Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  “And what, my dear Airedale—(’cause if you were a dog you’d be no pug, but a noble Airedale)—what, Hart, did you learn?”

  “‘Learn’?” I asked. “Oh … learn. Last night?”

  And then, thanks to Robert and Manhattan, I learned that learning was really a main part of it. To learn. From sex, from everything. We soon lived life in order to learn and then report it to each other, facts rouged and pumped some.

  “I guess I could say I learned that Ed—Ed was the one I was talking to? Thin, with the boots?—I guess I could say I learned that Ed needs the Duchess of Windsor. Ed was overready, Robert. Ed was a premie. One thing, Ed introduced me to a term I’ve never heard before—‘window treatment.’ Otherwise … back to the drawing board.” I felt such a failure.

  “Back to the ‘Bored of Ed,’ hunh? Hartley, be tolerant of poor Ed. He only came fast because you’re so exciting,” Robert rattled forward, saving me. He did that from the start. “There’s a coffee shop at the end of your block, which is the beginning of my block. Ossorio’s ‘physical plant’ is for shit, but his coffee is the tincture of ambrosia. He believes it’s very good for you and that makes it so. Trust me. The place is all tiled like a mouthful of broken teeth? You’ve seen it. Go back to your writing, sorry for interrupting, but I’ll be having caffeine with the silver older guy from last night around, say, six? (He was Carole Lombard’s confidant and favorite fellow shopper.) He’ll like you, guy’s got amazing stories. Cary Grant-Randolph Scott sex in the pool stories. Then we three, from there, we’ll just invent the rest of the evening. What you and I don’t know, for now we’ll fake. So, bye. Scribble, scribble, Mr. Fitzgerald. Oh, and don’t forget the Nobel delivery, your stoop, by ten. Ciao, Airedale duck …”

  1980: It was always a new guy, it was usually the first night. I was so new to Old New York, I kept getting lost: the avenues had names, the cross streets numbers, and Romance wore size fourteen boots.

  I could now claim a friend one block away, a closet-sized apartment, some few clothes in it, a Hermes portable typewriter Swiss-made, of stainless steel baked a detached and promising pistachio green. I also had a part-time job and certain short stories I continually worked on. And I had limited bar-admission mad money for weekends spent prowling, picking, preferring, perfecting. Erotically speaking, with Maestro Gustafson’s encouragement, I was already making book.

  I felt as shy as I acted bold. Before entering certain doors, I literally shook. I crossed arms to disguise St. Vitus spasms. Fear, governed, made me look pugnacious, or so your Hartley hoped. I grew wilder in search of quips and news and good details for him.

  Robert went so often to the St. Mark’s Baths he called himself “amphibious.” He assumed I knew the place. I stayed away, scared. But I was haunted, goaded, stoked, by Robert’s query, “What’d you learn?”

  It was always the inaugural reach into unfamiliar britches, it was the first sight of the New World. We were all brave Magellans circumnavigating the belt and what was under it, circumcised or not. We all sought the single shortcut to the nectar spices of India.

  My ideal, I found, was tall, rough-hewn, silent behind his brooding. Unlike your gullible cream-rinsed Hartley Mims, Jr., here, he need not be from a good family. Fact is: Broken noses were a selling point.

  A housepainter was fine; or some rough-hewn farm-owning Spanish count. I tangled with both during my first Manhattan month. I was an equal opportunity. Episcopalians need not apply. If they’d ever attended a private secondary school called “Saint” anything, show me the door. Been there, done them.

  No, make it anyone as unlike my white middle-class My Fair Lady self as possible. The bedroom was any private chamber not mine. What room service brought up for breakfast … was never a dish that I myself could fix on my dive’s two sputtering gas burners.

  Romance was a love slap, a non-English speaker, a criminal exception—a still photo, the contrast so high, it became almost as abstract as a great dark city seen from the air by some brilliant color-blind angel looking down on us. A guardian angel, right? A guardian angel amused by all this healthy coupling, a male angel blessing us for providing him such good and squirmy entertainment from on high.

  1980 was a great time to wash up on this rock island. Our youth plus New York’s riches made a heady mix. Money was being extravagantly earned, instantly spent. Not necessarily in that order. All, of course, by others.

