Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  There is a Journal of Bisexuality with the funniest and truest title: “Anything That Moves.” But that phrase feels tragic if applied to the person you yearn for most. If he doesn’t phone, it’s like somebody turned your iron-lung down to power-saver half speed. You try to wean yourself off the necessary sight of him, you go three days, cold turkey, you tell yourself your pride has begun returning, and you sit down with the Times and there, in the society section, at the center of a group of new money charity ladies with smiles like electrocutions, there between two famous old cigar-wielding comedians who’ve become national institutions, he stands in a tux he borrowed six bucks from you to buy, used. (He never paid you back, did he?) He pivots at the group’s center and yet his iridescent smile hints, “This is not important to me, but what a goof, hey, I’ll go along, I mean, after all, I’m here.” It sets you back in your control substance battle. That instant, the phone rings, and Angie’s venom at how he would compromise himself to pose with such a low-end Hollywood toupée crowd and those gals wearing diamond chokers to hide their necks’ going. “I plan giving his publicist holy Hell for letting the Times get their newsprinty mitts on our Prince Golden.”

  “So now he’s got a publicist? Angie, tell me the truth. You think I need a publicist?”

  “I am his publicist, dickhead. Robert is overexposing. For everybody but me.”

  We all kept keys to each others’ places, and sometimes, when I knew he was out of town for a house party or on some dreary Bloomington twelve-tone seminar, or traveling with the Stones’ entourage, I’d drift over to his place. Because I could.

  Alberta, the seamstress who had told us so many juicy backstage Ziegfeld Follies stories, would be working at her Singer. She kept old show-tune 78s stacked up, one crooner sounding as much like a reed instrument as the thirty saxes behind him sounded brilliantined and male. She’d sometimes leave his apartment door ajar (she also had a key, as did half the neighborhood). Her yellow alley cat called TinPan liked to stare down on the street. Alberta’s place, like mine, faced only rearwall. “Makin’ something pretty?” I called.

  “I tryin’. But this new polyester, you need a screwdriver to stitch into it.” I slid inside, I hurried to his fridge. I could open its door, see the light flash on, showtime! I could study a giant brown bottle of vitamin E, the two plates of wilted sushi, could sigh, then meander back home almost refreshed.

  Only our plans that failed unleashed the little toxins. Ambitions met, confirmed, achieved, let us revert to lightness, tungsten charm. We became, briefly, sloppy sentimental messes. We gave each other gifts commemorating each advance. Small magic shop novelties. Eggs carved of marble. Week-old genital-shaped cakes from The Erotic Bakery. Because no one really ate them anyway, those cakes.

  Back home in Falls, “ambitious” stayed a bad word. “The wife of that new orthodontist overdresses for the Piggly Wiggly and corners you in Deli and calls her baby daughter Crosley and seems … ‘ambitious.’”

  It meant someone not from around here, someone trying to horn in, someone too visibly seeking. The preferred WASP technique was to push, like air pressure, without ever seeming to.

  We three stayed blinded by coffee and hope, while playfully working. We confided sensing, like seismologists’ sublest needles, that “something huge” was coming. This young, we assumed we’d be its chosen subject. We believed it would want only our work.

  We felt a strange and bracing daily fear, one all stage stars recognize as the surefire foreplay to greatness. (Alberta recalled how, in the old days at the Ziegfeld, even little Jimmy Cagney kept a bucket backstage to throw up in. —Plain terror before stepping onto that huge stage each night, the boy was pure talent, but still terrified of how unterrified he now must go out there and be. For all those paying others. In the end, he proved immortal because: He was more afraid of seeming afraid than he was actually afraid. So, he stayed on record.)

  Make a Wish

  s we sat waiting for Angie to join us at the restaurant, she phoned to say she’d “solved” a five-foot painting that had been driving her (and in turn, us) insane for weeks. She’d just figured how to attach a piece of wood and make it “read” as actual paint. Instead of being miffed at her, we ourselves grew briefly withdrawn. Robert and I felt suddenly overdressed and a tad shallow. Though it was, after all, a Saturday night date-night in flashy New York, we slouched here, we were not home working.

