One day, instead of going to work, Gunther cut out, taking Harry down the hill and to the beach. Harry seemed surprised. “I come here with Kevin sometimes. I try to get a tan.”
He took off his pants and his T-shirt, and Gunther didn’t recognize him at first. He looked like a little boy. Gunther hadn’t remembered in a long time how young Harry was. They played cards a while, in the sand, then they went way out and let the swells rock them. Gunther liked to swim out as far as he could. Harry didn’t swim well. He floated instead, and Gunther swam in lazy rings around him, trying to fluster him by splashing waves in his face. Harry looked at the sky. It was all he could see. Like God, he thought dismissively. Aloud he said:
“Gunther?”
“I’m right here.”
“Gunther?”
“Yeah, I’m here, pal.”
“You think salt water washes ink out more than regular tap water?”
“I don’t know.”
“Gunther?”
“Yes.”
“I had to do what I did. I had to come into your life even though all I did was wreck it.”
God is only a concept. The sky is only a thought in God’s mind, and changes as often as breathing. Harry’s throat stretched and fell, his cheeks puffed and pulled, but Gunther couldn’t hear him breathing. Harry’s eyes darted from side to side as though trying to judge the breadth of a universe that, Gunther knew, was narrow enough that he and Harry had found each other in it, and floated together, hand in hand, at this its watery deep base. Gunther wanted to sink like a stone, to immerse and die here, so that then he would be clean. Eventually, he supposed, the blue ink in Harry’s tattoo would fade away. In a way it seemed a shame they had never gotten to put in the “r.”
“You didn’t wreck it,” said Gunther wearily.
“Oh yeah, I sure did. But I didn’t mean to. I’m not a bad guy really.”
“I’m not blaming you,” Gunther said. “My life is fine. I just wish I had a woman in it.”
“That’s because you hate women.”
“I don’t,” Gunther said. But he did, really. They drifted back to the shore. Harry’s bathing suit came from the Salvation Army. Gunther didn’t know who had bought it for him. It sagged and bagged with running water. Probably Kevin had bought it. “My life is fine but someday, I know, I’m gonna hear from some authorities. We got that Kevin Killian up the stairs breathing in every word we say. I know he fucked you. I know you tell him every little thing I do. I know it’s all gonna come back down on our heads.”
“I made you,” said Harry, looking into the sun. One hand fell across his eyes, and he glanced at Gunther guiltily. “It wasn’t your decision. I wiggled my ass in your face.”
“It’s all wrong.”
“I made the first move with you,” Harry said. Gunther saw with shocking clarity the marks of their connection all over Harry’s skinny childish legs. “That was wrong of me. But hey, don’t worry about Kevin. I got him wrapped around my finger. And my lips are sealed.”
“You like it here?” Gunther said, indicating with the sweep of a hand the sands, the Sound, the glistening white tide.
“Yes, Gunther.”
“I do too. Where I come from we don’t have the beaches.”
“I put my hand on you, picked you out,” Harry said. His wet head dropped beyond the towel, lay in sand. His hair was two colors, vanilla and chocolate, and swirled from the scalp in a dozen confusing directions. His upper lip curled under when he laughed like the crest of a wave. Under his arms sketchy tufts of hair dripped water, drooped and stunted. His narrow shoulders seemed freckled in the strong sunlight, and all his native intelligence beat behind his brown eyes in vain, trying to make sense of his circumstances. He was a kid fucked up as the scars on his lean body, but someday would grow up and think worse of Gunther than he did now. Gunther was all he had, and formed the boundaries of his world in the same way the lovely fresh horizons of the day and night formed Gunther’s. He was, Gunther thought, too dumb to live, but life has loopholes through which swim or are borne like matchsticks all the dumbest kids in the world, carried by luck, good and bad, to go on suffering, with no ASPCAs to put them to sleep painlessly by gas. They’re forced to live in beauty and splendor they can’t understand except by translation.
