Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  “Well, yes and no.” The compliment seemed to undercut my serious intellectual credentials. Sure, I knew pain. I just preferred the other. Colette advised: “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.”

  Wasn’t that natural: expecting contentment in New York after just two months here? “Happy” meant work done well, done so well that grudging acceptance, then inevitable fame must follow. How ambitious was our group? We were so ambitious, we did not know we were.

  That young, we believed most every myth. We certainly believed Manhattan’s. It had just drafted us.

  My parents introduced me to the city at age eight.

  My starter purchase was, alas, a tiny maroon paisley ascot from a tie-shop in Times Square. I recall my folks’ worried glances. “I guess it’s his money, Richard.” Mother sounded exhausted in advance. Did my folks consider this baby ascot a prediction of my show biz queerness or, maybe worse, some indication I was finally home?

  We saw My Fair Lady (original cast), we Christmas shopped (the old Bergdorf, the old F.A.O. Schwarz, original locations, both, like so much, gone). I stuffed my piggy bank’s nickels into skyscraper telescopes. The Rockettes made me cry.

  Manhattan seduces even the sternest. It specializes in the sternest.

  Even my proper mom, my war-hero dad, succumbed to unlikely dandyisms. Dressed for a nightclub, she wore her reddest mouth and the real pearls. His cuff links matched his onyx tie tack. His hair was oversleek in some new way that gave his whole blond head an eerie prettiness. Dad had worked hard convincing one white pocket hankie into three distinct Chrysler Building points.

  The hotel provided a baby-sitter, one swart old woman I believed would undress my kid brother and me the very second our handsome folks waltzed out. (Instead, she ordered many room service hot fudge sundaes, smoked her whole pack of Luckies, then snored like some stevedore. Disappointing.)

  Leaving, Dad bent over our bed. Wanting to commemorate our whereabouts, he did the most charming thing. Eyes on his sons, he simply pointed to the white peaks of his own perfect hankie. “Boys?” he said as his pink forefinger moved, a magician’s, showing how the trick is done. “One, two, three. —New York, look out!”

  He pressed that same finger to his own backside and made a sizzling sound while winking. We giggled. “Rich-ard!” Mom, as usual, flirted by pretending to overcare.

  I’d never seen Dad so worked up. It made me straighten the ascot I wore atop my blue pajamas.

  I would later judge that New York City made my dad feel very (almost cruelly) sexual.

  —Like father like son.

  The folks soon noticed a strange expression claiming their young Hartley’s face. My frown became more set each day, and Mom at last stooped before me. She brushed at the brown velvet collar of my little chesterfield. “What is it, darling? Are you scared in New York? Hmmnh? Yes?—Scared?”

  I nodded.

  “Scared, what of?”

  “Leaving.”

  I had the shaming secret knack for happiness. Even as a boy, my image of perfect contentment always centered not on toys but the toys’ workshop, chockablock with paint, hammers, table space. Now, full grown, arriving here at last, I imagined myself one skilled elf about to go on payroll at the North Pole’s action central; I would soon meet all the other top toy-making young elves … or is it “elfs”? (Kinds of people in the world? Those who want to own the toys, and those who long to make them.)

  First six months in town, I would climb to the roof of my tenement and watch the city’s beady lights come on and remember Mom’s real pearls. (She wore them “out” despite expecting robbers, even at the Rainbow Room.) I would sip my cheap Chilean champagne from the last of Granny Halsey’s flutes (long since stepped on). And I would toast the skyline like some hick, to your health, chin-chin, for simple gladness. I was a hick. Whose life had finally begun …

  Newly-off-the-train, I sensed I was not the only gay one. All of us were still very much guy-guys, the more so for youth’s stubborn cockiness. Butch and jawed and proud and hung, our mothers’ favorites. In Falls, North Carolina, my sexual outlook had been Hush-Hush. But here, on glossy streets—one glance at any other slim tailored dude was returned with interest, a brazen unharmed “Yes?” Safety in numbers. Who the hell cares? Strong, we were here now.

  We had come this far to be ourselves. We would not hold back. There were hundreds of thousands of us.

  And we were mostly so friggin’ cute.

