by Edmund White
“Chéri, j’ai pensé à toi toute la journée. …” He was there, a reedy, throbbing voice, unashamedly romantic in the Gallic manner, urging me to do something, anything, to put his desire at ease, which now was standing rigidly at attention. “Sit on it … put it in your mouth … it needs you, it can’t live alone like this, it’s a fish out of water.”
After a month of calls during which he told me all about his life, a recital that always shaded into phone sex with its incantatory repetitions and its vigorous, slapping silences, my lover decided we should meet. With Jamesian modesty I told him that I would only disappoint him. “My voice may be young,” I said, “but I am not. I’m overweight, my hair is grey, even the hair on my chest is grey, I wear glasses, if you saw me you’d say I was a professor nearing retirement age, not the kid you want to hurt and cherish and live with forever.”
“No, no!” he cried. “I love you, my love has gone beyond details like looks.”
When I thought of the diplomatic negotiations a real, working, live-in love affair requires I felt tired and hopeless—would he like my friends? I his? Who would cook? Was he a vegetarian? Did he have a steady job? No, no, I thought.
He suggested that we meet at a tawdry hotel (the tawdriness was an essential ingredient). He’d already be there when I arrived, undressed and in bed, the lights off. He’d leave the door open. I could enter in the darkness if I was afraid to reveal my looks to him, undress and join him. If I liked, he’d cover his body and face with a sheet and just leave his sex exposed, which I’d be sure to like, he said, it was big, the skin much darker than on his body.
I never agreed to go and we passed over from that moment when a fantasy is still exciting because it might be realized to that later eternity when it dies from lack of nourishment.
Every time I spoke to someone in New York I heard of another death. “Beal,” or Bill, the American composer I’d met in Rome, had become well known for a musical he’d written that Joe Papp had produced; I read in the Herald-Tribune that he’d died at age thirty-eight of complications resulting from AIDS. My old New York office mate Jamie was alive, but his lover, Gerry, the blond he’d carried up the stairs the night I’d met the White Russians—Gerry had died. They were the same Gerry and Jamie I’d slept with so many years ago on Capri. When I gave a reading in New York, Jamie, handsome although for some reason he’d dyed his hair white, came up to me, smiling, shy, encouraging; his wooden, head-prefect’s manner had become supple, fluid, young with age. He seemed angry with Gerry for dying, as though if he’d only stopped smoking everything would have been all right.
None of these men had I seen in years, but they had continued to exist in my imagination, not only as real and potential stories, heavily specific, but also as allies that I’d always dreamed I could call on in a pinch. Most of the people I knew thought the world would continue in the future as it had been in the past, but I was always foreseeing disaster and vaguely preparing for it. I knew one society beauty and clothes horse who’d had two thirds of her stomach removed so that she could eat as much as she liked and remain slim, but her new condition required enormous quantities of food to maintain even a minimal weight, since everything passed through her so quickly; I was astonished that she could be so certain that she’d always be rich enough—or the world bountiful enough—to secure all the nourishment she needed. I had a war mentality and could easily imagine ending up penniless, for if I lived extravagantly, at the same time I had no savings and no possessions and my way of life required that I be constantly at work. What would happen if I became too ill to work, if I lost my mind? I’d always vaguely counted on my dozens of friends in France, America and England, although the one time I’d asked Max and Tom for a loan they’d refused me. And now, as I numbered my dead, I felt that I’d spent my whole life social climbing and someone had sawed the ladder out from under me.
I learned that my old secretary, William, had died, the brave little masochist who’d danced in leather and made jokes about his suffering and diabetes. I found out that my shrink, Abe, had lost his lover, but only after the lover had become a crack addict and carried their television and stereo out of the apartment to sell on the street. “He became demented at the very end,” Abe said, “and reverted, mercifully, to his old sweetness. He’d lie with his head on my lap and smile at me. And to think how much he knew! Everything about Egypt, China, Louis XIV …”
Hajo’s ex-lover Gerhardt died, as did Gerhardt’s new lover, Italo. Ned’s friend Arturo died; I ran into Arturo’s middle-aged French lover, the one who’d pretended he was interviewing me on a television chat show, and he said that he’d gone on a trip alone after Arturo’s death to Tangier and there he’d met an adorable Arab boy who was able to wear all of Arturo’s clothes, a perfect fit, surely a sign from Heaven that Arturo had sent Ahmed to console him.
