Darling

by Richard Rodriguez

  The bar is fine . . . DARLING.

  Broken yolk. Call 911. I steered you, as I would have steered a fizzing depth charger, through the placid mirrors of the Garden of Eden, into the bar. Two clubs, please. They made them with chopped olives, remember? Two clubs and one beer. And one coffee. Black. Black as pork blood. Black as shark bile. Black as . . .

  I will have the Syrah, please.

  Sorry. One beer, one Syrah. Skip the coffee.

  Ex was on your mind, I knew that. You were on edge. I was never the Other Man, careful on that score. I made you laugh, though. Ex was grateful. OK, it was “darling” that pissed you off.

  One redhead. Chin resting on hand. The snake’s neon tongue flicked long, short, long, short.

  One pretender.

  3. Habeebee

  “Darling,” Andrew says, with a good-humored sigh. He writes the Arabic word on his napkin with a fountain pen; the ink bleeds away from the word.

  “Come weez me to zee casbah,” American children learned to say from cartoons without the least idea what a casbah might be. Some kind of nightclub, I imagined, for Shriners. In the course of writing this chapter, I ask Andrew who lives in Cairo to explain to me—not a parlor game, not quite; I am truly interested—how it is possible, in what way is it possible, I mean, for an Arab to address a man, another man, affectionately, as “darling.” Still imagining the casbah.

  The feminine noun, pronounced habib-tea, might be spoken to a wife, to a family member, to a child, to Mata Hari, to Hedy Lamarr.

  The masculine noun is pronounced habeebee. While it is not advisable to address one’s employer or a policeman with such a noun, my friend instructs, one might, in a playful manner—with irony, I assume—address a waiter or a cab driver as “darling.” You might be surprised, too, he says, when a man you met for the first time only a few hours earlier phones you at your hotel and opens with a Tallulah, as in: Habeebee, why have I not heard from you?

  The admirable intimacy and the demonstrative physicality of Arab men among themselves seem to depend on the separation of men from women before marriage, and a curatorial regard of women after marriage, and the consequent mystery and the consequent male anxiety about women—their scarves and blooded rags and watchful eyes—from birth to death. In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues (as too hot to handle) and stoned to death on an accusation of adultery (as too insignificant to cry over), men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality.

  • • •

  Do you remember, Darling, we were sitting in the ICU waiting room at UCLA Medical Center when two Arab men, thirties, handsome—one the father, one the uncle, we supposed—entered with two children, two boys? The boys played; the men talked. A tall woman wearing a black veil entered. Her face was exposed. Her complexion was ashen; there were dark circles under her eyes; she was preoccupied, talking into a cell phone. Her burning eyes strafed the room. The men leaned away from each other, stopped talking. The children got up from the floor and took seats. She briefly spoke to the men then left the room, still talking into the cell phone.

  The children returned to the floor. The men recommenced their conversation; they spoke Arabic to each other but English to the children. By and by, one of the men, the uncle, lifted one of the boys to his knee. “So, my darling,” he said, “do you want to go to Mecca with them? Or will you come to Medina with me?” At which he kissed the boy’s forehead so juicily that we immediately turned to each other to mouth: Medina!

  • • •

  A teacher invited me to my niece’s prep school classroom to give a talk, and I entered the classroom at 9:05 a.m., how-do-you-do, etcetera. There was my niece in the first row. “Hello, darling”—I addressed her in the familial vernacular in front of ALL her friends. My sister reported to me later that my niece had wanted to DIE. At fifteen, I guess she was a year or two shy of being able to relish a gay uncle in public.

  She didn’t die. She grew up to be an absolute darling. And a player.

