Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  After the chill, May had once more grown warm as May should be. Summer again. By now I felt so at home on our block, during hotter months, I left off wearing shoes. The pet-do scooper law was being enforced; only that made this old pleasure possible. Just as I’d worn a nightshirt downstairs by accident, there was such comfort padding along a city street, your feet nude. It can feel like suede, the nighttime pavement, cooling. Summers at home, we kids wore shoes only to church or doctors’ office visits. (Looking back, I see this urge to run barefoot in Manhattan was one early warning sign of homesickness for North Carolina.)

  As my solitary dinner, I’d eaten almost a pound of cherries, just come into season. Cherries, especially the first ones each year, always make me happy.

  I was in a strange receptive jumpy mood after eavesdropping on Angie’s interview, hearing her detached medical version of our communicable RobertRobertRobertitis, then seeing that show of new paintings by Francis Bacon. Angie had insisted I go and, as usual, damn her, she was right; it was incredible, upsetting work. Bacon kept depicting two nude white men humped over each other in some excess of erotic greed. They were usually eyeless and their pose showed a leaden suet will to do only what each did, with no more love than dogs show while fucking. I remember thinking these figures must be based not on photographs of lovers, not even on Bacon’s personal memories. No, these guys seemed painted from life, done very fast—of the people in some low-rent apartment just across the way, rutting people who do not know they are being watched or preserved, even by each other.

  Letting myself in downstairs, I saw that Alberta—across the hall—was up late working as ever; it must be around one or so. I thought of going in and complimenting her on the beaded Alabama top, championing Alberta as the unacknowledged creator of the thing, but, this bushed, I decided against it. Robert had known to ask her to whip up his New York cocktail tweed, and Bama commissioned a state map in Ziegfeld bugle beads; and who would I be, as clothing—a blazer made of Baptist choir robe, and Confederate gray, what? I was so friggin’ sick of talking about all this. About them. Alberta’s music rolled on, scratchy, Rudy Vallee doing hits describing midnight terraces, a cottage for sale. Waving her cigarette my way, she signaled that her cat was over visiting R’s place.

  It sometimes pleased me to just wander up to Robert’s apartment and take naps in the mythic Ludwig-gondola of a bed. I had never plundered any of Robert’s drawers or trunks or closets, even though I longed to. I wanted that too much to actually indulge it. No, I had standards; I only read those items left right on top!

  God knows what-all lurks in a park statue’s pedestal closet.

  Alberta’s yellow cat slipped out of Robert’s half-cracked door as I slid in. Barefoot, I wandered to the bed and, using his short ladder, clambered up onto it. Feeling somewhat better already, I sat on its side nearest half-lit windows. Across the street, our pizzeria’s neon; the pink word “Slice” became a blue pie-triangle then returned, a pink if violent word. Four windows’ suspended crystals—gifts mostly, now hung plentiful as icicles. They seemed to burn with a green light; odd, since I’d just left the street and had seen nothing there that color. Green also burned in the fishtank supporting its little balsa wood and canvas baby Titanic. The ship floated there in perfect silhouette. A scale model good enough can convince you that the room is giantized, not it, condensed.

  I was feeling, not exactly blue myself, but certainly wistful, more than a bit left out. He would be back in a day or two. Once he was composing here again, maybe things’d calm back down, our old schedule regained. Increasingly to me, that in itself seemed paradise.

  It usually helped to scuff over here, check out his place, then head right back to my own, smaller digs. He’d been gone for ten whole days. By phone three nights back, Ang and I reinventoried his merits—finding a few new ones—then, as ever, we sighed, made the kissy sound, and hung up, each of us still alone.

  Tonight I’d brought along my manuscript, I moved to turn on the crook-neck lamp clamped onto his hospital breakfast tray. I felt giddy, sinuses burning, then heard something in the corner by the broom closet. Floorboards creaked twice, stopped, continued. My eyes had at last grown half-accustomed to the half-dark.

