Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

I resisted consulting my blinking answering machine; I fought doing any of my usual fussy things that might sabotage the mood. (How many chances had I squandered with efficient side-errands and postscripts, returning to find I’d spoiled “that loving feeling”? as Angie liked to quote the Righteous Brothers.)

  Now I tried concentrating solely on Juan and the continuous auditioning present. His looks made such focus easier. Juan simply waited. He used that wall as if he were still on the street. He would not step toward my futon; the Catholic church at work; he had mapped out a system of penance in advance. Hartley, as usual, would be required to do most of the hard lifting. But life is never easy. Today such work seemed child’s play.

  I approached him. Now the toothpick jutted upward at a forty-five degree angle of jaunty erectile display-behavior—I reached for his groin, itself not unready. Middle-class boys might like indirection, ear-kissing eventuality, hobby chat. But, on Robert’s advice, I’d learned, with the rough guys, to go for it fast or they’d hurt you or run, or both.

  I had just endured Juan’s first chilling glower. It put all blame for fun on me. It said “I can’t stop you if you’re this sick, but I might have to kill you afterward, okay?”—The mystery of the married; the residual handiwork of those hard-teaching nuns.

  I sensed all that waited uncurled and evermore uncoiling down Juan’s right pantleg when there came so serious a pounding on the door, my heart lost count.

  As I have told you, my downstairs buzzer system was a spaghetti platter of colored wires disgorged. “Momento, Juan,” said I, wondering if I hadn’t picked up the wrong language from last night’s De Sica retrospective at the Thalia. I stepped one yard past my surly yet oh-so-willing builder, I peeked into the door’s fisheye lens.

  Tony Wu, carrying a suitcase, wore a collarless leather jacket and glanced around my graffittied hallway as if about to be mugged out there. A distinct possibility. How had he found me? Why my place, and why oh why now?

  If I sent him away, if he got hurt before returning to Park Ave., where he so plainly belonged, I’d never forgive myself. (Plus I’d be out that weekly check.) But I hated his actually seeing how I lived. I also hated to ruin, even briefly, my playful rendezvous with the wonderful world of Third World Work.

  “Juan? Would you mind terribly waiting in yonder closet, the one with the forties floral drapery hanging over its …”

  Meeting only irritation and incomprehension, I led him by one horny hand through said portal, I abandoned him to stand among my exquisite thrift-shop clothes. I held up one index finger in the international sign for (I hoped), “This’ll just take uno minuti,” only to have Juan take my hand and stick its bossy index finger into his very warm and practiced mouth. An international sign I need not go into. I jerked shut the drapery. I (heart) NEW YORK.

  “Tony, what brings you to your teacher’s sadder part of town?”

  “Mr. Hartley, several things require being said; number one thing is Tony is running away from the home and her in particular; number two thing is Tony waits for our time weekly and Tony thinks of you, thoughts that a man is considered to be having more often toward The Girl. I am honored to view where you work as an artist. So, this I see is Hartley’s own garrick?”

  “No, darling, ‘garret’… G-A-R-R-E.”

  “You just called Tony ‘darling’…” and his smile was so adorable.

  “But I call every … person I care about … Downtown, we say it not un-often … Which in no way detracts from our cordial if …”

  “Tony has read the signs you have been showing and hopes to ‘be’ here with you from now on, Mr. Hartley. I have come to study under you! ‘Under.’ You understand?”

  “Oh dear,” I opined as he set down a Vuitton carry-all new enough to still have passports and various parchment assurances dangling from its handle; he opened a brown leather jacket so chocolatey in hue and texture, so recently bought, it put off a scent like some tanner’s daughter’s erotic fantasy. He wore widewaled brown corduroys and a brown cashmere turtleneck and his tiny brown Gucci loafers looked like shoes made to slip onto some costly ivory toy. Then Tony, frail yet determined behind his octagonal wire glasses, all smiles, unzipped his jacket’s front. Young Tony, nervous, somehow opened the zipper of his pants and pulled out, an opening chess gambit, as if introducing some ventriloquist’s dummy, one full-grown, ruddy, almost Irish-looking male member. “Well, Tony, honey! Look at you. This won’t do, but thank you. Really.”

