Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  The nineteen-sixties were the period of my greatest revelation. At Spence School in New York and at boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut, I was a docile and conventional student, with my eyes open and my criticism suppressed. I always felt not only that I was at odds with most of the people around me, but that any protest I enunciated would fall on deaf and perhaps scandalized ears. My parents, as I have indicated, were frozen in the glacial past of their imagination, and many of the boys and girls of my age, particularly the latter, were living in the future, equally unreal, of theirs. They exulted in the prediction that a new age was dawning, one where the old rules of sexual propriety, class distinction, formality of dress, religious observance and patriotism would be swept aside in favor of freedom of choice and act, freedom, in short, of everything. This was accompanied, of course, by the reign of drugs, and it may have been the violent and prolonged attack of nausea that followed my first and only experiment with marijuana that proved my salvation. What I gleaned from the experience was the knowledge that my contemporaries could prove themselves just as silly asses as my parents, and that was my first step to maturity.

  When my older sister ran off with a young man under a suspended sentence for passing drugs, and had to be recovered by the payment to her vile seducer of a sum my parents could ill afford, I made my definitive break with this “wave of the future.” I would prepare myself to succeed in a world that was neither my sister’s nor my parents’—in other words, the world. It seemed to me that all the protests against the war in Vietnam had only hardened the grim obstinacy of misguided hawks and that the goal of new liberties had only betrayed our youthful extremists into the clutches of anarchists and Reds. When the great breaker of the new wave finally broke, what was left but free sex? And how can you make a life or a living out of that? While, in the meantime, all around us were rising the new millionaires.

  I took to reading articles about the luxuriously appointed interiors of the new—and old—rich in the fashion magazines and decided that therein lay my future—or my beginning. Mother entirely approved of my choice, as decorating was the most acceptable of ladies’ occupations, and she arranged for my interview with the man who became the first great teacher and influence in my life, Beverly Bogardus.

  He was then in his mid-thirties, a decade and a half older than I, and already a rising star in the decorating world. He took an immediate interest in me as soon as he learned—for I at once felt that I could be frank with him—that I was totally uncommitted to any political or social change in the world about me. He hired me, though at an exiguous salary, and, in developing my own style, I took more than a few hints from his. He was certainly something of a genius in his field. He could make a future out of the past while shunning the banality of the modern. What I think he saw in me was a Schuyler saved from the terrible sixties, a Schuyler, so to speak, unspoiled, who could be used in shaping a future as yet undetermined.

  He was not, by any means, a handsome man. He had a long, lanky figure and a sloppy posture, and his messy blond hair fell down over a wizened pale countenance with large, unexpectedly boyish blue eyes, which lent him briefly an air of youthful innocence that was entirely misleading. He was brilliantly sardonic and utterly without mercy in his assessments of even close friends, but there never seemed any bile or ill temper in the cheerful guffaws that his own sallies evoked from him. He mocked himself as well as the world, or gave the impression of doing so.

  The reason, I learned early, that he never attained the first position in our profession was that he would never put himself out for people. He was notoriously slow in his work, and not even the shrillest protest of the richest chatelaine would induce him to accelerate the completion of one of her chambers. He would absent himself from the office for days at a time without offering so much as a lame excuse. He acted as if he despised his success as sincerely as he did that of his rivals. He was widely supposed to be homosexual, and I had reason to believe that his strong attachment to my husband, though not returned in the same way, was more than platonic, but he was also known to have been the lover of a great society beauty. I believe he was attracted by the unattainable, in both sexes. Or it may have been that he disdained to commit himself to any bourgeois limitation in the areas of sexual gratification. He would never have lost the world for love, or lost love for the world.

  He paid closer attention to me and my training than he did to any other junior in his office, and he sometimes described me to friends, only half-mockingly, as a Trilby to his Svengali. But he was interested in teaching me more than the art of design. He wanted me to understand the workings of our world, and he professed to see, in the increased lavishness of the homes of the rich—the meat and drink of our business—not the mere icing on the cake of a material society, but the heart and soul of a desperately corrupted era.

  “Read Balzac,” he urged me. “His human comedy is our own. His France of the Bourbon restoration saw its political left and political right both hit the dust before the onslaught of a united bourgeoisie. The left had been discredited by the Reign of Terror; the right by its intransigent clinging to a feudal past. As with us! Our left has been discredited by its long subjection to Stalinism and our right by its outdated faith in economic laissez-faire. So the goldbugs have swarmed in to fill a yawning vacuum. We wanted a world where every man would earn a living wage. Well, we have it. In the Great Depression of the thirties a man would carry a pike in the grand march in Aida for a buck a night; today, he has to have a minimum wage, Social Security and unemployment and perhaps medical insurance. But that costs money, and where are you going to get it? Not from Reds or bureaucrats or economists, but from goldbugs. So goldbugs rule the world!”

