by Edmund White
They were so happy rolling around at night in the long sweet-grass, heavy with dew and smelling of bush clover. Jack gloried in his own maleness when he was lying on top of Hillary. It sounded fatuous, but he liked his own broad rower’s shoulders and narrow torero hips and princely waist—he was a prince when he sprawled above Hillary. Was that abnormal, he wondered, to picture oneself, to glory in oneself? Did the average guy delight in the girl more than in himself? Most of the time he didn’t have such a flattering image of himself. He saw himself rather as a friendly collie of a guy: big, toothy smile; trusting, warm eyes; a sort of abashed look when called on to do tricks—to shake hands, say. He called it his “good-guy look.” (But then why did that teacher say he was a cold speaker? Had the teacher misinterpreted Jack’s shyness?) Then again, some friends did complain that he was “reserved” and even “secretive.”
Jack was just a little afraid of women, truth be told, unless they were pals or sisters and there was no physical deal beyond sitting back-to-back like bookends on a hay wagon, or sleeping in a two-person pile in the backseat of a dark car during the long trip back from a concert at Fisher Hall. Women liked him. He was often a little brother, sometimes a big brother; if there had been older women around, he would’ve been a good nephew type. He didn’t talk to them about their hair or clothes, nothing beyond “You look really nice, Cindy.” He wasn’t a professional smoothie, though in the frat house he had a reputation as an “ass man,” a seducer’s standing based on nothing except rumors about his big cock and that time he’d been caught necking with Hillary in the back stairwell of the frat house, both of them seriously drunk on Drambuie.
With Hillary, though, he was completely at ease. She didn’t want to go all the way, and she’d told him that. He remembered: They were walking along past all the sorority and fraternity mansions, but it was a Tuesday afternoon, and no other pedestrians were visible. Without looking at him, she said, “Jack, I’ve got something to tell you. Do you know what spasmophilia is?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Well, I’ve got it. And that’s what makes sex a problem for me.”
“Really? Don’t worry—”
“It’s a panic attack, but it means the vagina clamps shut. My shrink says it’s a form of hysteria, and when I say I feel perfectly calm, he says it’s either the feeling of hysteria and panic or the actual spasms, not both. Your body is tightening up, he says, so you won’t feel any panic, like conscious panic.”
She scrutinized him calmly and said the word “conscious” as if it were a technical term, possibly beyond Jack’s grasp.
“Gosh, that’s fascinating. Isn’t it amazing how—”
“My vagina clamps shut. My regular doctor, not my shrink, says it’s a lack of calcium or sleep. He talks about”—and here she shrieked with laughter—“my neuro-vegetative functions! But it all comes down to a clamped vagina.”
“Far be it from me—”
“Maybe I should take Miltown. Have you read that new Robert Lowell poem that begins, ‘Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed’? Very trendy, right? Is that your idea of poetry?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t gotten much farther than Wallace Stevens. I’d never read him, and I took his poems to sit on the crapper and I couldn’t get off it, I was so excited, and like a crazy person I kept saying out loud, ‘This is it! Oh boy, this is it!’”
Hillary laughed so hard she had to stop right there on Washtenaw and hold on to Jack’s shoulder. Someone driving past might have thought she was sobbing or having a panic attack.
“But the joke was on me,” Jack said, “because at last I thought I had found pure poetry, poetry that didn’t mean anything. I found it right there in the crapper, like ‘Eureka!’ Right? You could say it was abstract expressionist poetry, and I was sitting right there in my stall bouncing up and down—”
“Stop!” Hillary begged him. “You’re killing me! Bouncing? No,” she wailed.
“It wasn’t until two days later that my English prof cleared up the confusion. That fuckin’” —and Jack lowered his voice to say the obscenity: he never swore— “that fuckin’ Wallace Stevens, it turns out, means too much, all this metaphysical gobbledygook, though his language is as inscrutable as a nursery rhyme.”
