Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  Therefore, I was too much like this man to give him that. Instead I muttered, if only to my hidden toys, “It maybe could be. Him.”

  From here, I can explain Dad’s anti-Christmas news in several ways. Maybe some need to prepare me for our very un-toy of a world? Maybe he performed a task he guessed would be rough now but in the long run “good for me”? Maybe he was passing along some blow his dad had visited on him?

  And yet, the way he’d lowered his voice so Mother couldn’t hear—Mom, who would loathe this being done to any child of hers, especially on the big night, and most especially by that child’s very sire—there was something sneaky, something plain ole redneck country mean in what my father did to me on my fourth Christmas Eve.

  All day, Mom had been making Bing Crosby repeat about a white Christmas in snowless Carolina. Our house was decked with a blink-nosed deer, one punchbowl shaped like the head of a red-capped white-bearded man with many little cups to match him, but, son, there is no Santa Claus.

  I came to with a father trying to kill me. If not bodily, then hoping to eradicate my crazy speculative fantasizing nature. Actually, my favorite part. The percentage that plays. It is—thank God, with much work—still the bulk of me.

  Sometimes I’d dream of pinning Dad down, of hugging him till he begged for mercy. I’d just squeeze the tighter, tickle more, killing him with levity. I vowed that if I were ever a father, ever put in charge of ones weaker, needier, I would be stronger, better, kinder than he had been to me.

  I don’t believe in capital punishment. And yet, when it comes to certain crimes grown men visit upon helpless children, you know? At times … I waver.

  And now welcome to “the Sewer,” to my splendid world of urban make-believe.

  “We’re here!” she phoned from the hotel. I would deny my folks all access to my railroad flat. I knew that seeing the tub in the kitchen, seeing walls enameled more colors than one of Angie’s canvases—would bring forth my father’s finest belt-lash wit. The parents often told me they were “worried sick” about me, my “housing” and my “choice of company.” I failed to explain that my apartment rested just across the street from Ossorio’s. Still, I chose instead to take them there for coffee. After a musical matinee, we taxied downtown. As we pulled before the hangout, my dad sounded Santa-affable, “So, this where you all buy your drugs?”

  “He’s joking, honey. Richard has more a dry sense of humor.”

  Is that what that is?

  I would buy the folks a single round at Ossorio’s Cuba Libre Café. I prayed that my usually tardy friends would now be gathered inside to protect me. I hoped our headquarters would pass muster.

  True, its wire ice-cream-parlor chairs were somewhat badly bent since their 1920 debut. Yeah, the flooring featured hexagonal white tiles most often seen in barbershops of the nineteenth century. “Scenic vista” mosaics pocked the walls. Blue splashes from improbable fountains read zigzag-edged as crossword puzzles. A harlequin convention of tiles, laid at diamond angles, offered eight contradictory colors, all ugly—mustard to maroon to glue-brown. Even from outside, Ossorio’s interior today looked ancient, valuable, newly dug-up. A storefront Pompeii.

  Ossorio himself opened the cab door for Mother. He had been put on notice and now—with ambassadorial splendor—his moustache extra-waxed, he offered hostly bests. The guy was a total saint, telling both my folks how hard I worked and right in regulars’ plain view. He said he’d one day put a plaque back there on my table, he’d charge the tourists extra.

  I felt almost sick with stage fright. In cookbooks you read “Introduce chopped nuts direct into pre-whipped batter.” Like that. Introduce:

  In honor of my folks, Robert had brought cheese-and-cherry pastries (from a Greek place he’d discovered in the Forties). Angie, present early, was all dressed up. She’d worn a shirtwaist and pearls! Her hair, dyed ash-brown for today, pulled back toward spinster bun-dom, fell short. She had maybe overdone the wide-eyed Judy Garland “Dorothy” makeup. (She sometimes applied it like an abstract painter painting, or some young boy dressing up for Halloween as “Girl.”) But, I could see she’d turned her charm and accent up to full-scorch. I loved her for it.

  Mother, entering, clutched her purse (“A ROBBERS’ DEN?”). During the last year, her hair had gone from silver to pure white. The effect was pretty if, for me, disturbing.

