Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  She smiled up—from his for-real cowboy boots toward the three yellow crowning cowlicks—not hurrying. Larceny lived in the grin of Albam. “Number one: I like your particular level of interest. Two: great buns, excellent eyes. Now, crucial, Numero trez: Are you, by chance, also heterosexual?”

  “Welp, when it suits me to be, ma’am,” he scratched the rearmost of his cowlicks—and smiled the open spaces, the scent of sage after a recent driving rain.

  So, if this Ansel, at a flea market, picked up two bird-shaped rhinestone pins for a quarter, we considered it original that someone so farmboy butch already had “a jewelry collection.” Since Angie liked to paint late, she’d become our “night person.” We were mytho-maniacs, inspired by a city whose major industry that is.

  If our motley circle stayed put, it was because we knew that giving up and going home would be far worse. Leaving would mean quitting our whole group ambition—leaving one another alone here, undefended. That’d be a form of suicide harder than taking the forty-one sleeping pills washed down by vodka. With a life-ending suicide, at least you need not hear others’ catty remarks as they prod your remains.

  But, artistic suicide was destined to be autopsied (i.e., reviewed) in your own hometown hearing:

  “Guy tried to be a New York artist. Lasted less than six months up there. Came back to his daddy’s big white house, and a job on the loading dock of Dad’s Budweiser Outlet. Regular Rembrandt, right? They say he really drinks bad now. Never talks about New York City. Hasn’t touched a paintbrush in years. Sleeps in his old room. ‘Beave It to Leaver,’ hunh? Eats with the folks. Works here. Dates nobody. Gets plastered every weekend. Period. They say he really basically wanted to go be queer up there, but didn’t even have the nerve to get it on with even one guy. Never choked a one down. Never ‘came out,’ like they call it now. Instead, came back. —They say the poor jerk had some talent, too. Look at him, sulking, playing like his daddy doesn’t own this joint. Acting like he can’t half-hear us. Real rebel, right?”

  There are worse things than dying young.

  In the Midst of Your Early Blue Period, Something Overtakes You

  ou can paint your cheap New York studio apartment white, and it looks great for about three weeks. Then the window sills begins seeping wheat-plasma-color, becoming brown, next black. Finally some other substance arrives—some bubbling, tarlike force, unidentifiable. It is silt, it is toxic chem-plant New Jersey drift, it is others’ envy, it is the spittle of the roach eggs hatching, it is applicant Death.

  The neighbors’ leaky pipes, the hall’s Rasta graffiti artist, something starts immediately resenting and reversing mere girlish (virginal) suburban white. And, seeing this, you will either leave NYC, or else repaint, or (likelier) learn to survive it. You’ve already learned to cohabit with hand-sized roaches, occasional break-ins, and a certain quota of phoned-in wrong-number “breathers.” Chaos becomes a constant, like Mrs. Park’s almost-always-open corner green-grocery where you score your eggs and milk and they all know your name. Chaos has a neighborhood nickname for you. Does that make things easier?

  I noted that, since Robert’s blinding, we all walked in a new way. Darting, taking short breaks, sitting down on ledges, checking store windows’ reflection to see who followed—no longer just for purposes of stalking seduction-attraction—now, more self-defense. I had just learned what the word “tired” meant. The same ole hits of Cuban caffeine sometimes failed to pay their usual kickass magic.

  While Robert was out sailing with the America’s Cup crew and that gym teacher from Lifeboat Thirteen, while he weekended at Aaron Copland’s up-river retreat, Angie and I tried distracting ourselves. We exchanged two bits and a challenge: Go to The Honored Owl, four storefronts down, find a one-page portrait of each other. The book had to cost fifty cents or less. We would meet back here in forty minutes and swap our one-page likenesses. There is, in the young, such a thin line between narcissism and self-knowledge.

