Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  “Call this fat?” The ivory hand came out. It pinched up two sample inches of my sudden middle.

  “That ain’t fat, kid. It’s luxury. Just more of your potential.”

  During the siege, even if she was out on the road showing slides, out bucking up the young and the visual, she still sent perfect flowers, she mailed our sick pals art books (some now about her, her work). Bama was a “name” generally known and therefore specifically lighter in bearing, even better company for that. It let her gather bigger better taller tales for us, her being major. She was producing something called “mature work.” Most people who stumble into what others term “the arts” get only sweeter with their own hard-earned successes.

  In the beginning, we boys had sometimes been a bit prettier and usually better dressed than our gifted blue-jeaned women friends. Back then they valued our stylized talk, sought our advice about their paintings, plus the right color for so small an apartment. Angie, having scouted Federal harps for me (I let the one go, and only a hundred and sixty bucks!), had advanced from paint-smeared denim and makeup like fingerpainting, to the sculpted worsted of a glamorous vaguely-French cosmopolite. Our Angie, a respected woman of a certain age. Her notoriety suited her. Literally.

  In she swept with bundles. No backpack now. She wore three beautiful deco silver bracelets (long-ago gifts from Robert—shoplifted, we suspected but never asked). These baubles clanked as she embraced the sketch of a beloved former boy she’d fucked (once?) some years ago. Who knows how many times over how many years? I’d never learn that.

  No hard feelings. Mostly, none anyway.

  She now wore her best gray Chanel suit and the beautiful bone-colored Italian shoes. She trailed just a memory of scent and made the visit feel so glamorous a distraction, a blessed one. The broadness of her humor and its killer timing had grown even more refined. New York had robbed us of so much; but it’d given us all Jewish humor. The essential flotation device. Yiddish inversions, “You should be so lucky.” The low expectations and high hilarity of Borscht Belt jokes. Ghetto humor helped us goys survive the ghetto, and each other.

  We three sat on his bed watching some dumb TV docudrama about a dad molesting his little girl; the father was played by a dent-chinned Hunk of the Moment and the child actress was washed-out and snively. And when sexy Dad admitted to his girl, “There’s good touching and there’s bad touching,” Angie begged him, “Promise?” I cannot explain why her tone and sulk in saying this was so hilarious. But almost fell off the bed and Robert laughed till he gasped until, for a sec, we feared we’d lost him. By now, we were such experts in New York Jewish gallows humor, even that seemed funny. Robert dying laughing? He could do worse.

  Angie brought us personal clippings—about her big show now being hung in Berlin. She had wrapped up a scale model of the exhibition gallery with all the pictures we knew, reproduced two inches square and hung in this scale model dollhouse of art. It seemed a magical toy from the hand and workshop of careerist Santa himself. She held it out to us. “Couldn’t you just sprinkle a little salt on this like so much celery and just eat it?”

  “No,” Robert, a scratched stick, said. “But I’ll watch.” That we were playing, like the Titanic orchestra, playing right up to the end, it showed, I felt, we’d learned a thing or three. That made me momentarily happier.

  I was about to head South for Christmas. She now arranged the flowers she’d just brought Robert, most of a lilac bush that smelled almost too good and must’ve cost a fortune on the East Side. She would spend the night and, though mostly glad, I felt somehow uneasy.

  When he remembered to, Robert could still dispense the usual 100-proof charm. His quips that once pealed forth so effortlessly, now rode stray ungoverned barks, voice breaking like a boy pubescent’s. His former languor revealed what work had forever underwritten its nouveau curls, the swoops most cavalier. His drawl sounded less indolent, more brave. It was not an effect he had ever let us see, and you could tell that it embarrassed him.

  Bama suggested we should change his scene. Given Robert’s weakness, it took two of us twenty minutes to get him toward, then into the wheelchair.

  Co-op Care left friends in charge of loved ones. You stayed with them, only summoned nurses for a code blue. The ward proved ideal for folks with lots of pals who’d sit round the clock. I soon found: scheduling others’ half-reliable visits was often harder than just camping here myself.

