With each adult success, his father had sent John a telegram with a single line: HOW WILL YOU KEEP HUMBLE? No word of congratulation or indication that the old man might feel any pride in the work of his son. HOW WILL YOU KEEP HUMBLE? Keep your head down, shoulders slumped, affect inconsequence. Be the sad-sack do-gooding dummy who lies down as doormat to every other man. They thought it was Christian, living by the example of Jesus, but Jesus was never humble. The man was a megalomaniac, any Freudian could see it, one more Oedipal son claiming he had no father but an invisible ghost! Poor Joseph, denied his paternity! What a son, what a horror!
John’s parents espoused a spirit of abject humility, ungenerous, mean and denying, all the worse for believing so jealously in their own righteousness. Proud John had been, but prideful he had never felt. Beset by doubt, he was anxious of his own looks and talents, his performance as husband and lover, attentiveness as father, dutifulness as son. Cora and Zebulon, I beg your forgiveness, affection, and care. Wife and parents could give him no love and yet John went on asking for less: see how little love I can live on, see how I will still try to flourish, to be more vigorous for the drought, except that his hunger for love was so great it kept him returning, always hoping to find what would never be there. Nothing prideful about him, never had been, proud only in what he did well, and even still squirming with doubt that he might be delusional. Nothing he made would ever be good enough. Even if he achieved what might seem to him a near-perfect work, someone else would inevitably sneer: How slick, how trivial, how flawed.
April 21, 1950
12
In the midst of thinking back on that distant April day, returning to the scraps of speculative narrative I wrote in the weeks and months – and in some cases years – after my departure from America, trying to imagine the moments for which I was not present, could not have been present, but which I was certain bore on the outcome of that day even if only indirectly, a thought catches the back of my mind, a half-recalled memory, one I imagine might even be retrieved to wholeness if only I were able to locate its origin. It leads me to thinking about memory in a more abstract way and I know there is a book I should consult to help me. The shelves in my study are organized alphabetically, and by chance this means that the Bs are too high for me to reach. I ask Alessio to fetch the volume I have in mind, Bergson’s Matter and Memory, because it has occurred to me that there may be something in it I have been trying to recall. Alessio smiles, an indulgent smile that says, Why don’t you just relax, you don’t need to read something so heavy at this time of night, pick up a thriller or watch another old movie, do something you would actually enjoy rather than what you feel you ought to do. But he says none of this and asks me to repeat the title and author. I watch him climb the ladder, his olive hand leading his eye along the spines until he finds the right one. Lips pursed, he gently blows the dust from the top of the book, handles it as if it might fall to pieces, and climbs back down the ladder.
Right at the moment he is about to put the book in my hands he snatches it back, smiling. But only for an hour, he says, wagging a finger, it is getting late and you should go to bed. He means that I should let him put me to bed, although he does little but tuck me in like a child, make sure I am comfortable, and give me a kiss. Sometimes the kiss lingers, sometimes I think there might even be a surge of desire and not just affection. Once he has put me to bed, he will be free to go out with his friends for a late dinner, perhaps even just around the corner, to the trattoria that makes the most delicious stuffed carciofi. You can go now, I tell him, I will look after myself. Are you sure? he says, and I can see how badly he wants to go, how there must be someone he would like to meet but he has put him or her off because of his sense of duty to me. Go, I say, enjoy the evening. You don’t want to come? No, I laugh, you must have your fun. He blushes and I know that I have made a misstep in this bare acknowledgement of the life he lives when I am not present, and the fun that he has. Perhaps with Néstor or someone else like him. This is not the life I imagined when I was with you, Myles. I envisioned us growing old together, loyal to each other until the death of one or the other. I believed that there would be no going behind backs to see younger men. I was sure that we would, in our eighties or nineties, still be kissing each other with desire, if only the memory of the desire we felt as young men. I did not imagine being the elderly child of a beautiful younger man who calls me his partner but goes out at night to fuck other men. I cannot really blame him. I have no stamina for sex these days, as much as I might wish for the pleasure of arousal and consummation. It is enough to be able to look at his beauty, a voyeur in my own home, but it is not how I hoped to end my life.
I page through the book, reading passages I underlined in pencil some years ago, until I find what I think I was trying to remember. Bergson writes that we can speak of the body as a moving limit between the future and the past, a moving point that our past incessantly pushes into our future. I find this a beautiful image but also a terrifying one, the idea that for each of us our own private past is the engine propelling us into the future, or not an engine but a tide, a flood. I see myself sitting here at my desk, writing to you, my body driven forward into an unknowable future by the rising tide of my past, a tide always coming in and never going out, pushing me forward, climbing onto an ever-diminishing strip of land, the little crescent of life remaining ahead of me. Before the land runs out and time has drowned me, can I not convince you to join me here, or if you can no longer travel then allow me to visit you? If the idea of my physical presence is more than you can bear, would you at least allow us a conversation, the chance to look at and listen to each other while we still have tongues to speak?