  I, being born an archive, can still lay hands on my own page portrait of Alabam. It was lifted from an aged tome, called Certain Problems of the Spirit, stuffed with Medieval-looking woodcuts:

  Thus said Bernard of Clairvaux, the great thirteenth-century Cistercian, on the joys of bodily resurrection-

  Do not be surprised if the glorified body seems to give the spirit something. For it was a real help when man was sick and mortal. How true that text which says that all things turn to the good of those who love God. The sick, dead and resurrected body is a help to the soul who loves God …

  Truly the soul does not want to be perfected without that from whose good service it feels it has benefited in every way. Listen to the bridegroom in the Canticle inviting us to this triple progress: “Eat, friends, and drink. Be inebriated, dearest ones.” He calls to those working in the body to eat; he invites those who have set aside bodies to drink; and he impels those who have resumed their bodies to inebriate themselves, calling them his dearest ones, as if they were filled with charity … It is right to call them dearest who are drunk with love.

  Last month, trying to organize my jammed attic here (ninety boxes from this period, marked “Early Drafts”), I chanced upon Angie’s curious continuing portrait of me. It’d yellowed.

  As usual, she scared me with how much I admired her. The passage came from a blue book I’d also seen in my mother’s daily reference library. It was always parked beside her Joy of Cooking

  Emily Post’s Etiquette:

  THE LETTER OF CONDOLENCE

  Intimate letters of condolence are like love letters, in that they are too sacred to follow a set form. One rule, and one only, should guide you in writing such letters. Say what you truly feel. Say that and nothing else. Sit down at your desk, let your thoughts dwell on the person you are writing to.

  Don’t dwell on the details of illness or the manner of death; don’t quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart cannot follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the greater comfort it brings.

  Write as simply as possible and let your heart speak as truly but as briefly as you can. Forget, if you can, that you are using written words, think merely how you feel—then put your feelings on paper—that is all.

  My erotic adventures still gathered, overlapped, truncated to shorthand, and meaning to keep themselves separate—soon knew: every raindrop, falling, intends, on impact, to remain standoffish from all those other ordinary droplets. Fat chance. Lakes are made of them. Oceans.

  The time a New York cab driver, one cute, toothy twenty-eight-year-old with theatrical hopes but absolutely no experience onstage, told me he liked my looks enough so he’d actually “eat” the fare if I would spend the break time he usually wasted on a piss-and-a-burger overlooking the moonlit Hudson with him making out in the backseat, since the meter otherwise kept getting in our way. The time I met a high school boy in Times Square on a class trip and he peeled off the end of a long line and took me back to his little Edison Hotel room while his class did their walking tour of Chinatown; and the pathetic gym bags of his four roommates, white socks and jockey shorts with camp nametags stitched in back by moms, exuded the smell of adolescence at simmer, not unlike piping hot school-lunch Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. The time I wound up with a deaf and dumb house painter who wrote me notes on matchbooks and in his palm and who simply pointed at whatever he wanted and who led me home to his rented room over a Chelsea day-care center where the silence was erotic to the point of a narcotic and the only sound he made was, on coming, a drowned scream like some strangled rabbit’s last. The time I answered a personal ad and the person who opened the condo door was the married president of the college where I taught and we both laughed as I did a mock-military about-face and, wordless, returned to the elevator; and ever after he acted so kind to me, praising my sense of intellectual chan
ce-taking and my enthusiasm that recalled to him himself when young. The time, the time that, the time I found time to, found time … all that matters in the end are the memories of the unstandoffish merging flood, of droplets, ours, the times …

  Angie was already known to be as difficult as she was talented. That would legitimately make her very testy, indeed. Our women friends often pointed out: Guys who hustled in the service of careers were called “movers, shakers, comers.” Girls who tried were “pushy manipulative bitches, sleeping their way up.”