  Just then a police car passed, its red flasher spinning, and—with that—I slowly made out two forms. Caucasian, they were somewhat crimped atop each other, right down on the kitchen floor. The two were stretched out not fourteen feet from me. Maybe I had been so silent in arriving barefoot. Maybe the kitchen counter blocked whatever view they’d have of me. This place was often lent to whatever couples Robert currently promoted. Maybe that was how this pair came to be here, certainly making good use of Robbie’s floorspace.

  Came a louder thumping, old planks all but croaking with greater pressure and fixed grunts. It sounded like the usual wrestling had overshot even a particularly good athletic fuck. I considered tiptoeing right back out. I couldn’t really see them, be they guys or girls, could only hear their strain, could just squint toward bareness, an act quite unmistakable. “No, not … Daaaddy, not that one …” the voice, some adolescent boy’s, half-known, and then, I, driven, sick, reached for lamp and met—in its bleaching light—two faces turning this way.

  Their mouths hung open, one just above the other. A totem pole of grimace. Each mask varnished in sweat. On the floor, near her splayed palms, a small brown jar, two emptied bottles of champagne. With such light in their faces, their heads looked big, rounded, somehow ringed—jagged cutaways of great tree trunks newly felled. Though I already knew, I told myself I couldn’t recognize the couple. Though they aimed my way, though half the kitchen chopping block shielded them, I—like a kid, determined to deny everything while missing nothing “good”—scampered to the bed’s far end. I clung to the pineappled upright due Northwest. Suddenly slowly it registered.

  Their eyes were like the only four red vents they had to breathe through. Under Robert was not a boy he was so seriously fucking in the bum, but a person distinctly Angie-like. Yes. Mine, ours, her, it, us. Them. Doing this. He’s the tops, she’s bottom-feeding, really truly getting it.

  On all fours beneath him, she was stuck as in some doghouse. His right arm crooked just under her neck. Both of them frozen, as in some superstitious form of visual prevention. Stay still perfectly, you’ll disappear. And both, I knew, were still too far into the force of it to quite pull back, to quite snap out just yet.

  Though light stayed hard on them, I saw his lower body unstopped, helpless as an animal, getting in a few last good ones.

  Okay, this seems to be happening.

  Okay.

  I always figured that Robert fucking would appear to be some hovering archangel. I’d always pictured him floating in this bed above me, “a human form” made of light like spun fiberglass, no, white cotton candy. But never resembling the beast we all of us are. Not my darling. But Robert, drunk, appeared just another Bacon raptor. He looked made only of the male, only all of beef.

  Weight pivoted on one vexed arm, his face hung listless, blood-filled, spongy, ruddy as a cow udder.

  “You started playing without me.” They, blinking, still engaged, tried so hard to contort themselves invisible. “—Since when? Since … in the beginning?”

  How must my own face look right now?

  They both acted as if, being a single two-backed cretinbeast, by remaining deaf, they could make me disappear the fastest. I dearly wanted to. Be dead. I still held my manuscript but it had somehow rolled itself into my single weapon.

  I recalled my father’s face, how huge and raw it looked when he’d nearly finished whipping me, when first guilt set in for the jolt my little barebutt dance had given him. Their horror had not yet fully overtaken their desire. It had been blighted at the peak of being sated. The sight of them, all sweated into each other and right down on the floor without a quilt or towel, and his braced arm (the spotted left one) filthy from our city’s grime, and her below and still engaged, still hooked, the
sight seemed to roll on at a length unendurable.

  I saw their faces, invisible to each other, run through so many separate emotions for me; different explanations, his plain contempt, her honest excuses; a dozen changes pulsed across both sets of liverish features. I moved to reach for the lamp, to put it all out. Was then her voice said to me, regaining a certainty sufficient to the moment, said calmly to me while his whole beautiful birthmarked rose-colored stake was still in up her back.

