About My Life and the Kept Woman

by John Rechy

  We finished breakfast; the conversation returned to what it had been before, about nothing now.

  He drove me back to the hotel on Hope Street. I asked him to wait for me in the car. I rushed in and retrieved a copy of Big Table, with my story of “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny.” I inscribed it to him: “To my wonderful friend Bob. Always—Johnny.” I ran out, someone else ran out, someone else I would now allow him to see.

  He looked at the book, he looked at the story, he looked at the inscription. He looked at me.

  “Little Johnny,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  30

  In my room, I sat smoking—I smoked a lot now when I was upset. I had darkened the room, wanting to create night, intending to fall into the comfort of sleep, sure that it was all over between me and Bob; but light slipped through partings in the blinds, and I was unable even to doze. I felt miserable, knowing I had hurt a very good man, a very good friend who cared for me a lot. The knowledge that I had hurt myself, by losing his friendship, did not assuage my guilt.

  I lit another cigarette and—

  A slender streak of smoke arose, and with it came the memory of the kept woman as—

  —the smoke lingered about her, and she completed an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips, extending a moment of suspense.

  I watched the smoke from my own cigarette. More and more I pieced together the smallest details of my brief interlude with Marisa Guzman. What was eluding me about that distant interlude that rose up so assertively, so unexpectedly?

  As I often did in times of emotional turbulence, grateful that she was now living in Los Angeles, I sought out my sister Olga, not to share with her the source of my anxieties but simply to be soothed by her stories, her dramatized gossip about family matters and, invariably, as I expected and counted on, about Isabel Franklin. In learning of others’ entanglements I would at least momentarily forget mine.

  “Look!” my sister said when we were alone after a late breakfast and her husband and children were gone. She was plump again, yes, always beautiful, as sassy as ever. She pushed a magazine into my hands, open to a certain page.

  It was a glossy magazine, like Vanity Fair, slick, determinedly chic. The article was illustrated with many photographs. In the largest one, a lovely, elegant woman sat on an elegant couch in an elegant room. Behind her, steps swirled into a second level of the house.

  “It’s Marisa Guzman,” I said, startled and pleased that the memorable kept woman of Augusto de Leon was being awarded such lavish attention in an American magazine.

  “Look closely,” my sister said.

  I did.

  “It’s Alicia Gonzales,” my sister said.

  Yes, there sat Isabel Franklin in her home on Nob Hill in San Francisco. Other photographs, smaller, showed her roaming her “fabulous home,” as the writer of the article described it. Only one photograph, the smallest one, was shared, with a man past middle age, her husband, the famous columnist.

  There it all was, my sister’s stories and conjectures verified.

  Alicia Gonzales of El Paso, who had become Isabel Franklin of New Orleans, was now Mrs. Bert Schwartz of San Francisco and a doyen of the city’s society—or, as the writer of the article implied, a certain faction of it.

  “Read it,” my sister said, laughing. “Read it aloud to me and tell me it’s possible.”

  The gushy writer of the article gave the woman’s name as the former Isabel Franklin, recently from New Orleans. Her parents were from Spain, where she had returned to bury them, one month apart. She was a mixture of French and Spanish heritages—“some nobility somewhere there in the background,” the reporter quoted her as having said, “without pretension, just dismissing what is generally known.” “Her home in Nob Hill,” I read on, “is a show-place, to which artists and other celebrities regularly seek an invitation. She has a reputation as a great hostess.”

  My sister was poking at me, laughing, coaxing me to share the details of the article with her, delighting in it—“Read that again.”

  “‘A recent guest,’” I read on aloud, “was—”

  “The midget writer,” my sister anticipated.

  “‘Truman Capote,’” I read aloud, “with whom she laughed and shared sophisticated, witty stories about their memories of New Orleans.” I continued reading, fascinated: Invitations to her home were coveted by actors, politicians, everyone who was anyone. Toward the end of the fawning article, the writer tossed off a concealed gibe: “Although some in old San Francisco society consider her somewhat ‘nouveau arrivée’ and have not opened their arms to her—yet, she has established herself as a woman of substance and grace, staples of her noble ancestry.”

  “The gall!” my sister gasped. “A poor Mexican girl from El Paso!”

  I was wrong in believing that the relationship between me and Bob was over.

  He telephoned me to join him for dinner, as I had done before almost regularly. He seemed unchanged toward me. He did not even indicate what had to be obvious now, especially if he had read my story, that I was not the wayward young man I had pretended to be—replete with street talk and gestures, the boy he wanted to send to school. After my own awkward embarrassment at first, I welcomed the development. We now talked about writers that he liked, that I liked. To my surprise, sex remained as it had been before, as if, at those times, I became again the same object of desire he had originally pursued.

  Still, my need to prowl the streets swept over me. I had to return, as if to prove that I could not be drawn away from the enticing world of anonymous desire by my feelings toward one person, toward Bob. With him, I was restless now. I became moody and did not tell him why. I went hustling—liberated again!—and met Bob afterward for dinner.

  “I had to,” I told him. “It didn’t mean anything, not like with you.”