  He next pressed my hand against it, saying “Oh Mist Hartry, teach me grammar and …” He craned upward and, in a burst of warm air totally thrilling, added, “All the exceptions.”

  Juan coughed. Tony jumped. I got between Tony and the forties floral drapery, but he slid his arms around my waist, pulling me still closer against the door. I was half-heartedly mumbling something about “extremely flattered” and “can’t think of anyone I’d rather … but …” I was also picturing his mother’s newly hired squadron of forty detectives, all headed this way to arrest me for child molestation. —I exercised extreme willpower and removed my hand from his thirteen-year-old-going-on-forty’s dynastic implement when there came such a terrible banging on the very door he had, with no real difficulty, so recently pulled me against … The second wave of slamming beat so fierce, I could see Tony’s fine black hair move with it. I pictured the entire NYPD crouched out there, blue and brass, guns trained on my doorknob.

  First I pushed Tony toward my bed, telling him to hide beneath it. With his aid, I saw I had trendily opted for a futon flat to the floor; I so envied Robert’s fourmaster then—seven could fit beneath his bed, while practically standing up, and they probably had.

  Without much choice in a garrick this size, I pulled Tony by one hand toward my closet and calling “O Juan?” opened the curtain to find my first guest touching himself through stretched denim, “Tony, Juan, Juan, Tony. Play nice now….” I trotted back, kicking brand new luggage under my writing desk and kitchen table.

  I squinted at the lens when a loud voice called, “We see your head. Open up, it’s a real Emergency, Mims. ‘Cause blood’s way thickern water.”

  I unlatched the door to find my big smooth gorgeous first cousin, Lex, down from New Haven. Behind him, smiling, a thin date. I hadn’t seen Lex in four years. “Hart, buddy. Had to call my mom from a pay phone for your address.” He pushed past me. “You just write here or you got to live in it, too?” Lex had benefited from my uncle’s golf course heart attack at age forty-two; Lex had already spent most of the proceeds before achieving that long-sought B.A.

  “Lex, I’m actually living undercover, my time is not my own. I’m tape-recording the neighbors …” I pointed to a wall. “A child-porn racket.”

  “They sure found the building for it. Look, I’m in trouble. Especially trouble with Caitlin here. They canceled on us. Six months ago, I booked and now unless I can find help, we’re going to miss it, flat. They say they never heard of me. I need two orchestra seats for Cats in the next hour, for today’s matinee. Or else she says she won’t marry me, right, Cait? She’s a tough sell, our Cait-kins, but doesn’t the sight of her just make you wanna purr?”

  “You catch me at a busy time. I’ve got my hands full here.” Just then, as Lex and Cait stood facing me, I saw the drapery behind them flare into sudden lavish motion. I felt a strange urge to cackle and point, to rush my simplest cousin and his skinny girl to the closet, place an index finger across my lips in the universal sign of Shush, then yank the curtain back to see what my lovely construction worker and the little Prince were up to, or down on.

  Instead I suggested Lex dash straight to the Hilton’s tip-top-front-desk concierge (“Say I sent you,” I added, playing to Lex’s own bad character, the assumption that you are either known or dead). “Tell him money is no object, that your future married life depends on it, and believe me, cous, he’ll have you both in cat outfits by two.” This new goal seemed to galvanize them with enough of a mission so they moved out in
to the hall. “How about this bloodbro’ of mine, Cait? Did I not tell you he’d have strings to pull and irons in every fire?”

  “You have no idea,” I said, and they were off.

  Though my Juan and my Tony, my rod and my staff, had only been alone together three or six minutes, I now felt too genteel or nervous to actually interrupt. I did call, “Coast clear.” That certainly produced no bolting toward me; instead, a more persistent buckling of said drapery. So I upgraded to, “Come out come out whatever you’ve done.” But despite my singsonging, the curtain continued its tug and sway. I fought an impulse to peek. Looking-rights seemed only fair. Most agents get a flat 10 percent off the top.

  But, odd, a new feeling almost airborne settled. It was from all today’s entrances and exits. It was from the possibility of being this much in demand. (How did Robert manage the hourly energy outlay of keeping thirty beloveds dangle-dancing ever-interested, in and out of scattered floral closets?) Joy came mostly from my planning how I’d tell it. Especially how I’d frame it all (Punch Puppet Theatre) for Robert, Angie, over coffee later. So this, I thought, is stardom. Subject matter forever trying to crawl into your place, your pants.