  “Hartley, baby, listen …”

  I pointed. And the word that belted out of me was like some glum Old Testament prophet’s: “Baaaaaddddddd!” Instead of rushing out, I ran at, past them, helpless, joined. I grabbed the only water that might douse them right, I hoisted the wobbly weight of an aquarium and sloshed its full wet across them, gasping. The soaked piano sounded as the boat struck keyboard. Titanic bounced against broom closet and promptly failed to shatter. That alone seemed right.

  I jumped fell backward, ran downstairs, losing pages everywhere, molting. As I went, I somehow threw up those cherries, out and all over myself.

  I do believe some howling was involved. On the street, me racing barefoot, stragglers sure got out of my way darn quick. One employee ducked clear of the pizza place (“Slice”), said “What the … ?” and bobbed back in. I heard my name said. Ossorio’s was closed or closing, no one saw me do this dash. The shrieking was unmanly, childlike, girlish really.

  When I rushed into my fourth-floor rear, me filthy, stinking, and groaning like some ox, my phone was ringing but of course I didn’t answer. I could picture them nude at the kitchen table now, postcoital, having finished the act off anyway, sharing one cigarette and talking strategy. I was now their problem child, the loser.

  I yanked my receiver off the hook and stuffed it in a pillowcase and trailed the cord into the closet, slammed the door hard. I lay down on my bed and made those sounds you’re glad nobody else will ever have to hear. But sounds you must hear, as someone grownup and nearby and concerned would; and it only makes you sadder for yourself. I laughed because at that moment what I most wanted was a little dog, a terrier, a loyal clean little terrier to welcome its master. Marse Hartley Airedale is Home! And it’d be frisky, and it didn’t even have to be all that clean even. Messy could be good. I knew I would be, for a long time.

  Hearing me made me worry in all the ways you wish those others would. There, there. There, terrier, there.

  I told myself in a Carolina twang, “It could have been you with him.” And then a New York voice snapped, “Yeah, right. Fat chance, you no-talent scar-sided nonentity. The only way you’ll ever get into the Times is with your next self-paid ‘Needs Work’ ad.”

  I kept remembering our vacationing together, once in a hurry on hearing we could get a rental car for nearly nothing, we just blazed right out to P-town, where we took lots of pictures I still own, and those two stars sat, automatic, in the front seat and I wedged—just as immediately—in back, between them, my head almost in line with theirs. Were they doing it even then? After I tomcatted out to stalk the bars, and after Robert seemed to leave with some French Canadian guy beautiful as a new red Swiss Army jack knife featuring all attachments, was R really stealing back up to her pink gingham guesthouse room? I did know I had been happy as their Airedale, if that is what I was. I was learning. I was their darling, I was potential. I was still perpetually ajunior, theirs. They, maybe the Stronger. I, though, surely kinder.

  I know that I loved them for how they protected me, without knowing that they did, how guarded I felt as I most guarded them. I always felt safest when they were both within a four-feet reach of me (or due shortly, as one or the other of us sat facing the restaurant entrance: “Are we all here yet?”).

  I was between, I, pressed quite snug against two flanking sets of ribs as good as their ribs were. Celebrity Father, Notorious Mother, invisible li’l ghostwriter me, a triplet, a fit.

  Oh but, all along, we had thought that we were really something!

  And now so did the New York Times. At least them!

  Back there on the floor at Robert’s, I would have taken sloppy seconds, on either one of them, thirds.

  There’s the final closeness that two people can have, with nothing at all between them, having gone as far into another body as your own will fit. But, getting shut out of it, knowing you’re just extra and aside, that kind of isolation can do many things to you. Including save your life.

  Post-Op

  ven with liquids running from my eyes and nose and mouth, it was their health that I fixed upon the most now. You know I never hated either of them, not even when I’d just caught them at it, I never hated them enough to wish either of them hurt. Much less dead. She, at least, would now need better guarding. That alone helped resurrect me out of the spittle sewer where I swam. She’d sure need me now.

  If I had warned him of the spot, would he then have been more cautious? Did Robert go near the members of his traveling string quartet? How could anyone so beautiful have become so difficult, dangerous? “Careless” was a word to now upgrade. And if I had been braver and louder, might not my dear ones have waited? might might might … ? me me me.