  One snowy day, on my way to the laundromat, an acquaintance told me he’d just heard a bigtime dealer describe Angie as “her own worst enemy and the classic ball breaker.” As usual, I defended Ang. But I’d begun to feel more and more tired of doing so. It seemed unfair to both of us, how people brought their worst Alabama stories straight to me. I urged them to simply look at her work. They did, but her paintings were so fresh and strange, so laden with exemptions, her art irked them even more.

  My favorite laundromat stood just opposite a row of awninged Old Englishy antique shops. I had shifted my folding chair closer to the dryers for warmth. As I flipped through an outdated celeb magazine instead of the serious manuscript I now carried everywhere, I saw her. Angie stood window-shopping at an expensive little store across the way. Snow now flitted down in windblown drifts and everyone was bundled, mid-December. Unaware of being watched, her back to me, Angie had eased up onto tiptoe, kept leaning against a bay window full of nineteenth-century toy soldiers arrayed atop lead forts.

  She then dodged into an adjacent doorway, pulled off one red mitten, counted her money. She’d trot back—breath all blue—and stare some more. Once, using her coatsleeve and mitten, she cleared the frosted window of her own observer’s vapors. She stared up and in like some waif from Dickens. The prissy owner signaled her away. “Shoo,” he said, and waved ringed fingers to one side.

  I knew, to the bone, she was hoping to buy overpriced Christmas gifts for Robert and me. For some reason, she was convinced—from Robert’s affection for the word “Lad”?—that we both adored costly Anglo-Scottish lead soldiers. I felt such a twinge at seeing this “ball breaker” about to overspend on us.

  When I later opened my gift, wrapped in tartan paper, a note was attached: “You deserve a regiment. This year, can’t afford one. So settle for my company and these McLovers instead?” And there rested two lead kilted soldiers, all softened with nicks and lovely painted plaid, two warriors like something from a Robert Louis Stevenson boyhood poem. I placed one at either side of my typewriter.

  If I worked to defend Angie from others, I still couldn’t make her feel defended. My praise, my faith, never seemed exactly enough. She expected those around her to help advance her career and when she hit a lull—as we all did, long ones—Angie Byrnes commenced to flame throw in our directions. Even Robert caught it for treasonable disloyalty.

  Playdate

  was at her place, seated on her floor, helping Angie paint her studio high-gloss white. I warned her: White never lasts. We had praised Alberta, eighty-five, for her good looks, and she’d told us, “Ain’t nothing I ever done. It’s just: Black don’t crack.”

  “White sure do,” Angie replied. “Look at Hartley already.”

  The studio flooring had been barn-red; it kept souring and skewing her new blue work, and, no, she had not asked her landlord’s permission. He would say forget it. Ang had been refilling her Zippo with fluid and now she squirted a little flaa of that across the red floor, to see what paint did. Then she brushed white over that; it made a moment’s pink. Working, we chatted, catching up. We’d not seen each other in six hours.

  “Wait one,” she frowned at something I said, suddenly pointing her brush my way. “Hartley, I think my ears must fail me. Because, please repeat that. Let me get this straight. It’s during the taxi strike and you share a cab with the assistant director of Marlborough Gallery, right? And you never one time mention me or my work? You’re always telling me that you respect what I am doing for easel painting generally. Daily, I hear this. I talk you up everywhere. Any idea how many copies of that fucking dog magazine I bought and mailed? But here you finally get a ride from Fourteenth to Fifty-seventh with him, held captive, a silver-tray opportunity—and it’s like I’m on the cattle car headed for Auschwitz and you’ve conveniently forgot my name …”

  “Angie, it would have been forcing things. The man was a stranger, and straight to boot. We never even talked painting. It never came up.”

