Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  And since my work was mostly promissory, that meant the love alone—even love of those too booked to quite respond—was all that really held me here. Still, it seemed enough. We thought we were really hotshot something.

  I was, therefore, less a renter, more someone who owned, being owned.

  Ways Means

  ngie, like us, lived wild on purpose. She gave “the look” to middle-aged butchers and young CEOs, and succeeded with both and later recalled each clench in encyclopedic detail. “So, how was he?” we asked each other the next morning by phone. Before asking, we made sure we had our coffee mugs in hand.

  Though it cost her, she was very “good” at whatever she undertook. She did say often that—she had to be. I wondered if Angie might not be overdramatizing.

  She kept insisting how hard it was for women to show paintings; she snorted at my skepticism. So one Saturday, dressed up, Angie took me to my own list of the ten finest uptown galleries. In her best Lois Lane mode, she asked at each blond frontdesk to see the roster of artists represented, please. It was, she said, for a “piece” she was researching. “Secret is,” she explained to me on 57th Street, “I am the piece.” Five of the ten places showed either no women, or two. I held the stacked inventory, men. I don’t know why, whenever confronted by human stupidity, I feel personally to blame. Maybe being the eldest child is a disease I’ll never shake. My fantasies are rescue fantasies; my cross to bear has someone else’s name on it. And here it was again: four hundred males listed, twenty-six females. Eight of those, German!

  “You win,” I said.

  She said, “If only…”

  Our relation to New York had changed. We now walked faster, said more with fewer words, dressed down oftener, dressed up better. We each owned formal clothes—thrift-shop ones; but by now they’d been worn so often they seemed second skin. We expected less, but from our safer, lower spots—some central chambers of the anthill—we all still baby-sat each other’s sweetest hopes. Though we were as yet undiscovered, the three of us now acted like guest-curators of The Getting Place itself. We watched new kids arriving, running into buildings while looking up at bigger buildings, we laughed at their ascots and cigarette holders. “Wouldn’t you love to get ahold of that cute blond one on the end and strip him down and dress him right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Robert answered. “If only to spare him your taste in clothes.”

  When we failed to find it wholesale, we knew who’d know. If we raged about this sewer-moat-and-fountain, we did so to survive it. Our gripes were no longer those of supplicating children; they were the tongue-lashings you’d only visit on your lover—the lover you assume will always be, however irritating and delusional, your lover.

  This same New York allowed Robert his hidden love nests, his vices we still loved imagining; it let me patrol for “story background” in The Sequin District, on The Diamond Block, The Flower Market, where I asked questions Angie-like. Claimed I was doing “a piece.” I steadily played at learning. This same quarrelsome fond New York somehow let our Angie earn a living. But how?

  I’d known her for a good while now, and yet the central source of her subsistence stayed a secret. She’d made sure of that. I knew she received no regular money from her parents; I knew she could still claim no gallery, though she sometimes sold things out of her studio. My great aunt mailed me a hundred-dollar check, insisting that I “spend it all in one evening on someone fun and nice.”

  So, one rainy night, I used the last of it for our actual cab ride all the way downtown after a good Italian meal. (At two a.m., a fluorescent subway home can really shoot your atmospheric evening.) Just as Angie and I approached our neighborhood, just when the security of one’s home-slum kicked in, I stroked her short and hardened hand, “One thing you’ve held back—how you earn the cashola, hon. Will you finally trust Hartley with that? I mean—hooking? stealing? Because, I can take it.”

  I heard a twisting of clothes, I heard one long swallow in the dark. She stared straight ahead.

  “Come on, Ang. It can’t be worse than whoring or thieving. After all, I teach. I wank off into sterile little bottles to make babies for Connecticut. Your means of livelihood can’t be no more dastardly than that, art girl.” She nodded four times, yes. Hers was. She asked aloud how many years we’d known each other. She swore me to full secrecy, forever, okay?

  She sighed, finally beckoning my head toward her mouth. Using cupped hands as megaphone, my Angie whispered a single sad sad word, breaking it in three. Each unit popped against my ear:

  “Wait-ress-ing.”

