I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  To my relief, the Fashion Nun Curse seemed to be lifting. I was on my way back from a business trip to Japan, on the leg from San Francisco to New York, and lo and behold, sitting next to me was an extremely attractive blond man. I could tell from his accent that he was French, but it was difficult to tell if he was gay. Before deplaning we made a date, which I took great care and pleasure preparing for. Every bit of my body was accounted for and groomed. I splurged at the little florist on the corner, who had the most irresistible pale-pink peonies with a particularly strong and beautiful scent. It was a perfect night in May. When I opened the door, we wasted no time getting to the point. Without even saying hello we lunged at each other, and we were naked and in bed within minutes. It felt like an hallucination—that anyone that attractive could want me for my body. He had silky blond hair, long sinewy limbs, round horn-rimmed glasses, and blue-and-white striped boxer shorts. He made me feel beautiful, which in turn sparked a kind of love that made it possible to suspend disbelief for long enough to feel beautiful. We dated for about six months—six months seemed to be my time limit. He was the closest thing to the man of my dreams that I had yet encountered. He seemed to have all the emotional depth of the Israeli shrink coupled with lightheartedness, a fun-loving side that was so attractive.

  That first night we walked down the block to Cafe Luxembourg for supper. Life was good. He mentioned his last name and waited a long pregnant beat, as though I was supposed to know something. He was a French aristocrat, and he spoke of his noble background in a way that suggested it was a major aspect in his life. When I told my mother I was dating him, it seemed to warm her to the idea that I was gay. “I always knew one of my kids would end up with a Rothschild!” For a Jewish mother I guess that name was a kind of balm that made everything, even being gay, okay. When we broke up and I told her, there was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Then she blurted out: “Well. You blew it!”

  * * *

  While my personal life was full of excitement during my time at Jeffrey Banks, my professional life was markedly less so. At that time I was surprised to encounter a certain shallowness in my own personal character. Whereas Perry Ellis was smack in the center of the glaring fashion limelight, Jeffrey Banks was not, and I missed it terribly—the way a drug addict misses his regular fix. Jeffrey and I did everything we could to bring attention to the collections, which actually did get very favorable notice. There were a few covers of Women’s Wear Daily and a number of fantastic editorials in Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, etc. But no matter what we did, we were still a fledgling brand, and Jeffrey was known for menswear while Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and the other more established fashion houses continued to dominate the fashion pages. I didn’t know I would miss the attention that much, but I did. I kept thinking it would pass as other things took precedence in my life. But that never happened. What I missed wasn’t just pages of fashion reportage. It was shoots. Parties. Tables at Mr Chow. All the celebrities and socialites—the glitterati who seemed obsessed with us up there in Perry’s inner sanctum. The Fashion Tribe.

  And more than anything, I missed the fashion shows that came twice a year. At Jeffrey Banks we had beautiful, modest shows compared to the extravagant ones at Perry Ellis, which seemed prophetic and religious by comparison. All the star models lined up in their new hair and makeup looking like nothing anyone had seen to that point. The evocative, ear-shattering, edge-of-the-world music. The triple-strength lights that make everything look beautiful. The vast stretches of runway, which always felt like a walkway toward fashion history.

  Whenever I think about that time in my life, I’m reminded of a scene with Anna Wintour, which presented the high contrasts between being in the fashion spotlight and out of it in six short words. It was 2008. I’d just had dinner with Mrs. Jayne Wrightsman and Anna Wintour at La Grenouille and then went to a Broadway revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, starring Laura Linney. It was a warm spring night, and as we lingered in front of the theatre before the show, I told Anna how hard it was existing outside of the heady fashion whirlwind. Without missing a beat she turned to me with a weary chuckle and said, “Well, darling, that’s the big time.”

  19

  Answering machines were new inventions in 1983, and I was obsessed with checking my messages—and not merely because I was dating someone named Mario who was no stranger to last-minute booty calls. One night after dinner at Cafe Luxembourg I convinced Peter to stop back at the apartment on our way out to a nightclub, and there was a message on my machine, but it wasn’t Mario. It was my uncle Sam calling to tell me that my father had suffered another massive heart attack and had been rushed to the hospital.

  I hastened there in a kind of trance to find all of my immediate family in the waiting room in various states of emotional devastation. My father was in intensive care, and I was only permitted to peer through a small window in the door to his room. For the next two days my sisters and I split round-the-clock shifts at the hospital, mostly looking after my mother, who wouldn’t leave. Scared as we were, none of us really believed my father would die. We thought this time he might possibly have to have surgery, but we were used to the heart troubles, and we were sure he would recover.

  When I wasn’t at the hospital, I’d return home to find Peter there, which was a blessing. Having just lost his father a few months earlier, he knew all the right things to say. After the first day or two my dad began showing signs of recovery and all dire thoughts of losing him vanished. I even managed a coffee date with Mario, who left me one of the sweetest messages I’d received when he found out about my dad. Our hospital vigil eased and on the third night we felt okay about leaving him. Even my mother went home for a good night’s sleep.

