At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  A few key words landed in my head, and I locked them away to emulate and imitate and, perhaps, someday understand. There was “correct,” meaning the right thing rightly done (“She was always so correct in hallways…”); “disgusting,” meaning the wrong thing done wrongly; “all wrong,” meaning the right thing done badly (“So he had us over for fish and it was…all wrong”); and “wacky,” an affectionate version of “all wrong” (“Mike always chooses the wackiest restaurants to share confidences in”). He loved bizarre behavior designed to exhibit an unconstrained temperament, hated it if it was a display of pure egotism. Since pure egotism and an unconstrained temperament were near neighbors, it seemed like a minefield to walk through between right and wrong. You needed a sapper or two to go into the minefield before you, I thought. If they were missing a few fingers, all the better—it was a sign that they hadn’t lost more. I learned later that many of these terms he had picked up in Paris and London in the forties and fifties, where he had had his moral, as opposed to artistic, education. (The artistic education had been more purely American.)

  Above all, I was struck by his favorite murmured response to something that pleased his eye, whether a Cartier-Bresson of men walking at odd angles in the Palais Royal, or Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Tennyson, all pious beard and mad eyes: “Isn’t that beautiful and strange!” or “It’s so beautiful and so strange.” There was a strange beauty in the seesaw balance of the “and.” Not strange—which would have gone a long way in my family. Not beautiful—which went almost all the way with Martha. Not “strangely beautiful,” which implied romantic mystery, or “beautifully strange,” which implied romantic excess. But beautiful and strange, as independent categories but seen at once with both eyes, the ever-exciting discovery of a new marriage of kinds. That was what drew together all the imagery on the wall—beauty undercut by an unexpected informality, or by madness, or by rage. The second baseman, tipped over by the approaching runner, became beautiful by desperation. Sweet infancy became lovely when alloyed with anger. And everything not in motion so much as in action, as though the assertion of frantic energy was in itself redemptive, as though you could dance away any damnation.

  He spoke with an intimacy mixed with a strange tensile steel core of ambition, of push: he avoided the neat formulas of graciousness. “None of them are any good at all,” he said brutally of the current generation of fashion editors. “Just PR people. There aren’t any fashion editors left.” Around ten, his face drained and he said, “I’m having such a drop. Forgive me.” I went back down the steep stairs, and home.

  I went home, and phoned Martha in Montreal, and told her, in tones like Wally Shawn’s in the Andre movie, about my dinner with Dick. Whatever he had invited me for, I had obviously failed to deliver. The next morning the phone rang at eight-thirty, early for us then. “Adam? It’s Dick. That was such fun last night! I was so sorry to have had such a drop. Can we have lunch on Saturday and see the Whistlers?” I was startled and pleased. And from then on, truly, for almost twenty years, he became our alarm clock: Dick calling with some news, thought, thing read, scheme or plot to advance his career or mine, usually, well, wacky, or all wrong, but never disgusting. And then, before midnight—slightly drunk, to use his own words, on the sleeping pills he relied on, unscandalously, his generational tipple—he would call again with the day’s score. Matins and vespers, rung as reliably as a medieval bell ringer would. New York prayers, which are the same as plans, and not unrelated to plots. Though the plots, invariably, involved complicated carom shots in which the editors of one fashion magazine were to be played against the impresarios of some fragrance maker—Calvin Klein’s eagerness for an ad would be parlayed into a tripled fee for a cover shoot, or the “branding” of a camera in his name—and almost always turned out to be too elaborate or fantastical to be executed. He was, I said to Martha, playing chess while the world played checkers. Diligence, dutiful forwardness, was the rule for advancement, a truth that he applied to his own daily work, but which fled him in those early-morning megalomanias. He was right, at least inasmuch as the basic lever of “power” in that world was always the same—simply being desired elsewhere—and it vanished when you weren’t. But being desired elsewhere was a function of being good here and now; midnight machinations had nothing to do with it. He knew this without being able quite to learn it, and screwed up a few promising prospects because of it, pushing too hard or corkscrewing his ambitions too elaborately. I think he enjoyed the morning megalomania, the midnight machinations, for their own sake, like a kind of Manhattan Tom Sawyer, plotting to free an already liberated prisoner or, in this case, to advance a career already advanced, to score a coup by craft already earned by art.

