Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  “No, reconsider, please. We’ll do it as a Strengthening. Angel Calisthenics. —Okay, myself? I’ll go first. Come Tuesday next, at seven p.m.? at my lovely home? I will perform a new piano piece called ‘The Archangel Gabriel’s Homely Identical Twin: A Tonepoem in Two Parts.’ I’m just winging this, okay? But mine will be based upon the hymns of my wasted Lutheran youth. I’ve told you about my old organ teacher (no comment), his asking me to run upstairs and sit naked in the third-floor pipe-loft and tell him how each low note felt in my … Yeah, I thought I’d bored you all with that. I love hymns even now, don’t you? I mean, ‘Seraphim and Cherubim, Falling Down Before Thee’? That can still make a thinking boy hard.

  “Angie? Just one little painting maybe? and why not move more toward the blues instead of your recent burnt sienna earthtones? To see your hands is to know your palette. So what’s your title? What’s Miss Teen Alabama’s idea of Paradise?”

  “‘Santa’s Workshop,’” she said. “All I ever wanted for Christmas was the toyshop. Every drippy paintpot, and to have all the little big-dicked elves as my happy slaves.”

  I got chillbumps, staring. Had I ever told her this fantasy? No, I’d only thought it, hard. But if anything intense happened recently in my own head, my bed, it seemed to follow direct to hers: My slapdash hope of playing well in a big big room with others, of making bright pure toys alongside those few who were really best at that.

  I grabbed a paper napkin. I would try writing out some title grand enough to hold my place here at Ossorio’s round table.

  “Hartley Mims the somethingth? I’ll need the name of your story, and I want a draft read aloud by you on Tuesday. I crave your heaven. And I want to like it. And we want to laugh, please, in your haphaphappy-talkin paradise.”

  “Mine will be called …”—I read blurred ink from the white napkin’s pulp—“‘Toward a More Precise Identification of the Newer Angels.’”

  “You pretentious fairy. You are, like me, destined to rise.” She laughed with pleasure, and leaned right over and kissed me wet. “You fum Mars or wha’?”

  “When I make water, I make water. And when I make Paradise, you’ll book ahead. So eat your VD-ridden heart out, Sports Medicine.”

  We all now turned toward the pleasing sight of Gideon. Who shrugged. The French! The Arabs! The Sephardics! He got all that world weariness poured into a mere hundred and thirty succulent pounds. Then—to stay safe—sure of its still being reasonably adorable, he showed us his excellent dimples, but only in a demi-smile, in dimple eighth notes.

  Gideon said he thought he maybe had one done already. One with gold and blue in it. He said he did not intend to create what anybody ever asked him to, never for money, and certainly not for mere childish sloppy fun. But Gideon might, if he remembered, bring along the small one he had done already. “So.” Robert pretended to write on marble tabletop, ringed with saucer stains.

  “Title, of. Gideon’s. Paradise. ‘Done Already.’”

  Robert rarely went at anybody. (I once blundered by telling Angie I’d just defended her from someone’s insult; Robert gave me such a disappointed [and therefore schooling] glance; Angie went berserk with paranoia.)

  But this he’d said to Gideon was truly devastating. Robert knew it. Angie knew it, I did. Marco, eyes lowered, understood. But Gideon, you see, did not.

  Job Readiness

  ou can be waiting in New York a long time.

  If you’re lucky, you’ll find how to stop expecting much or how to keep expecting everything, but with payoff postponed indefinitely.

  (Given everybody’s secret hope of at least posthumous discovery, you can hover for decades, more. Maybe Paradise will be stardom’s forestalled “Callback.”)

  The lady who took in and dispersed our occasional splurge dry cleaning had become very good at her job, and at the waiting, and she stayed very friendly.

  On the mirrored wall behind her overlit counter, under a stylistically outmoded sunburst clock, she’d hung a framed publicity still of herself.

  It had been inscribed by her—courteous—to this very shop. It was suspended shoulder to shoulder between the inscribed glossy of Tony Randall, and one Bobby Sherman, just over a sun-faded Mimi Hines. Remember the gifted singer-comedienne Mimi Hines? Does Mimi Hines?