  But, instead of hogging my own center stage, I pulled a kitchen chair aside, six feet away from the suspended colored drapery. I propped feet on Tony’s bag, and watched fabric’s motions. I, in a good orchestra seat, felt not unhappy at this matinee of my own making. I rested here, listening to certain glottal human sounds. In the gap below the cloth, I took note of plaster-crusted orange boots, of the tiny chockie kick-offs in various placements, now bent and now on tiptoe. I was both erect and smiling. I looked around, my futon and its powder-blue electric blanket, the desk piled with new fiction, three red tulips a gift from Angie, Colonel Harbison Increase Hartley (provider of blankets and bacon to his adoring troops who had nicknamed him Saint Hen). His features offered a Confederate court-martial of my life. So be it.

  I tilted due right, I hit a button activating the dance tape Robert had lent me. “I love the city, I love the nightlife, on the disco floooooooh …”

  Everything in here could be reached from this captain’s chair, as on Star-ship Enterprise, as in Santa’s Workshop full o’ spunky hunky pumping elves.

  I flashed on a noun—the word that describes one evening’s theatrical entertainment. It applied to most of how we lived here, to all my work intended, to what I presently watched as my maroon draperies moved, so rhythmically animated.

  I was here, in my own garrick, attending a lovely, funny, wholly unexpected, full-length first-run play.

  New Blood

  n off the street, we dragged likely recruits for the Circle. They surely sensed being screened—a welter of rigged questions, swapped glances.

  The old Havanans at adjacent tables called us “the Keeds.” They indulged us with the courtesy of Latin patriarchs who protected well, knowing that their sovereignty would never be challenged. We felt guarded by them; we were. Still, Ossorio would soon double the price of coffee.

  Here, Robert introduced me to Marco, a linguist and political organizer who literally lived upstairs, partly for the love of coffee’s wholesome scent. His glasses always needed cleaning and seemed flecked with boat enamel; he cut his hair himself and lost interest, midway. He was one of those brilliant people who never notices what they wear; this made him unique among us. Robert, Ang, and I tended to screen-test a new Goodwill outfit every few days.

  Marco’s only foppery was a flimsy armor of political buttons speckling his khaki flak jacket. Even his bike, chained out front, was bumper-stickered with anticar sentiments. The button on his collar, “I Like Ike,” seemed to render half-ironic the more contemporary: “Boycott Table Grapes.” “What is a table grape? and how are they trained?” Robert made us laugh.

  But Marco really overqualified for membership by telling us, with a factuality peculiar to the highest magic, exactly what was being said at those tables nearest ours. We had studied college French, high school Latin, forgotten cold war Russian. But not one of us spoke “Cuban” Spanish. Precisely this made Ossorio’s Cuba Libra Café feel so safe. Loud as we could get, we lived curiously unobserved amid other tables’ linguistic music, the clatter of dominoes.

  Marco hunched closer to us, explaining that the Cuban dialect was unique; it was spoken from the back of the mouth and considered, elsewhere, hooty, owl-like in its sounds. We, hungover or self-involved or both, had always assumed the older gents at neighboring tables sat discussing 1947s sugar-harvest or Carlita, an Apache dancer they’d all known from their macho heydays in chic Havana pre-rev.

  Marco lowered his voice to report their true subject: these slick patriots’ enthusiastic support for an attempted (if failed) CIA plot. Someone had tried sprinkling poisoned powder in Fidel’s frogman diving suit. Now that plan had flopped, the force was concentrating on a drug meant to defoliate Castro’s beard. Would Fidel beardless not be a Fidel unrecognizable?

  Robert nodded. “Marco? I believe you. Since the CIA and the world generally is run by non-bisexual humorless white guys with the souls of eleven-year-old boys, why are we surprised they sit around boardrooms all day, funded by us, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if …’ It’s exactly insane enough to be true.”

  At adjacent tables, we’d seen large wads of money change hands. Now such payoffs seemed far more illicit than back rent. We scanned our dive with new respect. It pleased us to hang out in a hotbed of such foment. Not to mention steamed milk.

