After he accepted Maestro’s muttered notes and headshakes from the stage’s edge, after Robbie was told by elderly ushers just how good he was and going to get greater, we could all troup off to a bistro that—through a landlord of an ex-lover sort of thing, Angie via Ossorio’s brother, had talked into opening early—and, by ten a.m., we were drunk on my favorite low-cost high-impact dry champagne, Chilean.
The great inevitable vessel, christened. Maiden voyage.
And it was during this endless festivity, we established another fact that joined us all for life. I can’t remember quite how it emerged. Maybe someone was saying, defensive, we can’t all be geniuses. Marco stated Harry Truman’s famous edict, “The world is run by C students.” And somebody else, Angie, started quoting the Georgia public school’s evaluation of her own rotten character. We all laughed, amazed. It seemed their view of her was precisely our own schools’ vision of us.
Across many state lines, far-flung bitter teachers had described—and therefore created—our circle:
“Though she talks too much in class, plots constantly, and works far below potential, and though we have found her to be a terrible troublemaker when bored (easily is), she does seem a ‘creative’ if messy child, and plays well with others.”
Perhaps …
obert, at last coming into his own artistically, had finally conceded he was mainly gay, after charming and confusing Angie and ten more chain-smoking hennaed girlfriends (who each finally guessed before he did), and after steeping himself in Ravel’s suave dewy orchestration, he’d grown somewhat surer of his own idiom and inherent decent force, reading John Stonewell of the Times call him “possibly something new under the sun. We find a true melodic gift at war with and finally overriding a more astringent atonal expressionism. The subject of the liner Titanic’s optimistic (not to say arrogant) launching—also on April fourteenth (but in 1912)—provokes young Gustafson into a brilliant synthesis of nineteenth-century tuneful grandeur soon swamped and eventually sunk by a fatal cacophonous twentieth-century weight. Gustafson, just 33, a Curtis graduate, also studied agriculture at the State University of Iowa! In this single piece, he has seemingly used everything that ever happened to him and to the U.S.A. generally. That is both the unfinished symphony’s triumph and its possible problem. Gustafson turns out, as Mr. Copland privately predicted, to be a prodigy of some scope. If one has reservations, those stem from the composer’s rushing to try all effects at once. The piece sometimes displays an ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ inventory. As with many young composers, Gustafson must learn to trust the long career that so clearly stretches before him. No doubt the crowdedness simply indicates how great a fertility will serve him ahead. Though he has been a feature of New York’s music scene for nearly a decade, his piece seems written elsewhere. Under the Midwest’s landbound rectitude maybe just this opulent will for voyaging has always burned. We look forward to hearing whatever might next emerge from this season’s decided novelty, young Robert Christian Gustafson.” This same Robert admitted he did feel tired here lately.
He had been on the road a lot since the great launching.
He was out of town so often that I had to gather his mail and take in the gift champagne and floral sprays that kept arriving late. All his Café society friends—“Nescafé Society,” Angie called them—seemed delighted to have found him first and then to discover him discovered! They gave themselves full credit, as if his musical gift were what had first turned their heads. They sent Robert orchids and chockies and huge ridiculous stuffed toys, a shop’s worth of vintage bubbly. I settled it into his fridge, worried I’d finally corrupt him. In there, I found two half-empty amber vials of cocaine. Gifts, too, I hoped. Used by guests, I trusted.
The week after the review, along with seafoam drifts of pink flyers from Empire Szechuan, the hallway outside his place remained an obstacle course of gifts. I passed the canned macadamia nuts and two good bottles to his loyal neighbor, Alberta.
Just after the Times piece, his usual invitations tripled, but now he was asked to speak at colleges and seminars on The New Music, whatever that was. His, I guess. Robbie toured with a string quartet that spiked its hair and played as well as the squares did but chose far cooler things. They commissioned hip comers like Gustafson to write the quartets they soon shopped around at concerts for our sleeker universities.