  A little better known now, two group shows in, she was even more fun to be with. We were always throwing each other “coming out” parties to mark our latest little “Firsts.” First time Robert had a commissioned piece performed outside a church, we were all there, one high-styled pew, holding our confirmation gifts.

  Alone together in a tea shop after a great thrift shop sweep, Angie and I wondered if anybody alive is really not ambitious. “I think they’re afraid of hoping for too much, so they make a merit of killing the wish, just stymying themselves, don’t you, Hart?”

  I looked at this strange woman I adored—today a choppy brunette with blond roots—and decided there must be some Cherokee blood on her Williams side. Only Indian genes could’ve given her Mom the Ava Gardner bones so strong that even a clinging fern-curled jewel of Juicy Fruit would not turn you off. I asked Angie what she wanted most. Right this second. She spoke over the sound of frying eggs and a car alarm that’d shrieked till it seemed routine then inaudible. How many Trojan Horses can each of your five senses drag into its gates and unload—vanquishing—concurrently, while you still sorta concentrate, urban artist?

  “Apart from scouring Prussian Blue out of these stubby little Millet-gleaner hands? I use Lava and, still, look.” She knew, of course. “But, it’ll change next second…. Even so, right during this one, two wishes leap to my weakened mind. Okay—scenario this: I rush into the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. It’s three or six years ahead of here. Robert is to meet me. I am runningjust the wee-est bit late, shock of shocks. I bust through the revolving door. Let’s make it snowing outside just to heighten the diff between outdoor freeze and indoor heat, umkay, story man? Let’s make it being a blizzard because we can and it doesn’t cost a friggin’ cent more. There he is, waiting, gorgeous in his sheepskin shearling jacket whose cream color sets off the pink patches sunk deep in either downy cheek of him. (I’m still saving to get him that coat.) No surprise—most every eye not fixed on art is locked on him, my husband. He is my husband—since you asked. Do you respect me less for being married by then, for already wanting to? I’d even spring for babies, given a staff of sufficient size.

  “By then, see, we’re the darlingest, most sought-after, hottest, talent-on-talent couple in town. And our Robert (now mainly my Robert, I fear. Can ya cope?) adores me and eats my pussy as his three squares daily and I am so like fused with him, and this is the second part.

  “When he sees me, he smiles that lighthouse beacon thing, you know how much heat the first sight of his first smile just for you gives off? Did he practice as a boy? And directly behind him, here comes the second part: (I hate being predictable but that’s where my power comes from—isometrics, levees) hangs one of my bigger and arguably most important early paintings (I mean one of the ones I’m doing now, with certain ‘collage elements’ you’ll recognize and I want you to see before they leave the studio).

  “But this day at the Modern, I’m already forty, forty-one, in there. The painting is from the Bammie Byrnes raw-ore period, preceding her greater later Periclean stuff. The hits just keep on coming. But however early, all the ideas are there ‘in vitro,’ it’s still visibly mine. In front of the big picture, maybe we can gather a small school group from, say, Brearley? Uniformed girlchild artists gather before the work, enjoying—with the help of a young lezzie teacher who has seen and liked my photo—Alabama’s sense of texture, layered planes, perversity of images’ slamdancing. And this is the best part of the second part … I see his head, his jaw, see Robert’s too-true-a-blue-to-trust eyes fixed right on me. Despite e
very woman in there staring at him including the schoolgirls and several panting Princeton boys, his head is framed by the only picture that MOMA would even, like, consider putting out so you’d see it first thing. Not enough, being in the collection upstairs, tucked behind partitions with those uneven others. No, it has to be like this: There is the information booth, two ticket counters, some backless benches, the huge plant, the coat check sign, the Alabama Byrnes, the six chrome ashtrays, and the drop-dead husband of the painter running toward her.

  “Something like that. Banal, but there you are. I didn’t choose it but it’s mine. More coffee? Here … you’ve got a touch of foamed milk on one corner of your lovely sad little mouth. There, got it. No more caf for you? Me? I just cain’t seem to get enough today to even think half-straight enough to even start to work.”

