The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

—

  Oh, that apartment: how I miss that apartment. Its high ceilings; its creaking cedar-smelling floors; its whistling radiator pipes, sounding vaguely like sirens—which half the time they turned out to be. I walk past it sometimes, still; from across the street, that neon cat still stares into its living room. The back window looked out directly onto a brick wall. We were reckless in front of that window—that first night and many after. The six inches to the bricks, the thirty-some-odd feet to the alleyway below, the unknowable volume they comprised—these might have been the dimensions of the entire city, the entire world. It might have been the entire galaxy we traversed, safe in our ship, witnessed only by stars, gazing indifferently from the past.

  We double-locked the door against intrusions we never spoke of. Beyond us, roaches rampaged in the hallway; shadows zebra-ed down the fire escape. Inside, Matthew Miller told me many ludicrous things, and I believed them.

  What more is there to say? In that outlandish, inscrutable season, I would have believed anything at all.

  NINE

  cel

  1988

  Cel’s uninventing begins in the fall, when a man on a bus snarls at her to move the fuck over, princess.

  She is wearing an ironed skirt and conventional makeup. The man has a matted beard; his feet are black and bare. He hates Cel categorically, which still feels like a triumph. As Cel moves over she feels the fluttery recklessness, the sense of suspended rules and expanded possibility, of a masquerade ball.

  Because this, this, has been the project of her life. She spent all of high school trying to make herself into the others; she parroted their talk, scouring her speech of Hal’s obsolescent expressions, Ruth’s loopy malapropisms. She tried copying the spirit of their clothes until ninth grade; after that, she stuck to army boots and wore her coat indoors nine months out of the year. This was deemed weird, but the boring sort of weird that didn’t particularly excite aggression. In conversation, Cel was mostly laconic, occasionally extremely foul-mouthed, which somehow never stopped surprising people. Her pop-cultural awareness never remotely approached normal levels, but she was good at absorbing tidbits and savvy at deploying them. She organized these expenditures on the same syncopated cycle Hal used with the bills—deferred until the very last moment, right before the lights were shut off, the car repossessed. Cel knew her performance was effortful and basically unconvincing, to anyone looking too closely. But she also knew that nobody was really looking at all.

  But at Smith, it seems, her acceptability is presumed. It becomes quickly clear that this brings certain liabilities. The excision of her former life was supposed to make a surface; instead, it seems she’s created a vacuum. In October, a man on the street calls her a WAR PIG and asks how much money her dad makes. On Halloween, an Amherst boy dressed as Che lectures her on the class struggle. In Marxism class, there are scoffs over her halting analysis of systemic inequality. She is lectured on the Vietnam War and the plight of the mentally ill; she is lectured on bourgeois signifiers and the unacknowledged troubles of the rural poor.

  “You could tell them a little about yourself,” says Elspeth, after Cel tells her exactly that much.

  But Cel has not spent a lifetime building a sort of privacy only so she can throw it in some stranger’s face at a party. Elspeth says she might at least try Birkenstocks. Cel’s slight overdressing, she says, seems precious; a sign that she is in need of special instruction. If Cel is no longer invisible, it’s because the background behind her has changed.

  And so she buys a mustard-yellow collared shirt, brown pants that flare at the hem. She stops wearing shoes in the summer. She throws out her lipstick, her drugstore curling iron—faster and faster, she rids herself of these things, these treasures from a sinking ship, though with more regret than she’ll ever care to admit.

  It is clear that she will have to start all over. She mourns a little while, then begins again.

  part two

  The nightingales are sobbing in

  The orchards of our mothers,

  And hearts that we broke long ago

  Have long been breaking others….

  —W. H. AUDEN

  This ghost that runs after you,

  my brother, is more beautiful than you;

  why do you not give him your

  flesh and your bones?

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  TEN

  semi

  1971–1976

  It came slowly, then all at once: a delusional, fiendish love.

  How many nights, how many calls, how many pennies cast up at his window? How many keys dropped down to the sidewalk—and who could say from which apartment they fell? And yet it seems to have only been one night, eternally recurring—it seems that it is happening somewhere, even now, without me.

  The margins are easier to access: hours before, hours after. Images limned with a feeling they cannot possibly have inspired on their own. Dodging the junkies on Clinton Street. Dodging the anal-retentive NYPD German shepherds on the A train. Listening to the call to prayer on Atlantic Avenue in some gorgeous miscreant dawn. Wandering the warehouse district, gazing up at the cast-iron buildings, looking for a party that was never found. Standing atop the Empire State Building, the skyline before us like a sideways key. Calling Matthew from a pay phone outside Tracks or the Gaiety, ELO spilling out into the street. Do ya do ya want my love, do ya do ya want my face, do ya do ya want my mind? The smell of poppers acrid in my nostrils. I’d tell myself that this was why my knees sometimes shook when the phone rang, why they broke (once! only once!) when he answered.