  When I was fifteen, I attended a Catholic boys’ high school. I prospered well enough. In an all-boys school, as in a patriarchal theocracy, sexual roles are distributed widely. The absent feminine must still be accounted for, as in an all-boys’ production of Julius Caesar. Roles of pathos were available to boys at my high school, but I eschewed them in favor of a role more akin to Prosecutor, Ironist. I advanced by questions. In some more perfect world, like American Bandstand, I suppose I would have been happier in a sexually integrated high school. I knew how to talk to girls. I had two sisters. And I loved to talk. But early nonsexual female companionship would have come at a price. “Sissy” is the chrysalis of “darling.”

  As a boy, I resisted the aunts’ encouragement to go outside with my cousins or to join the group of men standing around the gaping hood of a car, silently regarding an exposed horsepower. I preferred to linger with the women, to listen to gossip, to hear irony concerning the projects of men—irony I was fully capable of sharing.

  During my high school years, a boy from my neighborhood named Malcolm chose me to be his friend for a season. His elbow nudged my book in the public library one Saturday afternoon as he sprawled forward across the table feigning some condition—boredom, I suppose. His voice was like shadow—as whispery and as indistinct as shadow, due to an adolescent change. “Do you want to wrestle?” he asked.

  I have never met anyone since who speaks as Malcolm spoke: He daydreamed; he pronounced strategies out loud (as I raked elm leaves from our lawn and piled them in the curb)—about how he would befriend this boy or that boy, never anyone I knew; Malcolm went to a different high school. “First,” he said, “I will tease him about his freckles. Then I will tease him about his laugh—how his laugh sounds a little like a whinny sometimes. I won’t go too far. You should see how his wrist pivots as he dribbles down the court.

  “He’s got these little curls above his sideburns. I wish I had those.” (He would catch me up on the way to the library.) “What are you reading? We read that last year. Not really a war story, though, is it? Want to go eat French toast?”

  Malcolm had a car and an after-school grocery-delivery route and a criminal penchant. I knew, because he told me, he’d been caught breaking into empty houses.

  He walked like an illustration from Huckleberry Finn—arms akimbo, fingers spread, picking up his knees as though he were stepping over creaking floorboards. He had dark eyes, very white skin, and an expression of condescending pity like that of a raptor bird, if raptor birds had eyes that dark. He said he was part Chickasaw.

  What is a season in the life of a high school boy? Four months or so. Malcolm’s next season was girls. Basketball and girls.

  On summer nights, my mother and Helen and I stayed up late watching old movies. At some point in the movie the women would retire from the table and leave the men to their brandy and cigars. I preferred movies that followed the women upstairs to a region of knowing. . . .

  The doorbell rang at eleven thirty.

  My mother went to the upstairs front window. I went down to answer the bell. It was Malcolm.

  “Come out for a minute,” Malcolm whispered.

  I closed the door behind me.

  “Smell this,” he said, thrusting his index finger under my nose.

  I did not understand.

  He named a girl I did not know. He was ecstatic. He leaned backward on his legs and silently crowed. He jumped from the top porch step down to the sidewalk. He ran away, down the street. I never heard that audacious male voice again. Unfleshed echoes in Les Liaisons dangereuses, perhaps, or the memoirs of Casanova, but never again the naked envy of the seducer.

  4. Picasso

  Because I had arrived early for my nephew’s wedding in Golden Gate Park, I decided to walk over to the de Young Museum to look at an exhibition from the M
usée Picasso in Paris. Many of the paintings displayed Picasso’s naked infatuation with female-ism, with convexity, concavity, bifurcation. The female face, too, was divided into competing arrondissements—one tearful, one tyrannical—like the faces of playing-card Queens.

  Concurrent with the Picasso there was an exhibit at the museum of the fashion of Cristóbal Balenciaga, another Spaniard, Picasso’s contemporary. But whereas the sexed, sublime painter undressed women as unashamedly as if he had created them, the modernist couturier made formidable casings for women, unassailable pods, chitins, scapulars, shields—made saints of women, made queens, bullfighters, pagodas, nurses, priests, Jeannes d’Arc—conventuals of the Order of Fashion who, thus armed, might one day slay the grizzled minotaur of the maze-like gallery upstairs.