  “Why do you tell me all this?” I asked at one of our protracted lunches. His never took less than two hours. “You can’t think that I’ll make a fortune. Surely not of our lampshades and chintzes.”

  “No, my dear, but you might marry one.”

  And of course it was Beverly who introduced me to my husband. He and Gus Barker had been roommates at Columbia College, and their friendship was lifelong. Yet they were as close to being diametric opposites as is possible for two men to be. Gus was lean and strong and wiry with a dark complexion, shiny black hair and a habitual expression of being neither fooled nor impressed, only of dispassionately assessing a person or situation. He was not strikingly handsome; his black eyes were too close together and his head a trifle too thin, but his supple movements and well-sculpted torso gave him the agility of a fine feline. I felt with him the force of a perfectly adjusted male, one who could take you apart, if necessary, and put you back together without a single part missing or out of place.

  He was already rich when Beverly introduced us, a junior partner in his famous firm, and educated entirely, I gathered, at public schools and at Columbia on a competitively earned scholarship. His background was obscure; it was much later that I learned that his father had been a New York City cop. I gathered that most of his relatives were dead; he certainly did not deny their existence or hide them, for he was ashamed of nobody, but it was clear that he was alone in the world. It would have been impossible for even a keen observer to fit him into a particular social class; his easy self-confidence and quiet good manners made him at home in any group.

  The very first time he took me out, after our introduction by the casually sly Beverly, it was apparent, though not through any clumsy ogle or untoward remark, that he was looking me over as a candidate for a serious role in his busy life, undoubtedly at the suggestion of his old college chum.

  At the French restaurant where he competently and briefly ordered our expensive dinner and a noble wine, I asked him, as my few close girlfriends always advised, about his business, which he disposed of with a few modest comments. But when I contrasted his success with my father’s poor record, he became more illuminating. “Your father has been the victim of the foolish American creed that a man must always do something. Though he inherited enou
gh money to live comfortably, he had to go to work to increase it. That often results in a man’s losing it. There are plenty of men, good men too, who can’t afford to work. If your father had spent his days stretched out on the sand at Palm Beach, he’d be a rich man today.”

  “You think that’s all he’s good for,” I retorted defensively.

  “Not at all. A talent for gain is only one talent in a man, but it’s a necessary one in the money game. With too many of our tycoons it’s the only one they have. They have no idea what to do with the money once they’ve earned it.”

  “They leave that to their families.”

  “Unfortunately, they often do. But your father could have done lots of other things. Charities and trusteeships and saving the environment…”

  I broke in. “And collecting button hooks?”

  “Why not?”

  “He plays a very good game of bridge.”

  “Well, that’s something, isn’t it? The great thing is to do well whatever you’re doing.”

  “What will you do? When your pile of Rhinegold is high enough to hide Freia from the giants and your youth is given back to you?”

  “That remains to be seen. But I trust that I’ll do it well.”

  I could see from the first date that Gus was determined to have everything in the world, and I had my first glimmer that I was destined to be a part of that everything. But I had no idea of resenting it then. It seemed to me, both before and after our marriage, that he assessed me at my exact worth. He took my decorating seriously, holding to the modern idea that a woman should have a career, and grateful that I hadn’t chosen the drabber occupation of lawyer or accountant, which might have interfered with the role I was to play as consort to an international and widely traveling investment banker. Nor was I to engage in Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption.” Though I was always to be dressed well—and his sharp eye censored my wardrobe—I was also, even on business trips, to be a “real” decorator; and many, if not most, of my best jobs were commissioned by the wives of his business associates.

  Oh, yes, there was to be nothing fake about the “lovely Mrs. Gus Barker.” I was to be like everything else in his life, the genuine article. Even my ancestry was to be tastefully and never brazenly demonstrated. The Schuyler family portraits that Gus purchased from impecunious cousins were handsome works of art in themselves and were hung in inconspicuous but appropriate corners of our apartment, not pompously displayed in the hall or over a principal fireplace.

  And so in a surprisingly short number of years we reached the top, or what he and I and his mighty partners—how can I separate myself from them?—considered the top. There was a pleasant tinge of the liberal in our entourage, for Gus, who did not believe that either of our two major political parties had much effect on the thrust of our surging economy, found it more “attractive” to hunt with the Democrats rather than with their more flat-footed opponents. This helped with our children, who were never able to get a toehold in the slippery elevation of their father’s apparently liberal philosophy to stage the rebellion so craved by many of their contemporaries and finally dropped back into a decorous and well-rewarded submission.

  So there I was, seated on the veranda of our big, cool, spotlessly white house on the Southampton dunes, or gazing over Manhattan from the huge windows of our penthouse, an integral part of a matchless setting. Gus’s bathroom in the apartment, faced north, toward the George Washington Bridge; sitting on his john, he could see all the kingdoms of the world as if they were being offered to him by Satan. But didn’t he own them already? What could he do but shit on them?