  Bama came across a long white nurse’s coat hanging behind the bathroom door; she now modeled it for us, joking, “But, you know? I worry about the length.” She showed off her gams; with gym work, they were now nearly as good as mine. “Oh well,” she said, trying to entertain a listless Robert, “hems up one year, down the next. As Cocteau says, ‘We must forgive Fashion everything, it dies so young …’”

  Then silence. None of us would touch it for one whole second.

  “Good thing you finally got a decent gallery, kid,” he was merciful. “You never would have made it as a Savannah club lady.”

  “Thank you doubly, Robins. I always did put my foot in it. Trying to get better at that but, you know me, I’m hopeless basically.” And she met his look.

  We joshed throughout, while shifting him from bed to chair. But finally the three of us just shut up; we simply did the chore with whatever grunts its facts and physics demanded. We were all now old enough, ripened enough with wear and love, not to need to lighten every little bit of pain. You could do either Charm or Efficiency. We had all grown wise enough to alternate.

  Given Robbie’s leaflike frailty, we settled for eating downstairs in the cafeteria. At this end of life, a change of scene could be mean a change of floor. Miss Byrnes now handed our patient a bundle from Bloomingdale’s. He tried to break through stubborn tissue paper, then, frustrated, struck at it.

  “Here, let me,” she said. “I love ripping things up.”

  “No lie,” said I.

  It was the latest in pajama loungewear for persons both rich and richly ironic. Some designer must’ve collected, then copied cowboy patterns from the bedspreads and boys’ room draperies of the 1940s. Cacti, mesas, auburn broncos at full buck. A freckled blond sixteen-year-old cowpoke, grinning in his huge white hat, wearing spurred boots endearingly too-large, recurred, bowlegged. “These patterns arrived just yesterday. As usual, darl, you’re cutting-edge,” so she told the man she wheeled, Robert all done up now in cowboy robe and matching dude ranch jammers. (The pants were more than any of us could bear to bother with right now.)

  We rolled off the elevator into a mealtime traffic jam of thirty other rolling Giacometti men. The age of mechanical reproduction seemed to have Xeroxed one skeletal spectre into these many identical chairs. Each replicant was pushed by a healthy rosy person whose own face showed a cow-catchering all-purpose smile: “Ain’t we got fun?”

  The patients themselves sat stern, hair gone wiry thanks to lethal medicine and the disease’s own ferocious coarsening. Each sick boy, yellowgray-whitegraphite-colored, feeling himself uniquely beloved, being so sick it felt gravitational, ignored—with queens’ unlearnable grandeur—the sight of any others, similarly ending. Thirty Elizabeth I’s on wheels “cut each other dead.”

  Meanwhile, those pushing them grinned, to compensate, emoting gratitude for two. Emerging from the elevator, Angie and I loomed. We beamed down on others’ sullen boys in passing chairs. Kids who sulked, too sick to play, their parents urging them on. I felt such claustrophobic panic and I knew Robert must.

  But what seemed worse than this rush hour of the ill? Ten boys wore his same flannel cowboy pajamas! (Comes in pistachio green or beet red.) Bama had sworn that these were “hot,” unseen till now. And so they were. But other friends of others dying had rushed that same counter not two hours back.

  Bama, always a speedster on her feet, old medical hand from the clinic days of our mere-VD innocence, now did such a quick reverse into the elevator with our Robert.

  As we rose, he said with
effort, “So much, if only I, for the fashion individuality of we … the clone-prone.” And we laughed, at least thinking we had followed his drift. We’d gotten pretty good at it, but the circuitous logic required ever more.

  Returned to his room, relieved, Bama phoned out for deli fare, making quite a production of it. “Now when you say tapioca, you mean the old fashioned big pearl kind, with lots of cinnamon on top, and is it worth the cals to have a whole trough of it brought up here to us. And, honestly, Cal? ‘Cal’ was it?—Now, Cal, m’dear? Where would your own grandma rank it on a scale of one to ten?” She winked our way. Robert smiled his now feral smile and appeared, as she had planned, entranced.

  We soon enjoyed a picnic on the bed. Ms. Byrnes made much of her nurse’s coat as we settled, shoes off. She laughed, pointing to her sterile garb: “Déjeuner sur lab!”

