Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  After his second and last pneumonia, Robbie’s speech slowed so, muddied by the warring drugs. In looks, he first grew even blonder, was soon thinning toward an altar candle’s very vertical if very transient beauty. And in one month he’d gone nearly as transparent as Venetian glass. People whispered around him. A squeal might shatter him. Our voices and fond looks, excelsior, elaborate packing meant to soften the inexitable shipment.

  Studying Robert, seeing how he made a home within the cave of his receding event, I wondered whom I myself might have become without this knowledge. I’d always been lucky in my friends, and if the friends proved unlucky—did that make my own luck greater?

  What if I had just stayed home, got myself into a long engagement with some solitary decent rich girl of many interests but teeth somehow too plentiful; if I had taught junior high school French, and just partied on weekends with the better gentlemen florists of society Raleigh, or maybe saved and finally bought that profitable local Ethan Allen distributorship?

  To this city, I had lugged my hometown. It was in my luggage, in how I still considered pigeons (family Columbidae, order Columbiformes) a form of wildlife, it lived in my replete seersucker swagger, in an accent that persisted like my own stage-motherly ambition for front-page rave-review happiness. However much I’d failed in New York, however young I died here if my next test came back bad—at least I wouldn’t end where I had started. At least I’d found some people.

  James Abbott McNeill Whistler, from his pinnacle as the aesthetic king of Europe, said, arch with bitter ashy understatement, “I did not choose to be born in Lowell, Massachusetts.”

  But I had picked my nationality as a New Yorker. I had at least got here, got started, got to love my dear ones starting, too.

  Not to mention, for the six or seven years when I looked my all-time record best, I had got to fuck my brains out.

  New York dance performances of this period soon abounded with men carrying fallen men. Critics—heartless and therefore easily bored, easily bored and therefore heartless—complained of the excessive Pietas everywhere. “How ‘tired,’” they said. A new movement cliché was being done to death.

  At about this time, a “civilized” conservative columnist named William F. Buckley proposed in hundreds of American newspapers that every person HIV-positive be tattooed on the wrist, and again upon one buttock, and then deported to some compound in the far West, so as to spare the rest of us. May I quote? I’ve kept it. “The next logical step would be to require anyone who seeks a marriage license [to have] an AIDS test. But if he has AIDS, should he then be free to marry? Only after the intended spouse is advised that her intended husband has AIDS, and agrees to sterilization.”*

  If you doubt me, look it up. May he remain eternally known for mainly this, his civilized high church-vision of troubled others. I read this column (Lourdes warned me of it, very upset) on the very first full day Robert was hospitalized. —I sure did hide that paper from my friend, Bill Buckley.

  Shame. Shame on you forever.

  How to Do All This?

  here are the simple skills you feel proud of. There are hard-won abilities you’d rather not have.

  Skills I’ve hated developing? A half-psychic ability to hear in the breathing of sick friends how long they have to live.

  I also despise my newfound gift for closing the apartments of my dead. I have learned which brand of black garbage bags to buy, in gross. (Always grab four twelve-packs more than you expect you’ll need.) Learn, learn.

  You storm into the quarters of the newly deceased, your latest beloved. Even friends who were very tidy in their prime got surprisingly sloppy by the end. (Blindness can sure impede even a neatnik bachelor’s housekeeping.)

  It’s important you first sense the stowing spots of his checkbook, will, journal, and deeds, and especially the address book (that’ll be the start of his funeral guest list). Once you’ve set those aside, you can become privately and truly ruthless. You must. It’s the only way to survive such purging.

  Tip: Put on an Aretha CD (try her hit “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”), or, failing that, go with Stevie Wonder. Songs in the Key of Life is always good.

  If your dead host was too Eurocentric to own anything African-American, then use Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations.” (But I mean the version Gould played and hummed at twenty, not the other, done at forty-nine just before he died; I mean the wickedly fast show-off version, the very young one.) You’ll need every scrap of borrowed youthful speed.

