Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  Worn past polite now, something extra had commenced standing up in me. Polite moved fast toward bold and was then getting brave, accidentally. At least our veering city’s energy, to some interior hamster running wheel, let me write sentences that, unmeandering, were less badly Jamesian. They lurched more. They learned to live with interruption. They did theme and variation on the New York show tune. Their long solos shot like serum out into a world perhaps incurable.

  One phrase, we’d all of us quit using overnight: No beauty ever again longed to hear himself called “certifiably drop-dead.”

  Bubble Reputation

  ollective anonymity is far easier for a group to bear than disjunct teacher’s-pet promotions. From Fame’s farm team, some of us got singled out for its visible Big League. Others stayed unfairly ignored. Still others yet live there hidden; rising hours before the office opens, working daily to make art. If only art for heart’s sake.

  With our uneven advances, there came jealousies, a souring pettiness. Lovers and best friends fell out, and then made up. Then one prominent rave review wrecked any possible reconciliation forever. Till years and a major success-of-one’s-own made contact possible, made a friendship run even deeper. No one can sympathize with a best-seller’s woes except another best-seller.

  Our Angie had talent, a luck unaccountable, and all the dogged ways to press both further. It’d still taken her forever. I felt personally disappointed; I’d begun to transfer my own hopes of a grand career toward her, toward hers. Angie’s major mentor dropped dead wearing a mortarboard in Providence; he could’ve helped her; his widow would not, would not even return Alabam’s post-eulogy phone calls. Two paintings of his she scouted out in the dorms of South Carolina now hung in the Whitney. She’d received no commission, no inscribed lithograph, no thanks. He never quite got around to writing that long-promised letter of rec: “To whom it may concern, never in my sixty years of painting have I met a young artist more …”

  But, one day, sitting beside two loud travel agents at a lunch counter, Ang learned that the wife of a famous midtown gallery owner was flying to a Mexican mudbath health spa for Christmas, and so Ang (wearing pleats, shirtwaist, mouse-brown hair dye) took out a home-improvement bank loan, paid top dollar for it, learned which plane, which seat, got herself plopped right next to the unsuspecting intended friend. They were soon being mud-packed in adjacent adobe vats. Angie did not let on that she’d ever painted anything more ambitious than her toenails. They mainly enjoyed full-strength N.Y. girltalk. They swapped paperback novels; they laughed to find they’d both brought the latest trash-pop best-seller: Why Brilliant Careerwomen Still Choose Cavemen: Those Who’ve Recovered Look Back. They starved over single green beans (exquisitely prepared). According to Angie—their massage teacher insisted that they practice “deep muscle” on each other. By Valentine’s Day, our talented friend, having finally admitted to “painting some, and even semiseriously every six months,” could claim a new gallery, two new mentors, and a home-improvement loan rolling on at 14 percent interest. By April Fools’ Day, she’d repaid the loan.

  For me, the fun of her big moment finally arriving was undercut; I resented all she’d had to do to get her remarkable pictures seen. I had written and submitted articles to Art News and ten other magazines that are no more. They didn’t know me, they didn’t know her, they didn’t even return my self-addressed post-paid efforts. One dealer had told Angie, “Your problem is you’re not enough like anyone else. You lack context. You need a movement. Art history moves in convoys.”

  “You know what the Captain of the Titanic told those in first class? ‘Don’t worry, we’re just stopping for ice.’ If I’m not a movement, will a little motion do?” She flipped him the bird, left.

  But then, hey, she overhears two travel agents … “Whatever,” she said when I was dumb enough to act grouchy at how late her good luck finally waltzed in. I told her it just seemed unfair to me.

  “Look, Hart. All I ever wanted was to get my workshop onstage. My form of stage fright has been the fright of never finding one. But from now on, from Angiebama’s spot center stage, everything takes care of itself. If they try and get me off it, expect quite the catfight. Bet on my staying put. —I will never sling no hash no mo.”

  Ms. Byrnes’s first one-person show opened to raves, October first.

  “Odd that in a town called New York so little should feel genuinely fresh and novel. But, on Thursday night …”

  She’d lived in the Celestial Cesspool City seven years.

