“Bernard hasn’t been up here,” William said, finally. “Will we be seeing him?”
“Bernard and I had a parting of ways.”
He had figured this out long ago, but the point was to wound. “Hence the generosity.”
“No one is keeping you here, William. You are free to go at any time.”
“You have a position you’re looking to fill. Admit it. You want to fuck me.” The tears in his voice surprised him, tiny hot beads of helplessness, but he couldn’t stop himself: he didn’t want to let go of whatever was killing him. Didn’t want to change.
Bruno sighed. “As ever, William, your way of seeing the world is sui generis.” He got up to go inside. “And no, I wouldn’t take advantage of you even if I had no one else to amuse myself with. You are a child.”
He wanted to get up, to stop Bruno from leaving. He wanted to feel the hard Teutonic fist connect with his cheekbone. Instead, when the last of Bruno’s going-to-bed sounds had subsided, he stole into the bathroom and pulled the pullcord and looked in the mirror. It was true: he was a child, greasy and pale and thin and ungrateful, unloveable and unloved. Even the mother he carried inside him was less a memory than a dream. He turned the water on, loud, and wrestled the ancient razor-blade out of his shaving kit and considered for a long time the image it made against his fishbelly wrist. But once again, life proved too much for William Hamilton-Sweeney. What could one do but strop the blade sharper and attack the child’s bad moustache lately sprouted on one’s upper lip?
IT WOULD BE FIBBING to say the blackness lifted off William all at once after that; diseases don’t work that way. But he did at least start sleeping through the night more often and shaving every morning. In the afternoon, he’d hike down toward the lake on paths of mulchy leaves, or what appeared to be paths, human-sized spaces among trees whose names he taught himself as he drew them. His sketchbook slowly filled with hemlock and mountain ash, and with the little animals that would come stepping into the clearings if he sat very still, or reveal themselves as already there, squirrels, sunbathing turtles, once a deer. He would eat the sandwich he’d brought and not even notice that it had begun to taste again, and then would resume his hike. The creek that descended from the swimming hole babbled nearby. The orderly old wilderness would split for a huge slab of rock down whose face tumbled a falls, and here, in the light, on the sun-bleached rock, with the breaking water in his ears and the ozone of peaking vegetation in his nose, he was granted what he’d hoped for those first days after his arrival: he was no one, with no past and no future, nothing beyond the now and now and now of the white water surging into the clear.
And at night, at the long dining table, he started to open up a bit. If anything, the men’s laughter was harder than it had been at Bruno’s salon in Boston, and the part of him that lived for it was apparently still alive. Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent to this one, claimed his life. As if he were his own ghost, standing slightly behind himself, observing. He observed that he would at this point have gladly become Bruno’s concubine, out of pure gratitude. And he observed that behind the indulgent smile, there was a part of Bruno, too, holding back, as someone once burned will keep his distance from flame. Bruno was careful now never to leave his bedroom door open, literally or figuratively. Sometimes late at night William heard through it the sound of something swishing through the air, a grunting in pleasure or pain.
BY MID-AUGUST, heat was draped over the mountains like a wet carpet. Back in New York, he could allow himself to think without too much bitterness, envelopes from Yale would be piling up on the mail table in the West Side penthouse where his father now lived: letters about course registration, about inoculations, about Selective Service, about extra-long sheets, letters with his four full names stamped into them by typewriter, William Stuart Althorp Hamilton-Sweeney III. It had seemed a problem, at first: how to go off in the fall to this machine for the perpetuation of class privilege without also returning to the family for whom its earth sciences building was named. Then, like a magician’s knot, the problem resolved itself; he simply wouldn’t go. And once that decision was made, his future seemed secure. It was part of the enchantment of this valley to make anything seem possible.
Here, for example, stood William, poised above the swimming hole on a rock the size of a Volkswagen. His bare feet gripped the warm uneven granite as though made for it. Below revolved the ivory bodies of men. On the banks where their clothes lay in neat piles, two of those bodies had been lumpy and dangly and ill-proportioned, but in the water they became gods. Through the undulant glass of the surface, parts swelled and subsided, now a thigh, now an arm, now a lunar white ass as the young one, the handsome one, turned to shout up good-naturedly, “What are you, some kind of sissy?”