  Same afternoon, I received what appeared to be a love note from my gifted student, Tony Wu. The week before I had stressed the utility of semicolons. His letter proved a clove-orange of them. Tony’s handwriting spun along, refined yet forward-leaning.

  I felt disturbed that he, so protected, had somehow learned my dive’s whereabouts. Had he filched it from his mother’s green-silk-bound address book, one she carried with her everywhere?

  “Mr. Hartley, sir;

  I feel that we have much interest in common despite our age differences and my mother; joint fascinations might well unify us at a differing more advanced personal level ahead. What you say to this, sir? I am sure your leisure time is limited; you have what seems to me a big need to be creating creating creating! Even Mother says you can teach Tony far more than thank-you notes; I receive excitement when you speak of Literature; I also notice certain of your recent looks; remember when Brigidhe brought in yesterday’s tea; remember the look you then gave me?; perhaps a moment savored or a touch of one of the hands might could be someday fun? You must not underestimate us because my father is prospering now as imports lately catch on. In ways, I am a political prisoner of Park Avenue; I long to know more working men such as you; carpenters I consider excellent. Tony is all too human; Saturdays she shops …” Oh, no noo, Tony, thirteen.

  Then I spied my own mother’s usual blue envelope and somehow it looked particularly charged and, I knew it! They’d invited themselves North—to Christmas shop, to “see the windows,” to “catch several of the better current shows, though there will never be another My Fair L., will there?” and to get a tour of “your new life and your attractive young artist friends.”

  Oh, help me, Lord.

  Our Mentors

  ecause we were all variously talented, and totally sociable, because we mainly looked pretty good, if only from being kids, and because, having got here, we now scouted our own field for those non-parental elders we most admired and because, despite what many think, however famous an artist is—having sacrificed her/his life to be an artist—no amount of fame ever suffices, and no acclaim is sweeter than that from somebody twenty-six and smart and still so very new-minted, someone who sees exactly how original you are within the mechanical limitations of your form, we soon found our ways to our idols, however incognito, however unlisted.

  And because no one is ever likelier to offer you a truer picture of your genius than someone newish to town and feeling only expanded by your pioneer work in personal expression, you—new mentor, old fogey—soon invite the kids over for drinks.

  Angie asked me along to meet a man whose paintings I had studied in coffee table books belonging to the Falls Public Library. The size of the great one’s loft impressed me; it was big as a tobacco warehouse back home. His curatorial-managerial wife, all Hopi jewelry and peasant braids, looked us over with the harsh Swiss interest of a metal detector. Their place was so perfect it might have belonged to two closeted young stockbrokers posing, weekends, as The Arts.

  When the genius appeared, from a nap, still puffed, jowlier than any photos ever indicated, I marveled at how young his recent work still looked. Reverse Dorian Gray. In life, his ears sprouted ant farms of hair. His manner was easy, within the confines of his right to brag. His mind was a Who’s Who address book of Legends Only. Reputation, his among others, strong-armed his every reminiscence. “So, an aspiring writer?” he asked, and then was midstory about Wallace Stevens.

  I felt thrilled to be in the presence of a fellow who as a college boy had taken the train to Hartford, camped outside the Beaux Arts insurance office where Stevens worked and, twice, walked home with the great poet (though the boy was never invited in for cocktails). Still, the painter had quoted Stevens to Stevens while Stevens quoted the same Stevens back to him but better. It was, for me, like hearing that Zeus still swam Tuesdays and Thursdays at the pool of the 92nd Street Y.

  I felt flattered by this artist’s kindness. He’d had the rare sense to collect the very best of his own contemporaries; he’d had the luck not to need to hock them later. They were all on view. The small Rothko was the best Rothko in the world and when I said it was, when I said that it seemed painted in tears, our hosts blandly agreed. For forty years, the painter and his wife had attended every twist and turn of New York interior decoration. The design of their loft looked younger and far hipper than Ang and I. Amid this season’s brushed chromium furniture, blond elm and frosted glass, our pouchy elders appeared Iowan farmers uneasily house-sitting for their drug-dealing grandson.

