Yeah but how did it actually happen? How did it go down?
How does sex ever actually happen, George? We’re all together in Susan’s room, we’re getting high, we end up prone, someone kisses someone, someone touches someone, Bob’s your uncle.
No, George said. No. Bob’s not your fucking uncle. Someone kisses someone and you say, Oh, hey, what? Look at the time. I have to go.
C’mon, George. Really. Can’t you see this from the perspective of living, breathing, stoned human beings?
You wanted to have sex with another woman?
The fact is, George, I had been wanting to have sex with you but you weren’t there. Which is fine, I know, you were doing something important. But I was very turned on. I was on my way over to the paper to see how it was going, hang out and whatever, and ended up pinned by the wind to the stone wall of the library and like having semi-orgasms there with my eyes closed when they found me. So I was ripe for the plucking. Jesus, George. I’m sorry but I’m having trouble seeing this as a big deal. Haven’t you ever been horny?
Yes, I’ve been horny.
There it was, that face again. Oh, the fury. She wanted to smack him. But not really. She wanted to scream. But she wouldn’t. So what the fuck would she do? Here, she would say this, which was true:
I can’t stand the feeling of being owned. And I can’t stand the Mommy-you-abandoned-me face you’re giving me.
He was silent, looking at her.
Oh my god, I’m sorry.
He said nothing.
I’m so sorry I said that. It was completely thoughtless.
He sat on the bed. He said, Fuck it. I’m going to lie down. It’s been a long night. Strange and beautiful and then terrible. An eternity of changes, this night.
He lay back, half on the bed, feet still on the floor. Anyway I’m tired. Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Which is today. I’d like to fuck Susan. Can she come over and fuck us?
There was something childish in whatever salaciousness he was mustering here. Like the sex humor among the fourth-grade boys.
George, I’m sorry. For what I said.
I know. You should go. He pulled his legs up onto the bed. Desert boots and all, on the bedspread. He wouldn’t look at her. She wanted to take his boots off: it looked so uncomfortable and wrong. And he would never have lain down with her that way, if she’d been staying.
Go, he said again, voice muffled by his arm over his face.
So she went.
8
It was close to noon, George had slept for two and a half hours. There was a hole in his middle when he thought of Anna and he could hardly manage to think of anything else. And there was this story that needed more writing, continued writing.
Richard said, You’ve never called the grieving family member before, have you?
No.
You scared?
George kept his eyes on his typewriter. I’m… horrified, he said. Harrowed. Don’t want to see and hear what I’m going to see and hear.
They could just tell you to fuck off, Richard said. That’s what I’d do.
For some reason this stirred him to dial. The heavy resistance of the steel wheel on the old phone: GRamercy7-5128. The phone chicka-chicka-chicka in his ear clicking out the numbers onto the wires. George waved the receiver at Richard, indicating he should go away. Privacy, he said.
It rang. And rang. And rang. Finally the sound of it being picked up, fumbled, a woman’s voice, distant and frail. Hello?
Hello, said George. I’m sorry to disturb you, My name is George Langland and I’m calling from the Columbia University Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper. Is this Mrs. Goldstein?
You should speak with my husband, the woman said. She put the phone down, loudly. It sounded as if she essentially dropped it onto a table. George envisioned the Gramercy Park apartment: the mahogany phone table in the hall, a fresh pad and nice pen. A lamp perhaps. A dark wood chair with upholstered seat in maroon and silver stripes. Everything frozen in 1948 finery. Really he’s thinking of his grandparents’ generation. These people could be Danish modern.
The phone swept up from the table. A man’s voice, deepish, unyielding: This is Bernard Goldstein, to whom am I speaking please?
Hello Mr. Goldstein, this is George Langland, I’m a student at Columbia and a reporter for the Columbia University Daily Spectator. I’m calling about Jeffrey.
This is, to say the least, a difficult time, Mr. Langland.
I know that, sir. I’m really sorry for your loss and Mrs. Goldstein’s loss. Did Jeffrey have siblings?
No, Goldstein said. He was an only child.
That’s so hard, sir. I really am sorry.
George felt… what did he feel? A shocking calm. Maturity. What could they do to him after all? Either Goldstein or Richard? He was just a messenger really, on either end.
His mother was recently dead. His father was long gone. He too had no siblings. Nothing mattered.
He said, Sir, as you might know the paper had a story about Jeffrey’s death in today’s edition with no identification. Now that the ID is official we need to print it, and we want to be as accurate as possible, and not make mistakes. Particularly important on a story like this. So I’m hoping to confirm some things with you, facts about Jeffrey.
I tell you what, Goldstein said. We’ll talk to you people. We’re not talking to anyone else. Jeffrey liked the paper very much. He admired the features man.
Louis Pennybaker? George said.
Yes, that’s it.
Well, that’s good to hear, George said.
