by Gary Indiana
He’s brought some tapes for me, Egyptian music he says he bought in Cairo. Chanting, flutes, tambourines. With a faraway, musing air he reminisces about camel rides in the desert, the effusive friendliness of Arabs, burnouses and casbahs. He tells of the oblivious infatuation of his travel sponsor, a “fat old queen” who he says descended on him like a bird of prey right after Gregory graduated from high school, plying him with gold watches and opal rings and designer clothes. “I didn’t know any better then,” Gregory qualifies. The fat old queen whisked him off to London, then Cairo. Just those places, no other ones. Doesn’t sound like much of a world tour. This long-ago sugar daddy sounds plausible enough, but I don’t believe Gregory has ever been to Egypt, or to London, for that matter. His memories sound a little too generic. Maybe he’s inventing them because I’ve told him a fair amount about my own travels, and Gregory can’t stand any experiential differences between us unless they support the idea that he’s seen and felt more than I have. A few days ago when we talked about politics, Gregory suddenly revealed that President Reagan’s son was an old school pal of his, and that he’d traveled with him to California one summer and visited the Reagan ranch, had dinner with the First Couple, etc., etc. At first, Gregory’s description sounded just dull enough to be true. But as it developed, I recognized the bravura, hurried style of Gregory’s improvisations. When Gregory invents, he patters, giving his listener no room for questions.
When I don’t believe what he says, I work my face into what I hope is a neutral, credulous expression. His lies make me embarrassed for him. As he tells the fat old queen saga, I find myself translating it into more believable terms. I can imagine Gregory ten years ago, even more beautiful than he is now, like a smooth doll unmarked by experience. Not that he’s much marked now, but his eyes look as if he’d seen a lot of things he shouldn’t have.
An older man came along, from where he doesn’t say. But I picture this older man as not all that much older. Gregory meets this guy in a gay bar in New Haven or Hartford, and the guy, who may or may not be fat, installs Gregory in a brownstone on Gramercy Park. (He pointed out one of those houses once, as a place he used to live. I’ve forgotten what else he told me. With him I’m a poor listener, always waiting for what I want to hear and not hearing what he tells me.) Dresses him in elegance and for a while gives him the tasteful life lived by a certain dated kind of respectable faggot. This is a period of rampant sexual consumerism. The old offer the young their money, use them for a season, discard them for fresh meat.
Gregory soon becomes bored, but he’s afraid to shift for himself, without the fag’s money. He finds himself torn between friends his own age who are less uptight, and the townhouse and this man. Eventually the lover gets bored, too, first of all with Gregory’s petulance, then angered by Gregory’s physical indifference to him, and one night, a horrendous fight occurs, Gregory finds himself in the street. He drifts to the nearest meat bar, one the lover won’t look for him in. He finds a companion for the night, works his way into this new person’s life until he finds a job and a place of his own. Maybe this sequence loops over and over until he goes home and enrolls in college. Yale, he says. After two semesters, he craves the anarchy of the city. Nothing really terrible can happen to him, not with that face. If Gregory stands on a corner for ten minutes, something promising will land at his feet.
I knit this background from the odds and ends he’s dropped since I met him. His flights of exoticism may be real, for all I know, but they don’t really matter. The point of what he tells me is that his life has been disjointed and weird and he isn’t too proud of it, but now he’s trying to be good. He relates his past transgressions to show how deeply he’s changed. His relationship with me, he says, is his first real step towards responsibility, balance, mature caring. His speeches on this theme are frequent and embarrassingly histrionic. When he goes on about “us,” about this unique bond between “us,” I feel he’s jumping a chasm whose true measure is unknown to him, and that he’s putting words on things that can only be real if they exist in silence. Where we actually live from day to day, in the shared fuzz of telephone intimacy, Gregory constantly redrafts the terms of this “us,” but abstractly, he considers us glued together for life in a pact of behavioral rectitude, exemplary moral fastidiousness, a correct homosexual couple. We simply haven’t evolved into our future state of happiness, where the physical stuff will flow naturally from everything else. For Gregory there’s no disparity between his brave declarations of love and his abrupt displays of frigid indifference.
