone. Unanimous. Anyway, Nina has written all about it in her memoirs and the book has finally made its way to the USSR and Mayakovsky’s ancient mistress, Lily Brik, has written Nina saying she found Nina’s account fair—and sent her a bottle of Chanel No. 5, which you can find in any drugstore in the States but which must have cost Lily a small fortune, it probably had to be smuggled in from Finland….”
These stories, Nina’s and Homer’s, gave me a sense of how history is nothing but feuds and fashionable conversations, how it remains in the memory of the last intact brain of the lone survivor, and if it is to be thought about at all afterwards it must become a monument to be deciphered or a legend to be read—not by hordes all at once but singly, occasionally, imperfectly. It occurred to me that what we’d thought and done, the people I knew, might someday be written about. Official history—elections, battles, legal reforms—didn’t interest me, I who’d never voted and felt no connection with society. No, I didn’t want to be a historian but rather an archeologist of gossip.
One night Fox and Homer and I got drunk at the local disco on Duval Street. We sat outside in the garden to escape for a moment from the heat and smoke and noise, and Homer, deaf and fat and in his nineties, said, “You wouldn’t believe it now but when I was in my twenties I was sexy, at least I attracted lots of men who wanted to … take me; I think I rather resembled a clean little piglet, but I must have secreted a special … pheromone, is that the word? Anyway, a hormone perfume that drove men wild. I wasn’t interested in my beauty, not like Ned Rorem. In fact I wasn’t beautiful. I was simply irresistible.”
We all three sat back in our bower, all three of us alienated in different ways from the lean, muscled gay men dancing inside like the parts of desiring machines in the Anti-Oedipus, the vogue book of the moment. We all three, I suppose, were thinking of the long since vanished power of Homer’s rump to attract men—older composers in France, tramway conductors, bankers in Right Bank cafés looking up from a copy of the Figaro—a smooth, silky, hairless rump, always in danger of becoming decidedly plump, as incontrovertible a historical fact as the grande cocotte’s belated conversion or that bottle of Chanel No. 5 that Lily Brik had sent Nina Berberova.
I thought of the century plant, a cactus next door to our rented house, in the yard of the lady who played the Hammond organ every day at three. Its strangely mechanical, spiny branches, like a robot’s arms covered with grommets, only rarely and then at night proffered at the very end of its prosthesis a delicate white flower; it was like Der Rosenkavalier performed in the age of Anti-Oedipus.
My mother came to spend a week with Fox and me. She was either drunk or so shaky that she couldn’t walk without being helped from our house to the car we’d rented just for her. Fox didn’t regress into a Southern Yes-Ma’am-No-Ma’am boy but rather called her by her first name and asked her for her opinion on world affairs, something she was always up on since she listened to the news all through the night. She kept her little portable radio under her pillow and woke if Israel invaded Lebanon or Carter lost the election. She was horrified by the way Fox shouted at his cats. She’d become so respectful of other lives that she would harm nothing, not even a fly, but rather shoo it out the window with an envelope. But she appeared extinguished. She was confused, she dozed all the time, she slurred her words and cried easily. Most maddeningly, she became tearful many times because she’d misunderstood a simple, factual sentence and interpreted it as a sentimental reference.
She’d retired or rather she had been forced into retirement by her clinic, which was no longer functioning. She had no pension and no savings. Her cancer had reappeared and she’d had her lower intestine removed and been outfitted with a colostomy bag. Her lover, Randy, managed to be transferred to the West Coast and he was never heard from again.
After she left Fox and me, Mother went up to her Michigan house, which she had to sell if she was going to have some capital to live on (though after paying off the mortgage she’d probably receive only thirty thousand dollars, which wouldn’t take her far). One night while eating alone at a steak house she started flirting with two men who kept buying her drinks. By the time she got home she was so drunk she couldn’t navigate her car into the garage and had to leave it out on the driveway.
Inside she fell in the bathroom and cracked two ribs. She couldn’t move and her peristalsis seemed to have frozen. Even when she irrigated “Rosie,” as she’d named her stoma, it refused to respond. And she was incapable of
leaving the bathroom. She heard the phone ring occasionally, but she couldn’t move to answer it.
Three days later, still immobilized, she made a bargain with God that if he’d save her life she’d never have another drink. “It was like a miracle,” she told me over the phone. “Suddenly the shit—excuse the word, but it’s the only one that will do—the shit came exploding out of my body.”
She’d been saved, but only for new horrors. She was selling her Michigan house and moving her things to storage or to her new Chicago apartment on Lake Shore Drive or to a maid’s room she’d rented in the same building and dubbed “the crow’s nest.” Standing beside the van when it arrived and directing the movers became a task that rendered her hysterical. She became impossibly entangled and the workers, frustrated, simply dumped most of her furniture in her new living room. She wept and shouted and the building management called me and alerted me to “a possible problem.”
The next thing I knew my mother was trying to give away most of her money to “that pitiful Dot,” a secretary she’d once had, a pale, skinny complainer who, nevertheless, earned a decent salary and in any event appeared to be better off than my mother. Dot called me, upset, assuring me that she’d refused the check but that my mother had become so vehement that she didn’t know how to react. I told her to accept the check and tear it up when the dust had settled.