No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  The auditions were always in some ill-lit and downright dingy room with uncomfortable plastic chairs and a gaggle of peak-eyed people who all seemed to be hiding a murder from one another. They were all, undoubtedly, attractive—the women with eyes like ceramics and their limbs thin and lovely; the men—well, the men as tall and noticeable as he was. They looked him up and down unabashedly, and once, one approached him and let a finger trail along the back of his neck, startling him so much that he simply froze.

  He’d be pushed into another ill-lit yet larger room, with a long tableful of people wearing black sweaters, or turtlenecks. He expected a gregarious bunch of free spirits, charming cultural purveyors of the Big Apple. Instead he found group after group of casting agents, directors, and choreographers who resembled college professors—stoic, unsmiling. He pared his audition songs down to two—“On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady and “We’ve Got It” from Seesaw. He soon learned that the former was a total no-no, its melody aped by scrawny queens all over the city. At least the latter made people pay more attention to him—when they paid attention to him. He would get through four of his sixteen measures before one of the people behind the table, as if asking for a bill at a restaurant, would flick a dismissive hand in the air. The first time that it happened—indeed, the first few times that it happened—he was confused, standing dumbly in place. The creative teams were used to this. They laughed and said, “Oh, honey, don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

  Still, he clung to that Betty Buckley story as if it had been passed around solely for his benefit, a message by carrier pigeon that had found its way magically from Manhattan to Youngstown. He knew that perseverance was the name of the game; he knew to expect rejection after rejection. In the meantime, he continued working at the deli, happy to be doing something that he genuinely enjoyed, despite the meager setting.

  Soon, in the evenings, when he went out, he’d find himself ordering more than one drink. One summer evening, he got cruised so aggressively by a handsome guy in a straight bar that he followed him to a gay bar. He wasn’t even sure which bar it was because they proceeded to get royally drunk. Ken confessed that he was a performer, too, and he promised to share his wisdom on auditioning in exchange for more and more drinks. Later that night, in the doorway of Ken’s apartment, Frederick found himself close to being sick. Surrendering, he stumbled into Ken’s dark apartment and blindly groped his way toward the toilet, into which he ejected their countless Long Island Iced Teas. Ken unleashed a torrent of anger so strong and focused that it made Frederick sick all over again. He kept yelling, “‘Frederick’? ‘Frederick’? Classy name for a fucking disgusting guy who can’t hold his liquor!” Then he practically pushed Frederick into the street, from where, at 6:00 A.M., Frederick managed to make it home—not before tripping and falling painfully on his steps. It was when he was hoisting himself up, his knees bleeding through his pants and his forehead scraped, that he heard Ken’s voice ringing again and again in his head: “‘Frederick’? ‘Frederick’?” He decided to change it immediately.

  * * *

  It took him over a year to make a friend, then another year before she became his best friend. Séverine—a painter whom he met on New Year’s Eve in the West Village. They were crammed next to each other at Stonewall, which he now visited regularly, no longer afraid to declare himself. What the other swanning, laughing gays there didn’t know—regardless of his handsomeness, regardless of his gazes, regardless of the confidence he exuded when ordering drinks and carrying them like a glass bouquet back to his and Séverine’s table—was that he was still a virgin. He had only kissed men, but he still found himself hesitant to go home with them, because of that failed night with Ken several months ago and because he had begun to hear more and more about the disease striking young men down across the city.

  It was so easy to take refuge in Séverine. She had emigrated to the States from France right out of “art school,” though Teddy could never quite get out of her which school that had been. She shared his height and thin frame, her shoulders and elbows pointy, her knees like fists through cloth, but she had the undeniable fashion sense of a Frenchwoman, a penchant for dark clothing, black hair dye, and abundant eyeliner that was in stark contrast to her paintings (which even she admitted were ersatz Chagalls). Her eyes were black, too, their irises and pupils indistinguishable from each other, giving her the look of someone perpetually enthralled even when she was three sheets to the wind.

  Speaking of three sheets to the wind, they both were, often. They spent that first New Year’s Day sprawled on the Oriental rug in her loft apartment, a harem’s quarters of palm fronds, patterned silk, half-empty perfume bottles in varying shades of amber, and discarded underthings. Her easels formed a painted hall of mirrors, their truncated animals and disembodied eyes reflecting each other across the gigantic space.

  “Ça va?” she asked Teddy.

  “What?” he replied, kneading his forehead, which had lain flat against the carpet all night.

  “That is the reason why you do not feel like a New Yorker yet,” she said, crawling over to a little bookshelf, from which she produced a packet of cigarettes and a rusty lighter. “Everyone in New York should be able to speak French.”

  “People barely know anything about French where I grew up,” he said. “Except if it’s dressing.”

  “Pardon?” she said, and at first, he thought that she was trying to pronounce the English word, hindered by her accent.

  “French dressing. Have you never had French dressing?”

  She had never heard of it. Then Teddy realized that he had absolutely no idea what was in it, either. It became their catchphrase. From then on, when they didn’t understand something—when they couldn’t hear a subway announcement clearly, when a person at a bar gave them a lame line, when they couldn’t agree on a time over the phone when they should meet at Caffè Reggio—they’d just mutter “French dressing” but with an exaggerated accent—“Frawnsh dressink.”