  A week later, after we had walked and talked, I confessed that Martha and I had always tried to live with nothing but beautiful things. He invited us to dinner. (Martha wore the white Kenzo dress she had bought in Paris on our first, teenage visit there; years later he would photograph her in that same dress, hugely pregnant, on the verge of giving birth to our son, his godchild.) “I’m so relieved,” he said. “I was thinking all week: What if she’s a lemon? Well, we could have lunch. But that throat and that hair…Now we can have dinner every night.”

  In an era of cocaine and punk, we were champagne and Gershwin. But it was where we had always intended to be. They were always my tastes, and finally someone shared them—though he shared them with a sure grace that I envied. (I mean by that that he always chose the one right record to put on—mid-fifties Sinatra, whereas I was still a little lured by “Summer Wind” and the tacky sixties organ; Mel Tormé with George Shearing and only with George Shearing—not as a series of ukases and snob values, as I had grown up with them, but in the same spirit of emotional overcharge in which Martha chose her clothes.)

  On winter weekends, for ten years, we would go out to Montauk, where he had a house. In those days, Montauk was still a decently underinhabited part of Long Island, well clear of the Hamptons and their desperate social masquerades, where a handful of similar figures—Warhol, the designer Halston—had bought properties. (In My Dinner with André, Dick’s place is referred to as “the Avedon estate,” which infuriated Dick. It made him sound too landed.) Our weekends out had a beautiful regularity. Usually, Dick and I would drive out together on Friday afternoons, while Martha finished her day in the editing room. Then she would take the jitney or the train, and we would go out to pick her up and start dinner.

  The weekends were pure joy, bookended by absolute terror. Dick was the most hair-raising driver I have ever driven with. The problem was that he lived for human faces—was addicted to them—and he could not, just could not, have a conversation with someone without looking at them, usually searchingly, to see what they were really saying, or how they were responding to the story he was telling. This meant that he negotiated the Long Island Expressway with his eyes and head turned right toward you in the passenger seat, not the front-facing direction generally recommended at fifty-five miles an hour—speaking and laughing, and, more disconcertingly, listening, intently, while the traffic roared and honked in disbelief at the station wagon veering and lurching from one lane to another. It seemed scary then. Now that I can drive, I know how really scary it was.

  I’m aware that, in reading this, the reader must think: Oh, he was looking for a father! Perhaps I was, but only in the more special sense that, having a strong father already, I was always comfortable in the presence of another. Indeed, in those days, I was subject to an illusion that I later came to recognize as semi-universal: boys with good fathers, like me, tend to trust the entire world, perhaps unduly. I saw it in another friend, Wilfrid Sheed, the wonderful critic and novelist, whom I would usually try to visit when we were in Montauk: he went through the miseries of Job in that decade, from pill addiction to cancer of the tongue to a recurrence of adolescent polio, and yet was always oddly resilient, optimistic, even blithely unaware of his own close shaves. (Having become, like
so many writers of his generation, over decades of ever-rising ingestion, a stone alcoholic, he saw his own drinking sweetly, as mere sociability. It might have been, once.) He put this down, grumpily rather than evangelically, to his faith—but his Catholicism, I realized when I read his beautiful memoir of his parents, was really a faith in his Catholic father, Frank, who had instilled in him a sense of trust in the universe, the greatest gift we can give our kids, even if it is always at least partly an illusion projected on a universe that in fact wishes no one well, or ill. Dick’s father, I was to learn, had not so blessed him, and the bouts of paranoia and pushiness were both designed to impress an untrusting father, absent the blithe confidence that the universe, like the good father, would always embrace you in the end. This is a roundabout way of saying that I was never properly scared when he was in the driver’s seat, since, trusting my own father, I trusted anyone who drove. (Martha, a good driver with an absent father of her own, was, over the years, with gentle, mostly invisible diligence, able to nudge Dick out of the driver’s seat and take it over, leaving him in the passenger seat and me in the back, where we belonged.)

