by Edmund White
One evening, on the way to a cocktail party being given by a colleague, I was walking alongside Jamie. I was recounting to him all my thoughts about Richard Smith. “He’s driving me crazy. He keeps calling me. I can’t bear him, though he is a pretty good fuck. But you must have met him,” I said, suddenly putting the pieces together, “somewhere during your social peregrinations.” Then I was conscious of the stifled sob at my side. Although he turned his face away I could see he was crying.
“Oh, Jamie,” I said, “Richard is the guy—that guy—the one you …”
The hours and hours of Jamie’s tormented, spiritually twilit descriptions of his paragon, even his report that his love had recently developed for the first time an infatuation with a ridiculously unsuitable man, a West Village clone, an idiotic bodybuilder who spurned him—all these details came flying back to settle on my shoulders. My callous words (“though he is a pretty good fuck”) hung in the air. Here was I, each day listening to Jamie’s morose and labyrinthine speculations, while hoping he would eventually find comfort in my arms, whereas the very person he so hopelessly loved was this creepy Richard I was fending off. I longed to comfort Jamie, unsay my words. I hoped he’d find me attractive now that he knew his beloved was pursuing me.
Suddenly Richard seemed much more interesting to me. The becoming aura of unobtainability he’d been lacking until now because he kept hurling himself at me stepped up behind him like the blue shadow a spotlight throws. Now he was haloed, three-dimensional, desirable. The next thing I knew he’d moved to Hong Kong to manage a branch of the family business and I never heard of him again.
Jamie, embarrassed, dried his tears and honked his nose. A few days later (so great was his capacity for secrecy) I discovered yet another aspect of his life he’d not yet mentioned in a year and a half of our sharing an office and daily confessions: he had a lover, whom he’d already been with for five years.
Jamie gave a cocktail party for the White Russians one night while his mother was out of town. There they all were in their Harris tweeds, Church shoes, Brooks Brothers shirts and Porcellin ties mixing martinis and tinkling the ivories, talking about next summer in the Hamptons and next Monday at the opera. The house was a stately ruin in the East Fifties, wedged between massage and pizza parlors. The neon sign from the massage parlor blinked shifting pink and white light through the dusty velvet curtains. Inside, everything was shabbily genteel—worn Oriental carpet, Ming figurine lamps with torn silk shades and an upholstered couch with sprung springs.
The nicest man there was named Gerry. He was blond, tall, with a wiry body, a ski-jump nose, clear glasses perched on the end of his nose and a way of investing more energy into the story than the person who was speaking had put there. He leaned into the conversation and tapped at it energetically, like a bird sharpening his beak on suet. He laughed and nodded with sympathy, understood everything, touched people, made them drinks, found echoes and instances of what they were saying in his own life and affirmed their tentative notions with well documented enthusiasm. He was quick to say, “But you know more than I do about that,” or “That’s exactly like you to say that.” Although he was usually immersed in what people were saying, once in a while he’d draw back, observe, shake his head as though in amazed disapproval and then relieve his interlocutor by saying, “You’re simply fabulous.” If he’d been filmed while responding to someone and if later the film had been sped up, his head would have ticked as rapidly as a metronome from side to side during the conversation, never held steady or upright. Although he was working hard to charm everyone, the White Russians didn’t like him, especially because Gerry, it seemed, was from humble origins but pretended his father was a retired naval officer. “He calls him the Commodore,” someone named Furlong hissed, “but there is no rank of Commodore in the Navy And look at him now, the little slut.” Jamie—my Jamie, the timid prep-schooler who’d wept in the Sainte Chapelle—was carrying Gerry upstairs in his arms. “Did they just meet?” I asked Furlong.
“What? Just meet? But of course not, my good man, Jamie’s been cornholing that little slut the past five years. They’re what pederasts call lovers, vile term.”
I SCRATCH AWAY at these memoirs at midnight as my hound sighs and turns on the couch beside me.