I knew Robert would be arriving home in the next few days. Having a key of my own, I chose to wander in his place, a sedative, and work there. I was nearly finished with a memoir about my father’s parents and a touring gospel singing group they joined. It’s the oddest tale—my farmer-merchant grand-folks wandered into Falls on market day, heard a traveling choir so good that they clambered up onto the flatbed Ford truck and rode off for five months, leaving their chickens and their children. Joined a cult, come to think of it. In some attempt to match up my life’s work with the tragic face of that Austrian woman crying at Carnegie, I’d now revised my own list of suitable subjects. Instead of focusing on my mother’s faintly aristocratic Scottish forebears, I was fessing up to certain trashier aspects of Daddy’s redclay clan. I sensed that my work’s lovely surfaces needed more difficulty rubbled underneath. Robert’s shipwreck had inspired me. So did the depths implied in Alabama’s lyrical yet scratchy pictures.
Her belated good career luck held. A Southerner had recently been elected U.S. President. His wife came from Alabama. One of the First Lady’s pet projects was extremely visible, and comfortingly uncontroversial: bringing the arts of that underrated state to national attention.
Neither Angie nor her dealer had seen fit to trouble our young First Lady with any geographical tedium about the painter hailing from Georgia and now living, actually, in New York. So, it was in this way that, not four weeks after Robert’s stellar review, Angie, alongside one of her best and largest paintings, shoulder to shoulder with the President’s blond wife, appeared in a famous supermarket celeb magazine. It is rare for serious painters to become mainline notorious. The last one to do so had glued cracked dinner-plate settings for sixty onto his pocked pictures. He had an ego the size of his weight problem. Angie seemed the next. My darling was not caught unprepared.
Wise, she commissioned Alberta to make her a beaded top, one patterned to resemble her namesake state. The bodice map featured favorite sequined crops and cities of interest. Angie later made fun of the whole White House opening; but she admitted enjoying her caustic informed Powder Room powwow with the First Lady, who had attended Wellesley with three great girls Angie knew from Savannah. So, again for reasons other than her major talent, Alabama Byrnes’s paintings were being reserved before she could complete them.
“My problem now is how not to hurry. Interesting switch,” she told me as we both sat, pining for Robert’s return. “I am despised enough these days without pressing too hard on this Alabama statehood stuff. ‘Hush, ye many-peopled streets of Tuscaloosa.’ You should read the vicious letter I just got from some three-named lady who ‘spearheads’ (her word not mine) the Alabama Arts Council. She wants my pedigree. She hinted I should send along my birth certificate to justify myself. I plan to make a goodly donation—two drawings—to their Arts Council, just to smooth their feathers about my real nationality and get them to shut the fuck up. I wrote her exactly what I told them at the White House when they asked point-blank. Said I’d spent many a happy summer in Montgomery with my grandmother. I claimed my grandmother was a second cousin of Montgomery’s top deb ever, Zelda Fitzgerald. Hartley? Wasn’t Zelda’s maiden name Sayre?”
“Think so.” Of course I knew.
“I should have brought over that letter I wrote and showed it to you first, so you could make it stylish and check my waitressy spelling.”
“Ahah. Well, thanks for thinking of me, but I’m actually working on something of my own …” And I nearly added, sudden bitch and grouch, “believe it or not.”
“‘Believe it or not’? Well, I see.” And Angibama gave me such
a look.
But it was their picture in the Times that really did me in. After the review, the Philharmonic asked to play an excerpt from Robert’s Titanic and though I attended (it was strangely less thrilling than that early morning, the first time. The orchestra was more technically capable but …) there was a party afterward but they’d only sent him a couple of invites, so naturally he took Angie. It was the week her White House magazine pic came out.
I’d grown used to finding Robert depicted amid society dames and those patriot comics who tour for our troops abroad. It’d even been a pleasing shocker to see her, with the President’s wife. Like Ang, the painting behind them photographed so well. But discovering my two best friends alone together, my darlings, beaming, she in her Alabama top yet again—that was different, that felt somewhat harder. They were no longer the decorative young lions asked into the shot. They were the event now. Both of them appeared, arm in arm, absolutely made for each other and … happy. Plus, the picture rested equidistant between the Society page and the Arts section, so you didn’t know if it meant fluff or news: “Composer Robert Christian Gustafson, whose Symphony no. l: The Titanic was previewed last night by emeritus guest-conductor Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, enjoys a light moment with companion, the young painter Alabama Byrnes, whose work was recently featured in the First Lady’s White House ArtsAlabama Talent Showcase.” I got out Scotch tape, I dutifully affixed my best friends’ grainy image alongside the postcard of van Gogh’s retreat. But every time I sat down to type, my eyes flew right to them, I lost the power of speech.