Kevin told me that his old lover Dennis, the boy with the beautiful birthmark on his temple, had married a rich, powerful Washington hostess. Dennis announced to all his old friends that he now despised homosexuality and had never “really” been gay, anyway. He said he was happy to have left “gay life” now that it had become “grim death.” But soon he was ill, he was traveling to Switzerland to have his blood scrubbed, and he was on TNF, an Italian miracle drug, the “thymus-factor” as he kept saying. He became bitter and maniacally angry. He ridiculed waiters and denounced his “dumb-as-shit” Irish family, beat his wife and squandered her fortune on boats and houses and trips that brought him no relief. One by one everyone he’d ever known abandoned him. In the past his flare-ups had made his pale, birthmarked face flush under the wave of cave-black hair. When Kevin would tease him for his sexy Black-Irish temper, he’d laugh so that he’d reveal his broken tooth, which he’d suddenly remember and attempt to conceal by straining his lips back into a straight line—a remedy that would only provoke Kevin into new fits of teasing and Dennis into new fits of chagrined laughter. Now he was dead and his wife had written an inspirational Christian book about her handsome young husband who’d died because he’d been infected during a blood transfusion. Of course she never mentioned (did she even know about it?) his homosexuality.
WHEN MY FATHER DIED he’d left my mother five thousand dollars and my sister and me fifteen thousand each; the rest of his money had gone to his second wife. Now she died and willed my sister and me just five thousand dollars each; we had no idea to whom she’d given the rest, probably one of her relatives, possibly her cat. When I thought how Anne and I’d always cringed around our father, terrified we might be disinherited, I had to laugh. He and the power of his money had frightened everyone, but now he was almost entirely forgotten, no one visited his grave, and if he’d sacrificed everything to the almighty dollar, the dollar had not kept faith with him, nor with his vassals. Our biggest fear, being disinherited, had come to pass and it meant nothing to us, even the manner in which it happened was quiet, incidental.
My stepmother’s death left me alone with their stories and mine, alone with my father, his cigar, his towering rages and his Cadillac. I remembered that when I’d descended once a month by train to see him for a weekend, after the exhausting seven-hour trip, after the anxiety of daily life with our mother (who was penny pinching, then hysterically extravagant, drunk, desiring, frightened), suddenly I’d been caught up in the solid, dull, Republican luxury of my father’s car and big, air-conditioned mansion. The Cadillac door would slam shut with the solidity of a space shuttle hatch. Our mother resented wasting money on food and many meals were just caught on the wing, but in my father’s basement a restaurant-size freezer was full of dead birds and animals, dozens of cans of frozen orange juice and quarts of chocolate, peach and cherry-vanilla ice cream, while the double-door fridge itself groaned under the weight of cooked hams and turkeys, quarts of milk and vats of cole slaw, dozens of eggs as well as pounds of bacon and of unsalted Land-o-Lakes butter divided into foil-wrapped sticks. Now the larder was empty, the house torn down, the diners dead.
Family life binds strangers together. I would never have chosen a retired child psychologist in her eighties living in Chicago to be my closest confidante. Left to her own devices my mother, who disliked fiction and was embarrassed by my confessions, would never have read my books, but because she loved me she puzzled over them and told me, in a vocabulary more suited to her own values and achievements than to mine, that she admired “the service I’d rendered my people,” for she saw me as a political spokesman for homosexuals and praised me as she might have lauded Booker T. Washington or Gandhi. By the same token I listened as she told me of her worries and hopes and of the joy she took in planning her visits to France. I was determined to show her the châteaux of the Loire and Ned and I hired a Mercedes and a wheelchair and shuttled her through Azay-le-Rideau, Chambord and Chenonceau. I found us rooms in other châteaux-hotels. She propped her big glasses on her small nose and read the descriptions of the castles with the same breathless absorption she’d once devoted to reports on Mongolism. She feared losing her memory and exercised it daily by repeating long lists of names and facts, appropriate to a woman who’d been trained as a child back in Texas to learn by heart the names of all the states and their capitals.
She worried constantly that she might have to live in an old-age home, but I could see she was happy in her high-rise apartment looking out over Lake Michigan and downtown Chicago and encouraged her, every two years, to renew her lease “one more time.” She died, five years ago, at age eighty-seven. My sister said she was angry; she’d done everything her Indian doctor had told her to, she’d followed his smallest suggestions, and now, unfairly, she was having to die, she, a professional woman, who’d always worked with doctors, who’d run a medical clinic. Now she was dying just like a lay person.
She had, as she would put it, the “inner resources” to live alone, stick to a schedule, nourish herself adequately, read, receive visits, attend her Sunday School and church every week. I bought her a subscription to the opera and to museum events. She praised me constantly for my generosity and even if I thought her praise was wide of the mark I basked in it. I’d always feared that the love of a woman, a woman my own age, would have a weakening effect on my character, but my mother’s love, as uncomprehending as it was absolute, was an affection I could accept with humility and a smile.
She and I flew to Dallas and were driven all over Texas by my beautiful cousin and if we avoided certain subjects—my homosexuality, my sister’s black babies, my mother’s refusal to believe in the divinity of Jesus—all went well. None of my relatives even knew I was a writer, since my books were not distributed in their Texas towns.