  Here, safe alone together again, his pj’s seemed playful, a very good if overcute idea, free of others’ having—the sheep—rushed out to be the first to “copy” him. Clear of eyesore strangers in the same big leaky family rowboat—we felt ourselves regaining our own old consequence, our pique.

  Her bad pun about the Manet released us into irreverent early days. Like kids just off the bus, fresh meat for this carnivorous town, we became kids with nothing to lose, at least nothing that the kids yet knew about.

  Three, saucy, on a bed. Our lives soon seemed all before us, along with those lives’ aftermaths: Careers become reputations become memories. We were talking ourselves into everything again.

  We talk talk talked, about old times. What else? There had been the insane Rasta man, his dreadlocks drumsticks, who lived in Robert’s building, who made an altar beside the elevator on the third-floor landing and left lit candles and food on paper plates, food that spoiled though it was jabbed with toothpicks wearing handwritten paper legends that read “Immortal,” “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” “Bob Marley IS one pupa form of Pope.”

  We had known dear Nina, the woman who finally got called out of retirement to sing again at the Met because a Hong Kong flu epidemic felled two alternate substitutes and—judged crazy all those years—for her studying every alto role for every Met performance—“working up my Hungarian” to perfect her incipient “Bluebeard’s Castle,” all those Health Department flu shots and the epic vitamin C she’d taken had finally paid off. Nina, fifty-two, stepped in for Carol Vanness twice and got an excellent though single sentence in the Daily News if not, alas, the Times. Still, she’d now sung at the Met repeatedly.

  We talked about abortions, about one of our old friends who now regretted sacrificing Mick Jagger’s child because it’d come at a bad time for her, a girl who’d had the goods but went home to Idaho anyway. There were others who had little visible talent but who stayed put, politicked, persisted, and got semi-famous anyhow. Famous enough. Prose and cons. Team and variation.

  Four huge works by Alabama Byrnes were still the hot topic from the last overly political so-so Whitney Biennial, where they were said to have been “the only real things in it.” She was now collected by the same museums we’d sneaked into with borrowed student IDs.

  Bama sat crosslegged in stocking feet, toenails professionally polished, and we were soon puppies again, snug on the bed (not a downtown floor-through’s futon this time, not Robert’s busy fourposter, but a hospital adjustable upright, with hidden hydraulic motors we toyed with like a motorboat’s controls). We sat here downing whole containers of the tapioca just as good as Cal had promised (and warmed by him for us, special). I dragged over the phone and my textured address book (“You got some miles on this,” she said. “By now, Robbie, doesn’t Hart’s address book look like The Dead Sea Sc … I mean, St. Peter’s ledger … er …”) and we called people all over the world, and she’d smile, “Guess who we’re with?” and Alabama still sounded proud of it, of him.

  After dinner, bored of the sound of the TV, the three of us eventually sat facing the door. We agreed that, belonging to the last generation to recall a world before TV infested every house, having explored actual woods and fields, we were the luckiest of all. We had been born at exactly the best time. We now sat, in fitful silences, as if awaiting the arrival of someone important.

  Maybe one of our old regulars we didn’t feel complete without. Someone big, with perfect naval ensign posture, and not hair so much as locks (like Goldie’s, Harpo’s), some kid with a jawline like the best Pirate of Penzance juvenile lead, ever. Even the thin courtly minor man slumped here with us, gone all wristbone and eyesocket, he too sort of faced the door, as if he was also a big fan of the missing party’s. Every passerby’s footsteps in the hall made us hush, half-turn. We were waiting for him. Before. We aimed in the correct direction just in case our mutual true love appeared for just a moment, popped in with party food leftovers, stories, stage kisses so enlivening, “Ciao, ducks.”

  Alabama and I sat swilling low-cal frozen yogurt, and Robert slumped among pillows, eating real ice cream for the weight gain, and we kept rough-housing, teasing and touching like people barely twenty will, and not folks slipping unbidden into their forties. And beyond.

  And a last, loud, good old New York time was had by all.

  Alabama fetched her overnight bag and prepared to sleep in Robert’s room, the extra bed. You could still hear a foghorn, boat traffic chugging up and down the East River. I would crash on the sitting room’s foldout couch. I stripped and got comfortable quicker than I’d figured. I knew this ease came from having her here. It made him so happy.

