by Gary Indiana
We were under the spell of suddenly tolerable weather and unchanging dissatisfactions. Sometimes, on my way out of the apartment, I misplaced my keys, and then my wallet, and then a dozen other things, until I felt angry enough to smash things. And then I forced myself to sit down, close my eyes, and breathe. I knew I was afraid of one more thing happening, afraid of the slightest event.
The only person Gregory feels “really close to, ” besides me, is Pugg. Puggy. I bump into Pugg at a TriBeCa loft party. We’re standing at a table festooned with artfully sliced raw vegetables and a vast bowl of mint green dip. There are too many loud, desperate people in this place, despite its cavernous size. Pugg questions me, about neutral things, through the crossfire of several conversations. Everything about Pugg conveys neutrality, reserve. A preoccupation with looking out for number one, not giving away anything himself. A prig, I conclude, but not a particularly bright prig.
He’s studying video art at the SVA, not that I’m curious. While we talk he cruises every man in the area. The way Pugg opens and closes his mouth suggests that he performs this activity for hours every day in the bathroom mirror. Why do I hate him? He’s not exactly formidable. Since he doesn’t mention Gregory, I assume Gregory’s connection with me is a problem. Stupidly, I quiz him. Has he seen Gregory? I haven’t, I assure him. Not for days. Does he happen to know what Gregory’s up to? I even become confidential, spurred by several gin and tonics: Gregory’s so weird, isn’t he? I see him every day for a week, and then he just vanishes. What the fuck is wrong with him?
Well, retorts Pugg through clenched teeth, but with an air of satisfaction, that’s Gregory.
I think: Pugg lacks charm, and grace, and personality, but he has something far more valuable in Gregory’s eyes. He’s seven years younger than Gregory and fourteen years younger than me. And his mental age is even younger.
A few nights later, still missing Gregory, I wake M. out of his nap and send him into the chill evening, to walk his dog seven blocks past their usual route; I ask him to “casually” drop by Gregory’s restaurant to see if he’s on duty. M. phones back two hours later. He’s had “a nice chat” with Gregory. Gregory talked about his new work. He said he’s “getting into pornography.” And, M. adds brightly, his face lit up when I mentioned you. He adores you, M. says. He thinks you’re the most fabulous person he’s ever met.
Gregory calls the following morning and asks, slyly: Were you checking up on me, making M. come into the restaurant?
Gregory takes me for a drink, to a new bar on Avenue A. A bar full of dusky alcoves, twenties torch music, lacquered tables that belong in a Victorian sitting room. The kind of place that will be fun for two weeks, until it degenerates into a scene. We hold hands on a grimy sofa. He nuzzles my neck, his palm sweating in mine.
I don’t want to drink my rum and Coke. He sips a Remy Martin. I know he’ll only drink one, but I’ll keep going and get sloppy. I squeeze his hand. I kiss the shoulder of his vest. His face looks translucent. He’s pleased. He knows the guy who owns this place. A skinny dude with a blond crew-cut, who pops out of the office every few minutes to chat. Gregory knows a lot of young, skinny, tall blond boys with crewcuts. This one looks about nineteen. He wears a diamond stud in one ear. He’s offered Gregory a job. He’s nice, Gregory tells me, even if he isn’t very bright.
These joints resemble one another so closely the street could be one continuous sushi bar. At home, Gregory picks apart the steady remaking of the East Village, the pointless visual shock effects worn by the teenagers, the uniform restaurant decors, theme boutiques, ghastly art galleries. But in these places Gregory seems utterly relaxed and in his element. Heads swivel like radar sensors picking up his vibrations. We walk into certain rooms where I feel the atmosphere ripple as if he’d slept with everyone in the vicinity. Rooms are fatal, every last one of them.
In April Gregory gave me two pictures that later acquired a brief notoriety when Bruno included them in his slide presentations on a college tour. In April Sarah arrived from Italy, like an emissary from another world. At the end of April everything changed unexpectedly, and yet nothing changed.
Fog rolled into the city at night, thick muffling fog so uncharacteristic of New York that a general disorientation of things made the neighborhood interesting again. Flights out of Kennedy and LaGuardia were grounded throughout an entire weekend. The fog erased the World Trade Center from my front windows and even steamed up the view of Second Avenue. The sidewalks sparkled like veins of obsidian. The bazaar spilling down Second Avenue and across St. Marks Place looked for once as if it belonged there.