  Mom, in a beige suit and matching shoes, now visibly tried to make her peace with such dinge as only our crew might find companionable.

  Today, I must admit, the place seemed to warrant a Sanitation Grade Z. Its every tile looked steeped in coffee like those chips of white enamel used in ads for denture cleanser.

  “My my,” Mom said. “What a picturesque … little ‘bistro,’ I suppose you’d call it. My. It looks like the set for last year’s Raleigh Opera Society production of Carmen, doesn’t it, Richard? Rich-ard?”

  Mom surveyed the garish sainted figurines, the medallions and bright old calendars, José Martí’s fly-specked portrait—all upgraded only by strong coffee’s royal smell. “You know?” she told Robert, pulling out the chair for her, “I feel I’m stepping right into one of those pretty old cigar boxes my daddy used to let me play with as a girl!”

  We were all entranced by this. A comparison. Grateful for anything, my friends’ eyes lit. Pals flashed me a glance that said, “Your folks’re not so bad.” (Which is what we all feel about anybody else’s.)

  The Circle acted pleased with Mom’s gentling drawl, her willingness to step in here and quickly fictionalize our Action Central. She’d made ours seem a clean, well-lighted place. It was not. Ossorio, having understood her cigar box remark, smiled a translation to his minions, who glanced over, eyes moving up and down the springy length of my mother, still erotically imaginable. My own shoulders, relieved, had lowered two whole inches. When someone slapped my back.

  “Now you people know where The Artiste gets it from.”

  Everyone had been grinning when this new voice nailed us from behind. Dad’s. The gilded world reduced, as usual, to lead.

  We turned. He stood there, dragging one fingertip across an adjacent very sticky marble table—proof unmistakable of widespread filth here in our sewer pirates’ cave. He glanced from his shifting forefinger and thumb to each face present.

  “Now you people know where The Artiste gets it from,” might be pronounced with charm. It might be a confiding wish to include your child’s whole circle, to compliment both mother and son as imaginative, adorable, identical. But “you people” contained the Republican’s contempt for anything not Republican. He had referred to his wife of forty years as a place not a person, “where.” Alas, his tone had been so flat, withdrawn, and bitter. It sounded dead and, far worse, deadening.

  He had taken her metaphor, so stuffed with childhood fantasy; he had just squashed it like some cigar, puffed once, found lacking, stomped out.

  I felt like the true butt of his joke.

  I saw Ossorio, behind the register, note our change in postures. His own face lost its hostly jollity.

  But Dad smirked, pleased. He was a man of honor. He would not pretend this place was anything but a hole-in-the-wall run by foreigners who put up with degenerates in order to cadge their money, which, he felt inaccurately, was really his money.

  His jibe cost my friends their grinning pleasure. They had better things to do midafternoon than meet my address book’s only registered Republicans.

  “Pastries anyone.” Robert didn’t ask but told. “Too bad Hartley’s apartment’s being painted, those darn fumes. You can see the river from his place. And something about watching it from there always makes you stand up just a little taller. Can I offer you one, Mrs. Mims? All right then, ‘Helen,’ thank you.”

  I noticed how my mother, though settled, had seized up again. How did her body bear a day’s worth of such constant expansion and recoil? She was usually allowed one little public flourish of expression. Then she waited, till he closed her down once
more. It was like seeing the iris of a lovely open human eye contract again and again to pinpoint. How had she endured four decades of this?

  Mom now gripped, beneath the table, her pale patent leather purse, propping it on one bouncing knee.

  She held it as if suddenly quite sure it would be grabbed.

  After one coffee, they departed Ossorio’s and everybody celebrated with me. From the pay phone by the radiator, Robert, in our hearing, called to cancel an impending trip his folks had planned.

  On Feeling New

  t happened one Sunday before that Spring when everything changed. I needed to get my ass uptown to a brunch (one meal as yet unknown in North Carolina). If the city adored more and more about the bods and talents of Robert and Angie, it still barely flirted with me. New York was lately the feel of shattered windshield crunching underfoot. The mating calls of car alarms setting each other off.