  —You must move through these alien rooms like some otter, a swimmer-dancer. The moment you stop to read one of your dead friend’s lively letters, the second you bend over photographs of yourself and the deceased shown together, honey-baked brown in P-town and both of you more rangy and desirable than you ever knew, you’re done for—a sloppy mess. —Efficient, think efficient.

  In the very center of each room, make three piles:

  “Stays.” “Goes.” “Maybe.”

  The ailing hardcore careerists among us soon felt cheated of that payoff arc “mature work.” So cruel, not to get the mother-lode of one’s own middle period (I speak from the cowcatcher of my own midcentury jalopy-juggernaut, a lovely downhill ride).

  Those who had dallied, hurried now. Those who’d changed fields switched back, fast. Oh, to see oil paint, and an easel set up near the bed of some hospital room. This, in the final quarters of Gideon.

  Gideon now suspected that his work had gotten hurried, perhaps merely facile during these last few years he’d become somewhat popular. A gallery on Newbury Street sold most of his landscapes. His clients were often Beacon Hill dentists; they now vied for his next painting. They each had “a WolfKahn” and “a Gideon—V.” But he wanted his pictures seen by more than the prosperous and impacted of Boston-Cambridge.

  The early tension in his work, always flirting with the beautiful, had succumbed, at times, to being merely pretty. Since he was often in France, he ceased using varnish in his paint thinner, hoping that the pictures’d dry faster. Now, reverting to slower-drying sticky stuff, he worked so hard. Gideon had always painted small and that proved quite convenient now he was this thin, and sitting up in bed.

  He held out one painting, said to me, “I’m getting better again, ça va?”

  I nodded, “Never better, darling,” and quietly hoped, in the relay of help, that someone would still be standing, if need be, to eventually catch me. Or at least to rockingchair beside me and—decades hence—go on discussing our glamorous Lost.

  We all took whatever energy was left us into such overdrive.

  Days when Gideon was strong, he carried soup and silly astrology paperbacks to Marco. Then Marco, better, attended Gideon grown worse. The cruelty of the disease allowed such swing shifts. Came the time when fourth-floor walk-ups were a problem, too exerting for anything but friends’ emergency entrance-exits; Marco had once visited Emily Dickinson’s home; he’d noticed a basket that she lowered, by rope, out her second-story bedroom window. A young niece and nephew who lived next door would fill it with wildflowers and biscuits. Her reclusiveness was, it turns out, not all that bad, not quite terminal. (I remembered the amorous neighbor my first night here, crying up to a window, and Angel, then turning to Jesus instead.) We soon created comic balcony scenes. I bought my pals two nice baskets and some hardware store rope, almost too-new a yellow. Then “Coming up” could mean, even in Manhattan, flowers rising to them in wicker on a rope. Taadaa!

  How might I characterize my loved ones’ subtraction so you won’t become jaded or feel bored? I do not want to rush. Nor do I plan to recount the play-by-play expiring of young friends that you know now.

  I used to tell my students of creative writing, “When it comes to the death of your fictional characters, you cannot remove what you have not yet provided the reader. A general death is a contradiction in terms. —All deaths must be the death of a specific person if the reader is to feel involved and possibly even moved and, in being moved, changed, enl
arged or instructed.”

  The mystery of creating a character on the page means providing him or her with an appearance, a hobby, a country of origin, the love of one color especially, a pet way of saying hello and goodbye, a few physical quirks, one lucky number, maybe a sexual preference or its denial’s confusion, a secret love of chocolates, and, necessarily, some endearing faults.

  It’s odd that admitted faults should make invented character live most fully. This surely springs from a constant, renewable sense of fallibility, our ready admission to any shortcoming before we concede, even to some stranger on some train, a single of our own true merits. What makes us mostly expect—while idling in neutral gear—not paradise, but plague?

  Well, for one thing, visible plague does.

  So, how can I convince you I am not a sob-sister merely? Since we are talking of say, thirty-odd close friends and ex-lovers, is it even seemly to number them? Doesn’t that smack of war veteran braggadocio? … “I took seven minié balls and still lived to see Appomattox.”