  And come Halloween, under the arch of Washington Square, in a witch’s rite, we, the gathered, burned her waitress uniform. Plus that dreadful little frilly white Dacron cap. Its smell rose, noxious. Like so much else, in our pagan Village, it did not want to end.

  Suddenly, recent best friends were saying, “She never really cared about us anyway. Was always just milking us for her starter-level contacts. Loads of charm, Angie, and great hair, a steel rat-trap for a mind, and not that bad of a flashy painter really but, underneath, pure user. Borrowing paint in the middle of the night, and never replacing it. That girl had the ethics of a virus.”

  But, against the odds and punishment of friends’ successes, I still envision a silver paint tube, unopened, brand-new. So blue a blue is coiled in there, concentrated blood of the sky itself—the most costly of all blues. I see it in the rosy farm-strengthened hand of a Montana wheat-grower’s boy on the IRT, then the shuttle, then the Lexington Avenue IRT, then back on the IND, then back across town at Grand Central where all the predawn screaming crazies would be echoing, then up to Harlem on an IRT not wholly un-dangerous at three-thirty a.m., and finally to bed. (A trip nearly circuitous and stressful as the sperm seeking/finding the ovum.)

  I, forty-seven, know now to remember this, to honor it by listing it here, addressing its valor. Come morning, the kid who’d delivered his only cerulean blue via train (paint’s price $9.98 in 1984 dollars)—would barely recall the trip. And, even if reminded, he surely wouldn’t think it notable. Looking back, I—a bald(ing) to bald man of forty-seven—try and save it. A deed like art itself. Like art, a gesture made by one—yet shedding a light communal. And he never got his paint or money back!

  If there is a blue paradise, he belongs there, just for doing that. Seeing that there probably isn’t, this bulletin board notice will simply have to do. And since he, Ansel, our photographer farm kid with the “jewelry collection,” died at thirty-one, I will remember for him. Shall I keep him in the Book?

  It is a strange fairy tale, how we got here, how so many of our crowd knocked off so early, how our entire palace-liner drifted, stilled toward the bottom, then fell to sleep. The Titanic settled fully two and a half miles below the troubled surface.

  Only a few of us yet remain alive, holding flashlights, somehow still breathing at this depth, allowed to move about the sunken ballroom—each clutching a tattered hall pass and our one trivial precious light source—each saying aloud, to them and to eternity, our only mantra-motto-logo, the names of these, our adored fellow passengers, lost.

  Our voyagers lost.

  Lost. But still, in us, listed.

  Performance Finally

  isease itself was already “in” some of us. Soon life really felt like one of those pod people movies that we’d hooted through at midnight shows. There’s just one other survivor on earth, everybody else has “turned.” Then your single friend, lonely as you, moves to kiss you and, yuk, the Fangs, the Gills!

  Surface-wise, our days still meant pooled resources, the compensations of being somewhat young, still good looking, as yet generally desired. We waited, but while playing.

  Now, there was a far younger set, all punked up in ways that soon seemed to us comic and affected and endearing if misguided. “I saw a boy today with a ballpoint pen stuck through his cheek,” Angie announced at our table.

  “Awful—how’d it get there?”

  “He rammed it in there, dumbie. As a beauty aid. How old
am I? Ask me.”

  I did. “I’m so old, so out of it, I still just wanna look good.”

  “Pathetic Retro Passed-over Bitch! Acetone off her mascara! Burn that woman’s sweater sets!”

  Bouncers still waved us in (though we secretly felt fairly long in the tooth)—while the silver-haired limo crowd waited, segregated behind maroon velvet cordons, sulking at our mysterious cachet. That part was nice. There was still the joy of being “active sexually,” as our parents put it in their letters: “We know you’re having a lovely time with your young friends, but we hope you are not, darling, being too active sexually.”

  Right.

  Tell Niagara, “Now remember to wear your rubbers, hon, stay dry.”

  Just as one portion of my address book finally started—if a decade or so late—to become well known, that portion and another commenced feeling older than it really should. Sooner than we quite expected, we were grousing about undignified limitations known mainly from our parents. “My back is killing me, I never plan to leave this chair again, what happened to all my energy, I don’t need new friends, can’t keep up with the ones I’ve got.” So ran our parents’ gripe-fests we’d vowed never to repeat.

