How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  A part of my history made me an unusual figure in the Buckleys’ home. I was a former member of the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP. In 1991 I had driven to Maine along with thousands of other protesters to lie down in the street in front of President George H. W. Bush’s house in Kennebunkport, for a die-in protesting his inaction on AIDS. I still had episodes of PTSD whenever I saw policemen, after being attacked by them during a riot in San Francisco in 1989. I had been a committed member of the group’s media committee and occasionally appeared on television, determined to make a difference in the fight against a disease I was sure was going to devastate the world. This was an era when it was still shocking to hear that ten thousand Americans had contracted AIDS. But in just the six years between the die-in at the Bush house and the day when I walked up to the Buckleys’ entrance, I’d watched the number of infected grow exponentially each year, past all imagining. The World Health Organization report for 1997 estimated that 860,000 Americans had HIV at the time of this story’s events, and 30.6 million were positive worldwide.

  So when I tell you that I thought of William F. Buckley as the opposition, I mean specifically because he had given a powerful public voice to the belief that the illness revoked your basic humanity and placed you beyond help. The tattoo he suggested was to make sure you knew it. Whatever you might think of my friends who joked of my killing him, you may better understand the sentiment as a reaction to his denying that they were even people.

  On the day I arrived at the service entrance of his Park Avenue maisonette with a waiter’s tuxedo on my shoulder, I knew that we bitterly disagreed on the question of what it means to be human. I had never imagined meeting William F. Buckley at all, and so when my first day in the Buckley house began, the reality of what I was about to do set in. I walked to Park Avenue from the subway and looked up at the enormous stone and brick tower in disbelief. I wondered briefly whether they ran background checks on the waiters, whether they knew of my past, whether someone like me could really work there. I drew a breath and put all of that out of my head.

  And then the door opened and I was let in.

  A MAISONETTE, IF YOU don’t know, and I didn’t, is a house hidden inside the walls of an apartment building. The owners share services with the rest of the building but have their own door. In the entrance to the Buckleys’ maisonette sat a small harpsichord of the most delicate gold and brown wood. I was told that Christopher, their son, could play it very well. A portrait of him when he was young hung on the wall on the right, near the entrance, and in it he looked preternaturally beautiful, like the child of elves. Next to the harpsichord was a tree made of metal, with what looked to be cut glass or semiprecious stones for leaves, set in a bed of rougher stones in a low vase. There were trees like this all through the downstairs, chest-high, and the effect was like entering a forest grove under a spell, where the elfin child from the painting might appear and play a song. The forest was also populated with expensive rugs, cigar ashtrays, lamps, and chairs covered in chintz. The house gave the appearance of having been decorated once in a particular style and then never updated again. Between the dark reds on the walls and the glittering stone trees, it felt warm and cold at the same time.

  I was being auditioned, the captain told me. If I succeeded at this, one of his most difficult assignments, I would be a regular. “Mrs. B will watch you like a hawk,” he said, “in general, but especially for this first one. So you have to be on your very best behavior if you want to be asked back.” As the door closed behind us, he said, “That’s what we call them: Mr. and Mrs. B.”

  I was then introduced to a kind older gentleman who, in my memory, ran their household. I don’t recall his precise title or his name, but if it had been a palace, I think he would have been the chamberlain. He impressed me instantly as one of the sweetest and most elegant men I had ever met, with a full head of white hair and a wry look in his eyes that stayed whether he was regarding a martini or a waiter. He was busy with showing the cooks around the kitchen. The waiters were brought upstairs to change in a small room that sat at the end of a hallway near the entrance to the back stairs, which led from the second floor to the kitchen. The room contained a single bed, made up with a torn coverlet, and a treadmill covered in wire hangers and books. Dusty sports trophies lined dusty bookshelves.

  “Whose room is this?” I asked the captain.

  “Mr. B’s,” he said.

  I stared, waiting for him to laugh.

  He said, “Oh, honey. Sure. She’s the one with all the money, after all. Canadian timber fortune, I think. Her friends call her Timberrr because of that and because she’s tall and when she’s drunk she falls over, because she won’t wear her shoes.” I thought of Mag Wildwood in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I laughed, he laughed, and then his face came over serious and flat, and we both stopped laughing at the same time.

  “Don’t you dare write about any of this,” he said, “or I’ll have to hunt you down and kill you. With my bare hands. Because I love them dearly.”

  THE PARTIES THE BUCKLEYS had in New York were typically attended by a strange mixture of her friends and his, which is to say, I remember holding out a tray of scallops wrapped in bacon to the socialite Nan Kempner and the conservative writer Taki Theodoracopulos, both of whom looked down at it as if it had insects on it, and then I moved on to the magazine people, who swarmed the trays quickly, eating everything. It was her very rich society crowd mingling with the young writers Buckley was fostering, and they had very little to say to each other, often drifting to different sides of the room, yet never hostile.

