Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  Talking, I was a little drunk or coked up or both. Robert’s high was “natural” as we window-shopped, crunching through minor snow, gossiping the whole thirty blocks. We slowly began to feel followed. I said, “‘Hushed are the streets of many peopled Thebes.’ Robbie, is there an echo out here or have you attracted further admirers?” He ignored me, and we went on discussing Edvard Munch’s erotic oddities. Probably our first mistake.

  We were set upon by brigands; they wore do-rags, their lower faces smothered behind railroad bandannas. Two weedy kids, maybe fourteen—smaller, sourer, tighter-wound than we. If we lived “hungry,” they looked hungry.

  Through magnolias’ perfume, I seemed to smell burned electrical wiring. My head cleared quick. I passed the flower arrangement to Robert. He was so perplexed, he took it. In my disoriented state, saving these flowers seemed the goal, along with doing something heroic for Robert.

  “Quick, take off!” Having accepted flowers, he, confused, made two steps forward. They were on him.

  Kids’ being so whip-thin only made their single huge silver gun—held high and trembling at arm’s length—appear cartoon-gigantic. They slowly explained that this was a real gun. And, in it, real bullets.

  “We never doubted that, not for one single sec, fellows.” Robert, our leader—being the natural platinum blond—now got pressed back against a storefront grate. He asked the gangboss (the one with the gun), “What you need, man? Like some pretty flowers?—No. Say you want all my money I got?—Spent it. Back there. Fuckin’ clip joint. Cover charges, two-drink minimum. No fair to us, is it? I mean, you guys go out. You know the clubs.”

  They told him he looked rich. “Give us it. Don’t, we pop you.”

  “Fellows? If I had it, you’d be spending it by now. Trust me. Can’t give you cash I should have. Check my pockets. We are walking home, right? It is four a.m., whatever. We did liberate the centerpiece. You figure we’d risk a stroll if we had a subway token or anything to hide?”

  Shifting magnolias into one hand, his other strained to pull one pocket free of his velvet pants. Soon as I saw my friend’s back tense, preparing, I knew this would be a bad move. It might seem sudden. It did. Robert’s confidence always inspired him to rush things to their next theatrical level, then the next.

  The outturned pocket showed white as a truce flag. But the second it appeared, one boy came at me and placed something into my side. I saw his eyes choosing just where it should go. It felt like one of the long hatpins my grandmother used to secure her black hats. Having placed a long pin in me, the kid stepped back.

  Then the gun swung down on Robert. It cracked a new sound loose. The word SEWER seemed to appear overhead. Magnolias did one clownish roll into the gutter. Robbie’s arms flew way way out. Next phrase I got was “MANNED FLIGHT.” The pistol whipping was, in memory, just a single heavy curving blow. But it had these filmy strips spoked within it, like big feathers comprising a single silver beating wing.

  I was left standing untouched except for the hatpin burning my entire left sector. Had I been less rich-looking, not an apparent leader? Robert was down. The kids ran, cursing, hurling back at us the insult word beginning F-, a description of gay men that I cannot bring myself to write here even now. How had they known? Were the velvet and magnolias a magnet tip-off? But that year everyone was wearing velvet!

  Robert waited on his back, palms up and opened alongside his head. The street had grown far darker. I saw his arms and legs now moving like a swimmer’s. “Back stroke,” I thought. I heard a bubbling sound. It seemed I’d have a long way to bend down in order to help him. Just as I commenced stooping, a pain the likes of which I’d never inhabited (seemed I was in it, not the other way round) that pain and a gush of crackling adrenaline struck me at the back of either knee. I fell half on top of him. “Here’s another fine mess we’ve gotten us into.” I tried “wit.” My left hand clutched my left side and I knew what the warmth was but remained fixed upon the one hurt worse.

  He tried saying something agreeable but his mouth sounded full.

  Only when I bent closer over Robbie did I see how blood hid the entire blond face. His forehead was a black fringe come all across it. But, odd, he looked so beautiful, even hurt, the damage appeared half-planned. I made no sense. I must find help.

  “You all right … I mean basically? Still here, right?” I crouched over him as if scared they might come back.