  But, if you were young and hungry and artistic and presentable, and if you knew how to get to certain glamour troughs, the trickle-down theory briefly worked. If people had more money than sense, if they bought season tickets to every single concert series, they were always giving away their box seats … “Do you know any youngsters who’re especially ‘alive’ to music and might make good use of these?”

  If richfolks order too much catered food, you—poor, but ski-nosed and backpacked—get to haul away as much of it as you might camel home discretely. If you cannot afford drugs, well, they’re down yonder on that little mirror-topped end table Altar to Silvery Oblivion. Three brandy snifters full of pretty-colored pills, and round hand mirrors with several ivory nose-tubes, plus six new single-edged Gem razor blades, and mounds of fine white powder that’ll numb your lips.

  It’ll soon make you feel you’re throwing this bash, and not just mooching off its lush periphery, you hick bottom-feeder new-here, you.

  Happy happy pretty boy.

  What are you scared of in New York?

  Only of leaving this, him, too soon.

  Robert pointed out how, in the last boom of such proportions—the 1880s (centuries having repetitive life cycles, too)—New York society offered thanks for its good luck. Thanks registered as civic tenderness. The earlier high-rollers founded the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Opera, and on and on. But, during these gusher eighties, where did most of the good fortune go?

  Directly up about sixty rebuilt noses.

  And yet, for those of us smart, white, connected yet needy enough to wiggle into the edges of this endless feeding-frenzy party, we got quite stuffed, thanks. We made sure of that, notifying one another via pay phones or Princess extensions in some stranger’s fourth guest bedroom, “Get into your best clothes and get yer memorable young ass up to Park at Fifty-second, and it’s worth taking a cab this once … Because I don’t want to ignore even one of these throw pillow-sized South African shrimps and I’ll need help, carrying…. Here, Marco, copy down their names and address …”

  Being so young, we didn’t know we’d arrived during an economic peak. We figured New York must stay this lush. Being young, we made New York young, too.

  Robert, the pastor’s son from Iowa, my sermon-teacher-hymn here, attracted/transmitted at starlight’s speed. I told myself, as I watched him chest into a room of folks who never gave an inch, a room he suddenly subdivided like young Moses working the Red Sea hydraulics, I told myself, Hartley? Diversify.

  To seem to fall for a golden one like Gustafson might be part of the starting fun … But to fall, for real, for one wanted by so many, is a tragedy hatching. Look around.

  But only Ed kept calling back.

  Among us, being a “good” painter and being “good in bed”—soon ranked as virtuosities somewhat interchangeable. Robert Christian Gustafson was becoming famous both ways. Me? I just wanted to be.

  Robert introduced me to one of his girl lovers named Brenda. Next day, I met her again and she was called Bethany; a week later, someone referred to her as Grey. I soon determined one quality shared by those of us who preferred making toys to merely playing with them: we got to call ourselves what we liked. I had started early.

  There is a snapshot of my dad doctoring his own name with paint. He stands beside our yard’s black wrought-iron lamppost, horse-headed at top. Dad has just placed his paintbrush to the period ending a new “Sr.” after “Richard Hartley Mims.”

  His “Sr.” looks orderly, even semiprofessional, no unsightly drips as
he creates a dynasty. He grins and is attractive, a gent lanky and younger-looking for squinting so in daylight.

  What the photographer did not factor: her own steepling shadow, a woman’s legs and blockish dress beside the curving outline of a baby carriage, its lid raised, an arabesque of wheels and handle. Mom and I lurk out of sight; but we’ve just underwritten his triumph. Till me, Dad had not been a senior partner of anything.

  First day at kindergarten, the teacher took roll. “Mims, Richard, junior? ‘Dick’? or ‘Dickie’?” I already knew what Dick meant. I respected the word too much not to flinch on hearing my entire weight called one.

  Mom, clutching her purse, waited at the classroom’s rear. I, five, now rose from my little desk, I piped toward the teacher, “My name, ma’am, is Hartley Mims.”

  Teacher scanned her roster, found that middle name there. So, it was legal. “All right then, ‘Hartley.’”

  I saw her pencil X the name and make it me, forever.