You’ll come downtown to see us, Mr. Langland. Bring Pennybaker. I’d like to show you both a little bit about Jeffrey. My wife might be upset but I will be able to talk with you.
What time, sir?
As soon as you can get here, Goldstein said.
It was not yet noon. George had missed one class already and was on the verge of missing another. Keats was the first. The other was American Society After 1945. This latter a giant lecture with no attendance taken and virtually nothing of substance one couldn’t get from a Time-Life series on the decades. He was sorry he’d missed the Keats, he wasn’t keeping up with the readings either. He could feel that class slipping away from him, like a fish at the last moment coming off the hook, sinking away into the dark water.
That’s fine, sir. Just for now, though, in case anything happens, allow me to verify the main facts: you’ve identified your son, as the police have stated?
Yes.
What is Jeffrey’s full name, sir?
Jeffrey Benjamin Goldstein.
George verified age, residence, high school. Then he asked: And you’ve not been informed of any note Jeffrey might have left?
Silence.
Sir?
Why don’t we talk about that when you get here, Goldstein said. Do you have the address?
Yes, George said.
Fine then, Goldstein said, and he hung up.
Richard had slipped back into the chair across from George’s desk—the news desk, technically, which was an arrangement of two aluminum desks and an old wood table—and he sat slumped comically low, ass out by the edge of the seat, feet spread out in Converse All Stars. The chair squeaked brutally as he rode it left to right, left to right. Some kind of nubby hiking socks under the sneakers. George, a basketball snob, did not approve of such socks with sneakers.
George, eyeing the socks, said: I think there’s a note.
Really? Richard sat up, looked around. Dave, he called out, there’s a note.
I think there’s a note.
A small crowd filled in the space around the desk, four editors, another reporter.
Richard: What did he say?
George said, It was at the end of the conversation. I said something like, And you’ve not been informed of any note? And there was this long silence. So I said, Sir? Hello? Note? I mean, I didn’t, I just said, Sir. Then he said we’d talk about that when we get there.
> Richard said, Call Snetts. Or the homicide division, they must have taken it by now. Who’s the detective in charge again, what was that guy’s name? Baker? Get them on record. Say you know there’s a note. Find out.
This, George would come to understand, was where the tire-treaded sandal sole hit the road, among the disciples of journalism. Either you were totally dedicated and excited to find out about the possible note, or else some voice in the back of your mind said, the kid’s dead, what does it matter really, leave him the fuck alone. Breslin said every story is five flights up. You want the story, you climb the stairs. George kind of wanted the story, THIS story, he would climb the stairs, but he felt the first inkling that his interest would not carry on, that as days turned into weeks and story after story after story came and went he wouldn’t continue to care, wouldn’t be able to bear avid discussions urging him forward to pursue story after story after story: which is what you had to have to be a decent reporter. Louis of course didn’t have it either and didn’t pretend to. He cared about what he cared about. They were all going to be his stories or there would be no story.
You guys are going to have to do that. Goldstein wants me to come downtown to see him. Or them. He says he wants to, quote, show me a little about Jeffrey, unquote.
Richard scratched his beard. Really? Wow. Scratch scratch. That’s great. How’d you do that?
I was polite. Kept using the words Columbia and campus. Other than that, nothing.
You have the touch.
It’s not a touch.
Personality.
Presentation.
You’re a sophomore reporter I’m a senior editor in chief so shut the fuck up.
Right.
Just kidding.
No you’re not.
You’re right.
He mentioned Louis, George said.
Who? The father?
Yeah. Said Jeffrey admired the features man. He recognized Louis’s name when I gave it. Wants me to bring him.
Richard called out, LOUIS! Where’s Louis? Is Louis here?
Everyone looked at the features office doorway, from which Louis, with a hint of pause for effect, emerged.
I love when you talk that way, he said.
* * *
GOLDSTEIN HAD LARGE eyes behind John Dean–style round tortoiseshell glasses. The ne plus ultra in lawyerly eyewear. Thick lenses. The earpiece a flexible steel curl. Louis and George were dressed neatly in slacks and loafers, junior lower quality of Goldstein himself. Mrs. Goldstein was a fashionable woman, a kind of Kennedy-era remnant, a taupe dress with white piping along hems and collar and exaggerated hip pockets. Pumps a shade lighter than the dress, cream, with square toes and blocky heels. Ferragamo, Louis said later. George didn’t know quite why the shoes had struck him so. Then he did: his own mother would have worn them. Mr. Goldstein introduced his wife, who shook his hand faintly, and immediately announced in a flat tone that she would be retiring, that she wouldn’t be taking part in the interview.
I’ll leave you to it, she said, barely above a whisper. Please have some coffee and something to eat. Everything’s out.