  Despite the way the writers condescended to me, I knew I made more money than they did. But it wouldn’t matter. I was holding the tray they were eating from. The food was always from another era: the terrines, for example, which I never saw anywhere else I worked. The scallops wrapped in bacon. Gravlax slices on Melba toast. The Buckleys did not go in for the new trends in cooking. There was never going to be a piece of charred tuna, pink on the inside, on those trays. The only pink was in the roast beef appetizers. There would never be coconut-crusted shrimp. And dessert was often, perhaps even always, rum raisin ice cream, a favorite of theirs. I found that endearing.

  On my first night there, when I was not supposed to make a mistake, I did. I remember very clearly being in the dining room and making my way through the thickets of chairs around the tables. Someone was speaking to the room for some reason as the courses were being changed—we waiters had to bring in one plate and leave with another, swapping them out very quickly, working in rows. I cleared from the wrong side and served from the wrong side, and while the guests didn’t seem to notice, I was helpless as I looked up and saw Mrs. B glaring at me as if I’d personally done it to hurt her feelings. Her dark, thickly lined eyes barely held in her fury.

  I went to the captain immediately. He swore and glowered at me. “Chee . . .” he said, trailing off. And then he said, “It’s okay. I mean, you’re in for it now. But there’s only one thing for you to do.”

  That one thing, it turned out, occurred at the very next party, and it was a part of my probation. Instead of passing food or drinks, I looked after her. Mrs. B typically sat talking to someone animatedly, her cigarettes, lighter, lipstick, glasses, and cocktail beside her on a small table. She drank Kir Royales, but with a light blush, not too dark. She would take off her shoes, setting them to the side. And when she leaped up to speak with someone she recognized on the other side of the room, she left everything behind.

  Your job at that moment—should you have screwed up as I had screwed up—was to go immediately to the back and emerge with a fresh Kir Royale, prepared as she liked it. You never brought her the one she’d just abandoned. You then grabbed her lipstick, glasses, cigarettes, and lighter in your other hand, bent down to retrieve her shoes, and went over to where, by now, she was in conversation again. You did not interrupt, but waited until she looked at you, and then you said, “Mrs. B, you left these,” and she would exc
laim, take them from you, and sure enough, if the color of the Kir Royale was right and you were appropriately chastened in your manner, and you did all of this exactly right each time she moved, you survived.

  As I handed her shoes over that first time, I blushed a little, like someone in love.

  I HADN’T READ MR. B’S famous column on the AIDS tattoo before I worked for him. After I began working for him, I still did not read it. I felt it was somehow safer not to, because once that friend had asked me whether I’d ever imagined stabbing Buckley in the neck, it then flashed through my mind whenever I was in the house. I remember serving him and watching his neck as I set the plate down. The single thing I forbade myself to think of became, of course, impossible to ignore. I felt a little like the narrator in Chekhov’s Story of an Unknown Man, who pretends to be a serf in order to work in the home of the son of a politician he opposes. It’s an act of political espionage that uncovers nothing, and soon the narrator despairs of what he’s done. He eventually runs away with the neglected mistress of his employer.

  This is not what I did.

  For as much as William F. might have done to undermine the situation of people with AIDS, Pat seemed to do in their favor. In 1987 alone, for example, a year after his famous column, she was involved in raising $1.9 million for the AIDS care program at St. Vincent’s, a hospital at the epicenter of the epidemic in New York. Today it might be easy to underestimate the value of that gesture, but at the time, no one wanted anything to do with people with AIDS. Pat was one of New York’s greatest fundraisers for charity, and however many lives her husband may have put at risk, it seems to me she may have saved many more. If it was ever glamorous to raise money for people with AIDS, it was partly because she helped to make it so. And while the finances of their family were known only to them, it seems to me that Mr. Buckley would never have condoned the types of donations Mrs. Buckley made. If there is a question as to whose money it was, perhaps the proof is there. She could afford to go against him.

  And if it seems strange to you that one of America’s most famous homophobes was married to a woman who was a hero to many gay men, if it seems strange to you that the household where she lived with him was sometimes full of gay men serving food and drink to her guests despite his published beliefs, well, it was strange. It was what we used to call complicated. And yet the times were such that we, her waiters, experienced the millions of dollars she raised for those who were abandoned to their fates as a kind of protection and affection both. Money raised for people with AIDS was not for us per se, but it could easily have been us next. For gay men in the 1990s, that thought was never far from our minds. And so I think we could joke about killing him. But never, not even a little, about doing even the slightest thing to hurt her.

  I REMEMBER BEING IN the back of the Buckleys’ limo, headed to their home in Connecticut for a party there. Their driver, our captain observed to me, kept a gun under the seat. A VW Cabriolet convertible pulled even with the limo, and the driver gave three short honks to get our attention. It was Nan Kempner, waving wildly, girlishly, her hair held back in a scarf tied at her neck, the convertible top down. This was just a few years before her death.

  “She thinks we’re them,” one of the waiters said.

  I didn’t think so. I was pretty sure she knew we were the waiters. Why wouldn’t she know Mr. and Mrs. B were already in Connecticut? She was a good sport, is the thing. It made no sense, of course, but it was easy to believe she was happy to see the men who carried around the food she so routinely ignored.