They both drew a deep breath and trudged along through the warm, humid day as the occasional car glided up and shimmered, and they felt they were walking in a glue trap and not making any progress. A huge squirrel ran up to them, then scuttled up a tree. Jack was somehow relieved that Hillary had a medical problem that prevented them from rushing into things. They felt very becalmed, almost extinguished. Jack was proud of how funny he’d been about Wallace Stevens.
After that, it was understood that when they were alone and had drunk a few beers, they could kiss and kiss, and Jack could pull up her shirt and unsnap her bra and fondle and lick Hillary’s big, extremely sensitive breasts and lightly circle her nipples. Once in a while, if the chemistry was right, he might unbutton her jeans and pull aside her silky, lace-trimmed panties and insert a finger into that liquid warmth, presumably so likely to clamp shut over his knuckles, though at the moment open and welcoming.
One time, she ran her hand wonderingly across his erection, which was safely shut in behind his Skivvies and khakis. She said, half reproachful and half admiring, “Jack, that’s awfully big, you know. I mean, it’s huge.”
Jack suspected it was on the big end of the spectrum. Other guys stared at him in the showers sometimes, and he guessed they were slightly shocked or intrigued. His fraternity brothers had made it part of his myth. Now Hillary was saying, “Even without the spasmophilia, I’d be afraid to take all that. Maybe an older woman would like it, an experienced woman.”
“C’mon,” Jack complained, blushing in the dark, “moving right along …”
Later that night, when he was alone again, he turned on the lights while he was jacking off and actually looked at the damn thing. He could see that it was impressive in proportion to the rest of his body.
Hillary’s comment drove him slightly batty. He’d been nice about her spasmophilia, even shrugged it off, as if it were fine by him. He’d started clowning about Wallace Stevens in the crapper just to change the subject, but later she’d treated him like some kind of freak. He decided he’d just keep it out of sight, like some smelly, overgrown truant forced to stand in the corner facing the wall. Or the retarded kid kept back a year in fifth grade. That’s how he’d treat his dick.
With some graduation money an uncle had sent him, Jack bought a case of champagne and had a party in his minuscule room. Paul opened up his room as well, and Wendy made some “finger food,” as she called the little crustless sandwiches. Though Paul pretended complete indifference to the opinion of other students, Jack noticed he’d propped up four huge canvases—the baseball images and a version of Larry Rivers’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, which itself was a copy, wasn’t it? Howard, his old roommate, came and shook all over with silent laughter and said satirical things so mild as to be good-natured. Hillary, who’d learned flamenco in Málaga the previous summer, snapped her fingers, drummed her boots, and looked stylishly angry until the downstairs neighbor complained and said that plaster dust was sifting down all over his furniture, and everyone quieted down immediately.
And then, from one day to the next, the campus was suddenly empty. Ann Arbor changed from a busy town into a sleepy village—and Jack had no plans. Some kids he knew said they were moving to New York, it would be a ball. He’d applied to Harvard again and been accepted again, into a Ph.D. program in oriental art. His favorite Michigan prof, a German named Max Loehr, had been hired away by Harvard and was urging Jack to follow him and do some “important work” on the evolution of the Buddha image, from Gandhara to Sui and Tang China. But Jack’s father still refused to help out with the tuition to a communist university.
During the eerily quiet late-May days in Ann Arbor, Jack realized he didn’t have any real friend
s. Sure, Hillary liked him, but she’d gone off to Kennebunkport for a summer of sailing, and she hadn’t exactly invited him to join her. She’d never really trusted him (it sounded weird to say, but it was true) after she’d touched his dick. Jack was convinced that her fear of his size was behind her aversion; he wasn’t just being paranoid. Paul had moved to New York for the summer to paint. He said he wanted to meet the older painters who still hung out at the Cedar Tavern—there’d even been an article about them in Life. Jack thought it sounded pretty cliché if it had made it all the way to Life. In the autumn, Paul was going to study painting at Yale, though he said he was ashamed to admit it, as though a real painter wouldn’t take instruction. Paul said an authentic artist needed nothing but some scotch, hardship, solitude, and a good woman tiptoeing around cooking his meals. But Paul wasn’t as sure of himself as he let on; he needed Yale’s seal of approval.