  He turned his head and the street light showed me a great gash above one eye and I could only scream then. I was hurt but alive. Imagine if they had scarred him! I next screamed like some outraged little girl, “Not the face! Not thiiiis face!”

  I called it over and over to a God I did not believe in, except, during Serious Uncatered Sewer Emergencies. One second-story window lit, offered the promise of help, fell immediately dark.

  I grew practical-nursish. “Stay put, darl. Hart’s off for help. Don’t move.” As if he could! But now he pointed to his face, saying just “Our, ouurs.”

  I could always interpret his odd sounds: “‘Eyes.’”

  “Your eyes. Yes. Wait. Here, babe.”

  I ran two quicksand blocks. My left side was opening and closing, a new vertical mouth. I kept my hand across the opening, scared that the second mouth, like the top conventional one, would now start yowling too. Across the fronts of spice warehouses my voice echoed as I cried for citizens to rally because … it was not just anybody down. It was the prettiest boy in the city now. Was our Robbie down. Eyes! Face! Storefronts seemed mammoth black sandcastles that the next big rain would melt. I found a pay phone but instead of dialing 911 as planned, I heard Angie’s growl, “It’s three a-fuckin’ clock …”

  “Angie. Robert and I were walking home …”

  And just from this, from knowing my whole sudden voice so well, she started yelling, “Is he … is he … where? He okay? Where?”

  “He says his eyes. Meet us at St. Vincent’s.”

  The doctor explained that a sort of blindness can happen. The doctor explained it would probably be temporary, probably. The doctor explained. The trauma of a well-placed forehead blow. Our patient would need a lot of care until his sight came back, if it came back, as it likely would in ten days to two months. If not, we should keep the doctor posted.

  Me, they sewed up like a pillow.

  “No sweat about the care part,” Angie stated. “He is still the prettiest boy in New York, has been this whole past decade as any fool, including you, can probably see.”

  “Aha,” the young internist said.

  “I like your lab coat. Doctooor … what’s your tag say? ‘Coen.’ Where can I get one, Dr. Coen? You married?”

  “Angie, for God’s sake …” She was the limit.

  “It’s okay,” said Robert, safe back of bandages. His mouth, without the eyes’ distraction, seemed simple, upturned, and amoral as a cat’s.

  He could go home but required watching. We would, gladly. Watch. Him. Unable to stare back at us, and therefore to defend himself, he’d be so darn watched. Now I see what a rehearsal all this was. Now, on rainy days, when the fingertips of my left hand go half numb, I understand that I was also hurt then. But for us, the idea of damage to Robert’s perfect features, his cool eyes especially—that riveted us most.

  We’d never done home health care; we all rushed to be of use. We were fairly bad at it. We only wanted to try the fun parts—fresias near the bed, reading his Titanic quarterlies aloud to him. But oh the sight of him padding around his place, arms out, head all gauze, alive by touch, as blind as Justice—which is actually Injustice, having been blinded!

  Robert soon found that he could dictate music to a girl we hired through Juilliard. I would sit there staring at his fine skull, wrapped “to go.” I sat silent, listening to him say notes aloud, and name the parts “now, French horns” and I would hear her pen, a real old-timey dip ink pen, go scratching. Making something the girl called “a fair copy.” The pen’s nib also sounded very smart if q
uite quite blind.

  He wrote a lot of his First Symphony like that, saying it out from his pineappled fourposter, both the eyes sealed shut. She, at the window, nearer daylight, wrote it all down.

  I’d never known anybody blind before. For some reason, his odd herbal scent seemed especially strong and alluring while his eyes stayed covered. I could sit three feet from him and catch its salted leafy sweetness, now lanolin, now nutmeg, then plain ole varsity B.O.

  I read him all of Great Expectations. With feeling, doing every voice, and making Estella, the novel’s cold, sadistic beauty, sound as much like Savannah Angie as I could. He laughed, but with just his mouth. “Very funny,” she said flat, when I did some of her for her.

  We’d all gathered. They would unbandage him today. Dr. Coen seemed disconcerted by our whole circle Marx-Brothering into a cubicle so small.

  Scissors cut through gauze. Even that sound was painful. Angie and I cried, as in some forties movie. Doc’s first question, “Robert. Robert? Where is the window, Robert?” Angie and I bawled at that.

