And when Angie speaks (sooner than you know) at your funeral, her gratitude, her skilled eloquence on your behalf (I helped her with the speech)—her telling the fourteen hundred present (plus the international reporters)—how you wanted nothing but to encourage a kid’s excellence and to guard younger gifts, how you found her a Texas collector all her own, how you asked absolutely niente in return, how you simply wished to be a small part of art’s own continuous and self-renewing community—she will prove how right you were to choose her—to quietly, of all people in all the noisy places, help this child first.
Not a dry eye, in the church, at the funeral, of you, a genius, and also, apparently, a mensch, being—for this beautiful, still-mostly-untested and someday maybe-famous kid—her saintly selfless mentor.
As with art itself, what’s unique is: everybody gets something.
The Continuous Audition
long with coaching youths Harvard-bound, I became a sperm donor—thirty dollars a pop, tax free, cash and carry. No job interview ever proved so painless. Robert and I tried out the same day. I’d joked with friends that, given my endless need to please, volume one of my memoirs should be called The Continuous Audition.
At the sperm bank, it didn’t matter that my blue blazer still looked borrowed. Alone in the concentration booth with its black chaise (vinyl for quick cleaning), its single desk lamp (in case you needed the dark), its big big box of Kleenex, its stack of Playboys with one Playgirl slid underneath, hooray! you were not required to look your tiptop dreamiest.
I remember settling the clear cylindrical container, still hot to the touch, into the hand of a young redheaded woman at the reception desk. “We’ll call you,” she winked, and, for once, they did. Robert was not summoned; he sulked a day or two then turned my potency to joke. Great-great grandson of Increase Hartley, turns out my wriggler count was off the charts. “Wait,” Robert said. “Something’s slipping out under your right pant cuff. My God, it’s the head of an eighteen-month-old boy-child.”
“Very funny,” said I; but looked.
Thirty dollars meant a fortune then. I still recall the feel of fresh bills in an active right hand that had just easily coaxed forth another eureka! deposit, headed right into our nation’s gene pool. “Fully ten inseminations can be achieved from one male ejaculation,” the lobby’s antiseptic brochure explained my cum’s fiscal validity, splitting stock. “The technique was first advanced by an Italian scientist who wanted the semen of every Italian soldier to remain on file. That way, if some young man were killed at war, his widow might still bear his child.”—Now there is a project to administer, hands-on. —Sergeant? Atta boy, aim here, prego.
I now toyed with one definition of infantilized happiness: a state where every fluid leaving your body is valuable to someone. It will bring assured cash and motherly goo-goo congrats. There was the soothed feeling, newly jacked-up and expertly jacked-off by the in-house Master at that, the sweetness of stepping (flush!) onto businesslike pearl-gray Madison Avenue. And nobody knowing.
You snapping your baby-new ten-dollar bills, a player, a hunger artist, a hair trigger for hire.
In Solvency
had grown up the grandson of small-time merchant landowners. I once thrived in a world where particular and ancient trees gave their names to streets. Our rivers had been titled for eighteenth-century families whose great-great-grandkids I played with.
During the Depression, my father’s parents and his five sibs ate only beans and rice from one Thanksgiving till the following Easter. Even the littlest kids agreed it’d be worth it—to save for that piece of fertile bottomland adjoining their own best acreage.
—Dad’s folks would later lavish every Sunday after-church, dressed up like Mr. and Mrs. Gotrocks, her hat pinned into place, driving all over creation admiring green fields made interesting because we owned them. It’s like a tale from Grimm—amazing what you can get for beans (especially during that bad a Bank scare!).
So, the first economic concept to seep into my young brain, even before my “soft spot” hardened?: “They don’t make any more land.”
The need to have our name on every deed, that surely registered. How could I explain to my city friends that these grandparents—who looked a bit like Okies, and who reused envelopes—by now owned half the county?
And I? Somehow a New Yorker, I lived from one patched-together rent check to another, lived in a leaky building I wouldn’t buy if I could afford it. My grandfather’s parting advice the night I trooped North for college: “Hartley, number one’d be, if you know who you are in Falls, you’ll know who you are in the world. Number two, when in doubt, say so, at the top of your lungs. Number Three’s a large one: Don’t rent, own.”