  I found the subways shut; as usual, a water main had busted, flooding the station at Forty-second Street. Though I was expecting a cash influx from my sperm-date next afternoon, I could never swing that caliber of uptown cab fare. So it was simple. I would have to hike the necessary hundred and eleven blocks.

  Because it was so early on a Sabbath, traffic proved sketchy, passersby scarce. The homeless still rested, cocooned in burlap, terracing the church steps. It was a bright, delicate morning early in April. The weather felt like some Carolina country Spring’s, washed up on this gray rock by accident.

  The clear air made me feel like a young Audubon, observing, gathering. Forgiving a little. Sides of the brownstone towers held, I noticed, dew, just the way dew glistened on tobacco plants in fields my granddad owned. Those fields had been promised to my brothers and me (plus our seventy first cousins). Down tree-lined West Side residential streets, hammocks of blue mist still hung. Yellow cabs passed through such haze and came out looking varnished, baptized. This air all felt like Sunday air.

  Our city, caught in a leisure day’s first yawn, looked beautiful and blank. The sight was new to me. Where did I usually spend this hour? Oh yeah, at home, on the dark fourth floor-rear, gaping out at the world of hurriedly laid brick and quick-hatching pigeons. I spent this time writing, of course. Which meant hiding, while seeking. Writing about a rural South. But never, it seemed, about here and now. New York had lately seemed one large rejection slip.

  I felt like some mole who finally claws aboveground at the foot of the Alps, who assumes the world is all this vertical and grand. I’d been in Manhattan some years now. I’d been cataloguing the place with an Eagle Scout’s naturalist habits; those’d seemed misplaced till now.

  Odd, this felt like my first day. I was no longer squaring off against the city, competing with it, resisting its hard mass. Instead I rested with it, parallel, eroticized, we were fellow sufferers, both sweetly puffy at this early hour together. Something oddly trusting came from waking in adjacent trenches of one island bed.

  I was six blocks from Central Park. And yet a verdant smell now overtook the usual sidewalk ghosts of garbage past. Something new outstripped the come-on scents from bakeries, whorish smells of the West Side’s new bubble-bath shops.

  A tentative scent lifted from whatever land remained unpaved, from whatever lots were just now greening, from those weed-trees that can learn to live on soot and poodle piss.

  Alleys, hidden, proved to be plain dirt, understudies stuck backstage. Your nose knew them.

  Striding the West Seventies, I could smell a gray, exhausted city too newly waked to hide its sweet bitter-green heart. Some thawing creaky hopefulness seeped out, rising with first heat.

  Topsoil, all one inch of it, didn’t know that it existed in a zone so bartered, valued, water-locked. It simply opened to the sun. Dew found that dirt; then wet dirt dried; and such lush smells resulted, even midtown.

  The City itself smelled … New Here!

  I started breathing harder. Partly from the stress of this long silent hike. Mainly from a strange and general sexual desire. I loved it all. I loved them all. Quickened, I now wanted to possess, to eat out, to rut into this, my beloved. I wanted to know its every inch. I wanted to go to town on going down on old New York. East Side was the left nipple, West Side its right, and neither would this worshipper not nibble. I’d sublet and suffuse every inner inch of it. Each brass mail slot would unlatch, all gill-slit airducts behind buildings, I would find, rear entry. I’d have my way with every street—those one-way, and those bi.

  I, sperm donor, my loaf all fishes, would fill all city vacancies.

  New York, lean back!

  The countryboy come North smelled his city magically organically open to him. Just when I felt grayed from all the grief it gave me daily, thankless wage earning, slum accommodations, the state of remaining unpublished and therefore feeling unloved, here it rested, avenues akimbo—aromatic, wet, and ready. Not for cash. But freely given.

  And so, this early Sabbath of dew spangling fortieth-floor windows, of skyscrapers dampened till seeming sweetly edible as erectile snowpeas, while walking from its Battery to its Columbia crown, I felt myself to be some oral magician, tongue-climbing his lover’s entire tensed length. Knowing it, bottom to top, block by willing cave-in block.

