Between Men

by Richard Canning

  The “Tommy” Patch

  Aeneas’s pubic hair forms a flat, high, dark patch, kinky yet clean, organized yet extensive. It matches, in concentration, his face, and has the severity of Last Year in Marienbad, a Delphine Seyrig coldness and gravity. Aeneas’s patch is black and smug; it ignores small people and strangers. Aeneas’s patch: I call it “Tommy.” I first saw “Tommy” in my treatment room. I prefer “Tommy”—that pubic patch of matte superiority—to Aeneas’s penis.

  In Baton Rouge and in Lisbon, the “Tommy” patch had admirers who could not match its immobility, its function as fence. Don’t trample me! said his patch, in Baton Rouge, when it grew to its full breadth, but also in Lisbon, where it first germinated (he left Lisbon at age twelve, when his father died), and where it borrowed its airs, its bravura, its identity as shield of Achilles. In Lisbon the pubic-hair patch learned its barricade behavior, though in Baton Rouge it grew to full kingship; then, in Variety Springs, it could look back in complacent awe on its early accomplishments, and it could confidently predict another decade of sovereignty—for Aeneas is only thirty, and his patch will, until forty, be triumphant, at least in my biased eyes. I may be superior to Aeneas in intellect, but Aeneas’s patch equalizes us by humbling or humiliating me, when I have the luxury to contemplate it, in the semidarkness of my treatment room. His “Tommy” patch can smite me when it pleases.

  More on the “Tommy” Patch

  It counterpoints his gaze. Aeneas’s eyes see you, and his “Tommy” patch sees you. Also his mouth (third item) regards you. Mouth and eyes provide ironic supplement to “Tommy” patch. Aeneas can smile or smirk because he knows his “Tommy” patch immunizes him against your nitpicking. His patch, flat, never vibrates, rises, or assaults. When I see it, I am intrinsically without the tools to measure it. Observing it, I have no choice but to surrender, to live under its Book-of-Hours canopy, its Scrovegni-chapel tent. (I could never be this explicit in Dr. Pellegrino’s presence.) When I first saw Aeneas’s “Tommy” patch I knew I’d found the one object worthy of perpetual attention; I’d found the one zone that would never be kind to me, that would never have my interests at heart.

  In Baton Rouge, Aeneas ate crab boil (so he told me) with his mother and his guy pals from school. After spilling crab boil on his white jeans, Aeneas dipped his restaurant napkin in ice water and wiped the stain off his pants at the crotch. The moistened stain, urine-like, gave voice to the confident yet speechless “Tommy” patch beneath, a “Tommy” patch that a girl or two had touched, before it became my property.

  The Professor’s Spanking Act

  These notes are not escapist exercises, but calisthenics for the political work that will flog Variety Springs “within an inch of its life,” as Bettina Kracauer used to say, describing Isaac Gold’s “spanking” act, one of his vaudeville specialties, in which he, playing “The Professor,” would spank a dilatory pupil, a girl in a tutu, who compulsively broke into hybrid jazz/ballet moves whenever Isaac (“The Professor”) turned his back on the class and wrote mathematical formulae on the chalkboard. The culmination of the “spanking” act occurred when Isaac commanded his sidekick—victim of a danseuse—Tourette’s, a coprolalia of the toe shoe—to stretch herself on Isaac’s knee so he could theatrically wallop her, while a cymbal and tympani, in the orchestra pit, crashed and thumped in time with the Professor’s hand strokes. At the end of the act, when Isaac once again turned his back, the dancer would reengage in her jazz/ballet spoof, this time mimicking the Professor. Her dancing replicated Isaac’s characteristic patented waddle; though not corpulent, he shifted his weight from foot to foot as he walked, parodying an obese man’s rocking perambulation. Had Isaac Gold once been fat? Or was he paying inverted homage to Sophie Tucker, his beau ideal, and also praising his late mother, Lotte Gold, stern and wide?

  I come from a long line of sodomites—the Kracauers and the Golds. My erotic practices pale in comparison to their squalid behavior in clerestories and peanut galleries of vanished vaudeville houses.