  This cleaning receptionist had already aged three decades and forty-two hairstyles past her posted glamour shot; but, to that image, the time-span involved seemed incidental. Fact is, she had sung at the Metropolitan Opera, once.

  While you were naming substances in clothes’ stains—chocolate, red wine, and … erotic … some erotic liquidish substance (of the male variety), does that come out easy? … Nina might—after first asking rote encouraging questions about your “emerging” artistic career—again pull forth her own review. She’d got it laminated early on, got it under wraps quick, but it had yellowed to a cigar brown nonetheless. I’d all but memorized it but never acknowledged having seen it before:

  “Stepping in for Zinka Milanov was young Nina Fouquet-Marshall, with a supple if as yet unevolved though not un-promising voice. She has genuine beauty, occasional stage presence, and is someone definitely to consider watching up ahead. The scenery, as usual, proved adequate if …”

  Nina was lucky. She had sung at the Met, once. She still took lessons, she kept vocalizing daily, she stayed ready for recall. She’d got the photos made, and at prime time. Nina always “dressed” for work. Her haircombs agented a complex French Twist. Her full stage makeup offered no concession to the shop’s and the world’s ungrateful non-Met fluorescence. She hostessed here, auditioning her every dry cleaning customer as part of her ideal comeback audience (and claque). Nina Fouquet-Marshall had got quite used to waiting in New York.

  Me, too. I’d soon and suddenly lived quite a while in that jail-and-pedestal of the zip code 10014. I’d begun writing one slim story that became a novella, soon almost a novel and eventually a huge tome, the kind it would be easy never to feel qualified to finish. The kind that was fun to discuss but perhaps impossible to sell. But, what the hell, I could also now use chopsticks like some Chinese hit man, eating on the run. I recognized eight hundred people on sight—including my hardworking neighbors and our lady of the dry cleaning: “Nina, how goes it?” Robert said we could learn from her and called Nina “Fabulous, a sort of unicorn boarding unrecognized in our Claremont stable full of rental plugs and carriage horses.”

  I knew all Vermeers in hiking-distance and on terms most intimate; I lived on a first name-basis with those Dutch paintings’ times of afternoon light—each highlight brushstroke, a particular if minor friend. By now I “used” the Met Museum; I’d learned to go and look at just one picture for forty minutes, not simply gorge on two thousand images for three tourist seconds apiece.

  I had endeared myself to the immense emotional Hispanic family next-door. The week after I moved in, I—from my fourth-floor window—spied a cop about to ticket then tow the neighboring sons’ double-parked (hot?) hotrod; I found myself banging on their door, yelling, ‘Quick, cop, goin’ git your car, man! Queek!” Dash made, ticket eluded by nanoseconds as our whole floor watched from balconies, the community closed around me, “tight.” I might look white and set and snide, but I had proved myself “all right.”

  We, in this poor folks’ building, agreed to be similar. Our conversations in the barely moving elevator crossed all language barriers to indicate heartfelt exhaustion at the end of long long workdays. When needed, everything essential could be mimed. A palm placed to the lower spine, a rotation of neck and rolling of eyes, the universal sign for Alienated Labor. Complaints about hard work, terrible cold or heat, always drew a nod, a smile, a shaken head. We knew to hate The Law even more concentratedly and personally than The Law yet hated us. It gave you preparation time for Justice’s incoming mischief at your own expense.

  The Night of the Angels

  nknowns, we would gather at Robert’s to perform-reveal our celestial attempts. It was July Fou
rth, 1984; I remember this because of the fireworks our neighbors kept setting off with such scary regularity. Our City seemed even more than usually a war zone, but a comic one and safer for that. New York summers are so underrated. You get to throw your windows open. It’s too hot even for thieves to work at their brisk autumn-winter pace. The streets are less crowded and those left in town seem to have more time and emotion, and to wear fewer clothes.

  Many young artists from our neighborhood, those most rabidly striving, would travel out to some Hampton or other. They crowded into insanely overpriced cottages, time-share bunkbeds. They kept dressing up and going to parties where they hoped to meet the older situation-makers from New York; instead they met only other overdressed underfinanced young strivers paying too much for the right to stalk nobody more hopeful than themselves.

  Served the climbers right.