  —As males, we’d been born blind to the very exemptions manliness extended us. As guys-guys if gay ones, Robert and I still somehow felt promised our own Blue Ribbon distributorships, even as we made bitter fun of those. Thanks to mother-love and daddy’s name, we believed our work, if good, would naturally, in time, get noticed.

  Angie, born with huge talent, ready to title the wall-sized canvases Volcano-Appliance and Vortex Armor Battle IV, often raged, freely cried, lived racked by an insecurity that her male friends found (if silently) absurd. When she fell into one of her underclass moods, any little thing could set her off.

  One evening at Ossorio’s, I noticed she’d spread makeup under her right eye, it looked swollen. She often experimented with clothes and excess rouge, dolled up like some not-that-smart drag queen—trying things for pure effect, rarely knowing what was “good” on her. Once Angelina tried to indent her cheekbones with powder; Ossorio asked if she had “the blisters.” Robert would often shake his head: “You’re hopeless. Phone me and describe it before you wear it out of your place. As a service to Manhattan’s many-peopled streets.”

  Now, leaning closer, I saw that, despite fast-smeared foundation (in far-too-nutty-a-brown for so pink an Angie), her right eye had been blacked. “Honey, who did this to you? Because your baby brother will now go out and hurt them bad.” I feared that Ang’s sexual experiments had crossed some dicey new frontier.

  “Funny. I guess I did. Get so frustrated. Got my slides back from another uptown gallery and you know they sent them fourth-class mail so it took weeks. And then I spilled, Hartley, I hate myself for this, but I, no one else, spilled coffee … on the big new drawing? That one you liked, best damn one, and I felt so…. I hit myself.”

  “Next time”—I misadapted Robbie’s lessons—“phone me first. Here, let me kiss it better?” I closed my eyes and bent near. I fancied I could heal whatever they had done to Angie to make her The Heavyweight Champion of Knocking Our Own Angie Out. What do we do to our best women?

  “Hey, you! that hurt. Some doctor you are, Ben Casey! Is it still covered? More coffee? Fucker’s throbbing now.”

  Here recently, she showed only under the name Alabama Byrnes. One early collector insisted she return to his apartment and change his early painting’s signature of A. Z. Byrnes. (We laughed; but I would later marvel at the auction dollar-value of his sound consumer sense.)

  “One reason it’s good, my ‘Alabama,’ the jerks won’t ever get to hold my sex against me, see?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “like George Eliot.”

  “Who? He that old English guy, hermit, shows those painterly little cow and apple things at Davis-Langhorne? When is Robert coming?”

  Alabama Byrnes was achieving the sort of early territorial standing that precedes official statehood. She was already being admitted to small group exhibits if only often on Long Island; she was sometimes singled out in a review. And yet that never seemed to help her titanic crippled confidence float fully upright for very long. She had started, our Angie Bama Byrnes, with strangely little hope considering the scope of her talent. She’d got her old-family doctor daddy’s brains, his memory for names and dates and prognoses; she’d inherited her mom’s country people energy, along with their strange clannishness, that hot-cold redneck detachment from their own consequences. Expect very little; but use all your energy almost getting there.

  By the t
ime Angie was a kid, her mother just wanted to be a serious bridge player. Her mother sulked, like the versatile Wallis Warfield, craving a better title than mere Duchess. Mrs. Byrnes must’ve taken out her discontent on the very child that Savannah had blackballed on Jewel Fern’s account.

  Even with steady application, even twenty-four hours of daily obsession, never let our Angie completely believe. Her blind love of Robert seemed, like mine, a displaced form of self-respect she didn’t feel quite worthy of. She could tell you where her career would be at the start of the next century, including names of galleries and curators, but one indifferent remark from someone at an opening—where the indifferent cracks were considered kind—could send her weeping to the Women’s Room or out into the blind wet night.

  Boys and girls, Robert and I agreed, are more different that we’d ever imagined back home. The very thing that seemed to make our women friends so capable of empathy—the harp-scouting for others—became, they swore, their own worst enemy. Many disavowed any automatic tenderness as self-destructive.