  There was a complicated sexual triangle among us, not less potent for being unconsummated, no less real for being marginally incestuous. His sense of sex roles—what came to be called gender roles—was touchingly rooted in the 1950s. Though I did all of the cooking in our couple, and in Montauk, too, Dick, who admired Martha’s mix of femininity and career seriousness, assumed that she, being “one of those great women,” cooked as all the great women did. Alice Trillin and Nora Ephron had participated in what Calvin Trillin once called “the domestic deviation,” meaning that being expert in the kitchen was part of their feminism, rather than a rejection of it. Dick took it for granted that Martha was a master cook, and for twenty years would direct every culinary question to her, often leaving messages asking for instructions: “Maaatha—when do we turn the temperature up on the lamb to get it crusted?” “Maaatha—it’s me. When you’re doing the risotto with wild mushrooms, do you heat the stock to boiling first, or just to a simmer?” Martha would turn to me for instructions and then call or respond with the answers. Even if, as I sometimes did, I gave the answers myself, he always remembered them as hers. “She’s a filmmaker and a beauty—and what a cook,” he would announce to someone, selling her (none too subtly) to a newcomer. They were all parts of a single description of what a woman was, and one could never convince him that I was the chef. Even all the visual and palate evidence over countless meals and Thanksgiving dinners that this was so did not alter his admiration for Martha’s cooking.

  On bitter winter nights in Montauk, we would build fires and make plans. Sometimes Dick would call me in to look at Martha, curled up in a chair, her top lopsidedly buttoned and stretched around her, her yellow legal pad on her lap, her splashy smile. “Look at her!” It was a compliment to me, of course, and to us—but there was always feeling in his craft, sincerity backlighting his strategy, whether personal and improvisational or photographic, and so I knew that he delighted in the beauty of girls and women in a way that made my own lust-marked appetites feel vaguely second-rate. It was heterosexual and erotic without being lecherous. “Most men want something from women,” Martha said. “They want to fuck you, or gauge the chances at least, or they don’t. But a heterosexual man who loves women without lechery—it’s so rare that you give everything.” He put it more simply, but with a sense of bedazzlement more moving for having been professionalized for so long. “Men making pictures of women wearing clothes,” he mused once by the fire. “It’s such a little thing. But it’s so big in art.”

  He made us feel possible, and brought us outward. A tiny elegant man with a gravelly authoritative voice; a man of the forties remade by sixties politics; a master of the decorative arts who relished only the anti-decorative ones; an optimistic romantic who dreamed only of being a grim existentialist—he was the sum of his contradictions. Indeed, I learned from him that character is contradiction, a lesson he imprinted in every one of his portraits, so that, talking about one of his masterpieces—Oscar Levant, or a Wyoming drifter—he would draw attention only to the incongruity of a hideous mouth with an elegant brow, of a tightly clenched fist with an easy turn of the leg. What seemed at first like Roman portraits of grim similarity, a march of unsmiling ugly orneriness, were, once one had become sensitive to the micro-phonetics of their language, always revealed as studies in the paradox of personality—the enigmatic sense of human character that Rembrandt had achieved with half-light, Dick sought in harsh light, trying to make of the opposed inner life that scarred a human face something whole.

