Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  The rest of us, without her, tried to keep him entertained, then merely amused, then just distracted. And, finally, warm.

  Before Robert’s eyesight faltered, we borrowed gorgeous objects for him. On approval, I’d spring beautiful things from antique shops so he could study them up close. Even with my favorite receptionist presiding downstairs, this hospital felt so fluorescent and blank. Robert’s room itself seemed a sure first step off the cliff, a banishment from every visual pleasure.

  So, even for us, we overdecorated. And lavishly admitted it. Our aesthetic fallback position—like that of the long-lost Moorish Princess odalisquing at the Saint Mark’s Baths—ran to automatic excess. A damned good thing, considering the Operaticness of late, these death scenes were so hard to stage correctly. Familiar patterns soon set in and, if you weren’t scrupulous, the same Latin-fusion-jazz combo was heard playing the same few selections at identical memorial services in the similar splashy lofts.

  “We can’t go on meeting like this” was our jokey funeral greeting of the moment. “Or can we?” came the follow-up zinger.

  With us, it was reverse Bauhaus. Less Is More? Less ain’t, girlfriend. Mo’ is!—And Curly. And Larry, too.

  Our golden rule: “When in doubt, toss in those two extras with the fringe.”

  So, to Robert’s basic shell of a room, we added more Mercury glass spheres, further Victorian beaded bags and geegaws, old tin wind-up toys a faded-Christmas red that was his favorite color, crumbling coral-colored nineteenth-century paisley shawls slung over the shower-curtain runners that circled his bed to ensure any impossible privacy. It soon irked his favorite nurse, finding her beside table, reserved for medicine, heaped with mangos bought mostly for their lurid shade of green, plus a pile of magazines intended for thirteen-year-old girls, covers featuring this TV season’s pubescent boy-heart throbs.

  To the room’s ugly orange plastic form-fitting chairs we added little gilt ballroom ones where chaperons once sat knitting while young ladies whirled through waltzes on lower Fifth. We told ourselves we were giving Robbie something to look at.

  But now, I guess we partly did it to distract ourselves from the sight of him. He had always looked so unlike everybody else, handsomest boy in his time slot. Now that word “time slot” had a final ugly click to it, and we turned his music up to drown out everything but music itself.

  He appeared all but identical to fourteen others Lincoln Logged along this hall. Only the eyes, still a shade of swimming-pool “aqua,” pulled him forward from the rest. But gazing into those eyes soon made us feel neutered, boring, erased. The Ouija board had all the answers; you hardly needed to ask. The less he said, the more intricate and interminable his looks became. By the end, he was transmitting through those eyes. For the first time ever I read “Bored” there. That shocked me more than his sickness. What if I was now seeing clear through to the primer coat? What if Bored had been there, basic, all along?

  Marco brought in a slide projector and we settled the thing upon its own ballchair, locked on Automatic. Random. It projected continual images toward the white wall at the foot of Robert’s bed.

  I included whatever jumbled images might have meaning for him. Van Gogh’s perfect bachelor-artist pad at Arles. I commandeered a paint-stained Pentax that Angie’d once used to document her work. I took slides of the stage of the concert hall where his First Symphony had been so recently heard; I got shots of the front doors of Robert’s own apartment building but, for some reason I couldn’t name, dared not venture inside, though the keys still hung heavy on my ring.

  Too much had happened there. I pictured its shipboard coziness, its secret recesses. I already felt exiled from those stacks of Titanic clippings, the four windows prismatic, and that yellowest of Alabama Byrneses. At the Met Opera’s new gift shop, while acting like some high school music teacher, I bought slide portraits of his favorite composers. These got scattered throughout my media event for him.