  By the time that they became good friends—drinking bottles of port by the Hudson; getting mugged in Herald Square and, by divine fortune, finding Teddy’s wallet ten minutes later in a nearby trash can; spending another New Year’s Eve at the Stonewall while a couple not-so-discreetly exchanged handjobs at a nearby booth—Teddy had more or less given up his auditions and his sandwich-making. Instead he took a job at a small but popular department store in Chelsea.

  The job had come through one of Séverine’s expat friends who worked “in fashion”—all of Séverine’s expat friends worked “in fashion” or “in art.” He had mentioned it to Teddy and written down the owner’s number on the back of a matchbook. Teddy had called, spoken to a Piaf-voiced Frenchwoman named Michelle, and forty-eight hours later, he had quit the sandwich business and found himself behind a glass counter.

  It was at the store that he tended his budding sense of fashion. The seed had been planted by Séverine, who gave him scarves and sweaters as if he were a sibling who needed hand-me-downs. Michelle—in her fifties, wide-hipped, emphysemic from smoking—had a habit of taking his hips from behind and burying her tiny head in his back whenever business was slow, and she gave him perk after perk, from free winter coats to theater tickets that she “couldn’t use.”

  It was also at the store that he began to piece together French. He had gleaned words and phrases from spending so much time with Séverine, but they took on new meaning under Michelle’s tart tongue. She had the thickest French accent that Teddy had heard—it truly seemed that New York was teeming with more French people than Paris—and soon it was easier for Teddy to interpret her French, punctuated purposefully by her lively hand gestures, than it was for him to understand her English. He didn’t overlook the real reason why he had dived so intently into his new job and this lingua franca. He had still not dated anyone seriously, and he took solace in Séverine because she represented so much of what he wanted to be: stylish, cool, and beautiful. But also earnest, r
omantic, and easily romanced by life itself. She encouraged him to seek someone out, even volunteered to set him up with one of her few gay friends—most of them French. There was one, in particular, Edouard, whom she introduced to Teddy with an eyebrow arched and lips pursed meaningfully, but Teddy found him somewhat boring, his Frenchness concealing the fact that he didn’t have all that much to contribute to the conversation. Teddy’s dismissal of him finally led to a revelatory conversation with Séverine.

  “You confound me,” Séverine said, sitting on the couch and cutting hungrily into a leftover piece of chicken that she had slid onto a plate with some cold salad and canned chickpeas. “You don’t have to be looking for love. Have sex. That’s what this city is for. That’s what any city is for.”

  “I don’t want to just have sex, especially with people getting sick,” Teddy said, lying flat on the rug and lifting his legs languidly in the air in a mock-effort of exercising. “I’m looking for something bouleversant.”

  “My friend, if everyone in this city waited for something like that, no one would ever get laid. And then everyone would be as miserable as you.”

  “I’m not miserable,” Teddy said. He wasn’t, not truly. He was just lonely. (Although perhaps loneliness was inherently miserable.) It wasn’t just something extraordinary that he wanted. He knew, in fact, what that specific thing was, but never having verbalized it, he kept catching himself. In this moment, with Séverine looking somewhat drab for a change with her meager dinner, Teddy felt compelled to share it with her. “I’m not miserable. I just have a specific fantasy.”

  She threw her plate across the couch and crawled onto the floor next to him. “A fantasy? Oh, do tell.” She propped herself up on an elbow, and he mirrored the pose. He then proceeded to tell her about that first train ride, the heft and beauty of the man, and when he finished, he let himself fall back flat onto the floor, melodramatically emphasizing his sense of relief.

  “Oh, Teddy,” Séverine said, disappointed. She returned to the couch and picked up her plate, resuming her dinner as if he hadn’t told her anything.

  “What?” he said, taken aback by her indifference. “I’m not joking.”

  “I know you’re not joking. That’s the worst part.”

  An uneasy feeling crept over Teddy, like a lemon squeezed into milky tea until curd formed. “What’s the matter?”

  “You’re not really going to take a black lover,” Séverine said, not a question but a dismissive observation.

  “I’m not?”

  “No. You have more imagination than that.”

  Teddy couldn’t tell if she was joking, but her body language, normally open and friendly, had turned stiff and uncaring. “More imagination? What are you saying?”

  “Oh, come off it. I’m not racist. I’ve dated black men before. I had a black boyfriend at university,” she said.

  “‘Some of your best friends are black’?”

  “I said come off it! It’s just so cliché, my friend. The white boy arrives in New York to be fucked by a big black man? I thought that you had grander aspirations than that.”

  They had been crass with each other before, but not like this. Normally, they spoke in deliberate innuendo, the kind easily established and maintained by bar buddies that painted everyone as the generally promiscuous type, but this bore an air of archness more pointed than their typical talk. “Séverine, this isn’t just some fetish. At least I don’t think it is. It’s just what I find attractive. What I think I find attractive.”

  “What you think you find attractive? Stop thinking so much. Go out and actually do something.”