  At about two o’clock the next morning the phone rang. I was still awake, since I was not one to fall asleep before three. It was my uncle Sam calling to tell me to hurry to Lenox Hill Hospital. Peter woke and offered to come with me, but I declined. It was a warm night, and I smoked a cigarette in the backseat of the taxi, the window open and the dirty, humid summer blowing on my face. At times of emotional trauma, when there are things too painful or frightening to confront, I end up finding the next most terrifying item to obsess over. That night, instead of confronting my fear of losing my father, I thought only of the freedom I had been enjoying since I began separating from my family, and I worried about how the next few days would affect the course of my free life. When I got to the hospital I hesitated outside, not wanting to go in. I knew the minute I crossed the threshold of that building I would have to abandon my great new life indefinitely—maybe forever. I stood there smoking, teetering at the jaws of obligation, which were ready to chew me up and swallow me. I feared that I would be called upon to leave my happiness behind and take up the old mantle of the dutiful son, a role I loathed but one I was specifically groomed for.

  My father was in critical condition. He’d contracted pneumonia, and we were told his chances of survival were slim. In the ten minutes I was alone with him he was barely conscious, with tubes running in and out of different parts of his body and face. He looked exhausted, as if he’d aged fifteen years in the hospital. He kept trying to say something, looking up at me, smiling. Finally with a great deal of effort he said, “You’re a good boy.” I took his hand. Then he said, “Be a good boy.” A few hours later my father was dead. When the doctor came out to tell us my mother screamed, “Louie!”—the nickname they’d called each other since their honeymoon. It was a terrible sound.

  The following days were filled with great levels of sadness and anxiety. No matter what differences I had with my father, my endless tears were a testament to the love I felt for him. I was surprised by my response—I just couldn’t stop crying. As soon as I stopped, I would start again. For days I’d fall asleep in tears and wake weeping. Any thought that came into my mind would make me sob. It was a low point. A descent not only into despair, but also a revisiting of my troubled past. Horrible thoughts r
aced through my mind of being trapped again in the ugly reality of that community in Brooklyn.

  The funeral took place in the old shul founded by the Syrian Jews of my grandparents’ generation. Located on a tight side street in Bay Ridge, in a series of small, dark rooms that had been joined together from a row of houses. Dour colors, mahogany wainscoting, airless, no windows in the main room. Old, dark red-velvet folding chairs lined up close to one another. The entire population of those past generations manifest in the gathered crowd—harder, even less assimilated, and fuller with judgment. On a bier, which in my memory looks more like two sawhorses, stood a plain and beautiful plywood coffin that resembled a Donald Judd construction—simple, sturdy, elegant in its efficiency, unvarnished, the light-colored wood glowing in all the darkness. It’s the custom of the community to be buried in a simple way. All eyes were on me, waiting to see how devoutly I could pray for my father’s soul. His sisters and brothers were watching me closely now—these people I was so scared of in the past, I felt an innate disdain for them, similar to the disdain I had felt for my father. I imagined my future as being nailed in that coffin, about to be buried forever. Singsong, minor key Arabic prayers ringing through the rooms. My mother, in torn black, clutching my arm. Obligation, like a weight and as hot and airless as the stifling room, presented the unspoken implication that I was the man of the house now.

  After shul the cars caravanned to a Staten Island cemetery where all the Sephardim are buried. The nearest family members were all present—about sixty-five aunts, uncles, and cousins. We sweated profusely, the hot sun of August soaking our mourning black. Of all the days I’d spent as an outsider, I never felt more outside than on that day, among those people, everyone grieving in exactly the same way. For the next few weeks I was forced to move back to my mother’s house. The religious aspects of the shiva process felt false and invasive, offering no room for my own grieving process. My new personal identity was on the line. I’d gotten used to living my life as an out gay man, and I finally believed that my feelings were more important than those Jewish teachings condemning me. That day not only was my father’s life being eulogized, it felt like my life as I knew it might be over, too. My obligation was to keep up with the praying—the mumbling and swaying again—which felt like a big step backward.

  Dreams of my mother emerging from the confines of the Syrian community were dashed to bits. She didn’t become extremely religious like my sisters, but she would never become the Auntie Mame–ish character I had hoped she might. The division between her world and mine seemed to widen even as she tried to keep me tethered to her, to that world. As much as she wanted me to succeed, to have my own life, she couldn’t let me go entirely. Her responsibility as the matriarch of the family weighed too heavily on her conscience.

  * * *

  For months after my father’s death I was expected to go to temple three times a day and be part of a minyan: a quorum of ten men who have been bar mitzvahed, which is, according to the religion, the only chance the prayers might have of piercing through to heaven. Stepping into that scene felt fraudulent—if I participated in that, wouldn’t it stand to reason that I believed in it? That I believed in god? That I upheld the beliefs of those men I prayed with? Having lived through yeshiva, any belief in god had been thoroughly knocked out of me. Every word of those prayers around my father’s death felt like a lie, like a betrayal of the person I really was.