  If we had to leave Robert—and sometimes we did (late nights, we sometimes trusted him to his nurses’ care)—we made sure he had his favorite music clamped over his ears—he could rock through the Mahler Fourth, its culminating soprano solo making such a sweet and surfeited paradise promise. And he’d have the projector rattling through its catalogue—group shots from Ossorio’s, the owner and patrons waving and holding up their fingers in peace signs or devil’s horns behind Ossorio’s head. Some singular dictionary definitions I’d Xeroxed and then got blown up. Pictures of us, mugging at the round marble table under our Lady of Perpetual Help—a failure. Here were street characters we knew by sight though not always by name. Paintings he loved, Bonnards, early Alabamas, a Duchamp urinal called Fountain, corny shots of his own family, plus the composers he loved best. Godlike Schubert, dead at thirty-one, of venereal disease and then typhoid fever, after being weakened by his tendency to drink.

  I remember one Thursday, running late. It was the day before my trip to see the folks in Florida. By then, Marco was down with it and I had taken sweet and sour soup by his place. He never really let us in, and therefore it was necessary to wait a while for him to get to the door. Even hauling up the rope had become a godlike chore. I dropped off a magnifying glass at Gideon’s, he was trying to sell his Villon etchings, and wanted to have a lens there to assure some visiting Japanese dealer that the things were authentic. Gideon appeared, birdlike but elegant in a blue satin robe I’d never seen before, he asked me if I could lend him another couple hundred till the end of the week. As an IOU, while I waited, he did a charming little ink drawing, a caricature of me, I think it was meant to be. But it showed an Indian deity with all the arms, one supporting a magnifying glass that had suddenly grown big as Sherlock Holmes’s. Gideon handed over the drawing confidently as Picasso would, that assured of the work’s value and character. I thanked him, I wrote out another uncollectible check. Only Southern gentlemanliness prevents my stating the full final amount.

  And so I was, as usual those days, frazzled when I pulled at last into Robert’s room. It was often the last stop, and maybe that was unfair to him. By the time I arrived there, I sometimes yearned to climb right under the covers with him. (What else was new?)

  Instead—my duty seemed to fortify my long morning of earnest homely errands into something frothy, a comic meringue worthy of Noel Coward or Cole Porter. I recalled Robert telling me way back that the two of us exerted more charm while flossing our teeth than some poor suckers put forth during their whole honeymoons, and I remember wondering what charm was exactly?

  Some willingness to exaggerate? To live in continual innocent relation to the world’s outsized joys and shocks? I had actually looked up the word. Or had I meant to and was I, in my exhaustion, just recalling what I’d expected its meaning to be?

  No, wait. Not only had I got to the dictionary, I’d photocopied the definition, had a slide made of it. I’d scattered it among the sundry other images: the head of Brahms, the jewel-like nudity of Madame Bonnard’s floating iridescent in her bath. I recalled more now—in the jumbled fatigued way that only let me move cerebrally in such short staccato lurches like those follow-the-dot games I once loved in my boyhood Jack and Jill magazines.

  As usual, I entered Robert’s room talking. I had peeled off my coat, had plucked a dead lilac from Angie’s otherwise still-lovely arrangement, I tugged down one corner of his bedclothes, then slowly registered new retinal evidence, changes in a room that had begun to seem eternal in its sameness.

  The projector had jammed between two slides. These images (held there all night?) had burned. One depicted the upper half of Schubert’s face, his tiny glasses seared clear through to whiteness but the wavy hair and the whole scorched forehead remained, a brown zigzag husk. Atop this, superimposed as in some Alabama image, black spiney letter, projected, big.

  Charm, a noun. —based on Middle English for a magic spell, derived from the Latin word “carmen” meaning incantation. 1. The power or quality of pleasing or delighting; a
ttractiveness: “The breezy tropical setting had great charm”. 2. A particular quality that attracts; a delightful characteristic: “A mischievous grin was among the child’s many charms”. 3. A small ornament, such as one worn on a bracelet. 4. An item worn for its supposed magical benefit, as in warding off evil; an amulet. 5. To attract or delight greatly. To bewitch.

  Light in here bounced images off the wall and back down onto our patient. He, unsupervised, lay naked atop his sheets. He’d noticed me; I’d never felt so watched by him. When flourishing, he had never liked direct stares; but the more silent he grew, the more legalistic, dubious Talmudic, and resigned these long looks grew.