We try going out to a movie. Gregory insists on Desperately Seeking Susan; I suggest The Purple Rose of Cairo. I thought you hated Madonna, I protest. Yeah, but you said you hate Woody Allen, he counters acidly, pulling on his leather jacket, his face inexplicably dejected and sealed as if he regrets having wasted time with me.
You don’t have to get pissed about it, I say.
I’m just annoyed, he says through his teeth, moving quickly for the door.
For Christ’s sake, I tell him, following, do we always have to leave things in some weird place? You know I’m going to think about you all night, wondering if everything’s all right between us, can’t you just talk to me in a normal way? Look at me, I told myself, in wonder: I’m following right behind him like a dog.
How can it ever be all right, Gregory whines, when you want too much too fast and you don’t give me any room to breathe?
What about you, I say.
I want everything, he says.
8
“Pain and fever” (my notes) “the dual monarchy.” A picture from my front windows, that spring, of the street where it converges with the corner of Second Avenue. The liquor store with blocky neon lettering, the metastasizing Korean vegetable empire under its parti-colored awning, the greasorama BBQ chicken & steak grille with grass-haired punks ranged outside at a bank of world conquest video games. Gurgling noises from excited microchips, the sizzling of suspicious meat. The odor of rancid carcinogens mixing with the perfume of irradiated grapefruit.
“M., vainly attempting to rescue me from the horrors of infatuation, has a searching talk with Bruno about Gregory’s background. Is he sincere? A heartbreaker? Taking me for a ride? To worsen things, M. tells Bruno I’m so obsessed with Gregory that I’ll kill myself if he leaves me. He further yacks that Gregory’s the only real boyfriend I’ve had in years. Bruno, with characteristic insensitivity, reports the whole thing to Gregory, who storms into my flat while I’m writing, letting himself in with the set of keys I’ve made for him (a gesture which places my privacy at the mercy of his whims).”
Mid-spring, days of grossly fluctuating temperatures. From balmy to mild to ugly gray and clammy, the weather of hopelessness. The final grains of winter have dissolved. On Second Avenue, a sprawling Neapolitan bazaar clogs the sidewalk. Wasted types slump against cars and squat over blankets covered with disintegrating clothes, trinkets, books, stereo components, neatly fanned skin magazines, the contents of their apartments and, no doubt, of other people’s apartments. Junkie couples with livid arms, pederasts with sagging stomachs, leftover hippies coated with filth. After 6 P.M., the gypsy encampment swells into a major obstruction.
“Gregory is indignant, as only Gregory can be. Hurt beyond belief. Betrayed. Angry. Freaked out. Your friend M., he sobs tearlessly. And Bruno, all these sick faggots, he laments, and suddenly we’re back in high school together. They’re trying to break us up, they can’t stand the fact that we love each other. Actually, I’m touched by M.’s solicitude, even though it pisses me off. This infuriates Gregory further. It’s nothing to smile about, he instructs me.”
I’ve settled into a productive attitude, behind my typewriter, six floors above the disintegrating neighborhood. The streets have become esoteric. Lurching beggars proliferate, like waltzing mice liberated from a vivisection lab, demanding change, cigarettes, attention. And their eyes and voices are becoming wilder. I can’t look at them without seeing
murder trembling in their grimy hands. At night, my block swarms with ultra-thin chicks in metallic halter tops and satin hot pants, their customers circling in slow-motion cars. Last year’s dusky storefronts are blazing neon oases of sushi chefs and radical hairdressers.
The very young dress all in black, which makes them look old and tiresome and ugly. Gregory has pioneered this look, but carries it off with startling panache. Men follow him in the streets, he says. Sometimes he turns up at my door in a panting sweat. His forehead glistens, the forked, gray-blue vein near his right temple pulses strangely. His days are chronic, infectious dramas. Bruno has given him a one-day-a-week job sitting in the gallery. Another day less for me. He’s meeting smart young artists, he’s in a fever of creativity. The restaurant job is a bad joke to him now, because any day, he’ll kiss it goodbye. He pockets ever huger percentages of the nightly checks, blowing the money on lab work. He has three or four pieces already mounted.