  Home that night, Mother, proud if somewhat flustered, told Dad how self-possessed I’d been. And all while other snivelers still clung to their moms’ legs.

  “So, young man, it’s ‘Hartley,’ is it?” And he gave me a look so cold, even Mother glanced away. “So much for chips off blocks, hunh, son?”

  I studied my napkin.

  “Richard, darling, maybe it’s just me, but I think if he wants to be called Fido …”

  “No, no, it’s all right. Sounds classier, doesn’t it, son? This way, fraternities won’t blackball you quite so fast. Oh, you’ll go far, you will.” The blue stare was exactly as proud as it felt withering. But I stayed Hartley.

  And therefore Dick was elsewhere. Dick was others.

  New York had always seemed our only likely tolerant home. Plus it was the single possible distributorship for our work (much of which—we admitted—had not been thoroughly created … as yet).

  Like Robert and me, other pals had fled chafing little home places. What choice? There was nothing back there for nature’s bachelors to discuss past other people’s weddings. We couldn’t, even at the top department stores, register “our” patterns (though no silver flatware would have been chosen with more care and skill).

  We had nowhere local to do the sex that so needed doing. In my own Falls, sex with other men could only be had at Boy Scout jamborees or down near the Greyhound depot late on weekend nights, using the family station wagon as your portable honeymoon suite. Sex you got “off” certain drunk Marines between buses. (“Maybe a fiver before you get down there and start, pal?”)

  Arrived, transcendent on espresso, riven by eros, steadily loquacious if only fitfully brilliant, trapped in cracked-plaster closet apartments, Robert and I now lived like pets in the pet store—at the very front of our cages.

  On display—ready to go home with feeding sponsorship, ripe for learning very new tricks from fairly old ones.

  In neighborhoods as bad as ours, we nightly courted robbery. And—given our lack of cash—that could mean banter, then death. Later, muggers would hurt us. But, early on, we blazed in our exemptions. We didn’t know the costs. We briefly got things free.

  We were protected by our physical strength, the two of us being big boys with official shoulders. We seemed a third again larger when side by side and usually glad to be. Another help: the strangeness of Robert’s velvet suit on a man so visibly in control, the zircon star pinned to his lapel, platforms lifting him above his own good six-foot norm. The outfit had already slid a bit past fashionable; but since he’d invented it, Robbie was the last to notice that or care. We convoyed everywhere. The town, you know, can be quite mean. But, curtains up, pants half down, our talents stuck clear out to here, we tobogganed through it—energy to spare. Stupid is passive; gorgeous can be too. “Out” as we were, we lived so passive in our boylike trust. We mainly didn’t know why they were being nice to us. Why fate was.

  For the usual reason.

  It wanted to fuck us.

  Instructions for Young Emperors

  t the age of thirty-three, I had made $196 by actually selling some of my, like, you know, writing. One hundred came from the Kiwanis: “What Democracy Means to Me.” It never occurred to my mildly prosperous folks to underwrite my overwriting. And I felt far too furious to ask.

  So, needing other incomes, I soon coached Asian-American students, private classes. I dressed up for one Park Avenue apartment—its rock-candy mountains of backlit jade, its folding ancient screens were oil-black and stretched long as locomotives through shadowed dining rooms suitable for seating forty. The Wu family triplex was staffed by very young Irish servants with beguiling accents, illicit sexual glances, and—in uniforms of Pilgrim black and white—complexions pink as pink carnations. Their sullen stares at my coat and tie and only “good shoes” longed to communicate with Irish malice, ‘Ye’re just their servant too, so don’t be goin’ and gettin’ above yourself.’ I simply winked. Flustered then pleased, they winked back, “We got the Wus waitin’, and very serious are our Wus while waitin’, too.”

  Sipping green tea, I soon spoke of gerunds to a chic-looking, exquisite boy named Tony and, incidentally, his mother. Madame Wu insisted upon being present, maybe trying to improve her own determined, if uneven, English, maybe fearful I would take her frail beautiful son onto my lap. Stranger things have happened.

  Whenever I made a joke, or mentioned some rock singer meant to impress and engage young Tony, his mother, wearing a high silk collar overly fastened as a priest’s, would check her tiny wristwatch.