“Besides,” he said, “it’s a really radical department now. The most radical in the country. Motherwell teaches there, I think, and Cy Twombly, and some other real bebop talents.” Paul liked bebop jazz, and had extended the word to mean avant-garde and something as urban as traffic.
Then Paul was gone, with his mystery and pained, out-of sync smile and his big paintings, which after much dithering he took off the stretchers and rolled up and shipped home in sturdy mailing tubes.
Jack wandered into Paul’s empty room and sat on his bed with the bare, stained mattress. Without Paul filling it up, without Wendy’s apologetic smiles, her ripeness and shame, without the baseball players’ blinding white uniforms burning over into the green grass, without the cooked smell of espresso, without the bar of cobalt blue slashed across Paul’s ribs like a tribal marking, the room seemed small and lifeless and as dingy as the cast-aside torn underpants in the corner. Would Paul even bother with underpants at Yale?
2.
Two girls Jack knew from the middle room of the Student Union moved to New York and rented a big apartment on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. They said Jack could live with them for as long as he liked. He thought it was a disturbing sign of how “safe” they must imagine he was that it never occurred to them that his presence would hurt their reputations. Of course, they were bohemian girls and thought differently about these things.
One of them was Alice, who was from an old Southern family, though there was nothing of the debutante about her. She bit her nails and wore slacks and never put makeup on and drank a lot of scotch in the evenings. She did, however, like to hunt and fish, and she even owned a hunting lodge somewhere in Virginia. Her own family and its history fascinated her, and she spoke of making a documentary about it. She must have had an income because she never had a job, though she always seemed to have plenty to do. She sometimes helped out a well-known lesbian Broadway producer, maybe with money or finding investors. Strangers assumed that Alice was a lesbian but she wasn’t; she slept with famous writers and jazz musicians, though she never discussed her partners and dreaded all publicity.
Jack was impressed that New York was a place where you could casually say that your boss was a lesbian and no one would blink or ask for more details.
Alice’s friend and roommate, Rebekkah, had been conceived in the Village, as she liked to say, if raised in Brooklyn. She was the best writer to come out of the University of Michigan in recent years, but she preferred to be an actress. She and Alice rented a loft on Bleecker Street where they presented evenings of improvisational theater. They also had the idea of doing plays by some of Alice’s famous writers, both the novelists and the poets. Rebekkah was wonderfully warm and kind and original; Jack could never predict what she was going to say next. She’d been raised by atheists and socialists, and she was an only child. Her mother was extremely girlish and as impulsive as Rebekkah, bubbling over with laughter so much that sometimes her words got lost in the hilarity. She wore her graying hair in a braid down one shoulder with Indian feathers stuck in it. Rebekkah was like that too, though her humor, unlike her mother’s, was based on surprised indignation—about horrible right-wing politics and crazy American religious superstition and general bad taste in the arts. She’d widen her eyes as she talked about some new enormity.
When he arrived, Jack had only six hundred and fifty dollars, and after he’d given Alice seventy-five for his room, he was down in the five hundreds. He lived on waffles and sandwiches and the occasional banana. Sometimes the girls would cook up a big pot of spaghetti, which Jack didn’t mind eating cold right out of the fridge. He didn’t really think about food much, though sometimes he’d feel light-headed after walking too many hours without eating.
There was something about New York that made him want to walk all the time, even if summer was hard upon him, and Jack would sometimes come home to Cornelia Street soaked through with sweat, which was odd since he rarely perspired. With its tall buildings wavering in the heat and the blasts of dirty air blown up through the grates by deafening subway trains, New York sometimes felt like a rusting but still functioning factory built by a giant. The streets were rough and patched, and even late at night men in helmets and orange reflector vests drilled under flimsy little tents or popped their heads up out of open manholes like groundhogs.