  Why are so many writers, painters, (and hairdressers) gay—that’s another story, anybody’s guess. Maybe self-defense by those most longing to redesign an unfair split-end world? Camouflage got invented just after the airplane. During both world wars, the gay-friendliest of army divisions? Always the camouflagers. Born experts.

  We had all chaired our high school prom decoration committees. We now met at interviews for the same job, which none of us won, being a bit too visibly “artistic.” We seemed latent nonteam players—despite the blue blazer. (Borrowed, it, alas, looked borrowed.) Still unemployed, we adjourned to whine over coffee.

  I lost the job (writing-editing The Gasket, a rubber industry newsletter). But I found Robert Christian Gustafson.

  I first encountered said youth in a polished-deco-stainless elevator, going down. I had no particular feeling yet about the rubber industry. I stood behind this tall person, also studying the clocklike needle marking our descent. A smell rose off his back—the newly starched white shirt seemed worn by some kid who’d just mowed his folks’ two-acre lawn. He looked gold and smelled green. Gilt ringlets blocked my view and seemed the spinning arrow’s fulcrum: Cupid head.

  The interviewer had told us, “Expect our call”; we knew better. Leaving through a checkerboard lobby, he was drawing slow-burn looks, not noticing. He stood six feet, but so much beauty taffy-pulled to that height made him seem a sailing ship. I followed, already noticing others’ noticing for him (surely someone had to). Here I was scrapbooking for a (literally) perfect stranger.

  One old guy, his mouth clamped around a nasty unlit cigar, wedding ring cutting his finger, did this comic double take, scoped out the blond’s ass. Girl? Oh no, boy, oh well, a boy that young, why not look, long as you’re lookin’? Sir, my sentiments exactly.

  Catching up, short of breath, as if auditioning as Beauty’s executive secretary, I only knew I had to stop this youth. Soon backward walked I, before his silver-yellow fire-engine advance.

  “Don’t tell me.” I let my Southern accent go more molasses. “International Rubber hated you. For exactly the reasons they should have fallen on their knees. You’ve been in the city from ten to fourteen days, and you’re an artist just fantastically talented, and you think nobody knows or understands about your caliber of talent, but I do.”

  “Because you are gifted, too, right? I mean, like, extremely.”

  “Ditto. —Coffee? My cheapest legal vice. With refills, if you put a lot of cream and sugar in it, one cup can get you through the afternoon.” We spoke our names, told our “fields,” our minor hometowns, we shook hands and scanned each other from the knees—to the telltale groin—(two groin boys) and up, still smiling when our eyes rendezvoused back at either’s face, and we were already friends.

  Gustafson lived, turned out, one block from me. “Lucky for you,” he said, “I’ve been here five whole years, going on a century. I know things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Best getting places. Certain amazing people. The ropes.”

  I nodded, “Okay.”

  Soon after we said Up Yours to International Rubber Gasketry (which never called), after we memorized each other’s siblings’ names and birth order, we learned each other’s exact junior and senior prom themes. I still recall Robert’s gym masterpiece was “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” The welter of gym plumbing and steampipes he upgraded to being the Bakelite wheelroom of Captain Nemo’s submarine.

  We lived exiled to eternal bachelor pads; but we’d arrived here free of childrearing’s t
ime-drain and expense. They assign you ugly vents and ductwork? Make a line of it.

  We had not impregnated our hometown sweethearts; nor had we been impregnated. We were none of us the fair-haired letter-sweater son that Dad hand-groomed to stay home and take over his Budweiser distributorship.

  That was our form of luck.

  Blake wisely instructs certain prudish stay-at-homes, “The lust of the goat is the glory of God.” And we billy-club aficionados already knew this, thanks. Sex was among our several unacknowledged art forms. So early in our careers, most of us were still better at it than our sundry vertical artistries. —In those, we’d not yet found a way to be just natural (as we helplessly were the second that our pants fell down).

  But, in New York, you could get famous even for that.

  —We, barely unpacked, already painted (self-portraits, the model always being present, moody, and cheap), we wrote (self-portraits of young persons arriving in great cities that, happily, we were far too artistic to actually, like, call New York), we sculpted (torsos not unlike our own, if just a bit more “defined”), and we composed.