You understand I did not wish for that day in 1950 to end as it did, but every time I opened my mouth to tell you what I was planning only a portion of the truth would come out. The full truth twisted and died, rotting on my tongue. When, over dinner, I described to you and Helen my idea that we should all leave the country – that it was just a question of you securing passports and there was no reason to believe you would be denied them, although I had no idea if this was true – I was surprised by how stunned you both looked because I had fooled myself into believing your love for me was great enough that you could not refuse me, no matter what I asked. Perhaps this is a sign of narcissism, of egoism, my failure ever to see you as a subject in your own right.
Although I had little right to feel aggrieved, I was still hurt that it took only ten minutes for you and Helen to conclude that what I had described was an impossible proposition. Crazy, Helen said, and I remember how she hooted, a bitter laughter, as if she resented me for failing to see how such a decision would affect the two of you. I knew you were planning something but I never would’ve imagined anything so extreme, she said. What were you thinking, Desmond?
You both acted as if I did not understand the gravity of what I was suggesting, as if I did not appreciate what it would mean for your careers, assuming everyone would have believed the fiction we might offer as explanation. I knew that people would talk, that the four of us picking up and starting over in Paris or Rome would lead the gossip columnists to speculate in ways it would be difficult to deny. You acted as if none of this had occurred to me. Of course it had. And it made me angry that you both insisted there were no other places in the world where you could stand before a camera pretending to be people you were not, pretending to inhabit times and places you had never visited, would never visit.
Because this was your response, even before I had started the car I was again questioning my decision to leave. You had just driven away, and I sat behind the wheel, my eyes red with tears, trying to think what to do, how to frame the further revelation I had to make, that I was not only leaving, but leaving the very next morning. As I turned the key in the ignition I felt a surge of music before hearing what song was playing. Someone had been fiddling with the dial of the car radio, leaving the volume turned up so high it almost deafened me with the
blast of a trumpet. I quickly turned it down but that sudden cacophony brought back a dream from the previous night, one that I must have had while trying to work at the table in your living room, falling asleep between bouts of writing, my head dropping forward on the typewriter keys. In the dream I kept hearing static as I sat in my living room, and the sound was so persistent that I began tearing at the fabric of my house to find its source. When I pulled down the curtains from the bay window I discovered floor-to-ceiling microphone panels cemented against the walls. I started ripping at the wallpaper and underneath it I found more microphones, plastered near the crown molding. When I removed the expansion leaves of the dining table, I found balanced on the central pedestal a microphone the size of a bathtub, as shiny and black as the eye of a giant horsefly. In the dream I ran my fingers over the plastic mesh and it vibrated at my touch, crackling with static. This was the source, these were the sources, of the static that had bedeviled me. I shouted threats, pushing my mouth against that surface, crying out You bastards, you fascists, you Nazis! I’ll get you! I’m an innocent man!
I’ll get you: stock phrase of wicked witches and half-baked villains. I needed a different script, or I needed no longer to rely on the words of others. It was time to go off book, to stop being predictable, to begin improvising and extemporizing in order to shake the tail that refused to leave me in peace.
On my drive to the Marshes I thought I might catch up to you but I could never see your car in the traffic chute of Sunset. In the Los Angeles night one vehicle looked like another, black or kidney or hunter green, curving scallops of metal catching the glow of twin-headed streetlamps before shooting again into darkness. We should have taken one car. If we had taken one car, what happened later might not have happened. I should have accepted your offer that you would drive me, but your refusal of my suggestion had raised a wall between us and I needed that time to be alone, to think how to move forward. Desperation led me to imagine concocting a lie, perhaps an illness or mysterious diagnosis that required me to seek treatment from a specialist in Switzerland, and I was sure for the space of five minutes that if you heard such a story you would instantly agree to come with me, would apologize for failing to see how ill I obviously was, promising to stay at my side for the rest of my days. It is a wonder I did not have an accident driving to John’s house, I was so lost in my reveries about the life we might build in an Alpine chalet, surrounded by snow all the year through.
At Summit Drive a car stopped short behind me and killed its lights. I waited to see who it was, thinking it might have been you, but no one got out. Of course I knew what this meant, that the men who had been watching me for weeks were following now, even as I made my appearance at that odious party.
The two of you were there already, waiting for me at the gate, and we entered the house surrounded by other late arrivals bickering through their marriages of convenience and mutual advancement. In that crowd, even though I was with the two of you, I felt lost and alone. Still in shock from the extraordinary violence I had witnessed as I left the studio that evening, I was guilt-stricken that I had been unable to stop it, and convinced that such attacks were a portent of what awaited me if I stayed in America. I longed to be alone with you for the hours that remained to us, even as I was anxious about what you might do when you heard I was not just leaving in a notional sense, but had already bought a plane ticket and would be on my way to New York the next morning.