  Robert’s Symphony no. l: The Titanic, had not yet heard a single note of itself. Six years in progress, it was nearly two movements complete. His beauty had been more regularly performed and praised and practiced. (Soon as I finished writing a story, I could rush it toward loved ones; Angie’s paintings were nine feet across and highly colored and dared you not to “get” them at a glance. But among our circle, only Robert’s symphonic work remained a mystery.)

  Ned Rorem said of Robert, “Quite possibly the best-looking, truly talented new boy in the world of serious New York music since … well, since me.” Now Robert had quit vocational partying long enough to get his brilliance moving. He had always worked, but now he ruddered a project so immense it called forth newer energies, wilder risks. The mugging and its months of blindness kept him home; there he began to dictate; soon a sheaf of pages became a pile.

  The First Symphony had been accomplishing itself only onto copy paper. But it was created there with the glacier-inexorability of a native Mid-westerner getting something done, once but well. There now seemed the hope of a eventual premiere in Hartford, through a friend of a friend sort of thing.

  Thanks to Robert’s generosity toward the legions who loved him, there were many friends to have friends of.

  One was Mr. Copland. An all-day performance of Aaron Copland’s work would be staged uptown. “Wall-to-Wall Copland,” it was called. The deeply venerable, successfully closeted, and fully smitten old composer phoned young Robert with an offer.

  Since an orchestra would be assembled anyway—to play “Appalachian Spring” and “Rodeo” yet again, maybe, before the doors opened—Would Robert like to hear a cold sight-reading run-through by New York’s topflight pickup musicians? of whatever was completed of his First? of Robert C. Gustafson’s Symphony?

  Yes, sir! That meant we, Robbie’s handpicked claque, had to arrive at the hall by six-forty-five a.m. Mr. Copland himself must also be there then. (He, over eighty, would conduct Robert’s piece, then leave during the daylong playing of his more familiar music, reappearing only for a difficult favorite work [his Piano Concerto] at nine p.m. So Copland would be using his day’s main energy on his protégé’s music, not his own. He, obliging, said he had heard his own so often.)

  Robert typically invited everyone. Even his parents who, if thrilled, declined, “We’ll come when you have more free time for fun and us.”

  All Robert’s prima donnas of both sexes promised to try arriving exactly when expected. “This must be major,” he said as each of them, usually temperamental tardiness embodied, bustled forward, some actually early. All were overdressed, each perfectly in character.

  I stood with Robert at the corner of Broadway and Ninety-sixth. Here the West Side subways all rumble and ungorge. Most of our downtown gang would arrive by train. The rest would turn up on foot, probably in heels.

  Somehow I remember every detail of that day. I felt I was finally about to “have” New York. In memory, the morning when we heard the first of Robert’s First remains the light-filled high point of our innocence, being the last full day of it.

  Nina Fouquet-Marshall, always at the front of any line for flu shots and still on call as fourth alternate understudy to young Stratas at the Met, rounded a corner. Nina was wearing blue and white polkadots, a flair-skirted number with matching clamp and net hat (very Jackie Kennedy) from her Met heyday (one day only). Her outfit, rustling, had come right back into style. “If you don’t look fabulous,” Robert smiled.

  “Thank you, dear. Ciao. A great occasion in the history of American music. —Your Nina’s just honored to be included. On the dot, you’ll notice. We pros? We can do that for each other.” Eager to make an impression, Nina admitted she planned slipping “Aaron” this…. A tastefully gift wrapped (cowboy buckeroo paper, “Rodeo,” get it?) cassette of Nina Fouquet-Marshall’s own finest versions of Copland’s best art songs.

  “And, with the new dirge-slow tempo I’ve chosen for ‘I Had Me a Cat,’ I do not think Aaron’ll be displeased.”

  Angie rose like Venus, from the subway’s mouth, smoking. Pointing to her watch, she said, “It is six-forty-five a.m. Subways open before noon? Am I here yet?”

  “Completely,” Robert said, “and just look at you, beyond fashion.”