  Our Circle, too poor for that, stayed put. We did our homework in town; our task? to now amuse ourselves via each other. For that, it seemed, was what we did and who we were. Itinerant Entertainers. Somehow this felt easier to see during the summers. Maybe we were working up to playing Hamlet as a group. But, for now, we’d been cast as The Players, a crew just glad for the work, and only vaguely aware of its comic drama’s uses here at Court.

  Tonight, still living at our entry-level, we could afford the admission-price time-share of goofing off, being the paid fun for only each other. —We were “the talent,” if by default. The sole career that counted on this night of the angels was Delight.

  Our company felt far less toxic than the Hamptons’. (A rumor reached us, but then so many did. About a friend of Angie’s from Morton Street who’d caught a cold that went direct into pneumonia that left him so shrunken he soon looked like a pile of leopard-spotted celery, and was, in six weeks, dead. And he’d been a godlike weight lifter, so quickly overtaken. Poor guy, bench-pressed into oblivion that fast. It was just a rumor but it made the rounds and, unlike most such gossip, never quite vanished.)

  Summers, New York’s fire department opened hydrants at either end of our block to keep the restless street kids cool, occupied. Through Robert’s open window, we could hear their splashing, could hear our own known urchins pushing each other into cold spray then squealing out of it; we heard the pop and pump of firework munitions created only to look pretty, ending. From time to time one Roman candle’s overheated color would shoot past a window, trailed by that most magical of human sounds: “Ahhhs” uttered from heads lifted toward some spectacle right overhead.

  White pigeons, spooked by noise, settled on the window ledge and made their pearly coos and, if you squinted, they appeared almost a dovelike product. Robert’s dozens of crystals, hung from thumbtacks, strung in all four windows, caught streetlight invisible from within the apartment. The pendants proved that someone before this building must now be twirling white sparklers.

  We lounged around, half glazed in sweat, drinking cold cold Rolling Rocks, bottlenecks smeared with lime to make beer taste somewhat more expensive. Robert, I noted, sipped only ice water.

  Seated on an heirloom steamer trunk, Marco offered us a line from Una-muno, “The devil is an angel, too.” Then we got, straight from his memory, the word for “Angel” in each language Marco knew (sixteen). Was it just us or did these words not sound especially poetic and mellifluous? They flew.

  Next, I stood beside the fourposter and read my new story aloud. I tried to impersonate the chief angel supervising freshmen orientation for a new crop of winged ones. The tale met with a certain admiration—both for its proposed order of angel hierarchy, and the leisurely, conversational, getting-to-know-you quality of my intended paradise. There was applause, it held. I flopped down on a bolster at the head of Robert’s bed. I felt surrounded by a second, purer, kind of humid air.

  These were the only people in the world I wanted to please and, having done that, I could now relax, for maybe another six weeks.

  Both Angie and Gideon had hung paintings in Robert’s short hallway and, bringing over the one good floorlamp, we now admired them. Gideon was teased for not bothering to attempt a new one; but he still didn’t seem to know he ought to find such charges troubling. Angie’s painting showed a manhole cover that soon became the shieldlike pattern from a tortoise’s shell. A convincing oval fluorescent tube had been painted all around it (painted factually as if by a medical illustrator). She had given the turtle shell its own industrial-strength halo. I remembered telling her about a snapping turtle I’d seen murdered. Had Angie awarded the dead creature a miner’s carbide headlamp? You were, as ever, left with questions. But new ones.

  Robert had greeted us at the door and, on turning, casually showed the homemade wings. He said he’d considered throwing out early drafts of the piece we would soon hear, plus his sketches for the Ocean Liner symphony. Instead he’d scissored those pages into feather shapes. Then he stapled hundreds of these, overlapping, to twin pieces of long cardboard cut in curves. The striped paper and its speckled notes looked, at a distance, strangely like the markings of some white seabird. Given the heat, Robert wore only jeans, a white scoop-necked T-shirt, wings. He had fastened the left span around one shoulder with some twine; the other stayed attached via a web khaki belt. These Xed like bandoliers across his back, as he settled before his peeling veneer piano.

