Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  Tonight, rendered intimate by his music and our after-hour whorehouse familiarity, the street itself seemed so narrow you could reach its far side just by leaning off our fire escape; you could water those leggy zinnia in the windowbox opposite.

  Seated at the piano, one half-dressed boy wore formal wings. Candlelight played over the planes of his dark back. Light made much of his ringlets. Light picked out separate feathers, first drafts of the very music his long hands now played.

  Roman candles’ phosphorous tints fired by at crazy angles. They seemed—in their rocking surge—short-lived, half-sexual, pagan in spectacle—Roman.

  As our Robert ended the opening section and bolted into second’s gangly turns, I felt Angie tuck into herself and enjoy his every awkward complication, knowing now that an emotional competition waited dead ahead, and all at her suggestion.

  I fought not to stroke her dye-burned hair, not to whisper something childlike. A smell lifted from her like heated milk scented slightly by the saucepan’s steel, a scent childlike in its blank trust. I felt honored by the weight of her good head. I judged it weighed just eight to ten pounds. What a miracle, a mind this fine should be so light!

  I looked over at Marco. He often preferred to stand when others felt compelled to sit; he leaned back upright against a wall near the broom closet, arms crossed, head swinging a bit, filthy glasses glinting, locked in thoughts of usual purity.

  Gideon sat slung across a kitchen chair, facing Robert but with both black eyes fixed instead on the tip of his own new and pointy right shoe. He seemed to be judging Robert’s sound against the visual evidence of the costly shoe itself. Robert paused, just the correct length of time and commenced, repeating the first.

  The way you know true things in your very follicles, in the basis of your next breath, from the scrotum to the inner ears and back down the IRT express of your nervous system which IS a form of transportation—we all gained what we had earlier suspected: how gifted Robert was, how right our Angie Alabama had just been. What had first seemed an exercise for friends became, with one dynamic change, a composition fit for groups of strangers. It started as gifted kid stuff then got pushed, by certainty, reiteration, playful community, to a fast hothouse maturity.

  And without writing one extra note! By simply knowing the material so thoroughly, by trusting its seaworthiness to withstand this second voyage out.

  I felt then—as the voices of the street built, as another pink-gold rocket feathered past, as Robert reached the arc of the gentle music’s soaring—something lock into place. It registered bodily as a single isolated hiccup. Angie, head in my lap, looked up at me then. As if responding to a question with a question, which was actually an answer, at the very moment Robert finished, just before we’d pitch upright and applaud our winged one, she whispered a word straight up into my face: “Happy?”

  I could only nod, once, down.

  Finally, secure, surrounded, I was, that. I had felt—as completely as a work of art is art, with the brevity of a single potent wing-beat—the H- word.

  We would soon stumble downstairs, kicking through party streamers and burned rocket husks, we’d head toward Ossorio’s caffeine and, after vowing to visit each other’s hometowns for official tours of our squandered early years, in linked inches of a single golden line from her felt pen, we finally believed ourselves worthy, this night of the angels, to give Eternity itself our single autograph!

  Robert’s angel triptych, written as a lark—got included in a concert that was called “Ten Composers Under Thirty-Five: A New Romanticism Afoot?” (At Ossorio’s, this gave rise to foot fetish jokes.) Angie was picked for some decent juried three-person show in Houston and they actually sent her a plane ticket to the opening. Her first free fare. She brought it to our table to show us. “Round trip?” I asked, checking for her. We still didn’t trust the few good things that fell our way from strangers. Marco, who’d never mentioned knowing Russian, was now translating uncollected Isaac Babel stories into English. He explained the difficulties and read aloud a story so good I vowed to quit. “But,” he told me, “you are something Babel was not, ever.”

  “Thanks, Marco … what?”

  “Isaac Babel wasn’t born in Falls, North Carolina. Think of the material he missed.”

  “Great. What a vote of confidence. I wasn’t born in revolutionary seaside Odessa, either, ditz.”

  Gideon sold his blue-gold nocturne to a famous genius poet whose dad had founded the world’s biggest brokerage firm. And I, after waiting forever, heard from a magazine that mailed a check and the exact date I should look for my first published short story.