  I don’t mean to make it sound simpler than it was. I did not yearn for Matthew when I admired a man lifting weights at a Nautilus, or floated in a Quaalude haze past the Ice Palace, the air around me thick with sassafras and pine. I did not long for him when I went prowling around the Gansevoort Street pier, watching the dawn break over the container ships. They were yellow and blue and had been around the world: oh, the things they’d seen! And when I fucked other men, it wasn’t purely out of principle. Yet I found I could never entirely banish Matthew, either. He was simply there, within me—he seemed to have moved in somehow and taken up a phantasmal, stridently permanent, residence. This alarmed me, though not as much as it should have: like many early symptoms, its significance was clear only in retrospect.

  * * *

  —

  One man’s rapture is another man’s public service announcement: mine was the joy of the junkie in the gutter.

  The boys, of course, did not approve. A cold peace descended in the apartment: the boys united in some judgment of Matthew I could never quite define. One did not bow helplessly before one’s vices; drugs were consumed on the weekends, according to schedules. There were the usual objections to monogamy—it was an anachronism, an opportunity cost. The serial monogamists were all kidding themselves; we called theirs the Elizabeth Taylor approach. Now, we agreed, was not the time for restraint.

  I’d point out that Matthew and I were not monogamous, and made a whole big point of showing it off. But certainly it was becoming clear—as months stretched unbelievably into seasons—that I was in the thrall of a profound and unseemly attachment. This was embarrassing in a square, sentimental way—like coming down with a case of midlife Christianity. We found this sort of thing contemptible in part, I think, because we thought it feminine—stilettos and machismo: odd bedfellows, indeed.

  I understood all of this, and did not care. Like the twitching addict, like the serenely saved, I knew the happiness of a different, better dimension.

  And even now, who can be certain I did not?

  * * *

  —

  We were not, as a group, generally given to moralism. One of Brookie’s regulars had spent a year on Rikers for stabbing a man over, I believe, a slice of pizza. The notion that there was som
ething unseemly about my relationship with Matthew was a hilarious attitude coming from them, and I would have said so if they’d ever had the courtesy to articulate any of this out loud.

  But they didn’t. And so, in those days, we did not fight about Matthew Miller: we fought about everything else instead. We fought about civil rights, women’s lib, economic equality, and what order they should go in. We fought—Brookie and I did—about the Panthers. We fought about whether Larry Kramer was a visionary or a traitor; we fought about whether Andy Kaufman was a genius or a gimmick. We fought about the Joan Baez album Nick played for an entire summer—that hollow alto of hers sounding increasingly aggrieved as the months wore on.

  “As I remember your eyes were bluer than robin’s eggs…My poetry was lousy you said—”

  —and Stephen would say, “Case in point.”

  We fought about whether the new vibe at the sex clubs was sociopathic or interesting. We fought about whether the hippies were really only hedonists, then fought over whether we were in any position to judge. On matters of consensus, we sought hairline fractures. We all hated Ronald Reagan, but managed to generate some real hostility over whether “Dutch” would have made a good drag name.

  One night on Fire Island the boys dragged me out to see the moon. We’d spent the month in a swirl of tea dances and theme balls, tambourines and ethyl chloride. I’d thought “full moon” was a euphemism, though it turned out to be the thing itself—and it did indeed seem startlingly close, like an asteroid hovering just before impact.

  “Makes you feel like it could crash right into us if it wanted to,” said Paulie.

  “Would you blame it?” I said. “We crashed right into it.”

  “That’s what they want you to believe,” said Brookie, so that we might argue about that, too.

  * * *

  —

  “All young people take their opinions too seriously,” said Matthew when I told him all this. “They think they’re going to be stopped on the street at any moment and asked to justify all their life’s conclusions.”

  “Young people think that?” I said. “Then what’s your excuse?”

  But, in fact, I knew the answer already: in Albany, Matthew’s career was in something like ascendance. He’d been assigned to some important committee, and people were beginning to recognize him around town. He still did a lot of traversing, even though he wasn’t technically campaigning—he went to the Bronx, crumbling like the ruins of Petra; he went to visit squatters, shivering amidst falling plaster. He went to many places beyond his district, which should have been the first clue.

  We could not, of course, go anywhere together. And yet never has New York felt denser or more dizzying as there in that little apartment, that glowing-eyed cat staring us down, listening to Matthew Miller narrate the city.

  He was obsessively well informed. He was addicted to data, to complicating information—and all this was thrilling, cerebrally erotic, at first. He could seem maddeningly without agenda, beyond a commitment to reality—and, I suppose, a militant insistence that reality existed (not an entirely uncontroversial idea, then or now). He liked to say that if you were sure of more than three things, then you probably didn’t have all your facts straight. Though he always did, and he never let you forget it—not to keep the peace, not to support his own policies—which made him a very hard man to agree with. He had a reflexive need to volunteer mitigating information. Lambaste the union busters in the transit strike—their elitism, their blind pursuit of profit, their callousness toward the common man—and Matthew, who was about as pro-union as anyone could get, would note that his opponents’ position wasn’t exactly an elite one, since it was shared by the majority of the city, which was particularly hostile to a fare hike at the moment because service was the worst in living memory; and furthermore, while he had no opinion on whether they cared only for profit, it was undeniable that theirs were hardly the only profits at issue, since the strike would be likely to affect many people’s profits, the common man’s included.

