“Thought you’d never ask.” I heard a sound. Across white flooring still half-tacky, here rolled one yellow felt-tipped Hi-Liter, just the kind I’d seen her use before ever I saw her face. The kind we’d picked to sign a radiator. Maybe the same marker?
She wiped her nose and mouth then eyes onto either shirtsleeve, unself-conscious as a squirrel’s self-grooming. It seemed important, we were both down on all fours like babies previous to needing to actually, like, walk yet. I am not ashamed to admit that everything we said for the rest of that whole day we spoke in babytalk; but I will spare you having to phonetically weed through all that, read through all that.
I next heard the words: “You don’t really love me, not really.” It sounded different in baby talk but no better.
After my spending four hours painting the floor of her friggin’ studio, after all these years together, she could still say that!
“Love you? Love you! If I ever create a masterpiece, it will be convincing you I do. Earth to Angie: I am already your friggin’ slave. The only thing I haven’t done for you is oral sex because I have no aptitude for working with that little. I do convex only. You cut your nine-foot slots but leave me out of it. Where is that goddamn marker? You want me to write? I have complaints. I have threats. I have consumer advisories to those considering being friends with anybody as insecure as you.”
“Spell those out then. What will be will be. I want writing, longhand, but about twelve inches high. Use your beautiful cursive script. Yours looks like some good schoolmaster’s who spends weekends chopping firewood for widows. Me, I’m going to pee. Just do it. None of your usual thinking about it, either, Hamlet BoyToy. Scribble laterally at either end. Go with oppositions. Make a mess. I won’t be two shakes of a mare’s tail after blotting mine with one square of ‘the toilet tissue,’ as my mother calls it.”
Onto the floor, with a whap, she flopped her white board. Down it fell where I still toddled/dottered like somebody very old becoming very young again, or vice versa. Had I been briefly taken off her SS letterhead? She kept the bathroom door open. I could see only her pearly ruddy knees from here. And before I heard Ang yank the overhead chain and flush, I was done.
I sketched curtains, like some puppet theatre, all around the edges. Down at the very bottom front, I outlined my own hand to stand in as the puppet himself. I’d written two huge perpendicular sentences you had to turn your head to read. Then I saw her lighter fluid, and by the time she walked in, I held it to my crotch and was squirting it over my lines and words to make them beautifully “bleed.”
“Atta boy. Why, it’s the little fountain pisser of Brussels. ? is for Posterity. Look at this mess. What do it say?”
The righthand sentence read: I AM YOUR SLAVE AND HAVE BEEN ONLY GOOD TO YOU SO WHEN YOU MARRY A RICH MAN I EXPECT TO BE INVITED TO DECENT DINNERS LIKE CONSTANTLY.
The left end read, in her Nazi fantasy mode: WE HAVE WAYS OF BREAKING YOU, YOUR FINGERS, YOU WILL SUFFER TERRIBLY AND NEVER PAINT AGAIN, NOT EVEN WITH YOUR LI’L FLIPPER-STUMPS, LOVE, THE SS.
“You are so sick!” Her head butted my side. “Even so, I can work around these. I like your drippings, Jackson. First marks are always the hardest ones for me to make. So, even yours’ll do.”
“One last thing. Get your pretty little blotted ass down here. Now place your hand directly beside mine front-and-center. I’ll trace yellow around yours, no, don’t move it yet, I missed most of the pinkie. This is permanent. Look, I’m putting a ring on your hand, a yellow-gold ring. I have taken your hand … not in marriage but in play-like. —Here, how big an ole diamond you want?”
“Bigger than you got.”
“Look. An apple, eighty carats. —Now, do you believe I love you?”
“Some.” She nodded, already squinting toward the fumey canvas, suddenly primed to be only alone with it. “On alternate Mondays. —No hard feelings but … get out?”
The Verb: To Baby
ertain built-in urges were unexpected because, unlike us, they were so slowing, so non-New York. Imagine wanting:
Babies!
We boys stayed freer longer. Can we ever say it often enough?: It is easier being a boy, it’s a real good career move, from day one, coming factory-equipped with a dick.
Women friends finally commenced discussing the urge and itch. And they discussed it and discussed it.