  Robert’s starter chamber works were early Straussian tone poems in which yearning Coplandesque adolescence met caterwauled Bartok car-horn cello-scratches indicating a confrontation, the Iowan Lutheran Bucolic being eaten by the Godless Urban, get it? And, barely out of Port Authority bus depot, we fucked. Actually, in the depot, if memory still services.

  After one year’s art school, I’d found I might just make a better writer than a painter. As with most land-poor Southerners, my family tended to mythologize its struggles, enlarge its charms and holdings. In New York, I farmed out such diehard traits and glories to new friends.

  Having no money, we naturally moved into your cheaper neighborhoods. There still were some then. Instantly, on the street, Robert and I recognized others like us. Leashed urban dogs scout only at ankle height only for leashed urban dogs of a certain scent, size, and use.

  The town then mainly seemed child artists, also freshly drawn to Manhattan’s clearinghouse and open ward. I owned a typewriter. At least I knew what my work would be. In Manhattan, when you’re this underfunded, even small self-knowledge can give a kid a big head start.

  At thirty-three, I’d already finished grad school, worked odd jobs, taught in California and North Carolina, but somehow I still looked like a kid.

  My first Manhattan night out, each new disco Robert squired me to asked for my ID. I appeared to be just what I was: new here, doggedly healthy, loaded with energy, nearly as talented as driven, a rube, if a well-brought-up one, terrified, oversexed, and reasonably fearless. Meaning: innocent innocent innocent, and not unpretty. New York, watch out! Jump a goodly distance back.

  —Only in retrospect do we ever really understand how we actually looked. The young ones who learn that at the time can be rendered whores by overknowing. Whores, or actors.

  For me, New York meant the chance of having fun while creating something true and beautiful, a chance at lowering my address book’s bucket into the deepest, coolest waters I could find.

  New York offers the twin necessities for founding your artistic reputation: one very public stage, adjoining (via long service-corridors) many anonymous Santa-workshop refuge caves, places to perfect the work you’ll soon make public.

  Listen to the name of entry-level Manhattan real estate: “Studio apartment.”

  Your art’s foundry. Plus, where you go to hide from its results. “Ghetto” is an idiomatic Venetian word for “foundry”—a landmark in the only neighborhood where Venice allowed its Jews to live.

  My ninth address book (I still own every one, and will show you later if you’re not careful) reflects all this: a first huge forward swelling. There is red wine splashed across the A’s and most B’s—the thin, rich, membranous color that itself has now become something of a sensuous address in time.

  Looking back, rereading my young Manhattan life’s fine print, I now wonder who this Astrid Terboldt is. All Astrid’s possible extension phones are listed, and my scribbled note to myself: “Give her father’s driver at least 15 min. notice, named Griffin.” How did I (and memory) lose her? Jotted here are back-room phones for off-brand midtown galleries long since shut. There are the numbers of good restaurants’ pay phones. Here’s a friend of a friend in the Met Museum’s Department of Education who might help sneak us into black-tie previews meant for actual adult donors. Plus a lotto ticket number that, apparently (I hope), did not win. Addresses exist in time as well as space.

  You get a larger urban life; you go buy yourself a bigger, sturdier binder, industrial-strength. As soon as you’ve established your address book’s critical bulk, Natural Selection starts to cull the ones you really love from those you just find entertaining despite their bad characters.

  Then—too soon—Natural Subtraction kicks in. You adore some folks more than others, but you choose the ones who can best and truthfully adore you back. And—even there—little tiffs occur.

  Three missed dates. The promised letter of recommendation that never arrives. You keep score mostly by transferring the names of the living, your dearest, to the next book and the next. Buying up, humanly. Who will fit into your narrow pleasure boat? “Finding yourself” means the ways your favorite company mirrors all you’ve founded, all you hope for. You, Foundry, you …

  You assemble a community, and, in your early thirties, looking younger, you naturally assume that your assemblage will stay put.

  A collector, choosing paintings, has every right to believe those works will not leave home, or fade, or burn up in their frames, right?