  He slowly lit a dozen candles and now asked Marco to kill the lamp as our composer faced his new score. Robert played the two-part tonepoem, played well if with some church training evident in a steady underpulse and maybe overmuch pedal. The first half he presented was an exquisite melting thing, rendered more exciting by the shrieks of our neighbor kids, the jets of water heard striking asphalt. Pink molten spray from a Roman candle lit the fire escape across the street then cooled to darkness.

  The starting half of Robert’s poem was lyrical, a sort of waking up in Paradise look-see. It had long runs and the Fauré Requiem’s airy sweetness. The second half reprised the first but in a manner somewhat hellishly lumbering, overdetermined. Though it possessed a thorny integrity, when the second ended, when Robert turned around, wings shifting away from our applause, he sensed that something had been lacking. The two halves did not adhere. We’d all heard this.

  His right hand on the bench, his left atop his instrument, he said, “Tell me true, I can take it.” His face took on a beseeching softness. He was a spectacle that night, brown from sailing and from baking on his roof, with the Swedish carpenter shoulders, and a glimpse of his chest’s tattoo, plus the wings’ guy-wires.

  I can still see his paper feathers moving in a mild breeze while some cherry bomb echoed along our street. A great Mediterranean cry rose up.

  “Number one,” Angie spoke first and we, having sensed a weakness in Robert’s composition, felt relieved not to address it ourselves. “One: Never take the wings off. You’ve hit on a fashion accessory I didn’t know was missing from the world till tonight. Number two: Mother will now tell you how to fix your tonepoem. Simple. This is what only a good painter can tell a fairly good composer. And you are good. You’re just not grown. Listen …”

  Robert’s face bent itself into a paroxysm of penitence, it looked erotic, in extremis. It admitted, “I screwed up, I made something very bad for my pals and now I’ve slaughtered all their future respect for me forever.” And yet such hope still lived in the gaze he offered her (“Maybe I can fix it in a year? Maybe they’ll forgive me when I do?”).

  “It’s not a diptych you’ve written. More a triptych. You probably got too literal about your own two wings, you narcissist. Try this, why dontcha? Play the sweet one first, play the sour cubistic thing second, and then, verbatim, end with the sweet one again, no changes, no pushing up the emphasis, not even a bit, though you’ll want to, Love Machine. Repeat it exactly as you did it first. Thing’ll come out completely different. It’ll truly seem paradise the second time. Because, by then, it will all sound completely earned.”

  We sat in candlelight, we stared at each other, w
e did not risk a single smile about our own good fortune. We were lucky, we knew it, we were not scrambling in the Hamptons and, better, didn’t want to be. We were honestly entertaining each other and therefore learning. Could we make each other briefly content? Could we make this evening, through our own heavenly descriptions, indescribable? Yes, we probably could.

  The hardest thing to do is tell the truth and have your listeners love hearing something that difficult to bear: You’re not perfect; you’re a player but you still need work.

  I remember feeling my usual sinus burning. I remember hoping Robert would say nothing now. No word, please. He did not. Guessing we all had time for this, he simply turned back to his piano. To play. Robert breathed once. Then—paper wings suspended between shoulder blades as easy as male genitals between thighs hang, solemn, replete, concentrated—our wizard, as instructed, began again.

  I was so glad I’d already presented my piece. Imagine following his Paradise Lost Then Corrected! Angie was the only other person on this bed. As I sat upright against its headboard, she wiggled over and—just as Robert hit the first complex chord—rested her head in my lap. He seemed to play with more rolling conviction now, as if her suggestion had given him a confidence. He settled into the work as if he had not written but memorized it, and from some source superior, foregone.

  Now his playing bypassed that earlier determination. Instead, it unfurled; it oared, it wingbeat forward. And this new ease let us look around. This ease let us absorb our own scene as if looking back and down on it.

  The windows stood ajar, supported by sawed-off broomsticks (or, no, what were those? plumber’s friends?). Pigeons, made nervous by pyrotechnics, sometimes came to rest on the ledge and then swerved off, returning. Across the street, our pizzeria’s usual neon burned, hissing; it spread fitful pink, then a humming blue across the facade opposite. Robert’s crystals, intensifying colors, seemed the dripping faucets of some distillery where light is manufactured.