  He had incidentally pulled the IV from his arm and the milky nutriment line was dislodged from a catheter inserted midchest. He was naked and elongated as any El Greco saint. His arms, thrown open, rested to either side; his features were set and bits of the projected image played over his bare form. Part of Schubert’s nose lit one shoulder.

  Robert’s face had shaped itself into a question, one addressed, it seemed, to the projector’s light. I saw that my monologue (never able to cure him) would never again even cheer him. I sensed that he’d grown finally blind to whatever might now be offered to beguile or charm him. Nothing held him to us now. He had no interests. The continuous seduction, it’d ceased.

  I saw that the surface of his body, once so pure and supple, was mottled and pocked and scored as if by some terrible recordkeeper. Robert’s tattoo of five-line musical possibility forever awaiting notes had shrunk, as he had—in the way a balloon, broken, renders any words across it illegible.

  I climbed up onto the bed beside him, got both arms beneath his back. The crushed geranium smell of him rose so intense it threw a little clear-glass greenhouse all around us. His arm freely drained, the milky substance of the feeding fluid seemed to pour from the hole burrowed in the center of his chest like some nipple wasting nourishment that a suckling child might use. His genitals looked huge because they, having stayed their same size, contrasted with such wasting all around them.

  I held Robert, nothing horrified me now, because it was him I had here. All the protection that his beauty had once offered him and us, that was now lost. And yet, the lowering of its spangled curtain, let me in, in closer, and right up against him. He now appeared as interchangeable with others on this hall as white eggs in a single carton. And yet he still smelled like Robert: Now he looked green but smelled golden. I could feel him looking up at me, dry lips forming half a name, whispered. It sounded like “Tension.” Or “Tennyson?” It couldn’t be. He kept staring. I got a better grip on him. If he was messy, I would be. And his long hollow look itself let me know what a construction it’d all been. My Robert—the altarboy who was both boy and altar. I had needed that, needed both. Now, him naked in my arms, we were finally equals. If what had first moved me toward him had been his looks that finally surrendered to his gift, what held me here now was simply what outlasted admiration. I still loved. He could be dead but never ugly. Because I could still love whatever of him was left. He saw that. He saw that what the nurses cleaned up out of duty or union obligation, I cleaned because it was him and his. And therefore, ours.

  If loving him haphazardly had been misguided, masochistic, then this part finally, it at last felt proper, reciprocal.

  His meanness and fitful coldness to me, his making me a mascot-hobby-gopher, even his exposing Angie and the others to latent harm, none of that could lessen what he’d given us. Love had always helplessly left him. I’d left him helpless. He dispensed it like monoxide and we gathered it, his archivists, his orbiting bees and jagged minor moons.

  I patted one side of his face, I looked up at the wall, read part of the definition.

  “Robert Robert Robert. Still charming after all these years. How do you do it? Can we bottle it? I could drink you like honey and Ensure, forever. What a strange pair we’ve made, hunh?”

  And he? He said that last part of a word, “ension”—I got it.

  “‘Potential’? That still your nickname for me? Potential what? But thanks, love.”

  And, no longer angry at the inept nurses who had not looked in on him, had not kept him covered; no longer worried how many days he’d have or if I dared go South as planned; feeling nothing but how immense this attraction still was and how much of my gratitude still held, held both of us, I cradled him. Now, as he looked up at me from far out of nowhere, I could freely rock rock rock him, singing in my only voice, the froggy and untrained one,

  “Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do,

  I’m half crazy all for the likes of you.

  I am too poor for marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet upon the seat

  Of a bicycle built for two …”

  I don’t believe in Paradise.

  I do believe in Address Books.

  Time of Departure

  ideon died first. Locked in the room with jumpstart heart-shockers, unsuccessful—a pretty gifted dark kid who’d always been only lucky (till this), a boy whose new cashmere sweater was often a green as sweetly acid as the colors in his pictures. He assumed that he alone would somehow be saved, by friends with connections, saved because of all his genuine unrealized promise.