  Around four, I heard Bam’s voice. First I thought she’d muttered out of a bad dream. I sat straight up without knowing why. “Hartley? You ’sleep? Hart?” Something was wrong.

  I jumped up naked and rushed in, arms wavering before me in the dark. I found Angie’s bed empty. Then I saw, by moonlight, the two of them together, curled on his. Robert, in the middle, held up the covers for me and I knew how strenuous even this’d be for him. So I slid in there quite fast.

  “Couldn’t start playing around without you.” She leaned over him and she kissed me and gave my dick a little playful harmless tossle.

  “Here we all are,” he said, hoarse, straight up to the dark.

  “Alone together at last,” I spoke, mostly to mark my place, make it real.

  She groaned, “‘Bama’s Back and Two Buggers Has Got Her!’”

  We still found each other funny. That was lucky, if only for all it spared the rest of the world. But, hey, we three weren’t hurtin’ anybody.

  To be naked as in the old days. (Though, of course, we hadn’t ever really been, not concurrently, not as a quorum. It just remembered that way.)

  To be simply warming him, this fellow so recently still the prettiest boy in New York, and to be warming him from either side like this. We all touched each other all over each other. And as for his ID bracelet, these little clips and nodules and lines tea-potting off him, she and I, we learned to work (and play) around them.

  There came a moment about twelve minutes into our threeway when it really could’ve happened. Everything. Something. Groping each other, we found each other at least technically ready. Lowering my hand over Robert’s hard dick, unshrunken, Oh Death, where is thy shrinkwrap—the very act put me into such a sweet fraternity-sorority. Membership in the collective love of him, that, as much as anything, was what I’d mainly always wanted.

  By now, for us? hey, The Act itself would’ve seemed almost academic. Redundant. We three were such past masters at it, we now felt beyond even needing to demonstrate all that. Just to be here safe in the blessed smells of those best known, three scents mixed under a single tenting sheet, that felt almost erotic enough now, thanks.

  I could tell—for Robert, it was just the chance that everything might start up again. I had not brought a rubber, and certainly not two of them. Angie probably might keep a few spares in her night bag; but to fidget with prevention, here and now after everything, it would’ve been oddly awkward. We never had protected ourselves from
each other. That’d been the joy. That, I guess, was the problem.

  So, for Robert, it seemed better that we might’ve. It would be wrong to say that nothing did. Happen. After all, it was us, all nude, still here; so what little happened, in a way, was really everything.

  We would talk and sleep then drift, speak over the one sleeper, and hold on. I could feel her hips, the nubbin breast most north-facing, my hand struck his many many ribs, almost cold as piano keys. On the river, a ship’s whistle sounded three times. The horn was airy yet magisterial. One of the last great liners leaving port? I woke at dawn, my arm curled under his head, fingers resting against his neck. It felt, the neck felt, I decided—plumper, potentially better. Then I noticed how, as we’d slept, my arm had slid, cradling, beneath the pillows of them both. And the neck I touched was, just past Robert’s, hers. It beat with such life, life enough for three.

  But to bundle there with them, sleeping in that second innocence, it almost felt a truer, finer form of happiness. Darkest honey is best. I can’t explain. We knew much more. We forgave, not It, but most of each other’s playful careless foolishness. Even our cruelty was human after all; try as we had to be merely superhuman.

  I try and try explaining. I get close, I feel it, I fall back. I fail afresh. I can’t explain. You must help me out with it. Please, provide a little of your own, from your own rich life. I’ll count on that. You had to have been there.

  Thank you. You have been.

  She soon flew off to Los Angeles; she stayed in close touch with those already installing her work in Berlin. She kept posted about his temperature, R’s vital signs. She had won a fellowship that was, she joked, perfect for a father’s girl, coming from an outfit called D.A.D. She also joked, Now she’d had D.A.D., but would she ever get MOMA? The prize meant a residency, but she told them that sick friends would prevent her really living in Germany those six months. They still gave her the award and the big-time show at its end. She’d brought to Robert’s room that little German-perfect model of the gallery, showing us where each of her pictures went, in miniature. He loved all that, holding it. He lit up as ever and was soothed for days after her visits. It sedated me to see him far far calmer thanks to her. That made my work easier.