Words to live by.
And I could barely make the rent. It always seemed the last week of the month; I wasn’t either brazen or good-looking enough to sell my body for that kind of cash. My parents weren’t poor; but the idea of offering me monthly payments (in exchange for what?) would’ve struck them as unmanly and debilitating; maybe they were right. Sure they were.
I was far too chickenshit to steal effectively. It was rent I needed. It would determine where I slept as of the evening of the first. First of January. By now, the streets were sheet ice. Even diehard dogwalkers kept placing Jip in the bathtub, then standing alongside with a handheld shower unit, saying, “Go, Jip, go.”—Can’t have been easy for Jip, either.
I recall I had $4.13, I needed fifty bucks more, and by six p.m. It was ten in the morning and four below zero. I had spent my Tony-tutoring money on one little Federal mirror, a deal, but for me costly. I had run through my other cash during a single office supply visit—besides coffee, my favorite legal vice. I hoarded twenty-four-pound typing paper, high in rag content. I needed to keep at least three reams at arm’s length from both my desk and futon. Just as some mothers of six cannot sleep without milk in the house, I required quality blank white in easy reach. I believed that anything one human being could think (about his own condition) might be set down in writing (specifically my own). What I didn’t know was: Just how little, most days, most of us get to know about our present state.
I’d frequented my sperm depository so often, my jism’s motile count was flagging. I’d need to let sufficient wrigglers build back up. Never touch your capital, son. I had pilfered the futon’s folds twice. I even patted under it, found nothing but crispy fossilized insects that I let be. I now assumed my frantic month’s-end hunting-gathering.
Unannounced, I stopped by Robert’s apartment, yelling into the intercom, “Moi.” I wouldn’t borrow from him, he had nothing. Whisked away at night in friends’ Jaguars, by day he cleaned strangers’ apartments. I just needed the stamina his example and beauty provided. “A fix,” Angie called it, with that word’s bogus hint at true repair. He’d now become the dispensary and mascot-leader for more crowds than ours. Poor Robbie was so cool he never understood it. Is not that the definition?
Gustafson never led by “leading,” more by being, which meant doing. Our homages forever surprised and flummoxed him. During good reviews, Robert averted his crystal blue eyes till praise finally ended. Coast clear. “You don’t know how deeply flawed this mirror is.” And yet, he needed compliments as much as we. More. Since his “tolerance” had been stretched far larger.
Robert’s resistance to hyperbole just made offering Robert-praise-songs more fun. (It still is. Hear me?)
He’d paid retail for one thing only: the American 1820s fourposter pineapple-crested bed. We orbited it.
His own erotic leftovers and referrals, they dutifully seduced us; finger foods he smuggled home from ever fancier parties, verily these fed us too. His encouragement, from so far in, took note of our work’s technical babysteps (“You are weaning yourself off even the occasional adverb. Good, Hart. Adverbs are the monosodium glutamate of speech. It’s another sure sign of your genius flexing to become pure verb. My baby Merlin—‘You make them laugh, make them cry, get
them hungry, or hard or wet’ … You’ve already got the keyboard’s full potential in your two-octave reach, child”) that sort of Robert kindness fed us most.
His red door rested ajar, the green suit, stuffed toward scarecrowness with the Times, hung above a filling kitchen sink. It was being steamed for tonight’s serial bashes—poor man’s dry cleaning. Curled nude as Maja Un-draped, framed in the huge bed, surrounded by a fanned-out score, Robert, smiling, greeted me. Clear plastic dimestore half-specs perched on his nosetip; one smudge of black ink made a crescent moon of his cheekbone. There were towers of aging scrapbooks concerning the Titanic’s sinking. Atop his black Chickering upright—one of Angie’s smaller paintings, wildly yellow, outlines of toy cars painted over it in heavy black impasto. A gift. Your eye went right to it, amid all this stuff. (She had never given me one.) In the far corner, four sets of red Swedish-made cross-country skis and their old-timey poles. Crystals, presents from the love-struck worldwide, scintillated in each window. Lead soldiers bivouacked above the sink. His antique pen collection nested in an Easter basket. On a wire hanger, one unreturned rental—an eighteenth-century burgundy-red brocade frock coat, and its powdered wig. Upon the window ledge, a ten-gallon aquarium filled only with water supporting an exquisite scale model of the doomed liner. It was complete with thread for rigging, the correct inadequate number of lifeboats.