  At his funeral, twenty mourners held on to each other. Angie, determined to push Marco’s wheelchair, kept bumping into drainage slots and tombs, half-blind from our week’s crying.

  Gideon had had the goods but often used them up, on splendid times. He maybe figured he could finally “apply himself,” could become fully superb when he was old and homely, and getting no better offers. (Who on earth can blame him?)

  It pained me, his being buried here, in such a cut-rate sort of Jewish cemetery in far Queens. The boneyard rested, pummeled by screams, direct on the flight path of La Guardia Airport. We tried saying our goodbyes out here; the few of us gathered were little aided by a dwarf-sized rental rabbi who had never known our friend. We screamed, “Gideon liked … Gideon could always …” beneath the howl of jets that swooped so low we might jump up and nearly touch metal. Gigantic silver planes (so close you could count their undersides’ rivets) swept over this squat ghetto, gray stones somehow urban. We, already stooped by mourning, we ducked even further. Jet noise seemed a new part of the diaspora’s old humiliation.

  Here lies a beautiful boy who painted boats and houses, who, though forever broke himself, still managed to give his nephews refurbished forest-green Volvos to take to Tufts. Here lies a boy who caused the world to fall in love with him, and who allowed us to forgive him for never quite solely loving us back enough, for never playing at work quite hard enough at work. He had other gifts and he gave all those away, with a generosity that shamed the smallmindedness of his fond, loan-holding survivors.

  I tried, the day Gideon died, to get his obituary into the Times. I found I would pull all sorts of backdoor tricks for friends, especially sick friends—tricks I’d never once considered for myself. I was told that the paper’s art editor must approve the listing of any dead artist. The obit editor explained, “I’m afraid I never heard of him myself. We only have room for major painters. Your friend, what was his name again? Yes, nice name. I’m sure a fine person but didn’t have significant New York representation. A Boston artist mostly. No important museums. Just not well known enough for us. But I can give you the extension for the notices.”

  “Do, please. Now, the Notices? Because all this is new to me.”

  “Yes, the paid-for obits. ‘The shorts.’ You ready to copy?”

  So I at least got Gideon on record. For a mere two hundred and fifty-nine dollars, he finally arrived into the Times. Though below, of course, and in smaller print. It didn’t seem right, Gideon’s only staying down in the Personals. He’d never graduated, never became—above, free—News.

  —Gideon, we still talk about you all the time.

  But here’s the question … here’s the question once you mult
iply our darling pal Gideon by ten, by Robert, by Marco, then four times ten … toward the two million. Here’s the question. What to DO with a decade and a half of their phone numbers and street lore? What’s to become of this now-pointless information?

  I must decide: Shall I leave these loyal dead in my address book? Of course, I want them there. But bumping into them daily, each hooked to his final comet trail of medical 800 numbers, still stops me cold.

  It’s a minor yet momentous choice. There are memories that cannot be refiled, cannot be surpassed by contact with new people. I want to send a petition somewhere, to get my circle back, to settle them around that table for one more cafe latte, one typical, ordinary between-things day. A partly cloudy Tuesday might be good. I would send this petition direct to Management, were there one.

  Do I sound bitter? Do I care? Well, yeah, as it happens. But, one problem with surviving: you risk seeming either self-congratulatory or somehow, your own lucky self, very wronged. Instead of being left here grateful, you’re stuck with a brittle sort of veteran’s pride. It’s like those folks who did not name names to the House UnAmerican Committee; it makes you recast yourself as Joan of Arc and all the rest of them—cans of lighter fluid.

  Cleaning out Marco’s apartment felt strange. Both because it was right over Ossorio’s, the site of so much action, and because not one of us had ever been invited in. It was almost scary, finally barging in to pack him up. Happily some of the guys who worked with Ossorio volunteered to help me purge. They acted more superstitious than I. Looking back, I see they feared … contagion. But, thing is, they forced themselves. That’s all that you can really ask of anybody.