Was this mainly to catch me up, to let my heroic-regard down easy? Today young Gustafson didn’t meet others’ eyes. He sat talking to his own joined hands, elbows on knees, head slumped forward. In this basement, Robert sounded so unlike himself. Here, his voice came tough and uninflected, no usual clever vamping. He seemed intent upon offering facts only, none of the Circle’s standard excesses, playful flights. The voice sounded Midwestern, monotone, criminally melancholy. The opposite of sexy: dead.
“I started drinking it. I didn’t want to stop, not even long enough to breathe. I was, what? ten. From the first pull, I drank to get drunk. As often as I could. Carried a toothbrush and toothpaste to junior high in my book bag. I lifted funds from the collection plate at my folks’ church. I kept on, right through college. Went to a state school with extension classes, erosion management, animal husbandry, like that. Part of the course meant students’ pitching in to look after a few head of livestock kept on the campus’s model farm. It was really more a petting zoo. One night I was put in charge of a Guernsey who was to calf any day. I was sent out there to sleep beside her stall on a cot they had. My bourbon, by then it was bourbon, came along for the ride. In one hand I had a battery-operated radio turned to the Chicago classical station, I was hoping for some Mahler. And in the other Mr. Jack Daniel. I made pretty good progress with Jack. We were just like that by then. I woke around three to a sound, right up on my face and warm. I turned over and the cow’d got her head stuck through the slats like trying to wake me. She had dropped the calf, without my hearing a sound. I sure heard her now. But, see, she couldn’t turn around to tend it, nudge it to standing and lick the placenta off its nose and mouth and let more air in. The cord had got all caught around her back left leg and she wasn’t able to turn and help the baby and it’d fallen out and, tangled, she had stepped back on it. Stepped all over it and killed it.
“I looked right through the railings into her pink snout and the mouth. She just kept making sounds across my eyes. Her breath was sweet, grassy. It felt so shaming. And she seemed to know that I should feel ashamed, but she at least accepted what’d happened. She seemed to understand—this was what went on with animals. Missteps, one animal drunk and sleeping through his only chance to help another. Come morning, I lied about it of course. But I went into such a spin over her sounds, the look. That forgiving look. Still drives me crazy—I mean when people do it.
“Next week, I went to a party at some faculty member’s house. This was happening around nineteen sixty-seven, and even at Ames, Iowa, things were wild, wife-swapping and everybody stoned or drunk and all. Several faculty wives were swapping me. I never really knew why I was so popular but stayed drunk enough, enough of the time, not to really even question that. I didn’t mean to be drunk so often. There just didn’t seem an alternative.
“After that party, I woke up with some people I didn’t remember. It was in a ranch house I’d never seen. A big place. The kitchen was beautifully equipped. There were two naked girls asleep on the couch. I walked outside just at dusk (two days after the last day I remembered). A nice old lady in the next yard was watering her rose bush. I asked what town this was and where. She said, ‘Sonny, you’re in Moline, Illinois. And I sure do hope you get back where you wanted. And if you people in that house are a cult, like the neighbors say, I didn’t do anything to deserve being hurt. Remember I was nice to you about which town.’ I had a dollar or three, and I was in the wrong State, and I’d missed four days of college classes. And my parents had come for a visit I’d agreed to. I was to be the Youth Preacher at our Campus Lutheran Ministry, and hadn’t been around and had missed all of it. Two hundred people had turned out to hear me. The Chaplain’d called the police. Nobody knew I ever touched a drop. I didn’t seem the type. All this should’ve been my early warning sign, but …”
And he went on. But others’ stories had seemed maybe even a bit more … if not interesting, then somehow more personal than his. Convenience stores keep cameras trailed on the registers and, sometimes, they catch a robber on film. His story sounded filmed by a security camera it hadn’t known was there.
When we walked out, the sunlight seemed particularly golden and brash. Robert slung his arm around my shoulder. “I’m afraid I’ve disappointed you, Hart.”