Angie’s mom had blighted motherhood as an art form. But even in Angie, Dalí’s famous limp massive pocketwatches sprawled, clicking, big as wet comforters. Even our more determined girlfriends admitted being inhabited by biological urgencies, tocking, springy, and alarmist. A footrace was implied between their careers and their biology. Would they become Famous before they ceased being Fertile?
Angie soon shamed Robert and me for “not at least trying it at least once.” Groused at, called “chicken” long enough, some of our pals finally ended up in bed with best women friends. I promised Robert I would not father Angie’s junior if he would not; we shook on it. Then we kissed on it. Then he stopped me.
If a straight woman can have efficient sex (if not sex that’s athletic-totalitarian), if she can have it once with her best gay buddy, giver of such “good phone,” and her all-time-fave shopping-companion, her secret sharer, then why not weekly? Why not have at least one adorable blond kid by him soon? Get your childbearing and the drive toward it over with. A good long-range career ploy. And with none of the hassles you knew you’d have with the other kind of guys, their emotional compartments overloaded with Kapok and sports stats.
Angie told Robert and then me (in that order): “Since I trust your taste implicitly—how will you feel about ‘Damien’ for a son, and ‘Chloe’ as the tide for our girl? The name, I mean.”
It got so bad—if we were eating in our Cuban-Chinese place, and if a single woman brought her baby in, and particularly if it was a pretty baby—Angie had to leave. “Womb Warning. Infant: closing at eleven hundred hours,” Robert chanced a joke she made him regret. For about four years, she became allergic to babies as some folks are to cigarettes.
Surely there ought to be a husband for a person as alive and gifted as our Angie. It slowly came to me: In Manhattan, a truly straight, findable, unmarried man is rare as … well … a guy who’s openly queer in the little towns we’d fled.
I bought a white Filipina blouse for her, and a loose replica of Jefferson’s favorite muslin workshirt for Robert, a maroon ascot for Gideon, a used Portuguese-to-Modern-Greek pocket dictionary for Marco and a 1940s cowboy bolo tie for Ansel. It was not a holiday, it was a check from my great aunt marked “I URGE HART TO SPLURGE DAY!” So I did. I delivered each to each at home. It was the day of the blizzard. Reporters called it the storm of the century, but they were always saying that.
What we knew: it had soon snowed for five days solid. On my windowsill, I crumbled stale bagels for my desperate “pet” pigeons. The silence of stalled traffic made our New York Bucolic finally complete. He said, “I happen to have four pairs of Swedish cross-country skis over here.” Soon we all aimed outward, no plans past Central Park, all bundled, Robert in a long black sheepskin nineteenth-century woodsman’s coat he’d found upstate for sixty bucks. Ansel’s skiing outshone everyone’s.
New Yorkers love big clean disasters after living daily with so many minor ones. They finally get credit; they finally most generously give it!
The town looked tidy as a snowstorm from The Magnificent Ambersons. Sledding parties, snowball fights, and blissfully nothing working but the horsedrawn carriages, very popular today.
Only Angie and me—snow-deprived Southerners—felt the total glamour of this town gone white. She saw three off-duty execs rolling a huge snowball figure in the median. “Look,” she said. “A C.E.O. man.”
We skied clear down Park Avenue. We were aiming for the intermediate slopes in Olmsted’s masterpiece, our whole gang, one of our last great times out in the world like this. I zipped past a familiar marquee, the chiseled doorman nodded. I told my f
riends: That’s where Tony Wu lives and, know what? I want him to come out and play with us. I asked their permission. Though they’d heard his charm and particulars described, they’d never seen Tony. So we plotted at a pay phone, me pulling off my mittens, using teeth, seeking dimes in quilted pockets, mine then theirs. I just knew his mother would never let him out.
“Madam Wu? It’s Tony’s tutor, Hartley Mims. Fine, thanks. Yes, storm of the century so they say. I am near your place and believe I have a unique career opportunity for our favorite student. Certain dignitaries were stranded in town during a college admission officers convention. I’ve told them all about Tony. Forgive my bragging. But, can Tony come out and … apply?”
I covered the receiver because my pals were laughing; talking trash. “Apply his skills. I see this as an early chance to sharpen Tony’s interview abilities. —I know this seems impromptu but I wish you’d reconsider. He has no school today. Well … let’s see … I have a Mrs. Byrnes from Harvard, I have Monseigneur Gustafson from Yale. I have Mr. Ansel from Montana’s University Without Walls. Representing Princeton, here’s Mr. Gideon…. Yes, say two minutes? I’ll wait for him out front.”