Brice always liked the idea we’d both be cremated and our ashes mingled and put into a jar and stored in the dovecote at Père Lachaise. I worry about the practical details. Will his family mind the mingling? If I die several years later in America, will it be a big bore for someone to bring my ashes back on a plane? Will I feel far from home if I’m buried in Paris?
But where’s home? A French woman friend spoke the other day about the pain of selling her senile grandmother’s house and letting this part of the “patrimony” slip out of the family’s hands. But I cast a wintry look on her attachment to mere property. I’ve lived in furnished sublets for the last ten years and have given my books away with each move, though I’ve also felt a clandestine urge to own land and a house but dismissed the longing as old-fashioned materialism designed to create the illusion of permanence just when we must be getting in training for transience, then extinction.
For me the sublet has been a spiritual exercise. Until a year before Brice died, when we finally rented in our own names a big five-room apartment next to the Tour St.-Jacques, as though we needed to step firmly on a block of melting ice just as we were approaching the rapids. I kept feeling he was trying to fix up a place for me to live in after he’d be gone, and I received each nail he drove into a wall as a gift he was making me with his frail body. At least our new neighborhood has all the trappings of earthly permanence. It’s the oldest extant part of Paris and its narrow medieval streets were filled even back then with whores and writers (public scribes were given space to work under the arches of the Eglise St.-Martin). But if it seems permanent, it’s also a place of evanescence, even dematerialization. The Tour St.-Jacques is all that’s left of the leveled church, which in turn was built by the rich alchemist Nicolas Flamel, who one day invited his maid to precede him down the steps into his underground laboratory. On the way down she heard a loud whoosh, like the angry snapping-shut of a fan. When she turned around, the alchemist was vanishing. A month ago, when I heard that story, I sighed, thinking, Lucky man, to be spared the humiliation of decomposition. Real connoisseurs, my lover and I used to talk about what would constitute “une belle mort,” “a fine death.” More than once, on being told a supposedly tragic tale of a sudden demise (heart attack, car crash), we’d shock our mourning interlocutor by beaming and rubbing our hands together and murmuring, “Quelle belle mort.”
AFTER A MORNING of bad coffee and compulsive chatter with Jamie, I would spend melancholy lunch hours thumbing through new novels in book stores, trying to figure out why they had been published and my books rejected. In college I’d received several literary prizes and been published in the campus literary magazine. I’d been considered by my friends the writer most likely to succeed and thousands of cigarettes, drinks and hours had been consumed in discussing my “art.” I didn’t want to be very famous or even famous; I just wanted to be published. In fact no accolade seemed higher to me than that of “a minor writer,” because it exempted its bearer from the obligation to treat the great themes (birth, marriage, adultery, divorce), which in any event were closed to me as a homosexual. I liked reading minor writers more than major ones—Henry Green more than George Eliot, Ronald Firbank more than Hemingway, Ivy Compton-Burnett more than Tolstoy.
But for the moment even the status of the minor writer seemed unattainable. My oldest friend, Maria, was surprised that I was so driven by the desire to publish; she was a painter who seldom painted and seemed just as happy “putzing around” her apartment, redecorating the bathroom or tending to her minuscule garden as she was standing in front of a canvas and brooding. Because painting was, as a genre, more resolutely avant-garde than fiction and directed to a much smaller audience, the freedom demanded
of her was even more worrying than the combination of entertainment and art required of me. Yet even this “easy assignment” I’d failed to fulfill. Somehow I’d bungled the proportions. I loved to read my manuscripts out loud to Maria or my first lover, Lou, over the phone by the hour; perhaps my urge to please or the emotion I injected into my recitals with my voice made up for the blanks or faults on the page. But editors—all these people I didn’t know—rejected those same manuscripts, often jotting a note, saying they found my writing “cold.”