  If I led Tony toward the letters of John Keats, she urged me back to perfecting his résumé, his overliteral preparation for the Ivy League. How, she asked, did I feel about Tony’s wearing loafers, instead of tie-up wing tips, to his Harvard classes? (Tony was still thirteen.) During each lesson, my frail, beautiful student, in his rimless silver specs, flashed me two dozen glances that said, Do not blame your Tony, please, as I would also like to kill her, truly. Never to abandon your young Tony, please. Tony did not use contractions; that made him seem unearthly; it also made him royally adorable. The Little Prince. I imagined abducting him to the squalid safety of my downtown linoleum life.

  I fled their teahouse of a penthouse twenty dollars richer but completely spent. There was this curious guilt over leaving Tony prisoner of his mother’s understandable ideals. Did he ever just go out and play?

  My first canvas suitcase contained my mother’s arrival gift, four boxes of good blue monogrammed stationery suitable for the thank-you notes. “I expect there will, thanks to the world’s courtesies toward my dear boy, be many!” Mom was right.

  You are reading one.

  I keep remembering how it felt to be young enough to place your every earthly possession in two cheap suitcases, all your writing inside one loose-leaf notebook, and the whole world’s friendship in a twenty-page address book!

  I recall this state with some glee and envy, but no regrets about my current materiality, the bulk of middle-aged associations. I am now both my own seagoing vessel and its very anchor. “No wise person ever wishes to be younger.”

  My truest address? The intended destinations, the prizes I expected would be mine quite soon. Before my old bathroom’s blotchy mirror, I already practiced, “I wish to thank the Academy and all the helpful, loving background tech people who made this …”

  Back then I could do everything but stop. That much a kid, I had just two speeds: awake, asleep.

  But I do acutely recall how it felt to be poor, talented, poor, and popular and young and pretty and as lavishly talented as pitiably strapped for cash (if “poor” only in the play-dire way that middle-class kids are). And all this in New York. Before.

  By now, my newest address book (maroon leather) is big as Merlin’s cookbook. The thing weighs one pound and four ounces. These days, I buy a new one every two to four years. I’ve made a ritual around this changing of the guard. Before I transfer my viable, breathing pals onto new lines and costly clean r
ag-paper, I’ll grab a half-sized bottle of champagne, take the phone off the hook, light a candle at this kitchen table or the cleanest of my three “textured” desks. I use a favorite fat Mont Blanc pen and Pelikan brown ink. I meditate on each person being inscribed yet again, again.

  Who’s new, who’s not, who has bolted through hostile-takeover remarriage, who has moved to Africa and therefore doesn’t write and—that far into the bush—has no phone? Plus, of course, who is dead at twenty-nine. Disappeared into the bush indeed.

  I hand-copy the record of my life (best pals) into a spine of superior strength, between new covers, stubborn and handsome as leather armor.

  My address book often seems to me the best book I’ve ever written. Certainly it contains the most complicated characters. Surely it’s the work in progress longest.

  Draft after draft, you revise and shape your ideal tome. (Or does it revise and polish you?) As in art, you keep trimming repetitive weaknesses, you jettison unexpected impurities. Retain primarily the protein, please.

  Sometimes, dreadful, garish mistakes disappear without your even needing to banish them. Someone sulks away, hurt, for no real reason. (Good, I hate “scenes.” Except in fiction, where they should be as lurid, endless, and revealing as possible.) You must, with each revision of your holy text, acknowledge the Deletions not of your own making.

  When my address book slips—by accident—behind the couch, I panic. It’s like misplacing my suddenly necessary reading glasses. While the book is missing, I am literally lost and mainly blind.

  But, as a born record keeper, I feel thwarted. Certain thorny questions stubbornly recur. Shall I let my own dear dead remain—page to daily page—right where they stood while yet forthright, contactable?

  Why not? Well, because it’s so goddamn inefficient … to keep stumbling—midworkday—over the names of your missing lovers and coconspirators. Mornings especially, you first feel joy at seeing them recorded, still on call. No matter how often I tell myself what’s happened, there’s this momentary time delay, a split second as you sip the day’s first cup of coffee when you decide, “Good, I’m gonna phone him. Get his advice about that mess last night.”