  The hierarchy of suffering sets in too soon. What starts as your own self-armoring way of surviving can soon (esp in NYC) become The New Careerism.

  Manhattan Person A says: “I’ve lost most of my friends to it.”

  Manhattan Person B: “Only ‘most’? Lucky you. For me it’s total. Twenty years in one neighborhood and, suddenly, we’re talking Stranger in a Strange Land. For me, unlike you, a total rout—sorry.”

  Ten years earlier, on the message chalkboard of a Columbus Avenue gay bar called, yes, alas, The Deadwood, I saw this. Somebody had scrawled, in a self-conscious “autograph” handwriting:

  “Just Fuck Me, and let me get on with my career.”

  A second, more direct, script added:

  “That was your career.”

  Alabama would hand me the pink-covered volume of Whitman poems, bought for fifty cents and consecrated by stray drips of much strong Ossorio coffee. She said he’d wanted me to have it; and only afterward would I find his notes to me in there, tenderly penciled, precise as musical cues and intended dynamics, the order he planned my reading which poems, a sequence, a last musical sequence he’d worked out to help me through the lost chord.

  The first I found was this, from “The Wound-Dresser”

  … I stop,

  With hinged knees and steady hands to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you.

  if that would save you.

  Gideon kept inviting me over to see still more new work; true, he was belatedly, at record speed, getting uncannily more skillful and subtle; I held the paintings now like fine small plates of food that I feared spilling; Robert had been going down fast, then leveled off and was trying to compose again; Marco was becoming even more a hermit and, since he still lived right above Ossorio’s, we kept knocking on his door till, thinning, quieter than ever, he stopped answering, ceased even pulling up the basket. Two days later, I would find unretrieved jonquils dried right there. Ansel had gone home at once, the day he found out, back to Montana, and our frustration was that he never wrote and rarely came to the phone of his parents’ farmhouse. “He’s out with his dad checking the fences,” a woman said over and over, and you could hear our bass-voiced friend in back of her, muttering instructions, telling her to write down numbers anyway. It was odd, we felt he blamed us. Maybe he did; we were as likely a cause as anything in this new Medieval zone of magical thinking.

  My address book’s listed facts subdivide, unhealthy cells, under Gideon’s name: Two new hospital phone numbers and the exact street locations that florists require, though they know perfectly well where a whole damn hospital is. Here’s how to reach his room at NYU Co-op Care where we friends took turns staying overnight in the bed beside his. And finally “Hospice” (what is the word “spice” doing there, so promising and scented an end to “Hospice”?). And at last, his sister’s number in Queens, plus a note to myself, her husband’s name and ages and majors of her two sons at Tufts and even their dog’s name (keep it personal, Hartley).

  In health, he’d had one address—the little inexpensive 1980 apartment on the Lower East Side that Gideon, through illegal subletting, parlayed into a steadying source of income. Dying, he was everywhere. As his T-cell count dropped, the phone numbers and addresses exponentially enlarged, doctors’ home phones, antiques dealers busy selling off his hard-won collection a few treasures at a time. His teacher, Philip Guston, had given him a small pink and gray painting; it showed one large boot smoking a cigar; Gideon sold it via friends of friends to a little family museum in Texas. “But I got practically niente for my Piranesis, and not restrikes, either. In good late Empire frames, too. Alors.”

  Finally here’s the phone of the cemetery office out in outer Queens, and, ending, the number of a person put in charge of the art colony memorial fund we set up in Gideon’s honor.

  Last Shall Be First

  ur fathers were the victors of WWII; they felt justly proud of their sacrifices. They always regretted aloud that we boys hadn’t been granted so good a war as theirs. They wished we had “gone over,” not “come out.” “Would’ve made a man of you,” we each heard from old guys who hadn’t a clue of how the world had changed around them. Even by our dads’ hard standards—AIDS—another undeclared “policing action” like Korea or Vietnam—would soon make us, their gifted linebacker nelly-boys—“Real Men.”