He glanced over at where Bruno sat in his long sleeves and wide-brimmed hat, reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which took eight days to reach him here by mail. Last night, when the house was quiet, William had stolen down the hall and slipped into bed with the man who was now goading him, and after he’d sworn him to discretion, they’d athletically fucked. Even when he’d gone with strangers into their cars, or into the lavatories of Grand Central, William had never allowed things to go beyond the oral, the manual, the intercrural, and he now understood why they called this other thing consummation. He wondered, though, if Bruno had heard. He wondered if he’d wanted Bruno to hear.
“Come on! Jump!”
William shook off the shadow of his betrayal, reached down and peeled off his chinos, stood there with the wind on his skin. He was beautiful here, protected, admired. There was no prurience to it. Just men enjoying one another without shame or secrecy. And it was Bruno who’d made Eden possible. Bruno who sat reading and did not look up at the lithe body, now eighteen, as it took two quick steps and cannonballed into frigid water.
Later, he stretched out on the sand next to Bruno, unsure anymore if his body was so worthy of attention. “You should go in.”
“Ach.”
Except for the single syllable, Bruno might have been sleeping behind his dark glasses. And of course Bruno never swam. His skin was defenseless before the sun, he’d said. Now his right sleeve had slipped up his arm, revealing a blue tattoo, a number. William felt certain Bruno would have covered it if he’d known it was showing. Embarrassed, he retrieved his own pants from where he’d thrown them. “I’m just saying, you might as well enjoy it if you’re here,” he said, pulling them on.
“William, there is something we should talk about.”
“Is there? Talking is such a drag.”
“You have had, I think, a good summer. You look healthy. It is a great country that makes this possible. But what will you do in the fall, when I leave for New York?”
“I didn’t know you were leaving.”
“It is nearly September, William. Every season has its end.”
The architecture of the future was suddenly reorganizing itself, corridors becoming dead ends. Was this his punishment for last night? “I could stay here. Take care of your house.”
“I found your sketchbook in the living room this morning. I took the liberty of looking through it. You have improved.”
“That’s private,” William said.
But Bruno appeared not to hear. There was a college a hundred miles south, he said, well-known among artists. He had several acquaintances who taught there, men and women he knew from stints at other institutions. He thought William might easily be accepted. “It would be a way for you to stay in these mountains, if that’s what you want.”
William looked out at the pond, the men, the otterlike sport. “Bruno, I still don’t understand. Why are you making this all so easy for me?”
Bruno now noticed the sleeve and began to roll it down over his arm. It wasn’t clear this was connected to anything, though he did say, “Believe me, this is not for you.”
THAT THE
COLLEGE WOULD INDEED ACCEPT WILLIAM on such short notice was probably meaningless, given that it never rejected anyone. It was one of those progressive schools that were springing up across the land in the wake of the Eisenhower administration like mushrooms after a long rain. In practical terms, this meant William could do whatever he wanted, which suited him far better than the “rigorous character building” whose beneficiary he’d lately been. He took Drawing, and Philosophy, and Philosophy of Drawing; Social Realist Cinema, Latin, Psychoanalysis, Ecology of Mind … One course had him spend a whole semester painting a single still life; in another, he sat on the floor and glued together bits of cut-up magnetic tape. This is not to mention the on-campus performances: a concerto for transistor radio, another where the music was silent. Or afternoons spent lolling under the big pin oak at the heart of the Arcadian grounds, bullshitting with his new friends about the Bhagavad-Gita. Most of it was bullshit, on some level, but it was bullshit he felt passionate about, and in two areas—music and visual art—the passion was strong enough to burn through the veil that separated the two Williams, the real and the revenant.