  Sight began ebbing back into the right eye’s crystal-blue, the one hit worst. But its “white” remained bloodred five full months. The contrast between the red and blue—Angie admitted working with that in her painting. She cringed telling me, as if ashamed. “No, it’s good.” I touched her hand. “You’re using it, you’re making somewhat light of it, his blindness. I keep thinking about that sprayed gold magnolia arrangement on its side. I don’t know why. I feel I let it down by losing it like that.”

  Before Robert got so he could take care of himself, Angie and I alternated helping. We later admitted having especially enjoyed the sponge-bath part. His shower was busted. “Strip,” she told him, knuckles on hips. “No, on second thought, let me. Go limp like Herbert Marshall being the noble weakling in The Little Foxes. Here, allow strict Momma to. She’ll wash up as far as possible and down as far as possible. You wash Possible. Then she’ll take some good nappy terrycloth hand towel, Lad, and she’ll dry and dry and buff your big ole possum Possible.”

  There was scarring. To the credit of St. Vincent’s, the ER doctor, an East Indian who wrote short stories and had read my one, registered the beauty of Robert’s face and phoned a buddy plastic surgeon, who—for nothing, for the right to photograph this particular face and his work on it—did everything science could. Robert’s face drew art to its salvation. Even so, he was left damaged.

  The marks remaining above our Robert Christian’s right eye grew reasonably faint in the eighteen months left. Their deepest reddest V was shaped oddly, like a bow with two streaming ends. Scar tissue bit a line into the silver-blond eyebrow of the eye hurt worst. Though the gash became less angry—a mild half-pink, visible especially when he tanned—it never quite faded.

  Forever after, every time I looked into Robert’s deep-end eyes, I fought my urge to see scars first.

  Those Left Back Home

  e still heard from the hometown. Odd, it, and not New York, now seemed increasingly exotic.

  High school chums said they lost sleep over our safety—us sticking it out in The Sewer—but they still felt somewhat hopeful for us. Of course, I wouldn’t tell any of them about the mugging (lest it reach my parents). “Never better” remained my answer.

  “So, famous yet?” they asked. “If not now, when?”—Met Yoko? No? Know Carol Channing? Saw her once on the street? Spoke? That’s a start. Why not just invite her over?”

  My parents had sold the neo-Colonial Big House. They relocated to a glass box overlooking a Florida golf course and the lake that made that course both gorgeous and difficult. When would I come down for a visit and a rest?

  Most of my childhood friends still lived two blocks from their own folks’ landscaped houses. They did weekly laundry in familiar utility rooms. From these pals, I got mail. Here came the synthetic Hickory Farm Food packets we could all live on for days. Cheeze Logs rolled in pecan crumbs became your morning omelettes then afternoon appetizers, midnight entrees, till lucky airshaft pigeons were thrown the final nuts.

  Hometown friends we’d already outgrown, wrote: they truly meant to get around to someday working on their college poetry again, they really did. News of their early divorces reached the North. We heard hints about our quarterback’s probable alcoholism, a habit till recently considered somewhat glamorous—but not after his red Corvette struck and maimed a black schoolgirl as he left the crime scene. A boating accident, one unexpected grease fire at the Country Club, the usual gore and flareups. We absorbed these local disasters with an avid, shaming interest. Bad hometown news allowed our city lives to seem more clean, and—oddly—safer. We might be gunned down on the street. But at least our mistakes were not the ones our folks had made. At least we’d chosen this difficulty—this impossible, because universal, goal.

  We wanted our lives to be representative; we wanted our experience to go all dramatic and to become unique; we still expected to be known as our age’s record-keepers in paint, word, and permanent eighth notes, full-stops. Be careful what you wish for.

  One thing we never told the ones left home: how hard we worked. They associated Manhattan with vacation, shopping sprees, Lerner and Loewe. They assumed the art we sought to create was something like a pleasing dusky odor we exuded—something they’d opted to stanch with suburban Right Guard. The art scent was simply by-product, as wasps’ spit turns to wasp nests. Our sitting before some rental room’s desk or easel, our stewing over a created surface, then scraping everything off to start over more perfectly, our making it daily better? That was quite beyond them.