You never saw anybody happier than Tony running in his yellow snow-suit! He knew it was a ruse to free him, he tried to keep a straight face till we rounded the corner, clear of the doorman’s view. “He spies for her,” my young friend told us as we poled along beside him. “You are my saviors.” He smiled at everybody. “I will never go back.”
“Oh yes you will.”
“Hartley, he’s even cuter than you said. Absolutely edible.” Angie, as usual, stood on ceremony. Then Tony begged me for a favor. He said that a certain person was also marooned in town; he’d come in with his kids to see the Ice Capades, got stuck. Could we call him at the Mayflower, could we pick up and play outdoors with Juan, too? “Why not? The Mayflower’s right by the park, isn’t it?”
Juan had driven his four children from Fort Lee for the ice follies. Their car got lost under some snowplow’s mound. We were all soon in the park together. The kids, in matching hot-pink parkas, were beautiful as their dad. We took them to the swings. Watching Tony ride the seesaw with Juan’s daughter, not much younger than himself, it was all a kind of snowball fight of happiness. Created by experience, it contained an innocence that can only be understood by those still somewhat innocent themselves. The rest need not apply.
I’d skidded along wearing my cowhide backpack, the address book knocking heavy within. Legs aching, we chose to subway home. I remembered to gather up all Robert’s skis but somehow, during our crowded exit, I left my holey backpack on the local. It was a shock beyond the frequent robberies that kept us, by necessity, non-materialist, in six-month purges. The loss of an address book felt different, harder. I went into a sudden depression, atypically durable. My friends actually noticed, offered sympathy. Tragic, just the thought of recollecting all those zip codes one by one. I missed it, as if a pet had died. That Christmas, Angie gloated over the gift she’d got me. I figured it would be more tin soldiers, half a regiment this year. (Neither Robert nor I ever guessed who told her that we really liked those so.)
Instead, her wrapped present had real heft. I ripped in. Here was my old wine-stained address book. Since Angie’s last name started with a ?—, and since many of my A’s were out-of-towners, the guy who’d found the thing had finally phoned her. What’s oddest—I kept listed, in my precious book, the name of everyone I knew … except myself.
“Lifesaver,” I said. “You are a regiment,” and kissed her hand.
Certain Improbable Toddlers Survive
he earlier rumor had been confirmed by a little item in the Times but one no longer than your finger and, back in the C section, buried. The young Japanese guy who framed Angie’s paintings got sick and died in seven weeks. Rumor claimed there was nothing you could do. You would know It by your night sweats or a telltale spot on arms or legs—a spot like Lady Macbeth’s, unwashable-outable.
No test, no cure, no real name for It, and no escape. You were urged to make your will. You just got comfortable, preparing for it. Only comfort was not an option.
But, hey, we daily heard so many rumors. We tried to dismiss this one, too.
After all, somebody who worked nights at the Waldorf swore he had seen the longtime director of the FBI, his face like some ulcer-suffering boxer dog’s. But, this particular night, The Director was wearing a tasteful midnight-blue sequined dress, a real bad brown wig, good heels, while riding up in the staff elevator (rear), and being addressed by his longtime companion, a Randolph Scott lookalike, as “Miss Mary”!
“May God kill me if I’m not telling the whole truth,” the bellhop, a friend of a friend of Robert’s, swore it was dead-true. So, in a world of poison powder sprinkled into frogsuits, of G-men as B-girls, you simply could not believe in some esoteric tropical fever that had not yet happened to you. Or any of your fellow pirates. And so, hearing that a person caught it either from kissing, poppers, public toilets, or the air—knowing we were helpless to in any way defend ourselves, we ignored it. —Hard as we could, we just lived.
With Gideon’s dark unblinking eyes linked to his scary stillness, our boy had stayed insanely seductive. He arrived at my apartment once, ostensibly to see the Hudson while standing on my desk chair. I held his legs steady as he craned. I then felt his rich voice hum through these tibias, “You hold zhem well. I’m wonder, are you zhinking what Iyam?” I had not been, actually. But now he mentioned it…. My futon, my friend, our future, my my. Gideon was the Casbah, and I didn’t even exactly know what the Casbah was.