And yet my longest and most recent unpublished manuscript was a blow-by-blow description of the most passionate moments I’d ever known, my one-sided love for Sean, whom I’d pined after for the last four years. How could this book be “cold” when it was about my most tormented feelings? Had the people in my group therapy been right when they said I “over-intellectualized” things and consequently felt nothing? For one time in my life I, who thought of myself as ugly or, worse, corrupt, like a piece of meat that has gone off but still looks edible, had been briefly desired by a tall swimmer with a hairless body, dirty-blond hair, small blue eyes that looked too fragile for sunlight or direct address, a man who knew Latin and Greek, who’d made love to me before a candle and a mirror.
In those first few months together, four years previously, our faces had swum toward the mirror like those of the shepherds gaping down at the Christ child. We’d gone to a sentimental movie that had moved us because we had an excess of strong feelings longing for an occasion. Lightning looking for a rod—and after the movie let out, we’d run over a metal footbridge across the East Side Highway to the quay. Beside us the East River flowed quickly, half-industrial, half-wild, as though a mountain lion had wandered through city streets. It was a spring night and the superficial warmth of the previous day glided on the cold depths of winter air. Mist hung in the air before the street lamps. We ran and ran past late-night strollers. There we were, two fine young men, one dark, one blond, Sean’s face drained pale except for a dark red rose in each cheek just above the beard line, small dark roses the color of life.
If I was fine it was because I was with him. Ordinarily everything seemed to me so drab, so arbitrary, as dry and yellow as sun-faded schoolroom blinds, and walking out into the world, away from a book or conversation, seemed a venture into dissolution. Entropy was my enemy, and as the world collapsed its music slurred and went sickeningly sour, Victrola running down.
But not tonight as we showered out into space with our own explosive force. We sang the song from the movie, we turned the searchlights of our faces toward each other as we ran and the beams crossed at a point in space where the doubled light was neither his nor mine but an intensity that constituted us.
As a teenager at my father’s Michigan summer house I’d looked longingly, shamefully, at all those sharp-toothed scions standing up in their speedboats as they pulled into the dock, their torsos twisting as they fiddled with the line, or as they laughed and looked back to see how badly they’d splashed their passengers. Sean had been my scion, my high school swimmer, my head prefect. He was athletic, he smelled of leather and grass, his hairless blond torso rose up out of his lower body like that of a Burmese Buddha, shoulders gleaming and rounded, chest long and flat, waist dramatically slender, as though only such physical perfection could be the vehicle for the enlightened spirit.
Back then, in the fifties and sixties, I knew very few gay men and many of those I met were tormented or effeminate, yearning after cops or marines or moving men. Sean was gay—and he was as strong as a mover. He could size up another athletic man without yearning or innuendo, and if he liked me it was because he admired my mind. He also liked my body, sort of. He was the first man I’d met after I’d lost thirty pounds and started working out, but I didn’t realize that I’d become a “number.” I thought I was still the doughy-bellied guy I’d been, and Sean’s interest in me struck me as miraculous.
He’d liked me, he’d slept with me fifteen times—and then he’d moved on. Maybe I wasn’t exotic enough, too much the fellow Midwesterner. Or maybe he didn’t like my weird combination of intellectual bullying and sexual enthrallment, as though Voltaire had taken the form of a masochistic girl. Maybe he saw me as too openly gay—yes, that was what he disliked. He wanted to drink German beer with another guy and discuss Pythagoras with him and rugby before, almost accidentally, deciding to stay over; once in bed they’d jerk each other off in the dark, wipe up, yawn and fall asleep, the only sign of affection being a muted, playful sock in the jaw and a whispered, “Tiger …”
I was too histrionic with my big, pleading eyes, my oleograph fantasies of living with Sean as man and wife, my certainty that he alone could redeem me and confer humanity on me. Before knowing Sean I’d been what was called a “john queen,” someone who haunted the public toilets in the subway and sucked off other men coming home from work. I’d felt I was a worm, a sex fiend, someone too ugly and effeminate and fat ever to know love. Then, surprisingly, Sean had fancied me for a moment, without realizing that he wasn’t just dating me but rather raising me from one species to another.
I suppose those hopeless love affairs were a specialty of my generation, the one that came of age before gay liberation began in 1969. It may seem strange that a three-day riot could affect something so subjective as love, but of course what the Stonewell uprising changed was not love so much as self-esteem, on which mutual love depends.