Their Clipping Service
e had a cold snap that May and my two-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment felt freezing as I sat looking at a clipping from the Times, my two closest friends at a party I had been such a good sport about missing.
I would not say I was feeling directly jealous of my friends. Not exactly. It helped to know that each person depicted was carrying his/her address book. The roving photographer must’ve caught them as each was headed to the bathrooms where the pay phones lurk. Robert was shown holding “The Bag,” a green brocade sack that Christmas liqueur had once come in, one he stuffed with scraps of paper, names and numbers of the mythically unlisted. Under Angie’s right arm, the same red cookbook binder she’d worked from when I met her, a work long since revised, since the thing had binding rings and pages could be replaced, as the entries’ quality rose. Anybody else, seeing such objects in the hands of these two handsome productive youngsters, might have thought he held her purse and she the score of his symphony. I knew better. But this offered me not all that much consolation.
When my parents phoned from Florida and left a message on my machine to say they’d chanced to see the picture “because the Albertsons subscribe” and to congratulate me on my friends’ doing so well, I breathed deep, and tried to write fiction about the traveling gospel choir that was, for reasons now lost on me, my current pathetic subject.
I was glad for my pals, but I would’ve felt somewhat more happy if there had been three in the picture. Three is such an interesting number, don’t you find?
I’d hardly had a private word with Robert since the great event. I’d certainly never approached him about the matter of one spot no broader than a collar button. I told myself that bringing it up now would look like latent sour grapes. Besides, since there was no cure, no health regime that helped, what good would it do him to worry about this during these first days his ship had finally come in?
The morning after their Times photo, I’d stopped by Ossorio’s, expecting no one. Through the window, I saw Angiebama alive and in person. It was such a delightful shock, I literally ran toward the table. But she was giving an interview. At our table.
She introduced me and asked if I minded waiting. The journalist and the photographer and their three assistants were all hip humorless unwashed young Germans. Cigarette smoke formed a minaret above our table. The Germans were really “into” her, I was now told during some attempt at inclusion. Angie informed them I was a coming young writer. “Really,” the journalist said, looking critically at my shirt. I hung around only because it would’ve been too rude, dashing off. Grouch that I was that week, I soon had to admire the way she managed them.
In one of her Honored Owl finds, a book on optics, I’d scouted out a brilliant phrase, one I quoted to her. Now I heard her say, “My color? I deal in oppositions. A hard battle can make a good marriage. As our great Goethe teaches, ‘Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.’” In the way of journalists, I saw the shaggy young reporter flinch with joy, cut his eyes at the photographer during the erogenous word “Goethe.” I sensed she had just given them the headline for their Alabama piece, and from the epigraph that I had given her from a book she’d first shown me. When they turned away to pack up gear, she flashed me one collusive wink that made me feel almost human again, partly included.
When alone at last, we spoke of Robert’s return, how drained he felt from all the travel, how she feared he was involved with at least one half of the Smug Quartet, how all he wanted to do now was come home and hide and sleep and finish his First. I was still awed by the review he’d gotten. I’d memorized it. She smiled, “Number One, it was mixed, extravagant but mixed. Of course, you’re too fuck-witted to notice. Number Two, in each department, each reviewing wing of the Times, you get twelve reviews like that per year. It’s just an IOU, Hartley. The amount they claim is owed, that’s what’s attention-getting. He’s still got the National Debt to make good on. That’s different, honey, from the actual payoff.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’ve clearly thought this out.”
“What else have I been thinking about for the last few years but work and him. And, you, too.”