  New York has long since ceased being merely man-made. So many dreams daily wrap and re-create this city that, it, some centuries ago, went quantum. From the sheer volume of wishing, thanks to longing of such scope, on this first satiny Sunday of each April, even before the geriatrics take those seats along Broadway’s medians where only the homeless usually perch, there’s one annual coming out like this. A wetness uncontrolled like spots on lower clothes of pubescent boys and girls, ooops. Too much of everything good spilling. A mineral closet bursts open into light, and the town becomes not simply natural. New York is Nature then.

  And, by the time I reached my brunch at 115th Street, I myself was damp all over, and not just from trudging hard uptown. I felt the oddest sort of lanky owner’s son’s ease, a lover’s rights, the fairy tale’s slowest son returning home a prince.

  My friend opened the door. My friend laughed, taking in my ruddy cheeks, glazed eyes, and wettish clothes, “Well, well … Somebody got lucky on the way up. Who was he/she?”

  “It,” I said. “And this time, for once, no names, please. Because, you size queen, you would not believe the scale of what all Hartley has just ‘known.’”

  Arrivals, Departures

  y ninth address book charts our entrances. My tenth through thirteenth start to mark our exits.

  Entrances blared, “Taaa-daa!” exits often beg off only “Uncle,” gimping home to be one.

  Some acquaintances left early, of their own free will, and are therefore still alive today. After a few seasons of experiment, they returned home healthy, they folded back in, safely regrafted onto their Middlewest. They are the now fathers of three, inheritors of Dad’s business, and no one local is the wiser.

  But most not. Most of us stayed. Until we couldn’t.

  Since Father had visited his dark cloud on Ossorio’s, I, if only out of loyalty, practically lived there. The place was brighter and far bigger than my backstairs flat. The usuals played dominoes for major money. The sound of that game’s plak-plak across marble tables was such a soothing music. Ossorio’s smell of coffee made every mottled tile and granite surface seem, to me, luxurious, old world, and somehow sexual. In those days, everything (as I have hinted), seemed eroticized, and was.

  Upstairs, I could finish typing a draft of a chapter then rush it to our table, settling there for forty minutes’ uninterrupted work. Once, during a story’s most exciting phase, I had marked three pages before noting a recurrent wolf whistle. Some man called, “Not bad, not for a boy, muchacho.” He was pointing to my bare legs. I saw that I had bumbled downstairs in a nightshirt Angie had been given and had then offered me, wearing only that and my bedroom slippers, carrying one wadded dollar bill. I laughed then lifted the hem but to the knees with forties starlet modesty.
The fellows shook their heads, disgusted if pleased, but all still looking—with a gloomy grudging interest—at my renowned gams.

  I worked till Angie dragged past then—peeking—swept on in. She flopped down, awarding me all her fast-changing drama. Had she ever entered or left a chamber without being noticed? Now I saw her stare toward the men’s room. “Is he here?” She meant Robert. She always meant Robert. And before she even said hello. I answered no and therefore got a kiss myself.

  “I’ve been to the damnedest li’l lunch at the Cosmo Club.” She was all dressed up in her most respectable drag. Today auburn-haired, she wore only lipstick and her skin showed through. It was beautifully pale. She now offered accurate clench-jaw imitations of nice ladies. Their club had just pronounced her, so she swore, a Junior Miss of Promise in the Realm of the Brush. “Oh well, I got three drawing sales out of it and one nice Jessica lady offered to pay for my apartment in exchange for certain ‘hospitalities offered no more frequently than every fortnight when I’m in the country.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “About pay for play, yer Angelina never jokes.”

  At the window, Robert waved through the second and middle O of “Ossorio’s” tripleheader. “Here he is,” she smiled, touching the back of her hair. But he came ushering a dark youth. “Uh oh,” she pouted, “I’m in no mood for a boy audition today, not one of his boys anyway. The only thing I hate worse? One of his upper-class twit Adlai-sucking Barnard cover-girlsies.” But we went through our usual cheek kisses and rote exclamatories. Robert poked me, “Don’t look now, Lord Airedale on the trail of Literature, but you’re wearing a nightshirt.”

  “He is,” Angie noticed, now Robert had.