The late seasonal change has jolted reality into giddy motion. The phone rings off the hook, strange calls come from strangers. I change the number and enjoy relative quiet for a week, the new number leaks out, I change it again. With Gregory everything’s touch and go, mostly go. We scrabble around in the geography of circumspection, walking on the eggs of each other’s neuroses. I file my weekly column at the magazine, slip my weekly check into the checking account.
Despite the grand larceny Gregory commits at work, he’s broke. His photos soak up every penny. He neglects his bills. He’s developed a specially plangent, acutely modulated, nervous whine for times he needs to borrow money. At first it’s $10, then $20 as a routine thing. Soon it’s $30, $40, $50 at a go. M. is horrified. For Christ’s sake, don’t give him money, it’s the quickest way to poison a relationship. But it’s only money, I protest. All I’d spend it on is books, and I’ve already got enough books to read for the rest of my life. So, M. says promptingly, buy yourself an air-conditioner for the summer. Take a vacation. Invest in a new wardrobe. It’s your money, you’re working hard for it. And listen, M. says, his voice dropping down to flat, serious straight talk, you know you’re just like me, you go out of your brain over these fucking guys, man, and don’t tell me he’s different, because I know he’s different, he’s nice, he makes nice all the time, he’s not a creep and he really loves you, and all that, but your impulse, when somebody returns your affection even slightly, is you want to give the guy everything you have, make his life over, make him feel like he’s wonderful and accomplished and equal to you, which is really beautiful, but let me tell you, M. says, if you give somebody all your love, and all your money, and try to put him up where you are socially, or careerwise, and he’s not there on his own power, no matter how he justifies what he takes from you, somewhere in the back of his mind he knows he’s exploiting you and he doesn’t deserve it and ultimately he’ll end up feeling like a piece of shit anyway, and if he feels like a piece of shit, M. goes on liltingly, you know goddamned well what he’s gotta make you feel like for him to feel equal.
What do you mean “up where I am,” I plead indignantly, what, I can’t have a boyfriend because a few people know who I am?
In his head, that’s up where you are, M. says. People read that magazine, he says. I hear your name all over the place lately. Don’t think he doesn’t feel like a trick.
I know, I know, I know, I chant, I try not to offer him money when he starts in, but then I feel like I’m being hard with him and in a way reminding him what a comparatively unfavorable position he’s in, since I just sit here spinning things out of myself, I don’t have to leave the house, whereas he’s got to stuff himself into uniform and work on his feet for twelve hours every day.
He isn’t the first pretty boy who had to work, M. retorts.
The high temperature has flushed M. from his studio. He’s done a little walking tour of the East Village and ended up at my place, his fifth or sixth visit in as many years. M. marvels at the light, since there’s no space. This apartment is, in fact, blessed with an unusual number of windows. At this time of year the bushy-headed trees soften the neighboring architecture. We could be in Paris, M. declares, as visitors often do, indicating the mansard roof and porthole windows of a chunky three-story building across the street. Like Libby and Jane, M. enumerates the advantages of my place on these rare visits, as if proving the folly of my malcontent.
M. is short and nervous and thinks his hair is going back, which it is. His face is moony and saturnine. When he’s excited his voice swells and turns sinusy, ironic, a Jewish mother’s voice. Behind his abrasively practical view of things, M. has a marshmallow heart that any perfectly formed young man can reduce to cinders. When he’s infatuated he can’t work, or thinks he can’t, M. actually works more when he’s in love but believes he’s getting nowhere. This year his paintings are getting lots of attention. But M.’s new success hasn’t made a dent in his suicidal depression, any more than the money he was born with. Five years ago, on one of the very rare occasions when things got insupportably bleak, I made the mistake of phoning him. I feel my life isn’t worth going on with, I said, with realism. You’re right, M. replied, and neither is mine. Perhaps calling him then wasn’t such a mistake, everything considered. At any rate, just now M. has no companion and no fleshy fantasies, so his work goes well, and he finds time to fret over my affairs.
I steered Gregory around to a tolerant view of M., by forcing them into conversation at an opening. Gregory succumbed to M.’s standard, flatteringly seductive manner, mistaking an homage to sex appeal as a genuine interest in Gregory’s personality. As a matter of fact, M. is indifferent to Gregory’s existence, since Gregory is not available.