“Why are we always talking about him, Angie? Last Thursday, I saw a young boy, a young young young blond, who was even more beautiful. Why Robert?”
This time, she looked startled.
“You’re not suggesting we be de-programmed and leave the cult, are you, dickbreath? It’s too late for both of us. Some matron at that Lincoln Center party said Robert looked like a park statue come to life. If you call such a statue ‘Honor,’ that seems true. You name him ‘To All Fallen Soldiers,’ who’d argue? That’s our whip-wielder all over. He’s whatever anybody needs perfection to be. Once at a disco, I saw him by accident. He was with those idiotic fashion anorexics he used to fuck because they look more like eleven-year-old boys than eleven-year-old boys and a lot easier to get into without a can opener. He was with that coked-out watercress and cocaine coven. He was making them laugh tough. How? by doing the ‘funky chicken’ and his James Brown imitation, with a tablecloth as his cape. And not one of them looked stupider just then. And they loved him for it. I fell for Robbie because I thought he was as ruthless as I, chile. Turns out, I was wrong. About me. Hartley, the way you see him, he’s a face like a jonquil and his pedestal says ‘Virtue.’ You make Robert good because you can’t think of anything else you qualify to be. I’d follow him to hell and back. You, too. I know how much you love him. Well, so do others; it’s Titanic-sized with others. Fifteen hundred people have loved him as much as we do. And instead of turning us off …”
“I don’t think I want to hear this …”
Okay then. She told me I would probably be inspired by the new Francis Bacon pictures at Marlborough; Robbie loved the work; she’d stopped by the opening last night, had actually met Bacon. “He’s like some little shrunken-head cherub from hell. Like his paintings, a face the color of groundround. Very funny, caustic, bad to drink. We wound up giving grades—one to ten—for every waiter serving.” She herself had to rush off now to what she blithely called “a shoot” and, after … (I saw her hesitate to tell, but our habit of candor still proved too hard to break)… In a rushy urbane way, she complained that, vulgar as it sounded, her four o’clock might be fun: A famous woman clothing designer, always wearing black, erotically obsessed with her lookalike teenaged daughter, h
ad asked Angie about her Alabama beaded top and when Ang admitted to making it up herself, this commercial wiz saw a possible “new line.”
“She imagines I am going to do, either under my name or no, but better, yes, forty-nine others. You ready for this? ‘Tops of the States’! I ask you. She goes, ‘Bama, if I may call you that: It’s personal, it’s vernacular, it’s zappy mappy JasperJohnsish—and like you, I’m sorry, but it’s just so fucking NOW!’
“Of course, I wouldn’t touch such a project, of course, but still the ride is funny, it’s … just …” And, stalled, she bent, placed her forefinger to my mouth, as if seeking to hush me, and not her own talkative self. “Hart? You musn’t mind Raggedy Angie’s enjoying all this for whatever jackflash fifteen seconds it lasts her. You know it’s only fashion. I’d pull for you …”
“I know,” I said, even while deciding, “You’d pull for me if I had any talent or acclaim or one scrap of your unbelievable luck.”
I wanted to talk about Robert’s spot but I saw it’d queer her playful mood today. And when she, looking so great with the best haircut ever, a two-hundred-dollar job, rose, gathering all her gear, when she bent to buss my either cheek, I smiled up at her. Something made me say, “To quote Cole Porter, ‘You’re the Tops.’ Maybe they’ll let you handpaint a special department store edition.”
“Ouch-ette,” Ang pretended not to mind, and I longed to call it back but she was already passing our window as she luffed my way a customary parting kiss, my friend was gone.
Now, the evening of that same day, road crews kept tearing up a single patch of street, the fourth time in six months (graft, Union and Mafia controlled). The night work crew had been driving me mad with its jackhammer noise. Otherwise, hushed was our once many-peopled block and I felt restless for my pals, for our old days, “hungry” and hungry. I nearly felt the slightest bit sorry for myself. Who on earth was ever going to buy a hardhitting documentary piece about some tapeworm-riddled Baptists singing all over Carolina from their yellow truck painted almost black with scrawled Bible scoldings?
Plays Well With Others Page 27