The fog gave the nights added menace and allure. Random encounters in the streets had a film noir narrative attached. It was as if a culminating murder were about to happen. During lightning storms in my childhood, the power would blow and my mother, no friend of storms, filled the house with candles; the fog exuded that fear-quick alertness and promised dark adventures. Even though I was obsessed with Gregory, I lost all thought of him during the foggy nights. He was working double shifts and seemed safely iced. We froze in a holding pattern. For a few nights, I felt a strange peace after his late evening call, glad to have him out of the way.
I visited Bruno after seeing Maria Lorca and asked him if he would spend a little time with Gregory, watch his behavior, see if he thought Gregory might be shooting junk. Bruno was incredulous. I could see his indifference slipping. Bruno had a lazy, laid-back mask that covered a fierce ambition. He never displayed “difficult” feelings and tried to seem amiable all the time. It was no good pushing him into an expression of concern; Gregory had diddled around with his emotions and Bruno wanted to appear above all that. So I presented it as a test of Bruno’s powers of observation and knowledge of human character. This appealed to his conspiratorial side.
I knew nothing about heroin. I had heard all the truisms. The drug is stronger than the addict. The addict doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time. You might as well forget any sort of friendship with an addict, because an addict will sell his mother’s wedding ring for a fix.
Yet there were many people who found heroin addiction glamorous. The idea of being beautiful and damned was a perennial youthful myth in the downtown area. People went on smack when they had money and stayed on smack after all the money got used up and then started ripping off their friends and families and usually became incredibly sick and horrible-looking and got these strange diseases like lupus or hepatitis B and now, according to Maria Lorca, half the addicts in New York have HIV infection from needle-sharing, and of course the terrible thing is, the addict knows all this but can’t do anything about it because it’s the drug that makes the decisions. And if this is the case, I thought, what then?
Bruno, for all his infatuation, knew nothing about Gregory, and even less about heroin. He simply asked Gregory point blank if he happened to be shooting smack. He acted completely surprised like it was the last thing in the world on his mind, Bruno reported.
The boulder of Gregory’s depression levitated slightly. He still waxed bitter about his job, but devoted less energy to tearing apart each evening’s humiliations. He began sounding almost good-humored much of the time, judging from his epic morning phone calls. He had turned invisible again: seeing anyone was just too much for him. But hearing from people gave him some little pleasure. I didn’t make an issue of this, which irritated him.
We could see each other tomorrow, he suggested.
Work tomorrow, I said.
Wednesday?
Can’t. Meeting somebody for lunch.
(I liked the “somebody.” I always told who, and he never did.)
Dinner, then.
Dinner plans, too.
It was folly to put him off. He readily found a way to re-engage me. He stopped calling. A day went by. A fresh contest of wills had begun. A depressing prospect. I hadn’t the slightest hope of winning.
Long, brittle silence. My walks gravitated to the streets he favored, the
places he ate lunch, anywhere he normally spent time. I thought, it’s like smoking: you tell yourself it’s finished, you will not under any circumstances light a cigarette, you go for hours fighting it off, the phone rings, someone’s talking to you, halfway through the conversation you notice you’ve got this cigarette in your mouth. I decide this time I’ll let it go, I don’t need his company. Settle down to work, get my papers arranged next to the typewriter, train my thoughts on all the projects I’ve shoved aside, and suddenly I’m circling the neighborhood, pretending to shop for food. Or rushing home so I’ll be there if he calls. If I knew he was thinking about me, suffering from my silence, I could go out and enjoy myself But he’s not put together that way. He knows I’m crawling out of my skin.
Jane said: So call him up. Big deal.
I said: I can’t possibly do that.
What, she said, too humiliating, after all this?
Jane, I said, you don’t understand, Gregory loves me, we really do have this deep understanding, but he’s sensitive, if he thinks he’s not getting enough attention or affection, I mean from his point of view he can’t really humiliate me anyway, unless I agree to be humiliated.
Jane said, You mean this is just provisional humiliation?