“No, no. It’s just … I get lazy about other people sometimes. Guess I don’t want to think they have the same sort of … No, never disappointed. It just makes you more complicated, probably a better artist. No sweat on my account, please. I’d just like to have helped. Just feel bad how much Chilean champagne I’ve always tried unloading on you.” He told me he did meetings twice a week but should go more. I gave him a warm look. “You’re not going to forgive me so soon, are you, Hartley? Not the same hour you found out. You’re too easy, man. Speaking as one addict to another.”
Then he asked if I didn’t teach the prodigy today. We knew each others’ schedules and he looked at his watch. “Aren’t you late? You are late. You missed them because of me. Now I really do feel great,” and he hurried me to the street and, like my assistant, hailed a cab and passed a bill to the driver, then eased me into the backseat after giving me a peck. “Not to worry,” he instructed but sounded very glum, as if Robert were disappointed in me.
Sad to say (I am not proud of this), I never mentioned it again.
She Finds Somebody
ver low on cash, I took a part-time teaching job at a famous college that—even for those working there full-time—paid surprisingly little. I got hooked by the prestige before we actually talked figures; the charming tweedy committee had counted on that.
Three days a week, I commuted to my half-time college job in Westchester. The car pool offered a gossipy, entertaining bunch—gifted silvering poets, old Lefties as exhausted as vindicated by ending the Vietnam War. There were other socially respectable young bohemians. One gaunt woman taught dance; she forever arrived late, she usually hurried toward the car carrying a leotard, still dripping with Woolite. She would tie it to the Audi’s radio antenna. By the time we hit the Cross Bronx Expressway half an hour later, the thing was dry and flapping like some jousting pennant. It seemed to prove that we were ready for another day of strenuous youthful art-making at what we called, only half in jest, “The Soul Ranch.”
Given half of a limited full-time salary, I could not afford health insurance. No dentistry helped save the teeth my parents had paid so dearly to have braced and rendered civil-looking. Beyond my means was anything except a peasant’s ruddy turnip well-being. But hey (we all figured), this young, nobody ever gets really sick for long anyway, right? Risk it.
Robert found two gray hairs, though only he could “read” them coiled among the platinum. I’d counted five of my own, including a single argumentative mainspring pubic one, as yet unnoticed by anyone else. Angie’s coiffure by now combined so many dyes, the aging process seemed, if not halted, then perpetually upstaged.
Her painting evolved—if without any galleries yet noticing. Her beauty drew looks but—after a single audition—she discarded most applicant-supplicants.
Finally she told me she’d met him, Mr. Right. A medical student at NYU, he’d be a doctor like her dad. “Cow eyes, great hands, big Howdy Doody dick (never met a stranger), inherited farmland in Indiana, knows nothing about painting but intuitively suspects I’m a genius.”
“Just your type.”
“Just my type. Wanna meet him?” It was arranged, for Friday. I joined them at a Polish restaurant on Second Avenue. He seemed a good influence, they were both there even earlier than I. A first. The hostess had settled them at a candled table in the window—lovers, smoochy, handsome, customer magnets.
This young doc was a sunny hound of a boy, huge hands and a head as round and easy to read as a Boy Scout puppet’s. He focused mainly on her and she seemed not to notice or care much—but I knew this flush of color meant my Angie was already so tied to him … “Well, Hartley, buddy”—he practiced the bedside manner of us
ing people’s names—“Angie says you’re mighty good to her. That you really ‘get’ her work. Me, I’m from a town where art means whatever the high school kids’ll paint on the water tower this year. We frame flying-ducks covers off Field and Stream. Still, I get the goose bumps around hers, around her. You too? I mean, just feast your eyes on her. Her pulse is faster than most hummingbirds’. Contagious, that type speed. Look, she’s acting deaf. What can I do to get her attention? I’ve got an idea I’ll try out on you little later, baby. So, Hartley. You got a girlfriend or a fiancée? Because we’ll all have to double-date, what say?”
I look across the table at her. Our insinuating closeness rockets forward, leaves a geek Midwestern doctor so far below on ground. I call, loud: “You didn’t tell him?”
Two weeks later, they fight over nothing. His taste in orthopedic Boy Scout puppet-looking shoes. She never ever mentions him again.