Gideon often disappeared now into the south of France. Then we got a card at Ossorio’s saying he was in a borrowed beach house beside Princess Margaret’s on some Caribbean isle or other. The views were surely splendid and he painted them well. Using his French love for ready-made American phrases, Gideon would later half boast of these villas that they “came weeth.” Came with a staff of black gardeners and cooks and their darling kids for him to spoil with sweets and coins and hibiscus blooms that, being everywhere, meant little to them.
As if replicating Robert, Gideon partied as one of his several art forms. When in New York, he sometimes took me along. We had an erotic friendship and were like brothers who share a room and, secretly, more. When neither of us had anybody lined up, we would phone and drop in and it was comfortable. These parties he attended always seemed at the home of somebody famous, but hosted by that person’s drug-happy son, or niece, or the secretary’s niece—the star was away on location. We were always late to the restaurant, but they’d held the biggest table anyway. The car had a driver but both were borrowed and the chauffeur couldn’t resist letting us know he knew this. I noticed that none of the people Gideon ran with seemed to care anything about painting, or how good he was at it.
Angie took us on outings to the Guggenheim to see postwar Italian painters I’d never heard of; Gideon knew a little gallery on Madison that sold Biedermeier furniture and that kept, in its backroom, three paintings by Morandi, and the owner was in love with Gideon and so would let us take the pictures down and hold them in our laps like tawny cats. Robert tipped us off to a little Hungarian restaurant across from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and serving a cold cherry soup that, on scalding nights in August, was worth the thirty-minute subway ride to score, for $2.50 (a big bowl). Marco told us which lectures to attend at Cooper Union and the New School and he was rarely wrong. We heard Maurice Sendak, and an Auden-lookalike woman prime minister of Israel; we heard one man whose life was devoted to tracking Nazis; we heard another man who survived the Holocaust and had somehow made himself, professionally, into The Only One. And we sometimes picked people up at these talks.
I remember Robert phoned me, I should rush to Carnegie, this’d be worth the cab fare, we’d hear Janet Baker sing, for free. I hurried in and he stood waiting. I recalled Angie’s fantasy of him as a god of the lobby. While we rushed toward great sea
ts, Robert explained what we’d hear. Mahler, “Songs for Dead Children.” It was written prior to the death of the composer’s own beloved four-year-old daughter, almost a prediction. This would be my own first hearing of the piece. All I knew of it was what my darling had just told me in the aisle and whatever magic the music itself might reveal.
Baker looked like my favorite grammar school teacher, a Miss Crabtree. One minute in, I understood that Baker was a great artist at her peak and, despite my not quite knowing German, I—winded from the gallop here-seemed to slowly understand each word. I tried imagining what it would be like to forfeit one’s beloved children. Having none, I substituted seeing all my manuscripts burned, then upgraded that to losing a friend.
Imagine how titanic an echo chamber this great city would seem without the noise of even one of mine.
A huge bronze bell deprived of one hidden small iron clapper, its sole reason for being, its single means of song.
I could not conceive of this—and so I surrendered to the music, vowing I’d learn instead from that.
The songs’ intensities soon made me restless. Sometimes when you’re experiencing an upheaval, your eyes will choose some resting spot, an arbitrary target. Directly beside Robert to my right, one old old woman wore widow’s black. She had the posture of a question mark. Her collar pin looked like a Josef Hofmann piece, two black coils on a rectangle of silver. She, austere and probably Austrian, held her jawline high in a way so proud it appeared antique. Comportment. Resignation. Dignity, assumed.
The audiences at these events were often elderly elegant Jews, people who’d fled Hitler. They seemed to all know each other. You felt the hauteur of their standards, a snobbery about the only thing that mattered in this new world—what else?—one another. Over the years in New York, I’d come to admire their regal demeanor, dark clothes, courtly nods. They circulated with a warm reserve that gave you this uncanny sense of prewar Viennese culture. The face of the old lady so close by, it soon seemed the best porcelain teacup ever made to then be stomped on by the world’s largest boot. In a way so simple, in a way like breathing, she now sat weeping into a comically tiny, white lace handkerchief.
Plays Well With Others Page 23