  The mourner’s Kaddish is a prayer the living say for the dead in order to insure their passage into heaven. When my father was alive he made me promise again and again that I would say Kaddish three times a day for him for the full required year, completely convinced it was his only chance of getting into heaven. For two or three months I pretended to say it—I wasn’t really sure of the exact words, but it was easy to go with the flow phonetically, rhythmically, carried along by the other voices. I couldn’t bring myself to learn the prayer, even though I read Hebrew and Aramaic, which I was taught at Yeshiva of Flatbush. It rang completely false. Up to that point I had been cavalier about my disbelief in god, but from that point forward I was clear and solid in my atheism.

  The more I tried to fulfill the promise, the more of an affront it was to me. I thought if the roles were reversed, I would never hold anyone to something that wasn’t meaningful to them. Even though I knew it was easier to just say it, get it done for a year, and then move on, I realized I needed to assert my own principles. It was something I couldn’t discuss with anyone, I just followed my own heart. I was the one to make the judgment—which made it seem even riskier, making my conscience the arbiter of my father’s fate. What if someday I woke up and found that I actually did believe in the power of Kaddish? Would I hate myself?

  For what it’s worth, I think of it as one of the best decisions I ever made.

  No matter how much I loved my father and how much sadness it gives me to admit this, I was really only able to live my life—to thrive—after he died. There was no way I could live as an openly gay man without the fear that he might find out and be crushed, or try to crush me. In the following couple of years after his death, most of my extended family found out I was gay, and although I was never close to them, I did fear how my openness might affect their relationship with my mother. Once I came out completely it became harder and harder to show my face in the old neighborhood. There was no chance I would consider staying in the closet, even for the purposes of a visit home. By 1982 for me the closet was in the past.

  Still, there were certain conventions that I was obliged to fulfill, if only to make my mother happy. I was always present at Jewish holidays, though not at shul. (I stopped going to shul completely right after my father’s one-year memorial service.) Two years later I stayed in Italy for a few weeks after a work assignment and missed Passover, which was seen as a total transgression. My uncle Sam actually called me in Milan to tell me I was “too old for this sort of rebellion!” (I was twenty-three.) I attended most family events—such as weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals—where I was entirely out of place. At one family wedding one of the cousins that I’d been close to as a child, who had since become Orthodox, literally backed away from me when I went to greet her, as though I were a vampire about to bite her.

  Yet without my father, my mother took more and more comfort in the extended family, and my exchanges with her began to follow a certain routine. At dinner we talked raptly about literature, fashion, politics, as though it were one of our Saturday-morning breakfasts of old. Then, like a kind of switch had been thrown, she’d pull back and speak of nothing else but her new grandchildren—puzzled as to why I wasn’t taking more naturally to the role of uncle, or why I seemed to be pulling away from my sisters, who were becoming more devoutly Orthodox than we had ever been growing up. It became harder and harder for me to justify my presence at family gatherings. I had to deflect my real identity; even though they knew I was gay I couldn’t talk about it openly. I couldn’t talk about my chosen lifestyle, my real self. And somehow I was expected to swallow my individual identity, respect the status quo, and love it still.

  To be clear, I was at odds with every thought that was being discussed at these family functions. Not just sexual or religious ideas—economic ones, political ones, humanitarian ones. There’s a certain blindness toward anything and everything that doesn’t agree with their religious traditions, and a pass is given to terrible old ideas like racism and misogyny because they seem to serve the religion and the community. It’s not aggressive or even perceptible a lot of the time, but it’s a powerful undercurrent. Anything that mattered to me was made null and void by the built-in obligation of religion and family. It was a kind of orthodox, heterosexual tyranny that encompassed all parts of life and nullified any squeak of rebellion, any real innovation away from their reality. The message was: They were capable of loving me, accepting me, if certain aspects of my identity were left unacknowledged. It felt more and more like a grave compromise to my integrity. The chasm betwe
en us widened and nothing could be done to make it better.

  Rather than complying, or worse, begging for tolerance, I chose distance. Nodding politely while watching the clock for the right time to start saying my goodbyes and finally taking my leave. There was no ecstasy like the subway ride back to the sanity of my life, or the taxi ride home after Yom Kippur or a family wedding. Each time I headed home after one of these events it took me longer and longer to shake off the lies. Eventually I would come again to the joyful recognition of how far I’d come away from my repressed beginnings.

  * * *

  In 1984, after I’d been there for about three years, the women’s division at Jeffrey Banks was closed by the parent company. Successful as the launch was, they hadn’t foreseen the huge investment that would be required to take it the full distance. I took the opportunity to resign, and I made no plans to take another job. I did a few odd things, including making costumes for a small movie about a lesbian vampire called Because the Dawn, starring a singer named Edwige, a gadabout on the downtown circuit. I thought long and hard about taking a part in an all-male version of The Women being performed by an experimental theatre group in the East Village called ABC No Rio. (I was offered the part of the Countess de Lave, a part I always thought I was born to play. “L’amour, l’amour, toujour l’amour!”) I tossed around ideas of getting back into show business full time, but, again, it seemed wrong to expect anyone in Hollywood or on Broadway to understand what to do with me; making a distinctive mark in fashion seemed more tangible. I talked myself in and out of the idea of starting a company and ultimately concluded it really was not the right time. You feel these things in your bones, and my bones weren’t ready. All I knew was that I needed a little breather.