By his second year, he was holding exhibitions in the little cottage he’d rented on a hill outside of town—what would later be called “happenings.” William strummed along to tape loops on his Spanish guitar while faculty members circulated in a fug of marijuana and red wine, inspecting his friends’ paintings. (William’s own paintings never made it onto the wall; unlike music, they were a thing, not an event, and somehow they never felt done. How could you know when you were done when you worked as he was learning to, splashing paint onto canvases in big, bloody gouts? How could you know when you’d bled all the feelings out?)
Over his five years as an undergraduate, he would have love affairs with teachers and students, and even once, unsuccessfully, with a woman. Why not? Barriers of all kinds were coming down. In 1964, he ate LSD with several other students and lay in a Busby Berkeley formation in a peach orchard on a summer night watching the stars throb like ventricles on the inside of a vast, blue heart. “Wow,” two people said at the same time, and everyone ended up kissing everyone else. That was the year of driving stoned and never crashing. Of wandering into classrooms in the dark and covering the chalkboards with automatic writing and leaving without turning on the lights. Of taking speed and hanging mirrors in the forest around the college, and painting themselves and the trees different colors.
Color more broadly was still an area of interest, as it had been when he’d watched footage of the Oklahoma City sit-ins on the TV back on Sutton Place, with Doonie in the doorway behind him. He had no TV now—he was a conscientious objector—but he followed the Birmingham Campaign and the March on Washington on the radio and wished there were any blacks here in Vermont to whom he might demonstrate his fealty. The best he could do was set up an Alice B. Toklas bake sale on campus and send the proceeds to SNCC—a down payment on the day when someone like him might actually have to work for a living, rather than rusticating here at art school, and someone like Doonie might retire to the Riviera, rather than to Hollis, Queens.
Still, some barriers remained meaningful. In a moment of champagne-induced weakness, he had called Felicia’s on the phone at Christmastime of 1962, planning to apologize to Regan, belatedly, for having stolen her car. Instead, he got Stinking Lizaveta, Felicia’s new femme de chambre. “Who is this?” she said, while he fought to silence his breathing. “Is anybody there?” And there was the barrier of the mountains, which kept the seethe of the cities at bay. When President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, it had felt like fiction, like a report from an imaginary place. After graduating, he moved even farther out into the countryside—and farther into his painting. His grasp of current events was therefore even more tenuous, and it was not until a couple weeks afterward, stopping into the post office in town to pick up his mail, that he would find his “Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination,” covered in stamps marked
God only knows how the mailman had found him. He was supposed to have reported to his local draft board office two weeks ago—and that office was still, according to this document, the one on Church Street in Lower Manhattan. There was probably some simple way, he thought later, to change his address and thus avoid the three-hundred-mile haul back to New York in the ancient truck he was driving by then. But the sudden prospect of seeing it again, the city, his city, set his heart struggling like an animal in a too-small cage. The next morning, with his canvases and guitar and the boxes of art books he’d accumulated blocking the passenger’s side mirror, he was rattling back down the switchback highways, toward the Hudson River Valley and the vertiginous homeland beyond.
THE SERGEANT WHO INTERVIEWED HIM didn’t believe him about the homosexuality. “Of course,” he said. “Right. Just like every other wiseacre who walks through here.”
“No, but I mean I’m practicing.” What shame there had ever been his five-year exile had burned right out of him. And the thought of being bombed or shot at tended to focus the mind. Beyond the little glass room, fanblades whirred, long strips of flypaper wriggling eel-like, ends affixed to the fans’ steel cages. There were rows of metal desks with typewriters, and every time a form was pulled from a roller, it got tucked under a paperweight to keep it from blowing away. The interviewer, an apple-cheeked Southerner who still had a narrow strip of white at the back of his neck where his hair had been shaved, looked reasonably cool, but despite the tremor of the glass from all these pounding typewriters, not the faintest zephyr made it to where William sat, uncomfortably close to the desk.
“With a last name like yours, pal, you’d think there’d be easier ways to get a deferment.”