  • • •

  I was the one who insisted it was time for you to lose the jeans and the sweatshirts, Darling. I sat through a rainy Saturday afternoon on a fake Louis Quinze chair in a salon at the Beverly Hills I. Magnin as the Delphic vendeuse consulted her clattering racks to bring forward a succession of looks for you to try. Patience, Darling, I cautioned—I could tell you were about to bolt. The stockroom door opened one more time, and the priestess stepped forward, bearing in her arms a red Chanel cocktail dress that betokened revenge on a shallow, faithless husband.

  • • •

  A middle-aged woman in a brown wool suit tapped my shoulder after Mass. She knew my name. She said she had read an interview I gave to an online magazine on the gay marriage controversy in California. At that time, a Catholic archbishop colluded with officials from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a campaign to protect the sacred institution of marriage from any enlarging definition (including civil marriage, which the Catholic Church does not recognize as sacramentally valid). Campaign checks to be made payable to the Knights of Columbus.

  The Knights of Columbus is a lay fraternal organization sanctioned by the Catholic Church. The Knights are an admirable bunch of guys—I believe “guys” is the right word—who spend many hours performing works of charity. On festival days, the Knights get themselves up with capes and swords and plumed hats like a comic-opera militia.

  The woman in the brown suit did not say she agreed with my comments in the article; she did not say she disagreed. She said: “I am a Dominican nun; some days I cannot remember why.”

  I will stay in the Church as long as you do, I said.

  Chummy though my reply was, it represented my abrogation of responsibility to both the Church and the nun.

  A gay man easily sees himself as expendable in the eyes of the Church hierarchy because that is how he imagines the Church hierarchy sees him. The Church cannot afford to expel women. Women are obviously central to the large procreative scheme of the Church. Women have sustained the Church for centuries by their faith and their birthrates. Following the sexual scandals involving priests and children, women may or may not consent to present a new generation of babies for baptism. Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.

  It is because the Church needs women that I depend upon women to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.

  I shook hands with the Dominican nun and we parted.

  But even as I type these words, the Vatican has initiated a campaign against American nuns who (according to the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith) promote “radical feminist themes” and who remain silent regarding their Excellencies’ positions on women’s reproductive rights and homosexuality. A nun’s silence is interpreted as dissent in this instance.

  The Church—I say the Church but I mean the male church—is rather shy in the presence of women, even as the God of scripture is rather shy of women. God will make a bond of friendship with a hairy patriarch. God interferes with Sarah through her husband. God courts Mary by an angel.

  And yet the God of intention entered history through a woman’s body (reversing the eye of the needle). The Church, as she exists, is a feminine act, intuition, and pronoun: The Christian Church is the sentimental branch of human theology. (I mean that as praise.) The Church watches the progress of Jesus with the same sense of his heartbreaking failure as did the mother who bore him. In John’s account of the wedding at Cana, Mary might be played with maximum flibberty-jibbertry by Maggie Smith. Jesus struggles to extricate his legs from the banquet table in the courtyard; his companions can’t help sniggering a bit. The first showing of Jesus’s power over Nature, the changing of water into wine, makes no clear theological sense. But as the first Comic Mystery, the scene makes perfect domestic sense. Jesus is instructed by his mother.

  5. The Sisters of Mercy

  I would never in a million years have thought of lobbing a “darling” Franz Schurmann’s way, though Franz and I had lunch almost every week for twenty years. Now I wish I had, for Franz would have sluiced the noun through the brines of several tongues, finally cracking its nacreous shell. He would have told me something interesting. Or he would have spit the noun onto his bone plate as something the Chinese have no word for, no use for. (The Chinese tongue had become Franz’s point of view.)