  My parents would arrive on Monday. I broke the news and Marco’s instant pity endeared him forever. “Oh nooo!” he said.

  “Thank you, jjjes. I’m trying to be brave. I have it planned down to the second. Pray the conversation stays general. Make a schedule. Keep briskly to it. Time’ll pass. Right?”

  My friends swore they would help me.

  Nativity

  urly city workers strung our block with dainty Christmas stars, white ones. My folks would soon turn up and exercise their God-given right to shop while I waited. At the threat of seeing them so near the holidays, one memory, long suppressed, unlocked itself: the Christmas Eve when I was four.

  A windy night and more romantic for that. My slender father bound into my room. It must’ve been around one a.m.

  In their never-ending plan to thwart “the robbers”—who never stole so much as a brushed-aluminum coaster—my folks stored important deeds and papers in the nursery cedar chest in my room. Dad needed something from there (maybe assembly instructions for a complicated toy being built under the tree).

  Apologizing for waking me, he flipped on the overhead light. These were the only times I ever heard him say, “I’m sorry.” I awaited such moments.

  Since it was the night before Christmas, since I was four, since I was expecting a bike with training wheels, since I sat wearing flannel jammers printed with candy canes, I’d been awake anyhow. As I have told you, Santa’s image meant odd things to me. He was not just the usual Daddy Warbucks scattering factory-made bounty. I had transformed him into my own ideal: He was an ArtsandCraftsman, part William Morris, part J. P. Morgan, partly the John L. Lewis of the elves. He got to spend 364 days a year at home, creating; only one night involved the bore of home delivery. I longed to follow him back up our chimney and fly off to where he worked. I wanted a paintbrush; I longed to help.

  My imagination was glutted with the Santa possibilities peculiar to the son of a fellow prosperous as Dad, self-made. Mother liked to say, smiling, she “went all out for Christmas.” Wind kept testing our roof’s huge TV antenna. I’d heard a steady pull and creaking overhead. It might’ve been anything. Could’ve been anyone.

  Father now lifted blue blankets from the opened chest. He pulled forth the folded document. I watched. (According to photos from then, I had thick brown hair cut in bangs over wide blue-gray eyes and a smile overim-mediate. I had been born talking [no shock, right?]. I was a pretty, smiley little boy, hoping mostly only to stay happy and to always please.)<
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  “Daddy? I don’t want to say anything, but I just heard some noises on the roof? And it sounded, well, it sure did sound a lot like hoofs or something, or a sled or something … I don’t know but, boy, it really might be …”

  He turned clear around. He looked right at me. With two male steps, he reached my bed, he sat upon it. As usual, he did not touch me. Through the open door, a glow of blinking colored lights warmed our living room. The unfamiliar scent of evergreen lived right in the house with us. My handsome father, holding the important papers, now bent above me. He looked me right in the eyes. Sensing that the door stood ajar, that my mom might overhear, he now lowered his voice. The tender moment had finally come. Beneath my covers, I kept floppy toys as company, things “to be in charge of.” Now, thrilled, I secretly reached for one preferred lieutenant.

  It all looked picture-perfect as a recent Saturday Evening Post cover. I could smell his shirt starch. Father leaned nearer. I felt the strange excitement of finally having all his irked wage-earning attention fixed square on me.

  Again, helpful, I fed him my best hope, “Dad? It might just be … him …”

  “Son?” Dad said, with a pleasure faintly sexual. “It isn’t.”

  He spoke this with such emphasis, his chin lifted. Then he tipped back, pivoting. To check. On how I’d taken it. His smile seemed one of victory. I had opened myself to this, to the forces of realism, to the grinding brunt of commerce, to the common sense of a self-made man who believes his namesake-manchild should get tough and fast.

  (In fictional terms, it might be good here to include the child’s immediate facial response on receiving such hard news. But, you know? I cannot imagine how I looked. Maybe blinking? A small point in the chin quivering like some pinched nerve? What? You provide that. I still can’t concoct my own face then. Forty-three years later, call it lazy, but I do not want to know.)

  My father leaned on his right arm, steadied for a better view of what he’d done. I knew his deepest wish: for me to cry. I knew because: half of my own body owed itself to all of his.