If, by now, I can list all that I gave up for Angie, then she surely endured many sacrifices for me. But were these forfeitures she would’ve made anyhow? Or was a little love of me behind her every major “no” to others?
Paradise Deferred
s we drank intensest Latin caffeine in our hangout that sold it so cheap we could afford four or five hits per morning, we jumpily admitted, three years in, it really might not happen overnight, after all, you know? It. Recognition.
We heard It took some people six years to achieve. And “good” artists, too. And yet, we all conceded, after our latest cafe latte, we still kind of half-expected It, daily. Couldn’t it happen?
We were confused about our good looks, our negotiable sexiness, our social-climbing dreams and artistic talent. Where did each fit in? We felt we might be discovered right now, right here at Ossorio’s Corner Cuba Libre Café. Lana Turner found herself tapped for immortality while lost in thought, drinking an ice cream soda. And we each had sixty IQ points on Lana Turner. If maybe not her complete way with a short cashmere sweater.
Early genius. Self-described. Through clothes tight enough, didn’t ours show? Living in New York this long, we’d banished our inherited Ruling Class hopes by making ourselves into thoroughbred Rebels. No wonder the-powers-that-be didn’t yet recognize our work. It was too new; we probably just threatened their little hard-won patch of turf. By making the older others our enemies, we’d learned to resist all we had been brought up expecting.
Robert had been saying that, for every Shakespeare whose texts got written down by his loyal actors, for every hardworking J. S. Bach with a new piece due each Sunday, there must be, what? thirty other lost geniuses of such magnitude. “Imagine that the director of music, some young red-haired dweeb, at a Baptist church in Arkansas, outgeniused Bach, what would the locals make of him, and …”Just then Robert was called to the coffeehouse pay phone. He grabbed his address book, known as The Bag. It was a green drawstring satchel full of scribbled phone-number celebrity confetti. Summoned, he’d been seated astride one of Ossorio’s wire chairs. Robert’s whole right leg now lifted and moved back then over it. With one glad swing, his generative male gear showed collectively as the bulk of a single tender eggplant. And when he turned to stride away, Angie and I sat helpless not to note his buttocks in blue-jean retreat, right buttock, snap, left snapping, right.
“You do know, Hart, that familiarity’s supposed to wear it off. Most people, by now, you’d be so sick of looking. You, for instance, I can live with, but as eye food? Not that I am pure 20/20 protein, either. Just our luck, we find the only person on earth who gets more and more necessary to stare at. The saltlick. Somebody apparently took Noel Coward to see Lawrence of Arabia, see? And afterward his one comment was, ‘If that blond actor were any prettier, they could’ve called it Florence of Arabia.’
“—If you get to Robert,” she said behind one hand though we were alone now. “If you even touch it once, first … I want you to do two things and in this order, one, describe it to me exactly, as only you can, Hartley. Then hand me your notarized will and put your head down on the nearest level surface because I am going to have to cut it off.”
“Capeto,” I said.
“And what are you two lovebirds talking about?” a familiar claret-edged baritone. We just groaned. He had spent the past weekend helping crew last year’s America’s Cup winner. Then he retreated to Aaron Copland’s compound on the Hudson. May had turned him a deeper cinnamon-toast brown and his eyebrows were bleached half-white and it made the eyes below go a scarier and colder blue so it was like staring through his skull and out to sea through his porthole skull. “What?” Robert protested. “You two conspire against me and can just look so mean sometimes. I was only gone a sec. What’d I do?” And then, with his bare arms hugging the chair’s back nearer his chest, he cocked his head, hummed “Hmmm?” and made the deep fold on the left of his perfect mouth go way far in, smiling forth such hard-wired wattage, it was really too much.
Angie and I faced each other, balled our fists, struck each other’s shoulders over and over.
Like tortured babies offered then denied something they both so want, we could say simply, “Waaaaa!”