  My Slowness Stems from Sadism

  Today my speech is slow. New patient: Hans, seventy years old, overweight, moles on his back. A Frankfurt art dealer, in town to sample healing waters. I am disgusted by no variety of erotic experience. Hans says he will fly to Bogotá tomorrow to visit his daughter, formerly a kidnapping victim, now a banker. As I massaged his back, grotesque but forgivable, Hans told me that his daughter never recovered; she “managed” her feelings, but she never fully “worked them through.” I asked if Hans planned to work through his feelings. “No, just manage them,” said Hans, cheerfully. His stubborn lack of insight appalls me—”a true child of Frankfurt,” he proudly calls himself.

  Bettina Kracauer’s Andalusian Nouba

  “Did I ever tell you about my friendship with Paul Bowles?” Bettina said, one night in the Poconos. We were, at table, our usual fivesome—Bettina and Jacob Kracauer, me, and Isaac and Ludmilla Gold.

  Isaac said, “Bettina, I don’t know if your son is old enough to hear the Paul Bowles story.”

  “Nonsense,” said Ludmilla, “he’s nearly a grown man. Look at him.”

  They all looked at me.

  “Do I seem like a grown man?” I asked the assembled four.

  “I’m not sure,” said Bettina.

  “It’s definitely a matter of opinion,” said Jacob.

  “Maturity, like Latin,” said Isaac Gold, “is complicated.”

  “Do you want to hear my Paul Bowles story?” said Bettina.

  “We haven’t figured out whether our son is mature enough to hear it,” said Jacob.

  “Let’s ask him,” said Ludmilla.

  “I’ll do it,” said Bettina. “As his mother, I’m the logical candidate.”

  Everyone fell silent.

  Bettina turned to me: “How mature do you feel, Siegfried?”

  “I think the Paul Bowles story is too important to tell at dinner table, in a public restaurant,” said Jacob.

  The next morning, at breakfast, same table, same fivesome, I heard the simple story, not obscene. Bettina, prior to marriage, had gone to Tangier for a psychotherapy conference; Paul Bowles had been keynote speaker. “His talk,” Bettina said, “was anti-Freud, anti-psyche. Afterward, I accepted Paul’s invitation to return to his apartment, where I heard, for the first time, a recording of Abdelkrim Rais’s Moroccan-Andalusian orchestra playing an Andalusian nouba. As you know, Siegfried, there are different noubas for different times of the day. Whether Paul played me a morning, afternoon, or evening nouba, I don’t remember, though I recall that Paul impressed on me the significance of the listener’s state of mind, and how that same mood could be simulated afterward without rehearing the nouba. Once heard, the nouba became a permanent part of your physiology. If only I could sing for you, Siegfried, right here, in the Poconos, that Andalusian nouba I first heard in Paul’s presence!”

  Jacob Kracauer’s Upper Lip Has an Opinion about the Creation Myth

  My father’s upper lip and lower lip have divergent theories about the origin of the species. His upper lip is full (Rita Hayworth) and venal (Mercedes McCambridge or Agnes Moorehead in the radio-play version of Sorry, Wrong Number). Are my father’s eyes an adult raccoon’s or a baby rabbit’s? The many Jacob Kracauers coalesce into one scapegoated Green Hornet. Any sentence that describes him is like the long hallway in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (Bettina’s favorite film). Down that paranoid corridor, the frightened beauty (played by Josette Day) wanders, confronted by animate candelabra, each intimating her failure to return home and care for her ailing father. This sentence, here, is the disobedient daughter’s drugged refusal to return to the paternal cottage of penury and illness. Writing these words, I remain, ensorcelled and selfish, in the beast’s moneyed domain. Too metaphorical!

  The Painted Boy

  Edmund White

  I have written a few decent things recently. My yarn about the Wild West was good: solid. But no, not much else. Most of it
blather. Now critics are saying I never knew what I was doing. That the good things—The Red Badge, “The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Blue Hotel”—were just happy hits. Damn them! I took six weeks to write “The Blue Hotel.” I had such a strong feeling that the Swede felt fated to die, that he was shaking in fear in anticipation of his death that very day, though in reality he had nothing or no one to fear, and in the end he was the one who provoked the violence. Even in Cora’s newspaper columns I could always put in a good word or two—something fresh and queer. Most writing is self-dictating: yard goods. I was the only one of my generation to add a beat here and steal a note there. Rubato, it’s called in music; Huneker told me that.