William was starting to get genuinely nervous. He’d long ago concluded that the loving God of his mother was a cartoon character, and he’d never much believed in even the nail-paring old man who stood back and let the Hamilton-Sweeney bullion pile up in the vaults, but at moments of high anxiety, he was not above imagining a pedantic and capricious demiurge out to punish him for his sins. “I smoke pot, too, if that counts against me.”
“If we let it, Mr. Hamilton-Sweeney, we’d lose half our conscripts.”
“Sergeant, what do I have to do to prove that I’m a fag?” What, indeed, was he doing? He was reaching forward, touching the man’s hand. “If necessary, we could go somewhere more private …” The din of typewriter keys seemed to die down. In a lower voice, he added, “Not that I’m attracted to you personally, you understand, but in the name of science—”
Then a bright pain buzzed in his ear, where the sergeant had struck him. “There are rules here, son,” he said, a minute later.
“Do they involve abusing your examinees?”
“You try to make a scene out of this, and I will have you in jail.”
“I’m not leaving without my paper,” William had the presence of mind to say, from his doubled-over position. The rubber stamp came down like a hoof. Unfit to Serve. The guy didn’t even look at him.
On his way out, he passed another officer, who had presumably come to see what the commotion was about. William brandished the paper, gave his ear a final rub, and paraded out into the waiting room where rows of ungroomed young men in bluejeans sat or stood, looking uniformly uneasy. If he expected them to applaud, he was mistaken; they stared as if he were an ostrich escaped from the pullet factory, and themselves condemned to become dinner. No matter; he was free. He hustled down the stairwell and burst through the double doors and into the brightness of the fatherland at noon.
It was 1966—the year of Black Power and Jerry’s Kids and “Eight Miles High.” Behind the bright blue flag of the sky, a man was roaming outside a space capsule, tethered only by a rubber umbilicus. Meantime, down below, the kempt façade of the world he’d left behind was crumbling. Streamers of pot rode the lunchtime air; swirls of graffiti had bloomed on the postboxes and on the cornices of municipal buildings; near where William had parked, two white kids, a boy and a girl,
sat on a flattened box on the sidewalk asking stockbrokers for change, as if this were no more morally significant than asking the time of day. And it all seemed to William to betoken not decline but progress—to presage the breaking through of some more ecstatic and penetrating way of life. For how could his own father, the very incarnation of bourgeois order, have appeared on the streets where the son now stood? No, William thought, digging what little change he had out of his pocket to give to the coyote-faced girl: New York now belonged to the future. And it was going to protect him this time, he was sure of it. Never again would they let each other down.
18
THE 1973 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS were held in a flyblown banquet room way up near the Columbia School of Journalism—an area not known for its elegance. Then again, neither were journalists. And so, if you’d scanned the crowd before the lights dropped, your eye might have come to rest on a table not far from the stage, and a tall man whose nobility set him obscurely apart. It wasn’t in his clothes; the way he wore his rented tuxedo, it might as well have been a sportcoat and jeans. Nor was it in his bearing, exactly (a few crumbs from dinner still clung to his beard). Rather, it was something inside, something his physical surroundings couldn’t quite touch. This was the magazine reporter, Richard Groskoph. And as the plates were cleared and the PA system crackled on, he wasn’t even here. He was five minutes into the future, where his life’s work had just been vindicated.
He was a perennial nominee, it’s true, in the category of “Reporting Excellence,” but this year, he’d finally made finalist. The article in question had been pegged to the cancellation of the lunar landing program. Somehow, though (as was often the case with Richard’s work), it had metastasized into something else altogether. It had taken him the better part of two years to report and write, and when he looked around at his colleagues at nearby tables, the cream of ink-stained New York, he knew the competition was his to lose. He was close enough to the podium to see filaments of lint on the emcee’s black lapels. To picture the guy, a second-tier local Jerry Lewis, rehearsing his jokes in a kitchen in Rego Park, in boxer shorts and garter socks while his wife ironed his pants. Kids were wrestling on the floor of the next room and the teakettle was shrieking and there was too much going on for anyone to notice the shabby state of the jacket, and suddenly Richard’s colleagues at the table were applauding. Had he won? Had he really won?
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