Harry told Gunther he’d made up a song: “Want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
He didn’t have to sing very loud, because Gunther lay only a foot away, and because Kevin, no matter how far off, would hear him wherever he went, whatever he did. But he had to shut his eyes because he was kind of embarrassed. “Ready?” Like even though it was a real good song. “Ready?”
“Sure, pal,” Gunther said.
“The girls all call me Speed Angel
Cause when I move I’m quick.
I got a girl in Manhattan
She loves me til she’s sick.
Go, Speed Angel, go.
Go, Speed Angel, go.
Go, Speed Angel, go.
Go, man, go, Speed Angel.”
AN ORACLE
Edmund White
For Herb Spiers
AFTER GEORGE DIED, RAY WENT THROUGH a long period of uncertainty. George’s disease had lasted fifteen months and during that time Ray had stopped seeing most of his old friends. He’d even quarrelled with Betty, his best friend. Although she’d sent him little cards from time to time, including the ones made by a fifty-year-old California hippie whom she represented, he hadn’t responded. He’d even felt all the more offended that she’d forgotten or ignored how sickening he’d told her he thought the pastel leaves and sappy sentiments were.
George had been a terrible baby throughout his illness, but then again Ray had always babied him the whole twelve years they’d been together, so the last months had only dramatized what had been inherent from the beginning. Nor had George’s crankiness spoiled their good times together. Of course they’d lived through their daily horrors (their dentist, an old friend, had refused to pull George’s rotten tooth; George’s mother had decided to “blame herself” for George’s cowardice in the face of pain), but they still had fun. Ray leased a little Mercedes and they drove to the country whenever George was up to it. A friend had given them a three-hundred-dollar Siamese kitten he’d found at a pet show and they’d named her Anna, partly because of Anna and the King of Siam and partly in deference to an ancient nickname for Ray. They both showered her with affection.
Which she reciprocated. Indeed, the more they chased away their friends, the more they relished her obvious liking for them. When they’d lie in bed watching television at night, they’d take turns stroking Anna. If she purred, they’d say, “At least she likes us.” After George became very feeble and emaciated, he would ignore his mother and father and refuse to stay even a single night at the hospital and would play with Anna if he had the strength and berate Ray for something or other.
George would become very angry at Ray for not calling to find out the results of his own blood test. “You’re just being irresponsible,” George would say. “To yourself.” But Ray knew that the test would tell him nothing—or tell him that yes, he’d been exposed to the virus, but nothing more. And besides there was no preventive treatment. Anyway, he owed all his devotion to George; he didn’t want to think for a second about his own potential illness.
Every moment of George’s last four months had been absorbing. They quarreled a lot, specially about little dumb things, as though they needed the nagging and gibbering of everyday pettiness to drown out the roar of eternity. George, who’d never cared about anything except the day after tomorrow, suddenly became retrospective in a sour way.
They quarreled about whether Ray had ever needed George, which was absurd since until George had become ill Ray had been so deeply reliant on George’s energy and contacts that Betty had repeatedly warned Ray against living forever in George’s shadow. What she hadn’t known was how much he, Ray, had always babied George at home—nursed him th
rough hangovers, depressions, business worries, even attacks of self-hatred after he’d been rejected by a trick.
George, of course, was the famous one. Starting in the early Seventies he’d been called in by one major corporation after another to give each an image, and George had designed everything from the letterhead to the company jet. He’d think up a color scheme, a logo, a typeface, an overall look; he’d redo the layouts of the annual report. He’d even work with an advertising creative director on the product presentation and the campaign slogans. He’d demand control over even the tiniest details, down to the lettering on the business cards of the sales force. Since he was six-foot-three, rangy and athletic, had a deep voice, and had fathered a son during an early marriage, the executives he dealt with never suspected him of being gay, nor was George a crusader of any sort. He liked winning and he didn’t want to start any game with an unfair handicap. George also had a temper, a drive to push his ideas through, and he wasn’t handsome—three more things that counted as straight among straights.