  Matthew liked to say this impulse was a holdover from his years as a lawyer, when he learned to expect exculpatory evidence—though there were times I suspected its real source was his years as a Catholic, when he had learned to volunteer confession.

  And yet. We never, never spoke of Alice.

  Matthew knew a lot about the gay world, too—though it remained rather an abstraction, in those moments when we weren’t fucking each other’s brains out. He told me about taverns in eighteenth-century London where men performed marriage ceremonies; he told me about the drag shows of Weimar Berlin. He told me how Greenwich Village and the Castro became gay neighborhoods after World War II, when a certain set of small-town soldiers just never went back home.

  “I’ll have to take your word for that,” I’d say, and kiss him. Then I’d kiss his cock through whatever stupid suit he was wearing, then his State Assembly lapel pin, to be a little funny. And then we’d be at it all over again.

  I was amazed at the intensity of the thing. I told myself it was because we couldn’t go anywhere together, and because Matthew was away so much. I told myself it was because it wasn’t real—or anyway, not completely. Because really: who was this man? I wondered as I clutched his back, kissed his neck, pushed myself inside him.

  Who are you? And are you here? And are you this?

  Please be this.

  * * *

  —

  Once, I said, “The boys don’t approve of you, you know.” I was, as Brookie might have put it, “heightening the contradictions.”

  “Is that right?” Matthew Miller said, and kissed me. “Tell the boys I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t seem terribly sorry.”

  He turned over and began stroking my eyebrow.

  “What can I say?” he said after a moment. “Tell them we love each other anyway.”

  * * *

  —

  Did he ever really love me?

  This is all I can say for certain: he often seemed to, when pretending would have gained him nothing.

  * * *

  —

  In the apartment, we played movies on the walls. We took LSD three times with a liquid eyedropper; we took DMT once and vowed we never would again. I was working on a new play—a retelling of The Possessed, set in modern-day New York, with fags and queens cast as the conspirators. Suicidal Kirillov was based on Stephen; Paulie was the aspiring revolutionary Verkhovensky; Brookie the highly philosophical Shigalev. This made me the bitterly misunderstood Stavrogin, and I gave him the very best jokes. Its working title was The Dispossessed, which I simultaneously despised and felt helplessly committed to. This seemed like a very big problem, at the time.

  We had a lot of these, then. The great disaster of the fall was a particularly hearty troop of crabs—these could usually be treated with A-200, though in this case one of us (it seems crass to say now who) required multiple rounds of Kwell and, ultimately, shaving. We all complained wretchedly. Everything is relative.

  Then there were the other kinds of problems—the ones that have taken on heft with the passing years, revealing their natures only in retrospect. For Nick, it was a night at St. Mark’s, when he was strangled by a man we’d never seen before and never would again. For Brookie, it was a bad trip at the Mineshaft, when he watched himself turn into a mouse in the bathroom mirror. He’d punched his reflection, adding a helical scar to his collection. It turned out later that the acid tab he’d taken had had Mickey Mouse’s face on it. We laughed about this, though not because it wasn’t horrifying: the bald murine face, the enormous black eyes…once more, we’d dissolve. Things had turned out fine. And though we knew we were supposed to believe that they might not have, we never lingered long in any worry. At the time, these were only the best stories to tell at certain kinds of parties.

  * * *

  —

&n
bsp; One night I was headed out to see Matthew and the boys wanted me to come to some party instead.

  “Come, dahling!” said Paulie, clicking into a Boston Brahmin accent and pulling me into a waltz. “Let us prepeah for a night of meah-re-ad pleasheahs.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Brookie, when he saw us. “Who needs fun when you’re fucking a fascist?”

  For a long time, Brookie had kept his commentary about Matthew restrained, and relatively oblique. “Well, you know what they say,” he’d said once, when a piece of our subway car fell directly onto the tracks. “You can’t fuck City Hall.”

  “He’s in the State Assembly,” I hissed. “Read a paper, why don’t you.”

  “Love has pitched its mansion in the place of excrement,” he said another time—which was a line from Yeats, and also the door above the VD clinic on Ninth Avenue.

  Brookie’s remarks had lately taken an anti-colonialist bent; more than once, he’d hinted that my relationship with Matthew was a form of appeasement—as though Matthew were a conquering imperial force and I a cringing collaborator. “Fascist,” though, was new.

  “Oh, so Matthew’s a fascist now?” I turned, and Paulie dropped my hand. “He’ll like that. He’s gotten so bored of being called a Communist.”

  The apartment was strewn with people who did not live there: a rotund boy who always wore a purse; Stephen, who’d moved into a former barbershop in Chelsea; Cherry Cerise, a cruel-tongued drag-and-style queen who had shown up during a blackout and then had stayed and stayed.

  “Who said he was a Communist?” asked the nameless boy with the purse.

  “The National Lawyers Guild,” I said.

  “Well, okay then!” said Brookie. “As long as we’re slightly to the left of the National Lawyers Guild. Yeah, that’s good. That’s spectacular. I am definitely comfortable with those politics.”