  She’d lately tried upgrading her usual paint-stained gear and bikeboy drag to actual, like, dresses. Ang admitted she’d not yet found a style quite wholly hers. Today, our Ms. Byrnes sported a rust-colored forties suit, boxy shoulders far too wide for someone so short. She’d borrowed one of Ansel’s better copper pins, shaped as a calla lily. With her hennaed hair slicked back like some boy criminal’s, her white skin looked beautiful and stark. And yet, little wrinkles, crackled laugh lines, fanned from the outer corners of each amber eye. Experience and abandon suddenly showed in morning light. We usually lurked in Ossorio’s cave, or else it was night. We never saw each other so early and in so much, like, sun. Young as we were, we’d already gotten older.

  Her lipstick was the darkest of shades, somewhere between rust, blood, and grapeade. It, alone, was absolutely perfect on her. Angie did have such a sumptuous symmetrical mouth.

  That mouth now spoke to the composer: “Hey, History’s Han’somest Prince Golden. All fer you, genius-y boy.” And from behind her, two dozen white calla lilies lurched, noddish, breasty, white, so “period.” She pressed these against him. She went on tiptoe to nibble his left ear. He laughed, staring over her shoulder, winking at me. He had to have all of us, didn’t he? He already had us all.

  Robbie’s platinum lashes looked beautiful pressed shut for love of his darling. My feelings for him just then made me feel stricken, blanched. And still, above his shut right eye, the bow-shaped scar from a pistol barrel whose wet crack I recalled completely as some rainy place I could still visit. I should’ve prevented their hurting him.

  As Robert’s own fashion statement, he’d chosen an ancient too-large $6 Nick Charles tuxedo, aerodynamic thirties lapels. Plus my Thomas Jefferson gift shirt. For a tie, one long red argyle shoestring knotted in a bow to match the laces of those in his red Converse All Stars. The tux sleeves were too floppily long, so Robbie’d just doubled these over and folded them back at six-inch intervals—to reveal his pale ideal forearms, one knot of moon-white biceps.

  When, next season, designers forced all New York men to turn their jacket arms up this way, we swore they’d seen Robert outside Symphony Space on this, his day of days.

  Gustafson kept grinning, and in so much daylight.

  Gideon arrived lateish by cab, another new cashmere sweater tossed over his shoulder. Broke as usual, as usual he waved a blithe “Keep the change” to the snaggled smile of a cabbie who kissed the bill and offered Gideon Allah’s blessing. Since Gideon now owed several of us more money than
any of us could quite afford, we stared after that departing ten-spot with mixed emotions, even today.

  Marco pedaled up on his bike plastered with insults to all autos. The basket filled with pastel political leaflets, his one concession to dandyism. Waving, he set about chaining it to something architectural, anything very there.

  As we faced the theatre, Ansel wandered up, at a Montana cowboy’s rate, bolo tie evident, its silver tips swinging, male, and so easy on the eye in all his denim elongation.

  I don’t remember what I wore.

  We now presented ourself at brushed chromium doors marked, “Wall to Wall Copland.” Passersby, amused yet disdainful of our outfits, spared us outright sneers. Something in our solidarity today, something in our Ivy assurance must’ve held off their fullest scoffs, sensing we might turn up in the Times come Sunday, fearing we might actually someday be somebody. And (at least) collectively, we already were.

  The Circle faced a uniformed guard. We all pointed to our pirate-captain, flying foremost in his baggy evening clothes. We announced, as one, “The Composer. We’re with HIM.” The gatekeeper laughed at such rehearsed-sounding fusion. In we swept. After our years of party-crashing, this was one time we all felt utterly entitled to the star treatment.

  (At Angie’s big opening last fall, the crowd had been so chilly and Uptown. We’d appeared uneasily conspicuous Dickensian in our downtown drag as she worked the room and left us in one corner.)

  Our joy today was because of: RobertRobertRobert. Robert’s rightful, cushy entrance, finally. And we so fully with him, as we had been for so long. No matter that it was not yet seven a.m. No matter that this auditorium felt freezing. No matter that we ourselves must, as usual, suffice as our own drum-beating publicists, then our major audience. That was mostly all we’d known.