  I’d written forty pages of my boy-whore book, Garland read them over and then with all his Wisconsin gravity in that steel-cutting voice he said, “These are the best pages you’ve ever written and if you don’t tear them up, every last word, you’ll never have a career.” He handed the pages back to me and asked, “No copies? This is the one and only version?”

  “This is the one and only,” I said.

  “Then you must cast it into that fire,” he said, for we were sitting in a luxurious hotel lobby on Mercer Street waiting for a friend to descend and a little fire was burning just a yard away from our boots.

  I couldn’t help feeling that Hamlin envied me my pages. He’d never written anything so raw and new, so modern, and urban. No, he has his rolling periods and his yarns about his father playing the defeated pioneer farmer in the Dakotas, but he couldn’t have written my pages. No, Hamlin with his lips so white they looked as if he’d kissed a snowman, all the whiter because wreathed by his wispy pale brown beard and mustaches. His eyes sparkled with flint chips and he seemed so sure of himself. Of course, I was writing about an abomination though Elliott was just a kid, not a mildewed chump like Wilde—though you can find plenty of folks in England who knew him and would still defend him. We all hear them champion Wilde now, though no one stepped forward during the trial. Yeats was the only person who made sense when he talked about Wilde. Wilde’s trial and the publication of The Red Badge occurred in the same year, 1895. But he represented an old Europe, vicious and stinking of putrefaction, whereas the Badge is a solid thing, trim and spare.

  I threw my forty pages in the fire. It made me sick. A pearl worth more than all my tribe. And all through the lunch with its oysters and baron of beef I kept thinking the oysters were salty from my tears and the blood gathering in the silver serving dish—I thought that blood was my blood. I could barely eat and I couldn’t follow the conversation with all its New York knowingness, reporter’s shoptalk. Of course Hamlin hated my painted boy; he was even then scribbling his Boy Life on the Prairie in all its banal decency. Not that I’d ever dreamed of defending my little Elliott, but I knew his story was more poignant than scabrous.

  God, I’m sounding absurd with my blood and tears and my resentment of old Ham. Hamlin was the one who gave me the fifteen dollars I’d needed to redeem the second half of The Badge from the typist. He was the one who had told me I was doing great things and got Maggie to William Dean Howells, and then Howells launched my career. Despite all the labels flying around in those days—I was supposed to be “an impressionist” and then there was Garland’s “veritism” and Howells’s “realism”—despite the commitment to the gritty truth, my truth, the truth about little Elliott, was too much for them to take on board. Hamlin had been roundly criticized for saying in one of his books that a conductor had stared at a female passenger “like a sex-maniac.” That was enough to win him universal censure in America. No untoward deeds—just the word “sex-maniac,” and next thing you know he was being compared to the sulfurous Zola himself. Oh, he’s considered the devil’s own disciple because his heroes sweat and do not wear socks and eat cold huckleberry pie. . . .

  The only one who could cope with my Elliott was that mad, heavy-drinking, fast-talking, know-everything Jim Huneker. Jim would drink seventeen beers in an evening out and feel nothing. He’d teach piano to an all-Negro class at the conservatory off Seventeenth Street and then retire to his boardinghouse where he was in love with a married woman named Josephine.

  Her husband, a Polish merchant, never touched her, so Huneker said. He’d just stare enraptured at her V-shaped corsage and succumb to a red-faced paroxysm of secret onanism. Huneker seduced the unhappy lady just by touching her, the first time a man had touched those perfect breasts. But he was a busy one—he once gave a dinner for all three of his ex-wives. He had a long, straight Roman nose he was so proud of that he liked to speak in profile, which could be disconcerting. His very black crinkly hair sat on his white brow like a bad wig, but he made me pull on it once to prove to myself it was real.