Robert’s whole place smelled of fresh-sliced oranges, sunlight widening each white wall. Thirty prisms’ rainbows seemed whole notes trying—then rejecting—various locations. The boombox (new word then) blasted Peter Pears singing an English folk about some beloved sailor drowned at the height of youth.
And I told Robert I was broke. He laughed, “So what else is new? Maybe you’ll find another Queen Anne sidechair on Madison and sell it for six hundred cool ones.” (That had been a major coup, never repeated.)
He suggested I phone my sperm bank, say I’d eaten oysters, swear I’d had a no-win weekend, had read the complete Henry Miller and felt ready early. Or call my Tony prodigy and ask his Mom to fund, for her son, a tour of meat-packing-district gay bars; and maybe bring along Madam dressed in leather? She’d look very Terry and the Pirates.
Robert was my address book’s first to be tattooed. On his left pectoral, behind one forward-sailing clef sign, a five-line musical staff awaited notes. The way these crisp blue lines rode the upper quadrant of his pinky-gold chest made you want to place your own notes there, using the clear ink of your own melodic spittle.
Robert, ripe of baritone, with his platinum pubic hair, his curving rose-colored dick and its birthmark shaped not unlike a valentine heart, went on immodestly inking the notes of his own First Symphony. I marveled that he could get in at three and be up by seven, this hard at work. (And he hadn’t even known that I was coming.) The harder he partied, the better Robert seemed to concentrate. I wondered why I rejoiced less, revised more.
Hand still moving over wet notes that looked, to my illiterate eyes, like some headband made of stars, he now recounted favored moments from last night’s three best parties.
He had met an old starlet, a famous minor thirties ingenue, Groucho Marx’s lover; she had, after four drinks, described in detail Groucho’s sexual preferences, then … “Listen to this, Hartley…” he pointed to a black ghetto blaster the size of a baby coffin. Peter Pears’s isinglass tenor sang,
’Neath this hulk lies poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of our crew,
No more he’ll hear the tempest howling,
For death has broached him, too.
His form was of the rarest beauty.
His heart was kind and soft.
Faithful below he did his duty,
Now Tom is gone aloft,
Now Tom is gone aloft.
“Good, hunh? And after a fifth drink, she described Harpo’s own erotic likes and zoo noises. Harpo, ambisexual it seems, was mute only while ‘in character.’”
“Sandwiched between Marx brothers. Talk about a circus in bed,” I stood, hands testing the depths of my back pockets for some stray fiver. We discussed the song, the sailor, Benjamin Britten playing the piano as his lover so simply sang.
While Robert worked, I wandered his place, enjoying its surface comforts; like all of us, he was a visual glutton; that’s part of what pulls the retinally stronger to stroboscopic Manhattan. Eye greed: five thousand faces seen at once, and it’s still not enough. Where is the long-sought One?
He belonged to a society of fanatics on the subject of the Titanic. A smitten member had given him this handbuilt watertight scale model. During one recent confab here, grown men played at submerging this model while debating the several theories of how it broke apart, settled where. Robert told me that, till its last few minutes, the great ship’s lights had remained blazing. This detail (sinking, shining) seemed significant and, as with so many facts about Robert then, I stored it away, some tenderboat provisioning itself for later, just in case.
He continued silently composing. I was hungry but didn’t want to bore him with it, I longed to climb in bed and hold him, touch him, maybe sing to him, more, but knew he wouldn’t like it. He would say no kindly. I never had been asked up the gangplank into that galleon bed.