He just wants to know that he’s wanted, I said.
Him and a million others, she said. Are you supposed to go over there and disembowel yourself on his stoop? Hey, that might make him happy. Maybe he could make an artwork about it or something.
Well, I said, he probably would.
Creative type, Jane said.
An English writer asks me out for lunch. I’ve never met him. He wants to discuss “postmodernism” and feels that my work is “postmodern.” We meet in a cafe near my house. I can tell I’m one of several people on a list. He only has a sketchy idea of my work. He’s a man of medium height with sharp features, about forty-five but looks younger, his hair’s dyed bright blond and clipped in a shag. He has a journalist’s way of asking questions and then rephrasing the answers, adapting the other person’s vocabulary.
A few minutes into this lunch, Gregory walks in. He sees me, comes over to the table. He says, I won’t bother you now but I hope we can talk soon. Then he takes a table near the back and orders lunch. I can’t continue my conversation. I see him looking miserable while he spoons soup into his mouth. I excuse myself rudely. I plant myself down at Gregory’s table and start to demand an explanation. He cuts me off. He’s almost sobbing. He says he didn’t know I’d be in here, he says, I swear I didn’t follow you.
The idea that Gregory would feel insecure enough to follow me around is ludicrous but comes as an enjoyable surprise. He asks why I haven’t called him. I know it’s none of my business, he says. But are you seeing someone else? I know this is all a big act, he knows perfectly well I’m not seeing anybody and that I’ve been waiting for him to call for several days. His pretense that I’m important enough to cause him all this anxiety charms away all my defenses and I fall instantly under the spell of total slavery.
Paul dies, owing to “complications.” Someone calls and lets me know. The parents came and took the body back to Pittsburgh. I draw an emotional blank. Somehow as soon as someone gets sick from this you begin to insulate yourself. If you see them it’s as if they’ve returned from the dead for a moment or two. I walk through the apartment without seeing my messy piles of clothing, my books, my sea of papers. There should be special messengers who come and tell you these things in person, a pair of eyes to look into at least. Every death in my life has announced itself over the phone. It’s a dream. You believe it but there’s nothing there.
Later that day, Gregory calls. I decide not to tell him anything. We talk, as usual, about “our relationship.”
You keep trying to seduce me, he accuses. I won’t deal with that, I can give you what I can give you and no more than that until I’m ready. But you have to believe that I do love you, any time you need me to come and put my arms around you and hold you, he says, I’ll be there.
Well, I tell him, look here, Gregory, it so happens that I do need you. I’m in a bad state of mind.
I can’t right now, he says, I’m doing some paste-ups.
Sarah had arrived from Rome. I spent the morning thinking things over. I’m too far gone to cut my losses, I realized. We’re here on this planet, all these people. Endless people. We all have this stuff in our heads that sounds like gibberish. It seems I am digging out a life for myself, but the things I used to want have changed.
There had been a long time when I thought I would stay in New York just long enough to leave my mark, get the money problem permanently fixed, move on. And years of shopping around for another place to be. I had been spending every summer at Sarah’s house in Italy, a ship on an ocean of land. It was a cross-shaped former monastery that Sarah and her mother had bought in the sixties. Dozens of cats roamed the house and the property, sheep cropped the surrounding hills, islands of forest hid the place from its neighbors. We had a farm-size vegetable garden there. For a few pennies we got eggs and meat from the local farmers. Weeks went by when we never spent money on anything.
I had a suite of rooms on the north side of the house where I holed up for days without seeing anyone. At night we drank the local wine and jabbered until four or five in the morning. There was Sarah and her boyfriend Jacques and her mother Ursula. Ursula was eighty-three and had a lover, fifty. Nights were blacker than velvet. From the fields you saw a sky crowded with stars. The world was far away.
When I left in September it always seemed unthinkable that I was going back to the squirrel cage on Tenth Street. I stopped in Munich for a week to see Rainer, who kept up with things in the world. He lived in a large, impersonal flat overlooking the English Garden. There was nude swimming in the river and a wine garden spread out at the base of a pagoda. Sometimes Willie was in residence, but less and less over the years. He had started a going business in Australia. Rainer spent a lot of time on flights. He’d put together many little films and after the film in Colombia we talked about developing a project but since Willie’s death Rainer didn’t talk about projects any more.