  Ah, you see, I churn with bitterness. It was, in fact, Beverly who said that to me, but he was looking at me with that horrid little smile that showed he’d read my thoughts. He had stopped by that morning for a pre-luncheon glass of sherry and had excused himself to go to the bathroom. Knowing his way about the apartment, he had gone to Gus’s and, struck again by the panorama before him, had summoned me to recall the scene of Christ’s temptation.

  It was at that moment I conceived the idea that Beverly had only the lowest opinion of Gus’s material success, that he actually despised it. It may strike one as odd that I had not thought of this before, since nobody knew better than I that Beverly was the classic underachiever—as a collector, critic, even as a decorator—and that his principal joy was sneering at the world. But I had clung to my faith that Gus was the one exception to his rule, that he admired (and adored) my husband as the one man whose life and thinking made a kind of dignified sense in a universe of cant.

  And after that day I started to notice, at first in light shades but soon in more pronounced colors, the development of a new aspect of Beverly’s personality in his relationship with my husband. He was becoming a proselyter for the arts. Gus, in the eyes of Beverly, had conquered Mammon, a minor victory; now it behooved him to move on to the nobler field of the arts, to seek his salvation, so to speak, at the altar of man-created beauty.

  Soon Gus and I were passing pleasant Saturday afternoons touring the art galleries of Fifty-seventh Street and SoHo in the company of the knowledgeable Beverly, and Gus found himself buying oils, watercolors and prints under his friend’s expert supervision. As my husband always did things on a large scale and was inclined to be impatient in his eagerness to follow up any new enthusiasm, it was not long before the walls of our apartment could boast of an impressive collection of abstract expressionists.

  But was it so impressive? I began to wonder that after Gus’s purchase, for a smacking sum, of an oil that was a square of thickly painted inky black. Beverly had airily represented it as the ultimate of some extremist school, but many of my friends laughed at it; one of them suggested it was a school blackboard. And then Gus went in for a series of sketches of lines and squiggles that looked to me like the doodlings of a bored director at a dull corporate meeting. And after that he acquired a score of paintings of colored bars, some arranged in parallel fashion as in a flag and others in concentric circles like archery targets. At last, when the delivery men from a famous gallery unpacked in my presence a huge black-and-white canvas that depicted what looked like a cross between a menacing praying mantis and the skeleton of a skyscraper under construction, I allowed myself to speculate that the omniscient Beverly was making sly fun of us. Did it amuse his idle fancy to see how far an innocent tycoon could be pushed?

  And there was another change in Beverly’s attitude toward my husband, one that struck me as sinister. I’ve already indicated that Gus had shown a definite but hardly overwhelming interest in my Schuyler ancestry. And recently he had shown a new concern about allying himself more closely with members of New York’s old Knickerbocker society or what was left of it. He joined the Hone Club, for whose stuffy conservatism he and Beverly had once had nothing but sneers, and he improved his horsemanship by taking lessons in jumping, preparatory to joining a fox hunt in northern New Jersey. Beverly, of course, was quick to make sarcastic note of all this.

  One morning when I was showing him the almost perfect copy of a French eighteenth-century fauteuilthat Gus, without consulting either Beverly or me, had ordered for his study, Beverly burst out in a tone that had little of the underpinning of affection he habitually used in speaking of my husband: “Prerevolutionary Gaul is the eternal trap of the bourgeois gentilhomme. Almost anything else can be copied, but it must be genuine, and that’s what the new rich can never see. The Wrightsmans, of course, are exceptions, and what they’ve done for the Metropolitan is magnificent. But this piece—no. And while we’re on the point, you may warn our dear Augustus of the dangers of too close an adherence to the aristocratic standards of the stately past. Nor need you penetrate further than your own family history. I cite only the example of the illustrious Alexander Hamilton, who sought to cover a bastard birth with a Schuyler spouse but lost his life by conforming to what he wrongly considered a gentleman’s code of honor. Only a parvenu at that late date in the history of New York would hav
e decided that Burr’s affront mandated a duel to the death!”

  I did not like this; I did not like it at all. For his tone was not only contemptuous; it sounded cruel. It was hard to accept that he was speaking of his dearest friend.

  It was probably this note that prepared me for what I was to consider the ultimate revelation of something like a master plan on Beverly’s part. A master plan but a kind of devil’s work. It was his inducing Gus to invest a spanking sum of money in an avant-garde production of Othello by one of Beverly’s young theatrical protégés.

  The tragedy was performed in modern dress, and every character was represented as gay except Othello, and there evidently was some doubt about him in the malevolent mind of Iago. The latter’s motivation, of course, was his unreturned passion for the big muscular black and his misogynist compulsion to rid the world of his rival, Desdemona. The direction was awkward; the actors ranted, and the production failed after seventeen performances. But it gave me proof, if proof were needed, that Beverly, as a modern Iago, was stirred, not as in Coleridge’s famous phrase, by “motiveless malignity,” but by a fierce inner need to bring my husband down.