So I did a tugboat tour of the apartment’s snug harbor. It seemed that, in Manhattan, there were only two kinds of places: Out and In. Of the “in” ones, there were two further sorts: Others’ many spaces, and your one. It didn’t matter if your room, like mine, was closet-sized; it had to be this stocked with charms and amulets, just to let a guy break even in a tempest so harsh as the New York waiting downstairs.
His phone rang, Angie. I knew just from Robert’s smiled “Ahh,” how he cut his eyes my way, said, “Yes.” He told her I was in fine spirits but low on cash. She explained that a friend who worked for a catering service called Glorious Food was too sick to waitperson a party at the American Indian Museum, wherever that was, and how his tuxedo would just fit me and he was forced to find his own replacement but couldn’t till now, and if I would bus right over to his place, she would have him leave the tux hanging from his doorknob so I wouldn’t catch his Hong Kong flu, and I could head direct to her place and change, and did that sound okay? If so, she would arrange it. Robert jotted a stranger’s address on a scrap of five-lined music paper in his personality script. It looked valuable.
“Well, guess I’m off …”
“Much luck with dispensing those finger foods to the Sioux, and Godspeed with the rent. If waitressing fails, I hear there’s a Professor Fagin at the New School teaches a course in the undetectable pickpocketing of Rolex watches and East Side pocket hankies …”
I asked if a boy could pay the tuition after learning the trade. His boombox, set to Repeat All, had taken us clear back around to the drowned one, darling of our crew.
He seemed so light and jolly
Many’s the time and oft,
But Mirth has turned to Melancholy.
Poor Tom has gone aloft …
“Anyway.” He looked back into my looking back at him, “You’ll think of something, Hardly Ever Sad. All you want is ‘a chair somewhere’…” And Robert made a kissing mouth, so I tipped up, and smacked him goodbye on his cheek’s crescent moon of ink and felt insulted he did not need more.
“RobRoy? You know how much I respect you.” I risked this. “With one exception.”
He heard my troubled tone, set his pen down, peered over the glasses. As Robbie shifted, his male member, formerly loungelizarding leftwardly, rolled, significant, right. “So what’s my lapse? I can take it.”
“You never saw fit to seduce me.”
He gave me this strange look and then a smile leveled itself, angelically deranged. Sign of such satellite distance. He reached over and pinched my cheek, not quite hurting it.
“Oh no?” he said.
I tried smirking, felt broken, said “Toodles,” left. He’d just told me I’d long since been “had” by him. He’d got the best of me
while giving me, in fact, quite little.
Are any eyes ever colder then beloved glass-blue ones while being so mean? First I earned the needed money, played waiter, then lingered outside Angie’s. I would never interrupt her painting. When she finally appeared, Ang saw my face, said, “What?” I explained. Was I overreacting? She could tell me. I could take it.
We strolled around the Village for an hour and a half. She kept glancing over at me, her face placid with a shrewd patience that bordered on pity. “You don’t have a clue who you’re dealing with, Sweetness and Light. I mean, let’s say—conservatively—there are thirty other capable people in New York who love that boy as we do. Now think how cunning he must be to avoid the thirty-two of us, our expectations, all day every day. And yet, to find a way to keep the whole crowd interested. Miracle is, he has anything left over to write down as music, even bad music. Fact is, in most ways, he’s to die for. We both know that. But it’s a sinkhole, loving somebody already as noticed as a Robert Gustafson. You have to either do it, or not. But do it only if that makes you feel more vivid, Hart. There are ways of stopping it. For happiness’s sake—just don’t expect much of anything from him. Okay?”
So, being unrequited love, it was never solitude, more socialism. Privacy lived only in the privacy of art, which was, if not yet public, then at least intended as universal from the beginning. Promiscuity? A revolving door back into community. Our life together was not quite drudgery, since it mainly meant being so young. I had little else past this: I lived my work, I loved my fascinating troubled friends. I phoned my folks each Sunday drinktime. One stiff drink in, fortified to fake the love I only felt head-on by faking.
Plays Well With Others Page 13