  We truly wished to offer them confidence—like donated blood we’d hardly miss. But Robert and I couldn’t give Angie a transfusion of our own dick-swinging birthright certainty: Our dim belief (transferred to us by doting moms) that what we did mattered because, hey, we had done it! Watching Robert and me sit around assuming, Angie sometimes sobbed. We shrugged off her charges. Then she really sobbed. She once tried pounding our chests, overturning more cold coffee. This time, onto us. “What?” we said, as we signaled—like young lords—for paper towels over here, please. Quick, please, thank you, Ossorio, my good man. That really set her off.

  But, during sulks, while racked by killer mood swings, menstrual telegraphy, throughout unaccountable rages, while she complained that, when she introduced me to a woman friend, my chair had been nearly two inches nearer to that stranger’s than to hers, Angie worked. “Just to show or break even, we girls have to be four times as good as most of these jerks.” She meant men, but men generally. Not always us. By then, other males were joining our small Circle at Ossorio’s.

  It was from Angie we all learned to work full-out. A good policy, growing twice the normal rate at what you do. It made the bunch of us—us boys willing to be oversupple and listening as girls, and us girls hoping to get armored as most boys who’re born Juniors—become better artists faster.

  My parents received my calls each Sunday evening, one round into their holy bourbon and my own. They used their speakerphone. This device dared personal intimacy; it had all the nuance of a junior high school intercom; the folks seemed to like that part. One-on-one calls now became suspicious, possibly divisive. A speakerphone let them monitor each other; bad Radio Shack amplification forced my own news into the spritely tone of their friends’ Christmas letters: “Fifteen-year-old Kirsten’s bell-ringing group took top prize again at the Boulder meet! Congrats, Kirsten. We’re not a bit surprised!”

  “So, how are things in The Sewer? Can you swim yet?” my dad, long distance, asked, chuckling every goddamn time.

  This particular Sunday, after informing them I had booked their room at a hotel I hoped they’d like, after telling my folks I was still trying to learn enough to simply start to write well, “What else?” my father asked, his tone dry as some antique wheat-based dog biscuit.

  “They’re paying me for my sperm up here.”

  I imagined how it sounded, blared from their tinny speaker tucked behind the houseplants. “I mean I’ve been asked to be a donor.” For their sake, I softened facts into seeming some award.

  Silence ran right on till my dad cleared his throat. He quizzed me about the secrecy provision—how would I prevent such children, sired anonymously, from someday finding me? Then Senior asked Junior, “And if they do track you down, son, where does the Law stand on all this? I mean, would you have to pay for their college educations?”

  I laughed at his resentment of my steep tuition. Then, slowly, my folks did. But I knew I’d really surprised him. Maybe that’d been my secret-cocksman goal? True, his first concern has been for me; but mainly in protecting whatever of his cash I might inherit, and hiding that from a knowledge-starved swarm of my scattered juniors.

  (After four years’ doning, I would learn from that indiscreet and therefore valued red-haired secretary, “I’ll hold up a certain number of fingers”: I had become the actual father of, actually, six. They’re now in tenth grade somewhere. Working toward those full scholarships to Harvard, I hope. Wait-ressing, summers, possibly. Character-building.

  Sit down at your personal computers, crack a couple codes, and come find yer sassy Daddy, my pretty far-flung darlings!)

  Twelve Steps Forward

  ne morning a few years into our unseemly Robert worship, Angie’s and mine, I chanced to be headed home from an unloving Ed-like assignation in the West Forties. I chanced to look up at a Greek Orthodox church, its onion dome so unlikely, plunked down in this neighborhood of peep shows, musical comedy, and bus fumes. I saw our/my Robert, wearing a coat and tie, seated on a low wall, smoking, alone at the rear doorway of the church.

  Of course, I dashed right back there. The side path was gravel and the sound of my shoes crunching reminded me of some eager bounding animal. I noticed a slight cast fall over Robert’s face. I recalled his name for me, Lord Airedale; I understood that, though spunky, loyal dogs, and clean, Airedales cannot be counted the intellectual giants of dogdom, now can they?