George thanked her and she receded down the carpeted corridor and went into what George presumed to be, by its location, the bedroom. She closed the door with a faint click. Now there was a thing: how rich did you have to be in New York before you got an apartment in which the doors properly closed and clicked, not clogged by thirty years of landlord paint? Goldstein brought them from the foyer down two steps into the large living room. A coffee service on a silver tray. Sugar cookies and quartered oranges. Could people really live this way?
* * *
IT RAN AFTER the op-ed with a double byline, George Langland and Louis Pennybaker. A feature. Photograph by A. A. Townes.
INTERVIEW WITH A GRIEF-STRICKEN FATHER
NEW YORK, NY Oct 23, 1976—He is unusual, this 48-year-old man. His son was a homosexual and he knew it and he loved his son and he supported his son. And now his son is dead.
The son is dead because, in part at least, he loved a man and that man for whatever reasons did not love him back. So you could say that Jeffrey Goldstein died of a broken heart.
But that probably wouldn’t be true and, besides, it’s a cliché. “Jeffrey’s life was an ongoing struggle because of his sexuality,” said Bernard Goldstein, father of Jeffrey, age 20, who died early last Friday morning, having plunged, it is not yet known how or, fully, why, from the window in the lounge on the thirteenth floor of John Jay Hall.
“He’d had a very nice year the year before he entered Columbia—he took a year off before starting—actually living with a young man, they started Columbia together, and they seemed to love each other. But they broke up. They were young. That’s not unusual.”
Goldstein, tall, well-dressed, an attorney, sat on a damask armchair in the sunlit living room of the spacious Gramercy Park apartment he shares with his wife, Sheila Goldstein. Mrs. Goldstein did not wish to be interviewed for this article.
In truth, about the suicide, we have some idea why. Jeffrey wrote in a notebook:
I really DO love him.
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Then he’d left the notebook open on his desk—as easily a note to himself for his journal, which is what the book turned out to be, as it was a note for anyone else’s eyes. It needn’t have been some kind of explanation or goodbye. But now it is, inevitably, and the irony—cross my heart and hope to die—cuts like a blade. It is the living, never the dead, who are cut by the blade, and the elder Goldsteins, quiet, polite, seemingly prosperous people who until two days ago had many reasons to be at a satisfying place in their lives—they are the ones bleeding.
There was more, about Jeffrey’s childhood, his teen years, the Goldsteins’ feelings when they learned about their son’s sexuality—It wasn’t easy, for him or for us, was what the father said. George had asked, were there fights? And Goldstein had said, of course. Of course there were fights. But we worked it out.
This article, which he and Louis had worked out almost line by line, was the most matter of fact and open the paper had ever been about homosexuality, an entirely new treatment—a way of life, not a disorder or a freak show. Louis’s presence, his advocacy and his humor were largely responsible for this: utterly unapologetic, assertive, often funny. The other reason was Jeffrey Goldstein’s father. It was as if the alumni—of which he was one—had called in and officially approved a new approach. George, Richard, et al. would discover in coming days that the alumni very much had not called in to approve a new approach, nor had the administration that dealt with them, when they were phoning every office from alumni affairs right up to the president.
The other young man, Jeffrey’s presumed lover, was not found; the death was ruled a suicide at the inquest that took place the following week and the body was released to the parents, who buried it in Jewish custom albeit delayed. Not long after, they held a memorial service which George, with Louis and Richard, attended. It was at a small reform synagogue on 17th Street, a modest place of worship fitted into an old town house. Just down the street was the Quaker Meeting House—proximity to the Quakers was always reassuring. Afterward Louis had shaken the Goldsteins’ hands, père et mère; the mère was cool, the père was not, gripping his hand for an extra beat, thanking him. Ah—a look George caught when she was shaking Louis’s hand: there it was. She had never accommodated her son being gay. It grieved her and angered her and it grieved and angered her still.
That story, the Goldstein story, marked the height of George’s journalism career. His heart was never really in it after that. The job required an ongoing passion for what constituted news, what made a story. Or as journalists were fond of saying, a great story. Each story fed into the next story—or was erased by it. The narrative mind became a palimpsest with everything earlier rubbed away and only the current visible. A month after Jeffrey Goldstein’s death no one spoke of him or very much thought of him—but every time Geo
rge walked by the blank square of dirt where the little tree had fallen, he saw that boy’s body on the hard concrete and the red and white lights flashing against a curtain of autumn darkness, in a night of wind and loss. Something you couldn’t put in the paper.
9
A surprising day in March. Warm, but still with that pale angular light of late winter. George and Anna had been apart for almost five months. Awkwardness, all over the neighborhood, avoiding each other, veering off at a long-distance sighting, looking the other way at Momma Joy’s delicatessen. She’d stopped at his table one night at the library and said to him, We can say hello, you know. It won’t kill us.
Hello, he’d said.