Armies of shabby vagrants were on the march in the late afternoons, and the very old rooted through garbage cans and fished out discarded newspapers, a supercilious expression on their faces, as if this whole activity were beneath them and they weren’t accustomed to it. It was a sort of snooty I-wonder-what-we-have-here expression they were wearing. He’d never seen poor people in such numbers before, especially not vagrants wearing shabby jackets and torn ties, as if just a few weeks ago they’d been respectable office workers—or men like his father.
Jack thought maybe the whole idea of skyscrapers was a bad one. At rush hour the stacked buildings dumped too many people on the streets and into the subways. At night the buildings were empty, and block after block was deserted. Then he felt like a lone cowboy riding through a deserted but dangerous Monument Valley. The lights on all the floors were dark—or occasionally they’d be left lit to form a giant cross. A few old drunks would suddenly move and seem to smolder slightly in a dark doorway like hot ash.
Sometimes Jack would wander through a pack of gays, all sibilance and jingling and prancing, as if Santa’s reindeer had been watered with champagne and gone plunging off course. Or he’d pass a solitary handsome stranger in jeans who stared at Jack—of course Jack would look away instantly. Most of the gays seemed to be over on Christopher Street.
Here on Cornelia, almost everyone was Italian or bohemian. At the end of the block, on Bleecker, there were pastry shops filled with soggy cannoli and hard, week-old butter cookies, or they had little newsstands selling pink sports papers from Italy, or there were dimly lit pizza parlors, or there was the looming somber bulk of Our Lady of Pompeii. At the other end of this block on Bleecker, at Seventh Avenue, was a butcher with un-skinned rabbits dangling on hooks in the window, or scalped goat heads, all teeth and eyes. And always, late at night, another drunk was hectoring the dark. More than once Jack saw a rat sneak across the street. If you stood in the right place, you could look over the crouched rooftops of Greenwich Village and see the spires of Midtown illuminated behind swirling clouds of pollution. As the summer wore on, New York seemed more and more deserted, dirty, tropical. He wondered if the city would pick up once the cold weather returned. Would there once again be people in suits and pale blue shirtdresses? Here, in the Village, all was quiet. But over on the avenues, muted cars were honking and fire engines were wailing. Jack never actually saw a fire, but it sounded as if some part of the city was always in flames.
He didn’t think he could parlay Chinese art history into a job, though Max Loehr offered to get him an interview with a dealer, C. T. Loo, on Fifty-seventh Street. But Jack wanted to be a journalist; at least that sounded kind of cool. He went to an employment agent, a woman who had half a dozen pencils piercing her bun and a littl
e dirty office bathed in cigarette smoke. Her ashtray was the size of a dinner plate and nearly filled with stubs, crumpled or prostrate or still smoldering like an elite guard dying or dead on the battlefield, Zouave fatalities in their stained white tunics.
The agent, Shelly, sent him out on two appointments with magazines—one a men’s soft-core porn monthly and the other a trade publication for the refrigeration industry. Until now most of the adults Jack had dealt with had been teachers, people paid to praise and nurture promising youngsters. Suddenly he was up against busy, dismissive men who weren’t charmed by a candidate’s brightness but were coolly sizing up the possibility of working him hard for very little pay. He was no longer a poodle, but a mule. Neither man hired him.
The haphazardness of the adult world shocked him. At school, if you put in some effort, you got good marks and the ascent was even and never too steep. But here in New York, nothing was systematic. Your chances of being hired were determined by who you knew, what kind of first impression you made, your looks, your accent, your timing (they had just fired someone that morning!)—even whether or not you reminded the boss of himself or of his younger self.
“Hey, kid, you’re a go-getter, just like I was. I like that, kid,” some man had actually said to Howard, who’d landed a job in hospital management. Of course, it helped that Howard’s cousin attended the guy’s temple in the Five Towns.
Jack had lunch with Howard, who was sweet and reassuring, so far from his usual mockery that it unnerved Jack—was his case so desperate that even Howard had put aside his mild form of perpetual satire?
They met in the Carnegie Deli, where Howard explained to him what a knish was and—“You never even heard of brisket before? Well, order a hot brisket sandwich on a kaiser roll with mayo. You’ll like it, I guarantee it.”