  The Connecticut party invitation was a sign you’d arrived, both for the guests and for the waiters. To be asked to work there meant they trusted you the most. What I remember chiefly about the party is the roses, everywhere, carefully maintained. I had a rose garden myself in Brooklyn, and well-cared-for roses have always impressed me. I first pictured Mrs. B tending them, before my imagination conceded to who she was and replaced the image with that of a gardener. The Connecticut place was a large, if somewhat unassuming house in Stamford, a city quickly becoming notorious for gang activity across the tracks from seaside places like the Buckleys’. As Nan Kempner had sped away earlier, I wondered if she knew to worry about being carjacked in her convertible. Perhaps she had a gun under her seat too.

  We changed clothes this time in an attic room with a view of the grounds and the pool, before hustling down and attending to the needs of the hundred or so guests swarming the lawns. The party passed in its usual bustle, and was entirely unremarkable until the evening, as we went upstairs and changed to go. From the window, I saw Mr. Buckley head to the pool with a dark-haired young man we could see only from the back. I raised an eyebrow, and one of the waiters said to me, “It’s a tradition. He always invites a male staffer to a skinny-dip at the end of the night when there are parties up here.”

  “Really,” I said.

  We heard the splashes. My coworker smiled. “Really. That’s how they used to swim at Yale, after all,” he said. Before I could absorb this, Mrs. Buckley appeared in the doorway.

  She was, as I’ve said, very tall, and she loomed there like a ghost. We all froze. We were in various stages of undress. I had my pants on, but my shirt and jacket were hung up, and I wore just a V-neck undershirt. She had never before come to where we changed. Her eyes were half lidded as she looked down at me. I was nearest to the door of all the waiters, who stared as she gave me a long, long look and walked slowly ahead until she was right in front of me. “Thank you,” she said, very quietly, looking at me. “Thank you so, so much.” And as she said this, she set her long fingers down into the hair on my chest.

  “Thank you,” I said. It was clear she couldn’t see me very well. She didn’t have her glasses on, and she was drunk.

  I could only think I was very good with a Kir Royale. I wondered if perhaps Mrs. B had decided it was time for her to invite a male staffer of her own. Why was she there that night, when she had never come to us like that before? Was that party somehow unbearable, when all the others had been bearable? Whatever the reason for her arrival in the room, all of us were shocked to see her.

  There was a terrible loneliness and sadness in her expression, and then it was gone, and she seemed to come back to herself. “Thank you, thank you all,” she said, and turned and left the attic.

  We finished dressing and started back to New York in the car before the swimmers returned.

  IN THE DAYS AFTER, when I thought of this evening, I could barely believe it. And then months went by, and years, and I could still barely believe it. I knew that, yes, if I ever wrote of it, my captain would throttle me—at the least. But more important, I’d lose my job. And for what? Waiters and escorts both know that indiscretion is a career-ending move. You reveal a secret only if you are never going back again. At the time, I knew I had reached one of those accommodations one finds in New York—I had carved out a little place I could make a living, in a city where finding and keeping a job has always been an extreme sport. I was also supporting my younger sister with this money as she made her way through college. I couldn’t afford, in other words, to risk it—to become famous as a waiter who spoke of all this and then be blacklisted by New York publishing in the process. They were monstres sacrés, and I was not. Everything in my life would change, but nothing in theirs—I wouldn’t be a hero, just an example, the briefest object lesson. And so it soon became a story that I told instead, to which people listened in disbelief, and at the end we laughed as if it were only funny.

  All these years later, the moment itself has come to represent some sort of peak, the climax of my life as a cater-waiter. It’s as if I never did it again after that night, though of course I know I did. I’m sure I was back at the Buckleys’ at least once more, for example, in New York. But in the way of these things, there was no goodbye. I didn’t know in advance the moment I would leave, and there was no presumption of intimacy such that I would have written a note saying, “Thank you for the time in your servic
e.” I left the business, having finished and sold the novel I’d been working on. I transitioned to living off a mix of grants, advances, and teaching writing. I remember arriving as a guest at a party in Chelsea after the publication of that novel and finding my captain holding a tray. He smiled at me, we spoke, he congratulated me. Unspoken between us was that I still should never write of that time and place.

  And now Patricia Buckley is dead, William F. Buckley is dead, and the Buckley maisonette has been sold by the beautiful son. Even St. Vincent’s Hospital is gone. The building is being slowly converted into a nest of luxury condos.

  When I knew I would not return—could not return—I finally did find and read the famous column. And when what he’d written was there in front of me, contending that people with AIDS should be tattooed as a matter of public safety—in the New York Times Book Review of all places—I had a number of reactions. I was surprised to see he wanted not one tattoo but two, one on the forearm and one on the buttocks. I wondered if he knew, before he died, that this column would be mentioned in his obituary, along with the names of his wife and son and his place of birth—that it would, in fact, tattoo him. And I couldn’t help but imagine him in that pool in Connecticut with the young male staffer, swimming underwater, the walls glowing with light, their naked bodies incandescent, just like at Yale, and—maybe—wishing there was some mark on the boy he could easily see.

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