  Huneker was such a womanizer! I could write about him in a memoir, couldn’t I? As a music critic he’d encouraged aspiring female singers to prejudice his reviews in their favor through what he called “horizontal methods.” Huneker also had a quasiscientific interest in inversion. Usually he’d scorn it. He condemned Leaves of Grass as the “Bible of the third sex.” Initially he was hostile to the eccentric, effeminate pianist Vladimir de Pachmann; he feared that Pachmann’s silly shenanigans onstage might damage the reputation of serious musicians before the usual audience of American philistines. Pachmann would stop a concert to say to a woman in the front row, “Madam, you’re beating your fan in two-thirds time and I’m playing in seven-eighths.” Or, for no good reason, he’d interrupt his playing to pull his hoard of diamonds out of his pocket and sift them from one hand to another. Because of these hijinx Huneker called him “the Chopinzee,” and they traded insults at Luchow’s when they first met and poured steins of beer over each other’s heads. But a year later they mellowed and Pachmann came to dinner and played for Huneker for five hours, till three in the morning.

  Tchaikovsky also troubled Huneker for his indifference toward women. Huneker was particularly disturbed by the story that, seconds after Tchaikovsky met Saint-Saëns, the composer of Samson and Delilah, they were both in women’s clothes dancing the tarantella. When Tchaikovsky died, Huneker said he was “the most interesting if not the greatest composer of his day”; Huneker also defended Wilde and said the English were silly to abhor him after they’d courted him for years.

  I was with Huneker one wintry day walking up the Bowery. We’d just had lunch at the old Mouquin’s down at Fulton Market and we were strolling along in one of those brisk winds that drive ice needles through your face even in the palisaded fastness of Manhattan. In spite of our sole meunière and red velvet banquette we were suffering from the elements. Sometimes weeks go by in New York and I scarcely notice if it’s hot or cold, fair or cloudy—and then a stinky-hot day floats the reek of the tenements upstream or the gods decide to dump four feet of snow on the nation’s busiest metropolis. And then the snow turns it into a creaking New England village.

  The weak sunlight was filtering down through the rail slats of the overhead elevated tracks, and every few minutes another train rumbled slowly past above our heads like a heavy hand on the keyboard. Beside us, horses wearing blinkers were pulling carts down the center of our street between the El tracks. Their shaggy forms and pluming breath were scarcely visible through the blizzard of sideways snow. The dingy white awnings on every building were bulging above the side-walks under the weight of snow. The poor prostitutes in their scanty clothes were tapping with their nails on the windowpanes trying to attract a bit of custom. One sad girl, all ribs and scrawny neck, huddled in a doorway and threw open her coat to show me her frozen wares. Huneker with his three plump wives and horizontal sopranos certainly couldn’t bother even to sniff at these skinny desperadoes through his long Roman nose. We walked and walked until we decided we had had enough of the wind’s icy tattooing of our faces. We were about to step into the Everett House on Fourth Avenue and Seventeenth Street to warm up.

  Standing in the doorway was a slight youth with a thin face and dark violet
eyes set close together and nearly crossed. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but he already had circles under his eyes. He smiled and revealed small, bad teeth, each sculpted by decay into something individual. He stepped toward us and naturally we thought he was begging but then I saw his face was painted—carmined lips and kohled eyes (the dark circles I’d noticed were just mascara smudged by the snow).

  The boy stumbled, and I caught his cold little hand in my bony paw. His eyes swam and floated up into his head; he fainted. Now I’m as frail as he was, but back then I was fit. I carried him into the Everett House.

  He weighed so little that I wonder if he filled out his jacket and trousers with newspapers to keep warm or to appear less skinny. There was the faint smell of a cheap woman’s perfume about him and, because of the way I was holding him, the stink of dirty, oily hair that had absorbed cigarette smoke the night before.

  I was ashamed of myself for feeling embarrassed about carrying this queer little boy tart into a hotel of well-fed, loud-talking men. All of them were illuminated by Mister Edison’s new hundred-bulb chandelier. The doorman took a step toward us, so agitated that the gold fringe of his epaulets was all atremble; he held up a white glove. Idiotically I said, “Don’t worry, he’s with me,” and good old Huneker, who’s a familiar face there, said, “Good God, man, the boy’s fainted and we’re going to get some hot soup down him. That’s what he needs, hot soup. Order us some hot soup!” Huneker went on insisting on the soup as if it answered all questions about propriety.