Afraid of being liked for only his looks, Gustafson had developed all this casualness, all this ease with the lingo of morality. Just in case. (I had discovered, if belatedly, along with AA membership, he had never ever registered to vote.) Angie held his ethics in far lower regard than I did. “Have you noticed, balls for brains, that when he snags a party’s South African shrimp ‘the size of throw pillows,’ as you would say, he shares them, true. But he never leaves food under Saran wrap on a plate with a cute note on our doorsteps, ever notice that, hunh? He always makes us come to him. He insists on feeding us, the patriarch, out of his little fridge from whom all blessings flow. Am I right?”
“Shrimp spoil. Besides, anything covered-dish left on my doorstep, I’d never even find the empty plate.”
“You. You’re so moved because you’ve seen him get out of Aston-Martins one block from home so he won’t hurt your feelings. Maybe he doesn’t want his snooty friends to see his own shit apartment, ever think of that?”
“You sound like someone trying to convince herself.”
“He must be circumcised, right? Lutheran preacher and all, Iowa. Knife happy. It’d be a pity. I want the chrysalis still wound around the whole butterfly magilla, wrapped as it was born …”
“To go.”
We laughed then. And lurched on about him, with a fueling intimacy we rarely felt when speaking merely of ourselves.
—Would I ever be known as anything but “Friend of …”? I asked myself this while retrieving his special-order Berg scores from Schirmer’s. (“The influence of Berg on the sinking of the Titanic, eh?” I quipped. “Yeah, several people have thought of that,” he answered, sinking me.) While picking up a ruffled tux shirt from our favorite dry cleaner because Robert was too rushed to properly prepare for the bash surrounding a new Egyptian temple at the Met, it sometimes seemed that Robert did all the glamour, Hartley all its legwork.
Puppet Theatre
ust when I’d decided I had the soul of a drudge, just when it came clearest I was the muddy flower-peddler not her aftermath-princess, just when I felt that Immortality would only know me as a helpmeet, just when I’d gained six pounds, Farce, as it will when your happy-quota shades off into urban gray, intervened: all pinks, oranges, reds.
I stood buying skim milk at Mrs. Park’s corner store. The young construction worker in line behind me, a splendid looking Hispanic fellow wearing boots, hardhat and a hammer dangling from the belt, leaned forward. I felt his hand on my backside. (It actually proved to be his hammer; better still.)
He said in a toothy sugar-cane accent, “You mi’ could change m’ mind ’bout married life, I’m linking.” Guilty as ever, sure that any pleasure would exact a tax far greater, I glanced at our respected Mrs. Park. Had she heard? No, she appeared all cash register. “I ain’t no homewrecker,” I tried a joke. This was Hartley’s usual way of d
eflecting opportunity. But I saw that, thank God, this guy’s English was not good enough to pick up on my campy “go away.” I now wondered what Robert or Angie or other healthy normal self-interested people would do before such an offering. Learn. Grab.
So I ventured something international: I winked. He winked back so quick I heard a wet sexual snap from his right eye. Next I pointed around the corner while holding up then dangling my keyring it as if to hypnotize him. Finally I let my eyebrows lift in the possibly-worldwide sign of “Howbout it? Hubbahubba.” Still wearing his high-impact yellow plastic construction helmet, he nodded, he smiled around white teeth at just the moment a cashregister pinged “Sale!” I will henceforth call him Juan.
I considered simply leaving the milk, but Mrs. Park had seen me, so I paid, said I didn’t need a bag, and, moving backward—asked after her boy at Vassar, her daughter at MIT. But I kept one eye on Juan, making sure he didn’t slip away. He still waited out front, smoking. Passing him—I crooked my finger in the universal signal for Get Your Sweet Ass Over Here. He, smiling an endearing lopsided grin, teeth contrasting with his beautiful skin (Angie sometimes called me Mr. Support Your Organization of American States), followed.
I was noting what I wore, which soap I’d used last night, the current temperature and humidity. I was already hoping to make history repeat itself: Why me, why not, why now? Robert asked, Why not me? Angie asked, Why me just this once?
I let Juan in. I could see he was disappointed by how much my apartment resembled his. He stopped near the door, he leaned back against one wall. Juan pulled a toothpick from his checkered shirt and glumly chewed it while giving me a brown-eyed once-over that could rotisserie a raw turkey toward being instantly honey-smoked.
Plays Well With Others Page 15