  After ten days, extinction lessons, carbon monoxide intake, blue-gray dustballs gathering in a kitchen bathtub unused, it was in exactly ten days I understood I was, as an addict addicted to both of them—“my name is Hartley and I crave …”—was in no position to do without the two of them at once. Maybe one at time, maybe him, but at some slow-boil wean, please. Give me a placebo to suck on, or sit on, or talk to three hours per night by phone?

  But don’t make me go cold turkey, quitting them both. It would be killing, considering the scale of chemical dependency, to give up both my gods at once.

  Who else believed in me? Surely that’s the control substance most needed by most people. I had written nothing in this time. The sight of my own handwriting was like studying the traces of my filth spread across the finest paper and left piled, defilement sandwich, on someone’s desk.

  Oh, they sent flowers, they came by, they each pounded on my door three times a day, making jokes out there: “How is our defrocked Miss America unlike the Titanic?” Saying the usual adorables, they knew not to slide any more of their good reviews or glamour shots under the door. They never roused me. They each had a key and could have come right in and found me naked, a pillow to my mouth, for dignity and silence that seemed my one defense, if not much of a refuge.

  For a second, I considered flying to my parents’ place in Florida. Overt death wish, or what? And, of course, what mainly filled my vision was the spot on Robert. It was always a bad time to find out, but now, after finding them, doing that, and factoring the spot in, too …

  He had left town just after the concert, I hadn’t wanted to bring him down right then, and then he stayed gone so long, and the very second he got back, this …

  It’d been the sight of them like that, like two sneaky boys, or far worse, yes, much, like, yeah, some long-married couple … and if it had been going on all along, with the game of my wanting him and her seeming torture from the same desire and his professed indifference to us both.

  If it had been just a ruse that whole time of my life, I could not bear it. But, considering the spot, what might it mean to them and me now? We knew so little. It was too early in. Either way, for either one, I still felt something. Therefore, I felt needed. They might not know it. Not yet. But, even if I had to play the Sancho Panza role for both of them forever, well, I’d imagine how Spencer Tracy would create his Sancho; with maybe Kate as Quixote; I’d be the scar-sided plump peasant leading the burro; hell, I’d play the burro—Best Actor in a Supporting Role with saddlebags. I knew I’d play. I’d play along. What other game was there?

  There must still be some use for all this love left souring (mousetrap food) in me.

  So I got up.

  I walked half-dressed into Ossorio’s around two o’clock the afternoon of the eleventh day after it. They
were there, okay, she lost in smoke, and everybody gathered around, seeming somewhat mopey, mooning, with no good talk going on. I was glad to see repentance or that they missed me, if that’s what it was. But maybe I just arrived at twenty after or twenty till when the silence-spreading angel passes overhead.

  They all looked up, shocked. Like I had died, but had stumbled back in here for my caffeine allotment anyway. I guessed I looked like hell. That, at our age, was becoming more appropriate, far easier. Part of it today was inevitable, part an effect I’d planned.

  I just stood beside their table, ours once, my face quite white and large and hard. Said, “I’m new to New York and probably a big hick—but the guidebooks all claim this here is where the very best sluts hang out. That right?”

  “You should know,” she said. “You taught us all gave us … lessons, or … oh, honey, come to Momma.” She sputtered, her girl voice. Then Angie rose, ran around the table, grabbed me, flung me back against the tile mural of a fountain’s too-blue edgy zigzags. She pinned me there, front bumping mine so hard, and almost hurt me with her force. It was like she pressed the water and the bile clear out of every hole of me, and we just leaned there, she sort of pounding her body against mine, to show me something. Some old velocity, some tomboy tie that held us, no matter who we each fucked, even him.

  When she flopped back to sitting, she kept her hands circling my either wrist, and I made fists so tight, facing her but not daring to meet her eyes, my head hanging and hers hanging and our scalps meeting, a little touching comfort right on top, one warm spot of that.