  Compare the survival rate of footsoldiers from the Second World War with that of any cute young gay guy sashaying the streets of the West Village during his summer of love, 1980. Odds are …

  The new disease had complicated and crowded our once-stupidly-simple medicine chests. Nudged out were our crab-lotion called Kwell, our bootleg penicillin for The Clap. Now the roundtable at Ossorio’s became the site of staging operations. We’d turned into our own pharmacists, bureaucrats, wheeler-deelers, shameless string-pullers, accusatory screamers extralegal. We subscribed to medical journals out of self-defense. The competing lingos—of tenant rights, immune boosters, diet supplements—we learned, updated, relearned. And without meaning to, we became pedantic as the very doctors we were trying to second-guess. Nomenclature does that to you. We read aloud the news of Ronald Reagan cutting AIDS research because Haitians and the wrong sort (ours) kept being neatly taken out by it. Robert suggested that, if any of us had strength left to make mere art, the followup Hell assignment was in order. If only for Misters Reagan-Bush. No Fort Leavenworth of a Hell? Well, quick, somebody build a small good white-hot-collar one! But, by now, we were wired for something past mere rage. Rage became the starter kit that energy required for taking care of one another.

  Our imaginations came to rest, in neutral, on test-pattern Pietàs.

  In church basements visible from our coffee den, we, the sick and not and not-sick-yet, meetinged ourselves sicker. We were being called rude. Now, in mortal trouble, we began at rude, and upped the pitch, the volume, toward an outrage operatic. Has a human voice ever really shattered glass? Why not? Is a scream ever singing?

  Meanwhile, it continually seemed that a mistake was being made. Some invoice misdelivered. Maybe we should carry Marco downstairs and ask him to interpret properly. Wrong address, surely.

  How could Death have decided that it wanted, and be gathering so effectively, us? We felt right off the bus, still negotiably golden from last summer’s lifeguarding. We were literally overflowing with promise and with talent, and with jism unlimited and, even now, still crazed with such a wild blind hope. Surely goodness and mercy would follow us all the days of our lives and our paintings’d wind up in the house of MOMA, like, forever. Right?

  The disease itself suffered Attention Deficit Disorder. It would drag Robert once more to the edge, and then lose interest, take its own long vacation, let him scurry loose. Such hideous cat-and-mouse. You never knew whom you would find. The skull or the d
imple. A stranger would be bedded in “his” corner hospital room, scaring you to death. “Released?” You’d find young Gustafson back in his own big bed, joking, hyper, entertaining you for real with every inch of wattage left him. He made you forget how he looked now. He was making you love him in new ways. (He had all but adopted one orderly’s nine-year-old twin boys.) And yet you knew that, in one so weakened, love is an outlay. Even habitual seduction is exhausting. Odd, it proved to me that Robert’d never really faked it.

  Good days, his mind was so perfect it seemed perfectly eerie, then it went so wrong so fast. Again I encountered him, as alone in bed as Crusoe, water-bound, rereading Defoe’s account of that earlier sickness. Robert was, whenever possible these days, safe in the bed that came to seem bigger and steeper as the bulk and starch of him went. (Went where?) Holding the book, he marked his place with a single translucent finger.

  “The parallels, my Airedale dear, are often amazing. But I prefer his plague to m … ours.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Robbie pointed to a faded gilt title, “Journal of the Plague Year. Singular.” He smiled his stone-washed tiredness. “The one in here, it ends.”

  I daily checked his arms and shins; then, hidden at home, shamed, scanned my own. Masochistic, I bought myself a bathroom scale. Every three pounds dropped took me to the bottom of the ocean. I became Prussian with efficiency, hating to waste time. Even two minutes squandered felt … pornographic. (The futility, the going nowhere human.) I already felt so indebted to my undeserved good luck. My health made me feel not virtuous but sleazy. When my friends were out getting sexually sickened, where had I been? Home, retyping a single, sensitive, sterile paragraph for the twenty-eighth time? Home, beating off? Little else so concentrates the mind, so purifies the address book, as the certainty you have six months, tops. And your friends, six weeks.