  “Well, bring it up. Here I am, slaving away and instead of friends I get narc-collaborators, I’m hidden here in this attic, slaving away, and they’re off riding in stretch limos with the friggin’ SS and …”

  “Angie, darling? Captain Tom to Earth toward Angelina. Would you consider giving up all this recent Holocaust imagery? You’re catching Manhattan’s toxic shock. Your Mom’s people were snake-handling Baptists from a county whose only beauty spot is probably a ditch. Your Dad’s Episcopalian and you’re from Savannah and were about one inch from having been a debutante, as you never tire of telling us, your ranking friends in the Gestapo, sweetie. You’re growing solemn. Beware. Under the misapplied rouge, your face is turning the color of concrete. You’re forgetting how to mess around, Goofy. You’ve stopped really playing in your work. Honey? it’s mattering too much to you. And that makes it count less for the rest of us. Ansel is right, your best is the stuff you do with your left hand. Your accidents are better than most of what we manage with tongues pressed between our new big teeth. Remember what got you started at your grammar school? The prizewinning Fish and Birds of Georgia mural, remember? Play’s still the thing.”

  She had turned away from me. She went on painting the studio floor. “Are you crying? Are you going to kill me?”

  She shook her head no, then she shook her head yes.

  “They expect too much of us,” she finally said. I had been avoiding the sight of a waitress uniform on its hanger suspended from the bathroom door’s hook, the awful little frilly hat. At least I’d never had to see her in that thing.

  “I mean,” her back explained, “with one part of your brain, you’re supposed to stay this divine idiot child splashing around in a way so joyful they’ll all want to try finger painting again and squish all over in perfect innocence. Then you’re asked to sober up and get parental and put on business drag and wander forth and sell the idiot-savant’s output. It’s as seasick-making as Lifeboat Number Thirteen.”

  “Why won’t you look at me?” She shot me the finger. I tossed my brush her way. Instead it struck a huge blank board, prepared for painting. I tried changing the subject. “This the biggest one you’ve ever used? What is it? Six by nine? How you going to get a nine-foot painting out of this rat rec-center? Ever thought of that?”

  She nodded yes. Still on her knees, yet turned away from me, she thumped toward the living quarters’ big ugly oval “early American” Sears rug. She flipped it back, revealing a nine-foot slot. She’d sawed directly through floorboards to the landing below, sawed right through joists, everything. The hole looked about four inches wider than it needed to be.

  Still glum, she pointed to a cardboard box, and the brand-new red Craftsman ciruclar saw, still plugged in. She was the only person I knew in New York who still ordered things out of a Sears catalogue, one she’d brought in a suitcase from Georgia. Her landlord was not ever going to be happy again. I had to laugh. “I take it back. You never forget how to work hard at playing. I’ll nevermore doubt Baby Divine Idiot. If you told me you had invented a new form of competitive telephone that’d send Bell Tel into chapter eleven and that it involved tin cans and lots of string, I would believe you. You’re a genius. Along with maybe Robert, but, it’s his looks that make us say that. Truth is, you’re the only genius I’ll ever know.”

  I understood, from practice, the kind of crying she was doing now. Type 5. Bobbing shoulders, steady gaze, and low-grade nose drip like a cold hardly noticed. “W
eally?”

  “Geniusgeniusgenius. Plus the best ass downtown.”

  “Why only downtown? No, I’m a fat, lonely spinster. With a tragic need to be overly often fucked.” She said this in babytalk but I understood. Her babytalk was ironic, if still babytalk. I crawled over to retrieve my brush. It’d smeared enamel on her huge gessoed board. One, I now understood, that would get out of here.

  “Start it for me,” she said.

  “Start what? your new painting? I’m no painter. I tried that, remember? At art school, I was always talking the whole time. It disturbed the real artists, my explaining to them what they’d just done with that patch of Naples yellow. Then I started writing words in silver paint right on my canvas, sentences scrolling out nude models’ mouths: ‘Is it cold in here or is it just me?’ Like that. The teacher told me this was an early warning sign for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”

  “Hartley? You once quoted something out of Blake. ‘The creation was an act of mercy.’ To show you that your Ang still can play? And be the idiot … you begin it, friend. I’ll work with that. Play, I mean. Wanna play? ‘Cause, me? I’m easy—I’ll play wib you.”