  Finally a single magazine arrived by mail containing fiction of a certain length, my name claiming it. (Twice!—once in the table of contents, once hovering—a wing—below the tide, above my text!)

  I’d deleted my unasked-for “Jr.” Which of Dad’s golf partners might take this work as Dick Senior’s?

  Faking disinterest, I bought a copy right at our corner newsstand not thirty-five feet from my bed/desk. It felt warm as toast.

  I carried it to our empty table; the hour was early; none of our Circle ever appeared before two or three.

  Over coffee, I flipped through the issue, sniffing gloss paper. Its ink smelled like tea. I endured the opening ads for luxury cars, for plum-sized jewels; I then perused some town talk. And, oops, what have we here? I “chanced upon” a tale.

  I remember Ossorio was watering the plants that day—tall “mother-in-law’s-tongues” in brass pots. There was the extra sound of rushing wet and a bright domestic sense of calm defending me.

  I read it cold, as if to judge the work of any no-name stranger. In print, alive in the visible (purchasable) world, it first seemed the product of someone not unlike myself. But soon, this shape appeared made by someone finer, more serene, more generous. Less a bitch, not so apt to whine. Less likely to pine for loves hard-drinking and unattainable. A deeper, better friend.

  Reading, I wondered: What if I had stayed in Falls? Had New York kilned me into someone harder or far more hopeful? Imagine if I’d not met Robert, Angie. How had I even come to be here at this green marble table, one that felt so populated before anybody else showed up? What force had let my story ascend into plain view of the whole world (for at least one week)?

  On paper, at Ossorio’s, in an toney typeface not my Hermes portable’s, I seemed to learn what I owned so far. How much I needed yet to know! What I read was executed (dreadful, deadly firing-squad word) with the correctness of a grammatical model for my Chinese-American students. And yet, it seemed far less alive than the life we really willy-nilly led here: its squalor, its raw fun, its serious work, its temporary tiffs, and rabid loyalties. Still, even fictionalized, who would ever care to read about our ragamuffin band? Hadn’t I always exaggerated Robert’s beauty and virtue? Could Angie be half the pugnacious diva I daily required? All we’d earned so far was rent on floorspace for our makeshift workshops. Nothing had yet truly happened to us. Sure, some erotic popularity. But certainly not fame. Barely a head cold.

  Still, reading fiction about a terrier traumatized during divorce, I experienced, as if for the first time, certain emotions that some stranger-author had stuffed—perhaps overactively—into each paragraph.

  The boy writer was at least sheepdogging me through events and sensations, sentence to sentence, accountable to the end. His nips at my heels were, at times, too evident. But at least the story was traversing an ambitious cliffside path. When it comes to guarding his first flock, a young sheepdog can never be too careful.

  I finished reading a story that I myself had finished writing six months earlier. Even while at work with my scissors and gluepot, I’d forgot why I put in certain things. Humor, considered eighty times, had long since ceased to crack me up. But, at this remove, in others’ typeface, I could offer at least a good father’s fond half-smile as one joke did its single back flip, ably, if a bit too much on cue.

  I looked up
and around at Ossorio’s tiles, wintogreen and custard; I glanced toward huddled coffee drinkers arguing at those tables set between me and streetlight. I seemed to be recalling one of my own sweet seriously fucked-up students: “Poor struggling brat. But I do hope the kid will keep trying. A story about a goddamn dog! But, in time, the boy might really hit on something. He’ll bump against some event in life that’s big enough to lift him. For now, he’s overly happy to just be doing it! A four-year-old boy let loose in the Philharmonic’s percussion section. Oh well, someday maybe he’ll learn …” and I put my head down on the cool pages of my first visible story. And actually fell asleep.

  Most of the night before, I’d been up pacing, stage fright. I feared I would feel a total fool when it was “out.” My parents would simply airmail me a one-way ticket home, no note. Our so-so family honor besmirched, fools’ names and fools’ faces. It’s painful, to be always so visibly trying … you know?