  Though Séverine’s treatment of him had been harsh—downright cold, even—there was truth in it: if he held this idea inside himself and didn’t act on it, he was turning his fantasy into a fetish.

  Despite realizing, in light of Séverine’s remarks, how earnest his intentions were, he could not decide how to go about acting on them. That encounter with Ken, however insubstantial it may have been, still smarted. For him, every encounter felt insubstantial and crushing at the same time. If the topic of race, now soured by Séverine’s reaction, also entered into the picture, Teddy feared that he would commit some horrible faux pas and ruin everything.

  He continued, working at the store and accompanying Séverine on her adventures but, now more than ever, willfully resisting any thoughts of further encounters. He felt old and washed-up. Worse, he felt that he had missed the narrow window in which sexual exploration was acceptable. All this time, he should have been seeing his early time in New York as if it were college—a time for intent study of the sexual landscape, when he would learn the skills necessary to find men, date them confidently, pleasure them, and, when necessary, exchange one for another until he had landed the right man, as a professor landed tenure. Instead, he had squandered whatever sentimental education had been offered to him, so the only real choice was to embrace his ignorance. Denying himself sexually felt like denying any further development of his personality, as if he were trapping his mind in the foolish pen of youth while the rest of his body moved forward and announced a level of wisdom and experience that he simply did not have.

  * * *

  It was so terrifying at the time that it puzzles him how people forget about it now. Since he was so solitary during those days, he experienced it as if he were watching a horror movie. The constant fights between sensationalist headlines and angry protestors, the thinning but passionate-voiced ACT-UP members thronging his neighborhood, Reagan’s maddening evasion. His trips to gay bars of any kind had diminished more and more over time, but that didn’t stop him from imagining, at the beginning of things, that he, too, had somehow been infected. When he thought of his aborted tryst with Ken, he thought not only of the virus but also of how pathetic it was that this was the sole sexual encounter that could have put him at risk. When he was able to calm himself down, he felt horrible in knowing that he was healthy. He could feel a second closet being built around him: he knew that, however strong his lust could be, his fear would always be stronger. There were only so many lesions, only so many men ghostly in their premature age that he could take before he saw his celibacy as a dear treasure.

  Jance, the kind-eyed, able-fingered hairdresser from the corner barbershop: gone. Nico, the waiter at the Waverly Restaurant who had served him countless plates of runny-on-purpose eggs and snappable bacon: gone. Mike, the sinewy, crew-cut ex-army guy who always dipped a five into the tip jar after getting his BLT: gone, but in stages, walking down the street weaker and weaker until he no longer appeared.

  Then it hit closer to Teddy than he had anticipated. He had been seeing less of Séverine since her upsetting critique of him, but they hung out sometimes, though not at her place. They met at Caffè Reggio or for a movie at the Film Forum, went for cocktails at the Chelsea Hotel or a wine dinner at The River Café. One night, she showed up at the Waverly. Her eyes were glassy with tears.

  “Are you OK?” Teddy asked, suddenly as caring and affectionate with her as he had been in the past. He had never seen her distressed.

  “You were the wise one! You knew! How did you know?” She huffed into a handkerchief, something that she never carried and had once called disgusting.

  Teddy knew immediately what the subject was but didn’t know whom she was mourning. Then it hit him: it was Séverine herself. It was the oft-overlooked group, the straight people who were ignored so that his kind could be demonized instead.

  “Séverine! No—not you?”

  She flicked her head up and, unexpectedly, rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Teddy—don’t be insane. I don’t have it. It’s Edouard! He has it.” Her face crumbled again, as if someone had drawn a tragedy mask over it, and she hunched over again.

  At first, he didn’t even remember, but then he realized: Edouard was the quiet/boring Frenchman with whom Séverine had tried to set him up. Teddy felt especially sympathetic because he had become boring, too: he worked his job in the store a
nd spent his days in delis or cafés, went on occasional theater outings—during which he sat in his seat and pouted about his bad luck with love—while someone like Edouard probably had fulfilling sexual and romantic conquests and was repaid unjustly.

  “I’m so sorry, Sev,” Teddy said, leaning over the table and stroking her hair. He had seen many pairs of people in similar positions these past several months.

  “It’s just not fair,” she said, raising her head again. “Why can’t this just be a city of love?”

  For all of her flightiness, Séverine would say things like this, and they would lodge right into Teddy. It could have been a city of love for him, but then he might have ended up among the afflicted. Instead it wouldn’t be a city of love for him. His time with Séverine, the glories and splendors of downtown life, their adventurous loft dinners, his days doling out gently used foulards and minks to the fashionable, his strolls along the Hudson, dodging shady people but enjoying the view—it was all going to end sooner than he had planned, and he was going to have to begin extricating himself from the city before it ended his time with it first. He would break ties and his heart.

  It all happened, then: Edouard died among the masses, and Teddy accompanied Séverine to the somber memorial. Séverine took her leave of New York the following year, returning to Paris and becoming somewhat well known as an artist. Her letters to Teddy lasted a whole seven months before she was gone entirely. She had lumped everything in New York into one disillusionment; to engage with Teddy would mean showing mercy to a place that had dumped her quest for romance in the mud.