  The artist would send Angie to fetch a cheeseboard across the quarter mile of loft, just to see her walk away from him. His eyes sensed mine, already mustard-plastered there. Turning to judge the scope of my claim, he smiled simply, “A fellow enthusiast! Excellent judgment you have, young man. Her … back, it’s one in ten thousand, non?” And though her ass had led me to her, I watched his famous eyes return there; I joined them, feeling while feeling trepidation, strange pride, and some awe. Those eyes, Wallace Stevens, Angie’s heavenly butt. The Family of Man!

  Maestro enjoyed her nerve, her interest in him. (She was good for running specialty errands; she proved decorative at middle-aged parties.) I warned her he was a tailman on her trail. “Sherlock here,” she shook her head, pitying.

  Ang told me: The wife was diabetic. Whenever she clanked off for a doctor’s appointment, Maestro phoned Angie. As inducement, he scattered a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the couple’s loft bed.

  The intended narcotic: dropped names sprinkled across the secret histories of his own best-known masterpieces. Ang resisted, saying she respected him too much. She felt weak at what he’d done with the color gray. “Not since Manet …” etc. He visited her studio and, the second he saw her work, Maestro was so struck he never groped or ogled her again. He had not known that she was also “good.” In some rare cases, being good can keep you good.

  What she learned from her master—in the year before he dropped dead at Brown University’s commencement before a crowd of ten thousand while receiving yet another honorary degree—proved less arcane than brushwork tips or hints about his work’s spiritual sources. Instead of a philosophy of aesthetics, instead of how to prepare canvas with rabbit’s foot glue available only from one trapper outside Winnipeg, Angie’s mentor taught her:

  How to “handle” an egoistic gallery owner who thinks she’s the artist because she represents so many; their shows come and go while only her name remains forever frozen in those foothigh letters across plateglass; here only she is news, and permanent. First be nice to her, and eventually do your best just once at Scrabble (she’s a friend) and then ignore her. She will find you with a favor.

  How to cope with a batch of visiting Texas collectors who are staying at the Pierre, and would you consider taking their youngest daughter shopping for leather miniskirts, at the hipper shops downtown? (No.) How to buy linen wholesale direct from Holland from a man who’s actually van Gogh’s great-great first cousin, and how to serve the cheaper wine in cut-glass decanters so nobody’ll know it’s Gallo, and ways to greet, seemingly by nickname, “Old Man” “Here he is,” the critics who know you but who
se names you—daily besieged—have long since lost.

  Cross-pollenating across generations, Angie brought Maestro current pop recordings she insisted he must know, songs he would quote in his next show’s titles, further luring the youth vote. He had remained a young Turk since 1954. (This was partly a legacy of eighty earlier Angies. Always skinny girls, almost lethally hip. Six of them had OD’d, but most of them prospered, while forever after praising him.)

  During my fourth visit to his loft with Angelina, she blurted after a few drinks something she’d clearly been preparing to blurt. It sure got Maestro’s attention and, even more, his ethnic jewelry store of a cost-accounting wife’s.

  “I don’t know how you let those early paintings of yours stay nailed up all around the University of South Carolina. “They’re ones you must have done during that probably-miserable summer session when your mom was dying of throat cancer, I guess. You were, what? just nineteen but already scraping on the oil paint, gouging so it’d resemble the encaustic you’ve since used to such neoclassic effect. I think those are about the first of your map and target works. Probably you forgot and just left them, maybe when your Mom finally died? Well, the guys in Buildings and Grounds stuck them up in dorms and they are signed by you and dated and I have a girlfriend (who’s only enrolled there so she can be close to this cloddish if scarily good-looking frat boy, idiot, but humongousy trust fund), and Karen says she will gladly smuggle them out and ship all seven pictures to your dealer—if you’ll just tell me your gallery’s UPS account number. —Oh, you want them sent right to you? Is HERE good? Well, they surely are yours, okay. You starting to remember? Great. No telling how much they’re worth now. —To art historians, I mean.”

  And if a kid like Angie is bright (and you, Mentor, invite over only the crackerjack ones who need not be told what you pioneered and why you’re important)—she will keep you in the address book, as the crown jewel of that book, even after spurning your forthright early advances during your wife’s post-insulin nap.