  I slept on it, my work. When I waked myself—no one having nudged me—I guessed by the light it must be nearly four already. I felt some movement at our table and looked up and all my friends—pretending not to notice me—sat circled, reading their own copies of the self-same magazine.

  Held up over their faces. “You guys,” I laughed, sitting straight. But they maintained this pose of feigned detachment, reading, scanning me, reading me alive.

  Friends’ faces were hidden by my issue. (Who says I had no offspring?) Instead, I studied each set of hands. I saw Marco’s tapered fingers, one knuckle smudged with the exact print of one bike-chain link, fingers strengthened by hours with the pear-wood recorder he had never let us hear him play. Gideon’s were dark-skinned with the most beautiful pink nails and, I noted, this close, a colorless polish; I marveled that someone like me, scraping for the rent, should find ways and means to sustain a continental manicure. Robert’s hands were an athlete’s or a farmer-carpenter’s, fractured by subtle veins that each terrace-farmed a different plane; each hand made you want to do a portrait—manly hands like those on slender boys by Botticelli. Angie’s were a potato-eater’s, and the more she tried to hide them via fingerless gloves and long sleeves, the more their energy tubered forth. Today hers were marred by a yellow ochre oil paint, half coating a cheap if big-rocked “dinner ring” I’d given her.

  I saw my friends had planned to hide, as in some Steinberg drawing, behind whatever masks my work made. But though they knew I was awake, they somehow kept on reading. And when this ruse finally broke, when their copies lowered to show the separate principality of each grinning face, it pleased me more than I can say to note how two of them pressed a thumb or forefinger between slick pages. Keeping their places!

  Angie and Robert nodded yes. “But look, pig.” Her stained finger squeaked my paper. “You went and drooled on yours. —I swear, we can get him published, but you still can’t take him out. First sign of success, nods off like some junky, salivates all over his own Page One.”

  No! I jerked forward, genuinely sorry, trying to blot it with my shirt cuff. “Wait here,” Marco said. Where, I asked, was he going?

  “To buy you a fresh one, Hartley.”

  “Hey, they printed others?”

  I had always imagined that, after the first publication in some serious place, there would be only a continual Happiness onrolling. But it’s never enough, is it? First you try to make the single good good thing; then you doubt you can ever repeat it.

  My new worst fear: One morning next week, in my fourth-floor rear, with a view of the Hudson only if you are an acrobat willing to mount your deskchair uneasy on four casters—I would settle as usual before the yolk-colored Salvation Army desk, I’d expect to write beloved characters through yet another layer of crisis, toward some airier moment’s latent grace; and all that would emerge, my own handwritten instruction: “Go home now. Join the goddamn Country Club, get it over with. Whom did you think you were kidding, Oh One Your Dad Still Calls Our Artiste of The Sewer?”

  We who’d stayed in New York, truly stayed put now. Bars no longer asked for my ID. I told myself I went un “carded”—for reasons subtler than simply looking older. (Though I was definitely aging; the city slices its fair share right off the top, directly from your face.) I preferred to feel I simply looked less “new here.” I had lost that rangy glow peculiar to recent arrivals. It’s the glow that makes newcomers first popular and soon suspicious. A glow that, noticed and enjoyed by very many, fades so fast. Now, my writing must sustain whatever diehard virgin blush survived.

  Red, Yellow, Blue

  e, assuming immortality, used all our primal energy—the primary colors of your late twenties and early thirties: Red, Yellow, Blue.

  We all knew how to start works of art. Some among us knew how to “sustain” an idea. But endings, how to finish? completions emotional, the payoffs often still baffled us. Noticeable, still part-naïve, Robert, that triumph of Scandinavian coloring, overtly ambitious for a Midwesterner, now made serious progress on the Titanic. His apartment grew ever more stuffed with flotsam concerning the liner’s sinking. He name-dropped the 1912 passenger list. I learned that Harvard’s Widener Library had been given in honor of a student drowned. Above Robert’s mantel, framed charts of the ship’s cross sections. Some earlier fanatic had penned in names of passengers with arrows pointing to their staterooms. When Robert spoke of the sinking now, he got this moist troubled look that made him prettier but scarier.