My status as a human being depended on Sean’s love. When he drew away from me I started writing my novel about him. As I’d go along, I’d show him the pages, one after another, and I hoped to mold him through my descriptions.
Back then I was anything but an objective observer. I was a moralist, if that meant I wanted to suggest new ways of acting through examples and adjectives that were subtly praising or censorious. I knew as well as anyone else that homosexuality was an aberration, a disease, but in my fiction I pretended otherwise. I gave my characters problems, minor problems that struck me as human, decorous, rather than the one irrevocable sin of being blasted from the start. I showed my homosexual characters living their lives openly and parallel to those of their heterosexual friends: pure fiction. I pretended the homosexuals had homes, loves, careers if not exactly the same at least of a similar weight and dignity. But my greatest invention was that I let my queers think about everything except the one subject that obsessed them: how they came to be this way, how they could elicit the world’s compassion rather than hate and how they could be cured of their malady. I knew I didn’t have the equilibrium or self-acceptance of my characters, but I thought by pretending as if (hadn’t a whole German moral philosophy been based on the words as if?) this utopia already existed, I could authenticate my gay readers if not myself. Of course I had no such readers. I was an unpublished writer.
Now my strategy was being directed against Sean. He didn’t think he was queer and he hated the idea that he might end up in the arms of a man; I was trying to convince him that human contact is flexible, more a dance partner’s quick hoist or slipknot than the Stone Guest’s funereal embrace. (Today of course I see that all these youthful fears of how one ends up are wide of the mark since the only end, as the Buddha foresaw, is old age, sickness and death, and on that compost heap strange, unexpected new flowers breed.)
Nothing in all the world—not even old age, sickness and death—is as painful as one-sided love, which is a foreglimpse of the other three. Love was the great bitter school for me, since it gave me something the minute it took it away. It seemed to give me the man I’d longed for over so many years. Back in boarding school I’d stared through the steam at raucous carefree jocks laughing and snapping towels at each other in the locker room (I was the face on the towel). Hugging my books to my chest I would scuttle drily across the quadrangle and watch them clown and hit and hug each other. In a dorm room one cute little guy would bounce on his big friend’s lap and call out at the top of his lungs for the benefit of the other guys standing around, smi
ling, “Hey, this feels great, we should get married, how about dropping Sally, Rich, how about it? Drop the bitch and marry me”—a huge laugh, all that warm young flesh with the peach fuzz, the smells of sperm and Clearasil and cheap cologne and tuna fish for lunch and fresh sweat in hairless armpits, a tenderly veined and muscled hand, modeled by Michelangelo not in marble this time but terra cotta, red from the eternal cold of a Spartan, unheated school, this big, elegant hand emerging out of a sleeve of white linen and good tweed—all those powerful legs and soccer-playing butts in unpressed khakis, cuffless because they’d been let out as the boy grew, those perfect white teeth, sun-bleached eyebrows, small ears, baggy but secretly tumescent crotches, high-arched feet in thick white socks pulled halfway out of penny loafers under a scuffed wood desk, the ragged nails, the bobbing Adam’s apples, and in the shower the hairless chest and twin oak-brown aureoles, one round as the earth, the other (because the hand is stretched high) elliptical as Saturn, the boy’s lips a gash of garnet in a face drained dangerously pale by rugby practice, the knees black with a mud that under the flowing water snakes across the tile floor in the absinthe-green winter sunlight, cast by high windows on shoulders too wide for a torso all ribs and flat muscles, applied by the painter with just a few deft dabs of the palette knife…. Now a young man like one of my locker-room gods had been given to me but this one I was free to kneel before and worship. With all those earlier deities I had had to pretend I didn’t see through their disguise, I had been forced to act as though I believed they were human beings like me (I worshipped them alone, in secret, and with just one hand, the other molding the air into the divine form), but now the thick, knobby godhead itself was plunged into my mouth, not just some tasteless wafer of the imagination.