I had had this second life, a seasonal escape from New York. It turned down the volume on my ambitions. Perhaps I could get through without wanting too much after all. It had seemed, for many years, that Sarah had left off wanting things. In the sixties she had a short, fairly spectacular career in films, retired at her peak, and now spent most of her time painting. Jacques directed movies, the kind of light sex comedies that typically feature Monica Vitti. Sarah sometimes played small parts in his films, for the money. I met them when Jacques hired me for a part, he’d seen a short independent film where I’d played a hotel clerk. Six weeks in Berlin, in the crushing melancholy of a Berlin autumn. The film played festivals and art houses in Europe for a while and then disappeared. The following year Sarah showed up in New York, looking for a gallery to show in. We slogged around for a month with her portfolio and finally settled on a cavernous, unfavorably situated venue in northern TriBeCa owned by a pleasant, enthusiastic amateur named Doris.
Sarah began coming to the city every four or five months. She stayed with a former brother-in-law, Cyril. Cyril was a nervous, balding lighting designer who had turned gay in his forties and now lived in an all-white triplex on Grove Street. Cyril’s crowd was a fashion crowd. Bracelets and shoes. Sarah, with her show biz history, moved in the fashion world more easily than in the art world. Her stock was higher there. This had an unfortunate effect on Doris’s marketing efforts. She couldn’t decide whether to promote Sarah as a serious painter or capitalize on the scads of free publicity available to Sarah as a former movie star. Sarah was no help in this matter. She wanted to be taken seriously in the supposedly high-minded art world, where she really wasn’t known. But during her years of fame she became addicted to the idolatry of others. She ridiculed the glamorous people behind their backs, but found it impossible to let go of a scrap of old glory. She w
as expecting much too much from a first show of paintings in the city, I thought.
The day she arrived, I phoned Cyril’s place. He said they were at lunch with Doris. I left for the gallery in a state of indecision: what if Gregory called. Too bad for him, I thought. I have a life, too. It’s one of the first full days of spring, the mailbox is full of junk mail. I walk to Third Avenue, brushing aside ghosts of the brain. My street is crawling with memories. Sometimes, turning a corner, I expect to see Paul or Michael or some other dead person going about his business. The cab driver is a young black with Rasta hair and deep bedroom eyes and all the way down to SoHo I imagine undressing him on a king-size bed. His knees are planted on the mattress beside my shoulders. He guides his long, ebony member between my parted lips. His eyes find me in the rearview mirror at five-second intervals. I fix my face in a mask of fascination, wondering if he’ll speak, and, if he does, whether the conversation will lead anywhere. Finally he says the traffic’s bad. I can see that. Now he’s going to tell me why the traffic’s bad. Crazy out of town drivers, or else the tunnel’s closed, or Fifth Avenue’s blocked off for a parade or a demonstration or a motorcade.
I see Jacques and Sarah and Doris crossing lower Broadway. I jump out of the taxi. Sarah throws her arms around me. She’s jet lagged. We’re still putting up the paintings, she says. The paintings were at the framer’s until a half hour ago. Doris is dwarfed by the two of them, who look like thoroughbred horses. Doris looks excited. Doris babbles. Jacques rolls his eyes warily and shrugs. We walk. I’m aware of all we’ve ever said. I’m especially aware that for years I’ve bemoaned my bad lot here in New York and told my European friends that someday in the near future I’ll leave. We’ve laughed at the absurdity of life here, the crassness of everything. I’ve always been the rare “good American,” a person of unusual refinement, someone appalled by this culture of spectacle and commerce. As we walk all the jokes we’ve made at the expense of my environment crop up again in abbreviated phrases, tag lines, bits of old jazz. And I suddenly feel this awful distance between our summers in the country and the way I am now, peering into a beautifully decorated room that now has the proportions of a doll’s house. The three of us are never going to live happily ever after in the monastery. At first, I’d even pictured bringing Gregory to the enchanted forest: somehow we’d all get by on our vegetables and penny eggs in blissful retirement from everything and everyone. At this moment I understand that I could never live like that, and in fact have probably even spent my last summer in Tuscany.