  “You’re young and healthy,” Angie once told him. “Why not study the history of serving strawberries and cream during Wimbledon? Just my luck, one friend is the walking Baptist Southern Gothic Kennel Club and the other goes belly-up over The Poseidon Adventure starring Shelley Winters as Orca the Whale. Laugh riot, the pair of you morbid goons.” He shook his head with pity (her joke no use). He said Ang was not exactly chirpy herself; she believed that being passed over as a deb placed her suffering up there alongside Billie Holiday’s. But Robert went right on explaining that many families in third class, see, were swamped in their little berths belowdecks and before first-class passengers even understood how major the problem was. He said that Captain Smith had not fired the first distress flare till a full hour after the berg struck. “Mostly he seemed to feel this social embarrassment. It was nineteenth-century manners trying to deny the scale of twentieth-century disaster.” There had been an attempt to put the women and children in one place and the stay-onboard men in another; but the working-class families could not imagine separating in that way and so drowned.

  I’ve often thought about it since. Robert became ever more pedantic and fascinating on the subject of the wreck. To humor him, we all went under with it, too. Again and Again. We learned. He tried showing Angie and me how it was the earliest, the most poetically condensed prediction of our soon-to-capsize shipwreck of a century. Two years before the First War, there remained this belief that progress and development and the fruits of Industry could be so titanic as to outsmart nature. Angie told him he was overreaching. It sounded like a thing someone less smart than he said at cocktail parties. “After all, only about six or eight hundred people died, right?”

  “One thousand five hundred and three.”

  “Well, excuse me, bean counter.”

  Pacing, he was not amused. “But it was who went down. ‘Top Drawer on Ocean Bottom.’ It was all the people who could afford to invest in the promise their own brochure made. ‘Unsinkable.’ Survivors say that what you heard as the bow went under was ‘the sound of a world of china breaking.’ One crew member had to use his empty revolver to keep men out of the women-and-children-first lifeboat ‘collapsibles.’ Mothers were setting their own hats on pretty sons, thirteen years old, disguised as girls to save their lives. You can’t imagine how it felt! I mean, even if you jumped off, the water was three degrees below freezing and already full of deckchairs and barrels, and suction from the generators belowdecks could get you and hold you against the louvers till …”

  Angie gave me a look. It
said, This child is just barely afloat here. Needs to get out more. “And what,” she started, “is the name of your Titanic support group?” She sounded strict and overhelpful; he lowered his eyes, guessing we wouldn’t understand.

  “‘Lifeboat Number Thirteen.’”

  “Honey, we love you but you are getting into such deep … trouble here.” (Every metaphor about the shipwreck seemed applicable and loaded, but applicable to what … ? Our crew had enjoyed such clear sailing so far.)

  “And who comes to it, your wreck-fest? Who has time, of a busy Thursday evening in Manahatta?”

  “Three Wharton investment bankers, a sweet old gay archivist from the New York Public Library, one crew member from the America’s Cup winner last year who teaches girls’ gym at the Dalton School, and two ancient English women who lost an aunt on it and are as polite and frumpy and dentally deformed as most Brit royalty. Those are the regulars.”

  “What, do you guys end meetings by holding hands and singing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’? You actually have them up here?” She looked around. I understood then—Angie was jealous.

  Of a shipwreck. 1912.

  Street Crime Hurts Everyone

  ne night, with me carrying the “centerpiece” from a party, we waded home from Studio 5-. It was either Bianca’s birthday bash for Liza, or vice versa, or Halston’s for Truman’s, I forget. They blurred. Even during the parties. So much beautiful blurring of so much immediate drug-bright beauty. We’d later say, “If you think you remember a party, you probably weren’t at that one.”

  Tonight our Mr. Gustafson, the sadistic imp, had convinced me to filch this table arrangement. Because there were magnolias in it. I’ve always hated the sight of dignified matrons leaving some bash after pulling each others’ hair to snag a $7.98 “floral spray.” As usual I lacked the strength to out-argue Robert, and so—sweet smells drifting up from waxy blooms—I carried forth this Carmen Miranda clot of leaves. Like so much else of that decade, it’d been spray-painted gold.