  So it was no surprise—indeed, in the best sense, no contradiction—that he himself embodied as many opposing passions as his portraits. Or, in a better sense, it was a contradiction, between the sigh of mischief and a search for the monumental, and the one that gave his work life. I had been trained away from accepting that art, all art, is a scene of contradiction. Rather than being resolved through war, the myriad interpretations were likely to be all correct, and this was not a sign of tepid middle-of-the-road-ness but of real intelligence; the sign of real intelligence in interpretation was the ability to say how the tensions became articulate, rather than the habit of arguing for one or another trait as the foremost one. “Both at once” was almost always the right answer in life. But “both at once” always arrives one at a time—you’d have to go back to look again and again, at a Braque or a new friend, and simple duration of experience made up more often than not for a lack of instant understanding.

  As with all strong personalities, his attraction and charm could sometimes turn treacherous. The straightforward and puritanical tend to leave little room for ambiguity, and though they make few friends, they leave fewer feuds—whereas the charming are necessarily evasive and two-faced and create mixed emotions wherever they go. He had many embittered ex-friends. Strong personalities who try both to delight and to control do delight, and do control—but the underside of delight is disenchantment, and the underside of control is rage, and many disenchanted always trail in the wake of the enchanting. Their promises cannot be kept, at least not completely, and though their promises were (they thought) meant to be understood as enchantments, fantasies, and fables—the charmer charms the snake, he doesn’t converse with it—a fable no longer enlivened by faith is simply a lie, and earns the anger of those who feel themselves deceived.

  And, then, the gift of charm is the gift of instant intimacy. He’s my best friend, sees through me, my truest confidant. But of course instant intimacy, though not a scam, is an instrument: Dick used it to make what he needed, if not merely to get what he wanted, though the two are hard to separate. As with any great theatrical director, once the work was done, the intimacy was not so much withdrawn as suspended. For those caught short by the suspension, the sudden withdrawal of messages and conversations and dinners felt like (as in one way it was) rejection. (At first, we felt this at times ourselves.) Of course, the cynic would say, with as much truth as cynics possess, that the project, the getting what he needed, was just a longer one with us: a scribe and a pseudo son and daughter. But the cynic’s account of motive, though not entirely false, is not remotely true: all motives are always mixed, lust becomes married love every morning, and what we can do for each other is inseparable from what we need from each other.

  And so the most charming people one meets often tend to have the worst track record in making inexplicable enmities. Blunt Dr. Johnson had many non-admirers but few ex-friends. But blithe and ingratiating Boswell spent his life caught in a labyrinth of other people’s exasperations. The disappointed become enraged, and feel swindled, instead of just disappointed. Nora Ephron had many protégés, who loved her, but all felt that the great bright horizon that she held out never quite materialized—because the horizon was herself, which one could seek but never quite become. “So quick bright things come to confusion,” and big, still brighter ones are often what
bring the smaller ones to confusion. The moon tugs on the waters, and the little boats struggle with the tides even as they admire the shining silver object above their heads. If they knew that the moon made the tides, the boats would be angry at the moon. But they blame the water, or each other, and the moon shines on.

  Our meeting was, in retrospect, the great turning point of my life “in town.” A mentor can seem to resolve our problems—but even more to make our problems seem to vanish, becoming not problems at all. The mentor magician, and Dick was mine, is the kind who fills with you with confidence that all the things that looked terrifying don’t really exist. The mentor teacher—I had one in my teacher Kirk Varnedoe—shows us his subject and then ourselves. The mentor magician shows us his world, and then our possibilities. He makes the world’s contradictions look like connections, hidden to lesser eyes. Of course, mentors can teach us only what we want to believe, for as long as we want to believe in it. Falstaff showed that it was possible to be both witty and woozy, a drunk and a man of language with a sharp tongue, because Prince Hal wanted to be both. Then we sober up. Look before you leap, the mentor teacher teaches. The mentor magician says, Leap, and look after, and—what d’ya know!—you’re on the other side. This works out because most of the terrors are in your mind, and most of life’s leaps are easy. Until the day comes when they aren’t, and you have to jump by yourself.