He’d said it again the next time he’d seen her, and thereafter, until it was a joke: Hello. The hellos got bigger: Hello! HELLO! So this day of late-winter spring, they abided on the opposing edges of the same large group, first time since late October, gathered on the steps that ran along the north side of College Walk. Anna was watching him, he was watching her. They were separated by four others, all friends more or less; he and she both were wearing jeans, they each noticed the other’s, but hers were rolled up a bit and there were those Keds again. Interesting how she made them look sexy. Those ankles of hers, he wanted to have one in each hand with his arms outspread and her open beneath him… He looked away. Took a hit of a joint that was making the rounds. She was amused he had on his desert boots. Desert boots or, on the colder, wetter days, the duck boots; soon the beat-up brown deck shoes would come out again, for summer. Men were infuriating in that way, each got his look and just stuck with it for fifty fucking years. Or more. Until they died. She could see him at seventy in the same many-times-washed oxford cloth shirt. Beneath the same dark red crewneck sweater. Grizzled and gray. Not bald, no. Hair a bit shorter, uncombed. As if knowing her thoughts he pulled the sweater off and dropped it in a mean little pile beside him. There it was: that chest. Those shoulders.
Along these hundred and fifty feet of granite steps that rose up to Low Library—which was neither low nor, any longer, a library—were bodies, some stretched across three ridged lines of step, with shoulders and elbows propping from the top, butt down on the second, calves across the third, luxurious and suggestive in the pale sunlight of uncertain spring; others were sitting hunched like Times Square addicts and petty grifters because you tended to curl up when smoking weed here, folded inward against the wind and possible hostile observation. You could shoot up every day on the steps and find no institutional disapproval; campus security was nonexistent, an inheritance of the riots, the philosophy since then to leave the kids alone and keep them drunk, stoned, strung out, just as long as they were not engaged and taking the dean of students prisoner in his office again. But certain uptight individuals still complained. High above them: Low. Built in 1898 it had begun to sink under the weight of books by the 1920s and been turned into an administration building: leaden minds, apparently, did not endanger it. It was the geometric and gravitational center of the monumental neoclassicism of the original campus, rising behind them, laid out before them, stone and columns wherever you looked. The newer library, broad and squat, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet long, looked like a prison for criminal Greek statuary and stood across campus, militantly facing them, slightly downhill and nearly two city blocks away, separated from them by brick paths and three swards of patchy dirt and grass. Both these so-called libraries were massive architectural advertisements for the Western canon, not that the Western canon needed promotion or defense to these students; they had been exposed to no other and believed in it almost automatically, like the youngest children in a religious family, who are the last to question their faith. The Columbia students, which is to say, the males, far more than the Barnard women, were armed by virtue of their core curriculum with a newsmagazine writer’s familiarity with that classical canon’s major figures and its broadest points; they shared, too, the newsmagazine writer’s accompanying lack of skepticism. Some of them were magazine writers of a slightly higher standing than the others; some of them even knew a little Latin or Greek and one or two had continued with its study. None of them was thinking of Herodotus at that moment in the midafternoon of that first spring day, except perhaps in terms of his actual name, facing them from where it was carved on Butler’s frieze in meter-high glyphs, the seraphed, all-uppercase letters at eye level across campus from them: HOMER HERODOTUS SOPHOCLES PLATO ARISTOTLE DEMOSTHENES CICERO VERGIL. No one George knew had ever read Demosthenes or referred to him or quite likely knew a thing about him. For the perhaps fiftieth time George made a mental note to look Demosthenes up. The rest were like teams in the National League East (PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO ST. LOUIS PITTSBURGH MONTREAL NEW YORK…), crusted with particular characteristics in one’s mind, a set of colors, a vague sense of permanent qualities; and each author, like each team, admired by some, disdained by others, weathered by moments of intellectual victory that generally had been snatched from the jaws of the far more common defeat. Perennial .500 teams or worse. The foundational texts were, in literature, The Iliad (which George had to admit, even in the overworked and rather dry Lattimore translation, had its moments), and, in politics, Plato’s Republic (in George’s view there was no salvaging this book, it didn’t matter which translation). Only a certain percentage of students, a plurality or at best half, could be expected at this late date to force themselves all the way through these texts and take intellectual nourishment from them; there were drugs and whiskey and beer to be consumed, cigarettes and joints to be smoked, women (though not enough of them) to be longed for and pursued, talk to be talked, flippant remarks to be made, visions of one’s identity to be formed and smudged over and redrawn—and nights, so many nights, to be spent in the College Library Reading Room intermittently reading but mostly flirting with Barnard women. It was important though to know of these authors and these works in a general and accurate way, to know portions, to know the general thrust; it was part of the culture of the place to know that, just as it was to know that you should never go into Morningside Park, or to know the price and constituents of the Ta-Kome special hero sandwich, the meats and cheeses, the onions and shredded lettuce and oil and vinegar.
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