He’d also had the heterosexual audacity to charge enormous fees. His job as corporate image-maker was something he’d more or less invented. He’d realized that most American corporations were paralyzed by pettiness, rivalry, and fear, and only an outsider could make things happen. George was able to bring about more changes in a month than some cringing and vicious vicepresident could effect in a year if ever. George made sure he reported directly to the president or chairman, although as soon as he came “onstream” he solicited everyone else’s “input.”
On summer weekends George and Ray had flown in a seaplane to Fire Island, where they’d rented a big house on the ocean side complete with swimming pool. Around that pool they’d spent twelve summers with just a phone, a little acid, and thirty hunky men. They had, or Ray had, pounds of Polaroids to prove it. Here was the White Party and the house flying a thousand white balloons and Skipper in the foreground with his famous smile, the smile that earned him a hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Dead now of his own—not hand, but leap: he’d leapt from his penthouse on angel dust. And here was the Star Wars party with George as Darth Vader and his arm around little Tommy as R2D2, the cute kid who wanted to be a deejay but never made it though he did amazing disco tapes he sold to friends in editions of fifty.
And here’s George as Darleen. Older guys hated George’s dabbling in drag, since they associated it with the sissy 1950s. And the younger kids simply didn’t get it; they’d heard of it, but it didn’t seem funny to them. But for George and Ray’s generation, the Stonewall generation, drag was something they’d come to late, after they’d worked their way through every other disguise. For George,’ such a sexy big man with a low voice and brash ways, the character he’d invented, Darken, had provided a release—not a complete contrast, but a slight transposition. For one thing, she was a slut, but an intimidating one who when horny yanked much smaller men to her hairy chest without a second’s hesitation. For another, she had a vulgar but on-target way of talking over George’s current corporation and reducing it to its simplest profile; it was Darken in her drugged way who’d mumbled forth the slogans now selling seven of the biggest American products.
And Darken had introduced a certain variety into Ray’s and George’s sex life, for she liked to be passive in bed, whereas George was tirelessly active. No one would have believed it, not even their closest friends, but Ray had fucked Darken whereas he could never have fucked George. After sex they’d weep from laughter, the two of them, Ray sweaty and gold with his white tan line and George, foundered, skinny kids in black net stockings and the lashes coming unglued on his, yes, his left eye.
When George died, Ray thought of burying him in his drag, but the two people he happened to mention it to (although fairly far-out numbers themselves) drew back in horror. “You’ve got to be kidding,” one of them had said as though Ray were now committable for sure. Ray had wanted to say, “Shouldn’t we die as we lived? Why put George in a dark suit that he never wore in life?”
But he didn’t say anything, and George was buried as his parents wished. His father had been a cop, now retired, his mother a practical nurse, and in the last twenty years they’d made a lot of money in real estate. They liked fixing up old houses, as did George. Ray had a superstition that George had succumbed only because he’d worked so hard on his own loft. George was a perfectionist and he trusted no one else to do a job correctly. He’d spent hours crouched in the basement rewiring the whole building. Everything, and most especially the lacquering of the loft walls, was something he’d done by himself, again and again to get everything right.
Now he was dead and Ray had to go on with his own life, but he scarcely knew how or why to pick up the threads. The threads were bare, worn thin, so that he could see right through what should have been the thick stuff of everyday comings and goings, could see pale blue vistas it was death to look at. “You must look out for yourself,” George had always said. But what self?
Ray still went to the gym three times a week as he’d done for almost twenty years. He never questioned anything there and resented even the smallest changes, such as the installation of a fruit juice bar or a computerized billing system always on the blink.
And then Ray had Anna to feed and play with. Since she’d been George’s only other real companion toward the end, she felt comfortable and familiar. They’d lie in bed together and purr and that was nice, but it wasn’t a sign pointing forward to a new life, only a burnt offering to his past, itself burnt and still smoking.