  After kissing both his offered dewy cheeks, I asked what he was doing so near a church so non-Lutheran and at ten a.m.?

  “Hartley,” he said, flipping away his cigarette, signing toward an open basement room where two old ladies in matching yellow cardigans set up folding chairs. “‘My name is Robert and I’m an alcoholic and substance abuser.’”

  I looked into blue eyes. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  He shook his head no. I almost blurted, Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped! But even I heard the presumption in this. My feelings for him suddenly seemed all wrong. Did he view me mainly as his pet, his gopher? True, I often fetched clean music paper for him at Associated. In the long line of our PO, it was I who retrieved his boxes of Iowa baked goods, feeling as wrong as honored. So, why had I not been offered a crack at easing something as major as addiction?

  Perfect strangers wandered up, seeming to adore him, and he bussed them and they all talked rehab. The others treated Robert Christian G. like some young parish priest whose fine looks must never be mentioned, never held against him, simply enjoyed in reverent eucharistic silence. One smiling businesswoman now pulled a packet from her briefcase, “Last month, you said you collected these. This one was in my mother’s house, part of an old gas lamp,” and she unwrapped the crystal pendant that at once took fire in daylight.

  “Rhoda, you’re a saint, remembering. It’ll be the prettiest one I have, the absolute star. Bless you.”

  Folks filed inside now. He gestured, might I care to join them? Knowing I would miss the first fifteen minutes of my rent-paying lesson with Tony Wu, knowing I’d endure the servants’ glee and Tony’s hurt and the Madam’s quiet burn—I stepped downstairs. For my first meeting. I recognized Verne, the beer delivery man. When time came, I introduced myself. Typically, I nearly admitted to an addiction that still ranked among the few not really mine.

  Listening, I was soon struck by what I’d always professed in my teaching. Just how eloquent people can be when telling, in their own words, their own stories. There was one broken-looking broker who confessed he had kept a flower vase on his office desk, with vodka in it “for the smell. As you well know, contrary to what amateurs think, vodka does. Smell.” Having botched a national meeting while too visibly sauced, the projector jammed (dosage is fate), he got fired. One weirdly chipper bag lady then grinned and shook her head side to side, admitted she was just dealing with it daily, leaning on a higher power whose street smarts sure helped; Sterno was for burning now. There was a peroxided chorus
boy of forty-five who said that thanks to rye (and, true, his fondness for it), “I haven’t done a show since Sweet Charity with Gwen.” I could see that most of the folks here didn’t know when Charity had closed, but they nodded anyway. The most ordinary-looking people told the most booze-sogged, hair-raising, and shapely sagas.

  Came Robert’s turn to speak. I felt myself brace. Not just because I loved him. Recently some handsome guy had flirted with me and, soon as I responded, he confided, “I should tell you I know who you are. I mean: Gustafson’s assistant.”

  “No, just his friend.”

  “But I saw you dealing with the waiter and deciding who got to sit nearest him, then hailing the cab.”

  “Well, but if you’re Robert’s friend that’s part of what it means. —I’m afraid I just don’t find you so attractive anymore, sorry.”

  I wanted to intervene here. To tell these lushes to go home. Robert, so tenderhearted, was doing this just to make himself seem mortal. He was trying to cheer these dear losers by imitating one. I’d never seen him what I’d call stinking drunk.

  It’s hard now to explain, how committed I was—not to his being perfect, for I knew that no one was. I simply wanted one person in my New York life to seem that way. Just for a while. If only to me. Was that too much to ask?

  “My name is Robert and I am …”

  Today he told how early it’d started. How, at age ten, after a youth-choir dress rehearsal at his dad’s church, another boy who sang soprano had used the green robe for cover, shoplifting a bottle of cheap red wine, sweet wine for the Jewish holidays long over, wine now discounted. Two choirboys in full regalia biked quick toward the woods. The other kid took a single swig and gagged, swore it tasted like Kool-Aid, kerosene, and cough medicine, mixed. He then climbed back on his Schwinn and pedaled off, leaving little Robert the whole bottle. My friend was now telling his past to strangers and me, but I feared they’d heard it all before.