We saw the old homestead with its smokehouse. We visited a great-aunt in an old folks’ home where women with Alzheimer’s were clawing at their genitals through the sweatpants they were wearing or drooling their food on their chests. We visited a museum of Texas houses in Lubbock that traced the development from dug-outs to two-room homesteaders’ shacks to big comfortable Victorian two-story houses—the very trajectory my family had followed in just three generations. My mother was buried in the Texas village of one hundred and five people where she’d been born. Her grave is next to her father’s; he was a Woodsman of the World and his tombstone is a tree trunk in stone, broken off at a slant where the tree of life was felled.
Gabriel, my nephew, was married to a Japanese stockbroker and living in Tokyo, where he was teaching English, eating raw fish and miso soup bought out of a machine on the corner and sitting in the bathtub and writing a novel at night while his wife slept.
EVERY FEW DAYS I talked long distance to Ned in New York. He’d worked as a model builder for an interior designer but now his health was deteriorating and he’d lost his job. He was living in my old studio apartment, where he gave little dinners, usually for just one other person, a man he was courting. Eventually he began to receive some money and free meals from public and private agencies designed to help people with AIDS, but I paid his rent and gave him an allowance.
It seemed to me strange that I was living in Paris, eating lotuses, while my mother and Ned, whom I supported, also lived alone, counted their pennies but managed to derive a quiet pleasure from their solitude, their friends, even just the fact of dressing well and keeping a tidy, handsome house. I invited Ned to Venice with me and some other friends one spring. I took a photo of him against a pale blue painting and though he was thin, his hair nearly white, he still had the same physical elegance I’d first loved in him ten years before. The painting was tall and wide and Ned was posed against it as though he were already an angel mounting to heaven. The sunlight must have been too bright (he was having trouble with his vision), for in the picture he is squinting slightly, but then again he always looked both friendly and slightly confused, as though he were a prince visiting a possession whose language he didn’t understand; he smiled and squinted.
I remember that when in Venice I bought him a sleek raincoat and two new sports jackets, made of silk and the lightest wool, tears came to his eyes: “I’m sorry I’m getting so emotional, but I never buy myself new clothes since I keep thinking …” He cried, then blew his nose. “It shows you don’t think I’m going to die right away.”
“I wouldn’t let you,” I said, taking him in my arms.
We’d always agreed that if one of us became ill, the other one would take care of him. But I wasn’t in New York looking after him. I’d let down my side of the bargain. Once I’d told Ned that I was so afraid of becoming ill and dying a long, painful, humiliating death that I wished I had the pills and courage to do myself in right now, but Ned, calling me by our old pet name, said, “Don’t worry, Petes, we’ll take care of each other and you’ll see, we’ll have fun, just as we always have.” His sweetness and simplicity took my breath away; he’d said, “We’ll have fun dying,” which if I felt cynical I could dismiss as another example of his frivolity, but if I was less critical I could say was his promise that nothing was going to be too frightening to endure. We could live out our dying, step by cozy step, together.
Except we weren’t together. He didn’t want to come back to Paris because he was still searching for the perfect black preppie lover. In the meanwhile he liked having fifty channels in English, including non-stop cooking shows and soap operas. He would go to Joshua’s apartment as often as he was feeling up to it, open the mail for him, shop, clean, cook, but mainly they’d watch TV together and, snobbishness aside, the soap operas and game shows and cooking programs and news channels were proof that life was still flowing vigorously through the wires: put your cold, withered hand on the wires and feel the hum and warmth.
Kevin and his Israeli lover, in turn, began to look after Ned. He was in such pain that his doctor had given him patches that secreted a morphine analogue, but Ned, alone and delirious, applied several patches instead of the single one required. He went half-crazy, lost track of time, forgot to eat and attempted suicide. After that I made sure that Kevin had a key to his apartment and checked up on him every day. Kevin’s old heartlessness had been replaced by a sweetness that may have been tempered by
humor but was nonetheless deep and genuine.
I heard that Fox was dying and I flew into New York to see him. He had a private room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village. Although a mutual friend had told me Fox was unconscious, when I arrived he’d had a sudden surcease and was sitting up in bed, laughing and entertaining two of “his” authors, straight guys who wrote mystery novels that he’d edited. Fox was attached to a transparent tube and a glucose bag hung high on a pole that rolled around with him when he walked—“My dance partner,” he said.
Rumors were circulating in the little world of New York gay writers that Fox had written a nasty, obsessional novel about how I’d abandoned him and cruelly broken his heart and that it was scheduled to be published after his death, but I wasn’t afraid of his posthumous revenge. I knew that after I’d left him he and his curator had had a passionate, quarrelsome affair and been inseparable until the curator’s death (at thirty-four). I could never have given Fox that sort of belligerent intimacy.
Today he wasn’t the least bit cool to me. He didn’t want to talk about anything serious; in fact, he spent most of the two hours I was with him joshing heavily with his authors, who fed him tidbits of publishing gossip and kept assuring him how great he looked.