  Not that Franz was unsophisticated or unacquainted with theatricality. As a young man at Harvard, Franz was the best friend of Bertolt Brecht’s son. Franz spent several summers living among the colony of European expatriots in Santa Monica, with Brecht and Weigel and Mann and Isherwood.

  After Harvard, Franz embarked on a Pashto-idyll, playing the scholar-gypsy to the hilt: two years on horseback through the Khyber Pass on an anthropological search for some remnant of a lost tribe of blue eyes.

  When Franz passed through the molars and incisors of remote mountain villages, he was often invited to share a meal with the bearded men who squatted near a fire. The women who had prepared the meal stood several yards away, watching and waiting for the men to finish, for the men to pluck the remnants of food from their beards.

  Franz caught a young woman’s eye. She held his glance for only a moment before she spat on the ground and looked away, over her shoulder.

  • • •

  The women who educated me—Catholic nuns belonging to the Irish order of the Sisters of Mercy—looked very much like Franz’s Afghan village women. They wore veils, long skirts, long sleeves, laced black shoes—Balenciagas all.

  Of the many orders of Catholic nuns founded in nineteenth-century Europe, the majority were not cloistered orders but missionary orders—nursing and teaching orders. Often the founders of such congregations came from upper-middle-class families, but most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind. They became the least-sequestered women imaginable.

  It was in the nineteenth century, too, that secular women in Europe and North America formed suffrage movements, following in the footsteps of missionary nuns and Protestant missionary women. Curiously, it was the burqa-like habits nuns wore—proclaiming their vows of celibacy—that lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of a romantic air.

  When seven Irish Sisters of Mercy (the oldest twenty-five) disembarked in San Francisco in December of 1854, they found a city filled with dispirited young men and women who had followed the legend of gold. The Sisters of Mercy spent their first night in California huddled together in St. Patrick’s Church on Mission Street; they had no other accommodation. In the morning, and for months afterward, the sisters searched among the wharves and alleys of San Francisco, ministering to men, women, and children they found sleeping in doorways.

  The Christian Advocate, an anti-Catholic newspaper, published calumny about the nuns; the paper declared them to be women of low repute and opined they should move on—nobody wanted them in San Francisco.

  In 1855 the Sisters of Mercy nursed San Franciscans through a cholera outbreak. In 1868 the nuns cared for the victims of a smallpox epidemic. In
1906, after the great earthquake and fire, the Sisters of Mercy set up a tent hospital in the Presidio; they evacuated hundreds of the sick and elderly to Oakland across the Bay. City officials in the nineteenth century invited all religious orders to ride San Francisco’s trolleys and cable cars free of charge because of the city’s gratitude to the Sisters of Mercy.

  As they had done in Ireland, the Sisters of Mercy opened orphanages, schools, and hospitals in California and throughout the United States. By the time our American mothers caught up with the nuns in the 1960s—with the possibility of women living fulfilling lives, independent of family or marriage—the nuns had discarded their black robes in favor of sober pedestrian attire. Vocation has nothing to do with dress-up.

  Veiled women were seldom thereafter seen on the streets of America or in European cities, not until the influx of immigrant Muslim women from North Africa and the Middle East in the 1980s.

  A shadow of scandal now attaches in Ireland to the founding order of the Sisters of Mercy. An Irish government report released in 2009 documents decades of cruelty perpetrated particularly upon children of the working class in orphanages and homes for unwed mothers run by the Sisters of Mercy. One cannot doubt or excuse the record. The record stands.

  The Sisters of Mercy of the Americas—the women I revere—are fewer and older. The great years of the order seem to have passed, but the Sisters continue their ministry to the elderly, to immigrants, to the poor. The Sisters are preparing for a future the rest of us have not yet fully comprehended—a world of increasing poverty and misery—even as they prepare for their absence from the close of the twenty-first century.

  Nuns will not entirely disappear from San Francisco as long as we may occasionally glimpse a black mustache beneath a fluttering veil. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is an order of gay drag nuns whose vocation is dress-up.