  Welcome to New York. Welcome to the Lost and Foundry.

  JumpStart

  he very first time my very first Manhattan telephone rang—an old black rotary that, in memory, seems heavy, carved, and Deco-gloss-important as that movie’s Maltese falcon—it was Robert, joshing. His resonant voice managed a credible Svedish accent. “Is diz Mizzter Hartley Mimzz, der writer? I haf good neeeews from de Nobel Committee! Would tomorrow be acceptable time for home delivery of yer Pwrizze?”

  “Finally!” I shot back, ready for wit’s first SAT question. “I can maybe pencil you in, but only before ten. ’Cause after that, I’m booked, bitch.”

  Laughing, he liked this. I’d wanted him to. It is hard to express, after so many years of work—after all the writing things down, then cleaning things up—how easy and inevitable our first play felt.

  Fun founded itself on our assumption that great work would emerge from us. My starter story contained fifteen hundred sentences, most I’d memorized like Catechism. Fifteen hundred chances to get it right. We felt rewards were due us, if not now … soon. First, glamorous parties to crash. Then masked balls to legally attend, until, eventually, when we were old and forty, such bashes would be big ones thrown for us. Watch.

  Robert had phoned to invite me to the opening of something called the Boy Bar. He always sensed, it seemed, the one event in New York each night that the largest number of intelligent people would, next morning, kick themselves for missing. He had wasted not one evening of his five years here. I, clever enough to be teachable, followed all his hints. Followed all his entrances. Bouncers spoke his name, looked my way, paused, then wagged their heads toward side-entrances. Came the first night I heard a girl singer dedicate her next torch song to Robert—pointing out his ringlets so the credit would accrue to her.

  I fought to keep my face neutral as I sat slightly to his left, our shoulders touching. It was already at early bubble, RobertRobertRobert. And I, taking lessons, always fully along, if half-smiling, lived three steps behind, checked the coats—his fake fur and my own outmoded camel hair that made me, he said, look like the son of a Mafia kingpin newly enrolled at Andover.

  I agreed to help him open the Boy Bar. “Dress down for once,” Robbie coached me well, “got a torn T-shirt?” “No, but I have a T-shirt and two good hands.” “You’ll overdo it. I know you Wagnerians. You wear the s
hirt, I’ll do the tearing.” “Best offer I’ve had all day.” “Oh, that again? Hartley? I’ve heard Sisterhood is powerful, what say we stick with that forever?” “Fine, my powerhouse sistah. Ma’s napping. —Would you now consider incest?”

  The fact that, on first sight, I loved this guy insanely made me in no way unique. But it just got worse, or better.

  Many local boys who’d heard, “You’re too handsome to waste that grade of face here, you deserve to go to New York,” had by now. At the bar’s gala opening, such a smoky din—former small-town camouflagers blazing all the primary colors of Broadway Boogie Woogie. I heard others say, Robert was the god, terminally attractive, and had just one competitor: that gladiatorial towhead. The guy was named Horse, for reasons beneath mentioning. Robert’s hair shone platinum, Horse’s mane a mere corn yellow; I felt relieved to soon overhear Horse called “the other blond.”

  From the Boy Bar, Robert was whisked off in a white limo owned by someone older, the surviving lover of an early film star thrown out of the movies for being too incautiously gay and so became the adored interior decorator to his fellow actors. And me? I got squired home on foot (twenty block hike, freezing cold) by one Ed, who worked in “drapery alterations,” whatever that was. Next morning, Robert gave me my second New York phone call.

  He told me what he’d discovered from his date: One reason Wallis Warfield Simpson had had such a hold over the former king was that she had such a hold on him, his. The Duke, just the tallest in her kennel of popeyed pugs, was pitiably endowed, apparently, and always had a premature ejac apparently. But that slyboots Wally had learned, from some madam in Hong Kong, a vaginal clamp technique that could bite right down on her lover, very severe.

  “And she could hold the Duke until he achieved at least a brief reign.”

  “Oh,” I said. (Sister, I don’t think we’re in North Carolina anymore. In Falls, such morning-after conversations concerned which socially prominent doctor did the least obtrusive ingrown toenail removal.)