Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  All forms of Physics are now bent upon contenting you forever. Which means amusing you (which means instructing you). Heaven is secretly a school. Its only subject, the past and future history of Love …

  Observe, fondle, stroke, Indian wrestle, hand-hold. Try several brands of hearty handshakes to make sure. Winnow forth from among yourselves those known most fully—via love—to you other saints. Shout a beloved name. Feel each other, feel each other up, my darling sudden angels. You’re allowed now, anything, always.

  Pray, continue.

  We have only time here, only time, our memories, and charity. You’ll all soon be absolutely crazy about each other. Fascinated, and I mean forever.

  Here, no one will ever again leave you.

  Heaven’s code name is “Hello.”

  You have managed, you—of all your kinds and gangs. You have broken through the leaky outer edges of parlous actual love. You persisted when the wiser ones turned back. They retreated toward mere dignity, security. They’re in Hell or, worse, are nowhere. You chanced loving those that, trying, just … could … not … quite … fully … love … you … back.

  Mother hold daughter. Man who drowned while clinging to a stranger, hold him close. You are strangers reborn brothers. “Hello” say “Hello” to “Hello.”

  Let true pleasure—innocent and richly deep—at last begin. How can you know you’ve just found Paradise?

  The Celestial offers you privacy. Plus perfect, funny, erotic company eternally.

  BrotherSister, here we live beyond Race and Class and Shame. You need never again fear your own body. We all now play toward working. Existence is finally precisely understood because it is so perfectly recalled. Life’s become, at last, pure meaning.

  There is nothing left to do beyond the one great promise.

  Sound the Tympany, Master Pine, the Promise it is come. Play the gong, the flute, and strike the lyre, First Assistant Bach.

  Now that Promise shall be heard!

  The Conversation contains all God’s own favorite forms of bliss.

  This is the single IOU ever due you.

  This is the promise you saw carved clear through the overarching Gates of Paradise.

  These few words encircle all there is of Happiness.

  Turn to face those recent angels nearest you.

  Let your saved hands join others’. Touch new/old faces, old/new genitals.

  Eleven words—through Magna past Timbre toward Imbue—are burned deep within our Gate’s colossal crystal. Heaven’s motto lights you toward your vertical future. Finally, encircled, we conclude commencing.

  The Celestial offers you perfect, funny, erotic company, eternally.

  This is Paradise.

  This, my dears, is all God ever promised us:

  HELLO AT LAST.

  YOU HAVE ONLY

  JUST BEGUN TO

  KNOW EACH OTHER.

  ALLAN GURGANUS

  Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. His honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  ALSO BY ALLAN GURGANUS

  OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL

  Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and Colonel William Marsden was fifty. If he was a “veteran of the War for Southern Independence,” Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator’s daily battles in the Home—complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72663-7

  PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

  With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists—refugees from the middle class—hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher’s son whose good-looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina “Alabama” Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other’s work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this trio grows up fast, somehow founding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70203-7

  THE PRACTICAL HEART

  In his fictional town of Falls, North Carolina—a watchful zone of stifling mores—Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, and betrayal. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted great-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and eighteenth-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths—sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming—from human hearts as immense as they are local.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72763-4

  WHITE PEOPLE

  In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, senior citizens startled by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70427-7

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1999

  Copyright © 1997 by Allan Gurganus

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  Portions of this work appeared, in slightly different form, in GQ and The New Yorker.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Gurganus, Allan.

  Plays well with others / Allan Gurganus.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76413-3

  Title.

  PS3557.U814P57 1997

  813’.54-dc21 97-36884

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  www.randomhouse.com

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