  One old girlfriend-deb-date from Falls arrived the day before my birthday and phoned to insist I have breakfast with her at the Palm Court to celebrate. She was a darling person, funny, self-effacing, generous. “I don’t do lunch or breakfast out. Dorcas, I work till two or three every day.”

  “Now by ‘work’ you mean what? The teaching?” I told her, Writing.

  “But, Hart, that can’t be work, not for you. You’re a tale-teller. We used to look for you at recess, to find out what’d just gone on in our own class. It only made sense after you told it and imitated Miss Wart-Tongue Watson, remember? Hon, it’s your birthday. I’ve made fairly elaborate plans. Play a little. What’s your idea of the perfect way to spend your birthday?”

  “Work.”

  “But don’t you like to goof off anymore? We used to. You were a master at it. Remember our treehouse and the back of your parents’ Buick and how we clouded up the windows and went only so far, but far enough to at least feel very naughty? What’s your idea of play now?”

  “Work.” “And to round this out, what’s your worst fear?” She, intelligent, made a joke of it.

  “Leaving work.” “So we won’t be seeing you at my lavish birthday breakfast for sixteen at the Plaza, which’ll include every chic person under forty from North Carolina now living in New York, for you, on me?”

  “Cain’t tell you how much I ’preciate your offer, honey, but I really …” Next morning, at seven a.m., I called her hotel room; I’d changed my mind. She’d already checked out.

  I never heard from Dorcas again. (If she reads this … forgive me? Understand.)

  Finally, for such sweet trust-funded pals who took fewer chances, who believed New York to be only fun and merely a street address’s difference from their own, we had no words. How to inform them?

  How to explain that in the evolutionary race, the strongest know enough to swim beyond the horde, to paddle right into cornering darkness straight ahead, a darkness that is terrifying fertility itself. A darkness that threatens you with your shadow-black death while promising platinum self-perpetuating immortality. (We young mortals simply didn’t know yet how little time we had to make ourselves immortals.)

  The Immortal part, we worked at with endearing school-supply diligence.

  The Mortal, we assumed.

  I.D.

  ideon’s paintings were all still done on boards a foot squ
are. One of them had stunned even Angie into respectful silence, a hard-earned nod. The brushwork was broad and supple, gorgeous in its automatic certainty. Gideon’s color sense was unusual and, given the prettiness of his subject matter, that reversal of the sweet and sour became most necessary. If you are going to paint the harbor at Nice, a blue bowl triangulated by white sails formal as the starched collars of some ambassadorial dinner, you’d best offset the view’s calendar familiarity with a rind of bitter green at the horizon, with some bruised plum clouds so sullen in arriving.

  Gideon was a slow worker, so as to always give the appearance of utter ease. He would scrape away, like a flawed meringue, one pound of pastel paint gone mud, in hopes of making the next try seem effortless, his first. Gideon destroyed eight out of his own ten pictures. As a young man his standards were so high, he’d had little work he felt was good enough to sell. So, it was his very artistic integrity that drove him to the slippery world of Buy Art Low, Sell Masterworks High. He soon spent more time at auctions than at his easel. Not to worry. He was, he told us, buying himself the decades it’d take to become a master.

  Each of us tried on personae like cheap and brilliant store-bought ascots, sometimes a few a day. Angie gathered collage materials off street corners; she curated her own hairstyles and that show could change three times weekly. She also “found” Ansel, a rangy boy painter just in from Montana.

  He was just some hireling she’d brought in to tear down a studio partition. Unconsulted, from the top of a ladder, he had pointed down at three huge canvases: “Ma’am? You think that one’s best, because you’ve worked on it longest. I see all the rags and coffee cups around it on the floor. But, if you don’t mind a far Westerner’s far-out opinion? The end one with the least paint on it is still the most amazing. Looks like you breathed it. Dance of the seven veils. You get you seven paintings packed in one. Aren’t too many painters living as can do that. It’s almost weird, the pileup. The longer you ‘work’ ’em, the more of the play you squeeze right out. It’s a heap of artists in New York City that’d try and bring off that finished one, not that they could get it lathered up to where you have, li’l missie. But, of all the lofts I been in my three weeks in New York, I’d say only you can start out like that. So, leave off there, ‘d be my minimum-wage advice.”