He thought he was too young to have had to renounce so much. He’d always known that he’d have to end in renunciation, but he didn’t like being rushed. He thought of George’s long femur bones slowly emerging in the expensive coffin.
And of course he had his job. He did public relations for a major chemical company with headquarters on Sixth Avenue. It was a gig George had found him; George had done a total facelifting for Amalgamated Anodynes. Nearly everything about the company was reprehensible. It had a subsidiary in the Union of South Africa. Its biggest plant was in South Carolina, precisely because there the “right-to-work” laws, as they were called in the best Orwellian manner, had banned most of the unions. A.A. had produced a fabric for children’s wear that had turned out to be flammable; Ray had even had to draft for the president’s signature some very high-level waffling as a statement to the press. And Amalgamated Anodynes had a lousy record with women and minorities, although a creepy Uncle Tom headed up the company’s equal hiring practices commission.
Worst of all was Ray’s boss, Helen, the token female vicepresident. Helen was by turns solicitous and treacherous, servile to superiors and tyrannical to her staff, an old-fashioned schemer who knew more about office politics than her job.
Following a run-in with Helen a few days after the funeral (which, of course, he hadn’t been able to mention), he’d locked himself in the toilet and cried and cried, surprised there was so much mucous in his head. Where was it stored normally, in which secret cavity? He was also surprised by how lonely he felt. Lonely, or maybe spaced. George had always been barking at him, scolding or praising him; now the silence was oddly vacant, as though someone were to push past a last gate and enter into the limitless acreage of space and night.
To cry he had had to say to himself, “I’m giving in to total self-pity,” because otherwise he was so stoic these post-mortem days that he’d never let himself be ambushed by despair. Why did he keep this job? Was it to please George, who always wanted him to go legit, who’d never approved of his “beatnik jobs.” George had used “beatnik, “hippie,” and “punk” interchangeably to dramatize the very carelessness of his contempt.
Ray had grown up on a farm in northern Ohio near Findlay and still had in his possession a second prize for his cow from the State Fair; he’d sewn it and his Future Farmers of America badge to his letter-jacket. What big-city sentimentalists never understood about the rural existence they so admired was that it wa
s dull and lonely, unnaturally lonely, but it left lots of time for reading.
He’d read and read and won a first prize in the Belle Fontaine spelling bee and another as the captain of the Carrie debating team against Sandusky on the hot subject of “Free Trade.” His grades were so good he received a scholarship to Oberlin, where, in his second year, he’d switched his major from agronomy to philosophy.
From there he’d gone on to the University of Chicago, where he’d joined the Committee on Social Thought and eventually written a thesis on Durkheim’s concept of anomie. His father, who wore bib overalls and had huge, fleshy ears and read nothing but the Bible but that daily, would shake his head slowly and stare at the ground whenever the subject of his son’s education came up. His mother, however, encouraged him. She was the school librarian, a thin woman with moist blue eyes and hands red from poor circulation, who drank coffee all day and read everything, everything. She’d been proud of him.
But she too had had her doubts when, after he received his doctorate, he’d drifted to Toronto and joined an urban gay commune, grown his blond hair to his shoulders, and done little else besides holding down part-time jobs and writing articles analyzing and lamenting the lesbian-gay male split. In the doctrinaire fashion of those days, he’d angrily denounced all gay men and assumed a female name for himself, “Anna.” The name wasn’t intended as a drag name (although later George had insisted he use it as one), but only as a statement of his position against gender distinctions. Only his friends in the commune could call him “Anna” with a straight face.
Unlike most of the other early gay liberationists, Ray had actually had sex with other men. His affairs were shy, poetic, and decidedly unfancy in bed. Despite his political beliefs, he insisted on being on top, which he admitted was a “phallocratic” hang-up, although nothing felt to him more natural than lavishing love on a subdued man, similarly smooth-skinned, slender, and pig-tailed.
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