Although it was the last thing I felt like that evening, Mary’s party finally brought my position into focus, making it possible to see clearly where I stood, who stood with me, who against. I accepted that there were no absolutes. My vision would always be relative and partial and perhaps I was failing to see an obvious detail that would have cast the entire situation in a different light. But already I understood that you were not prepared to come with me, and that my decision to leave would have irreversible effects on the two of us. Given a different run of events – the failure to witness the stoning of a boy who would have been killed with or without my presence, the failure to speak aloud to you and Helen what I was envisaging, the failure to take separate cars to and from the party – I might not have trusted my own perception. I might still have dithered and equivocated, failing to commit to the course of my own future. Everything that happened made my decision possible. All the small decisions, accidents, and coincidences led me to the place where I knew I had no real choice but continuing as I had planned, and that meant leaving whether or not you were willing to accompany me.
Because we were late most of the guests were already drunk and getting drunker. I thought if we stayed together we could protect ourselves from Mary’s fascist friends – Disney and Cooper, Reagan and Menjou, Stanwyck and Wayne, Ginger Rogers and her mother, all of them so hard and varnished and pleased with themselves. There was no sign of Hepburn, Bogart, or Bacall, each of them too sensible to show up for the slaughter. Other people, friends and acquaintances I knew for a fact were Communists or fellow travelers, slunk around as if they hoped being seen at such a party might wash them clean of suspicion.
It may take centuries before America finally sees what it did in those years, assuming the country does not tear itself apart before such understanding becomes possible. Americans have the shortest sense of history of any powerful nation on earth. We think ourselves both young and eternal. There is no national memory of centuries of darkness, of those great long lapses in reason that mark the millennial histories of older civilizations. For Americans, embarking on a hundred years’ war is taken as lightly as coming to the aid of distant allies. There is no ability to see that a step in the wrong direction cannot be corrected overnight but may take epochs to put right. True Liberty is imperiled by the drive towards oppression fueled by greed, marching nonetheless under the banner of Liberty. True Liberty is nothing like what Mary and her friends imagined, but instead an assurance of total equality among all people, of whatever race, creed, or national origin, including those who remain marginal or liminal because they cannot or will not fit inside the available categories. Is such liberty possible? What if you are not either/or and could never bring yourself to be one thing or the other? What if you feel like a socialist in the morning and a capitalist in the afternoon? What if you go to bed with a man every night but still notice the beauty of women and your mind runs along tracks of fantasy that you never intend exploring while always wanting to hold open the route to alternative destinations? What if you cannot be content with the limited choices at the automat of life that offers only pre-packaged portions of identity and purpose?
I will not be cottage cheese or cling peaches.
I will not be rice pudding or lime Jell-O.
I will not be roast beef or chicken salad.
Oh, Barbara Stanwyck,
I want to write my own goddamn menu,
So please sit down and shut up.
John met us in the foyer with that unfocussed cerebral expression he always wore after mixing alcohol with other drugs. I knew that the evening would not end well when he spoke and his words came out with the sticky viscosity of rubber cement. I’m an exile in my own home, dear friends, he said, so take a bottle if you can snatch one. You’re in time for the fireworks.
In the backyard a chrysanthemum of red and blue sparks exploded overhead, revealing couples in the shadows, arms pawing legs, hands reaching under dresses. They call us perverts, I laughed, but look how decorous we are compared to them.
You glanced at me anxiously, as if you were afraid I would expose you. I had noticed that look more and more in recent weeks, every time I approached you on the set or spoke too loudly in public.
Nick Charles raced past, chasing a young actress. It was obvious she was not enjoying the pursuit.
Rapist! Helen screamed, and a few men near us laughed. Goddammit, it’s not a joke!
Even this made you look anxious. Calm down, Helen, you said, trying to take her arm, but she jerked away from you.
As soo
n as New York promotes Porter, just watch, he’ll make Nick Charles Head of Production and then that little schmuck will do whatever he likes, she said.
The band played the fireworks towards a finale that was only the first of the evening. Half the guests were in thrall to the pyrotechnics, half to one another, and all of them looked stoned.
The irony is, half of this crowd is queer, I said, only their husbands and wives don’t know it.
Again I was aware of you flinching away, trying to distance yourself physically, as if you feared being seen next to me.
Over the years, as I have thought of what followed and read accounts of the party in histories of the period and in the memoirs of those present, my own recollection becomes complicated by the feeling that you had already turned against me. You moved to accept a glass of champagne from a young waiter and then stepped to one side so that Helen was standing between us. You took a glass for her as well, but left me to take my own. No matter, I could do it easily, but you had never been so unsolicitous in the past. Coldness marked you, your face froze, there was no glimmer of pleasure in your eyes or mouth, not the least performance of happiness. Of course I understand that this was my fault, but it did not make it easier. Maybe I should have left that very moment and allowed you to discover for yourself that I had gone when I did not answer the phone the next day. That would have been cruel as well, but perhaps no more so than drawing out the revelation as I did.
Night for Day Page 40