Memory places M. at the front window, occupying space in a stoutish way; memory paints in the avid flush of a tourist in an unexpected country. Despite the brevity of his visit, some months later, on my birthday, M. gives me a little gouache painting of a patch of brickwork above the yellow chair. We each have our way of being here and marking the time as it passes. Not long after this, M. and Jane throw a dinner party in honor of my new job, for a few close friends; an hour before I leave the house, Gregory calls to say he can’t make it, that Philippe has suddenly demanded his presence at the restaurant. I mark his absence throughout the evening, blankly register the praise of friends, numb out when I should feel generous and happy. Somewhere between the entree and the Remy I phone the restaurant, and learn from a husky woman’s voice that Gregory is not, in fact, working. As this information sinks in, I realize that Gregory intends for me to find this out, that he knew I’d call to make him part of this moment.
One night, after taking a Valium, I ask Gregory why he needs to hurt me. He says it isn’t him, but Bob. Bob? Yes, Bob, he insists. Bob “takes over” when Gregory feels threatened. Bob unplugs Gregory’s phone, cancels Gregory’s dates. Bob hates Gregory and wants to ruin his happiness with Anna. Who is Anna, I ask him. That’s you, he says, Sweet Anna, when you’re sweet and nice with me, but when you’re upset because of Bob, you change into Ruth. Ruth? Ruth’s the one who protects you from getting too close to people, Gregory informs me. Bob protects Gregory even when he doesn’t have to, he thinks if Gregory gets serious about another person, even Anna, he’ll suffer so much it will kill him. And Ruth’s afraid Anna will give herself body and soul to some worthless creep. Ruth is beginning to trust me, finally, Gregory says, so she doesn’t threaten to destroy our relationship any more, but she still insults me, to test my love for Anna.
So Gregory and Bob and Ruth and Anna, and, I suppose, I, are locked into this thing together, apparently. Do others live like this? The discovery of these extra people defuses some of our antagonisms for a while: when an argument gets tripped off by an edgy tone of voice, Gregory says, Is that you, Ruth? Mind putting Anna back on the line? And I find I can coax Gregory out of nasty sulking by asking Bob what he’s done with Gregory. The game runs its course in a few weeks, but for a time it plays out at absurd length whenever we talk.
>
And then other games, fictions woven between us; one of us holding the yam, the other knitting. First Gregory assumes a Southern accent. Soon he’s doing it all the time, without much dramatic skill. From this artificial voice comes all the tender language I want to hear, the gurgled intimacies, the brazen sex talk, the things he can’t or won’t say when he’s himself. In his own voice he’s mercurial, drifting from enthusiasm to irritability without any logical transitions. In character, Gregory’s face colors up with reckless optimism. He flies into the apartment, beaming with upbeat news: he’s met X, X looked at his slides, said nice things about his work. Y talked to him, Y has befriended him, Y is an important artist. People around him are perking up, paying attention to him.
Against this pile of hopeful developments, the weight of his—what is it, exactly? An infernal dissatisfaction that contaminates everything. An expectation of disaster. Fear of the sabotage his own mind can easily wreak upon his plans, without warning. Trivial incidents oppress Gregory with obscene power. As long as I’ve got you, he moans, in his assumed voice, as if we were clinging together amid debris. But he doesn’t have me, declines any opportunity to have me. When he plants kisses up and down my neck, I wonder who exactly is the “you,” here. He bursts in one afternoon, croons that he’s met Anna’s sister, and presents me with a Xeroxed photograph on green paper, from where I can’t imagine: a woman in a loud sixties dress, nursing a drink at a cocktail party. Her face matches mine in three-quarter profile. Who is this? Gregory smiles coyly, then rattles on about something else: Pugg wants to meet me. Pugg read a story of mine, he thinks it’s a classic. Pugg told me, Gregory says, This story’s a classic. I liked it last week, and I like it this week. Pugg has been floating around in the white space of our relationship long enough for me to wonder about him. From what Gregory tells me, they’re like kids together, schoolmates or something. Pugg, for that matter, is a kid, twenty or twenty-one. I’m reluctant to meet him, worried that our age difference will make me seem old and out of it.