  “I understand, Johnny,” he said. “I do understand.”

  Again, the unexpected reaction—like his easy acceptance of the fact that I had been lying to him about who, what I was. There was, again, no anger, no accusation, and that thrust me into what I had been prepared to resist, guilt: guilt not for what I had done—there was no guilt there—but for its having hurt someone, despite his disclaimer, whom, like Wilford, I had come to love as an intimate friend.

  “Johnny, that book you’re writing—”

  It was the first time he had mentioned that. Of course, he had read the note in Big Table about the almost completed novel. I had written almost nothing more. The new deadline I had promised Grove had also passed. Each time I conceived of setting down what was expected, what I had indicated I would write, each such time, I was whipped into a frenzy of doubt and guilt—and self-recrimination—doubt that I could recapture those unique time, which I was still living; guilt that if I did, I would be plundering real lives, sealing them for a book while the actual lives would go on beyond our shared experiences, far beyond me, without me, secure in a new life.

  “What about that book, Bob?” I asked him.

  “Are you working on it?”

  “No. I can’t write here.” That hadn’t occurred to me until I had spoken it, that writing about the life I was still living was a factor in not being able to transform the experiences.

  “What if you returned to El Paso?”

  El Paso! The isolation, the ancient memories, the wind … El Paso.

  “I’ll send you money regularly,” he said, “if that will help.”

  I returned to El Paso. There, in the government projects where my mother still lived, I began to write and eventually to finish the novel that I would title City of Night.

  I wrote frantically, every day, sometimes into night, from early morning, typing on a rented Underwood typewriter that I set up on a table in my mother’s bedroom, the house kept quiet by her beyond the closed door, opened only when I came out to dinner, and at night when she went to bed. My divorced brother Robert and I once again sha
red the living room at night, he on the couch, I on a roll-out bed. The bedroom door was also opened during the day when I came out now and then to translate into Spanish and read to my mother a passage I thought appropriate.

  “You’re writing a beautiful novel, m’ijo,” she told me proudly.

  How to bring order to a world that thrived on anarchy? I chose a prose that might convey the dissonance of rock and roll versus the formal strains of classical music that my father had loved. I listened to Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Bartók—lots of Bartók.

  Often, from the window of the projects would emerge the sounds of Verdi’s Requiem, a favorite. That music would soar into the sounds of our neighbors’ radios, sad Mexican laments, a beautiful cacophony.

  The structure of my novel was emerging: Each main chapter was a “portrait.” That would impart the actual series of encounters, mostly fleeting. I wrote out of sequence—the ending of the book first, adapted from the letter that had become “Mardi Gras.” I wrestled with the order of my memories. Who had appeared first in Pershing Square—the fabulous Miss Destiny or Chuck the cowboy? A portrait titled “The Professor” dealt with an older, brilliant man laid up, longing for impossible love from the “angels” he paid. I had met him in Los Angeles, but did his story fit better in wintry New York? Would that shift falsify? How much could I interject into what I had seen, only seen, heard, only heard, in order, from a distance, to attempt to find meaning where I had, then, detected none? How “truthful” was it possible to be, while relying on the total unreliability of memory? I decided this: The sequence of my novel would be determined by the sequence of recollection. Adjusted memories might even yield what wasn’t clearly there in order to illuminate what was.

  Individual chapters found their own structure. In a chapter titled “White Sheets,” I evoked my fascination with mathematics for its structure. Just as the answer to a graphed algebraic problem is found in the intersection of two lines, so the protagonists in that chapter found the possibility of connection only at midpoint—and then they separate, like the diverging lines of such a graph. I saw in the fall from near stardom of a man I called “Lance O’Hara” a suggestion of Greek tragedy, the bruitings of the furies heard in bar gossip predicting his downfall.

  So it went; and always with the recurring sense—kept dormant only for intervals—that I was betraying the secret lives I had shared.

  Bob called daily, encouraging me, reassuring me. I told him that I was writing an ending chapter that would deal with our relationship. “I want you to promise me that you won’t do that, won’t write about that. Don’t, John!” That was the first time he was abrupt with me, the first time he had called me “John.” “I promise.” I veiled much of what had occurred between us into a last chapter titled “White Sheets.”

  After rummaging through several titles—“It Begins in the Wind,” “Masquerade,” “The Fabulous Wedding,” several of those announced with excerpts in Evergreen Review—I chose, at Don Allen’s suggestion, City of Night, which had, from the beginning, been the title of the chapters that occurred between the portraits.

  “Johnny!” My brother Robert unexpectedly opened the door I kept closed while I worked. It was Sunday and he was not at work; my mother was at Mass.

  “Robert?” Seldom did my brother annoy me.

  “Your movie star is dead.”

  He hadn’t forgotten her name. He had wanted to soften the news that I immediately grasped about my beloved movie star.

  Marilyn Monroe was dead.

  A suicide?

  Had she ever finally believed that she, at first a plainly pretty young girl, had remade herself into the world’s most desired movie star? If she had killed herself, whom had she wanted to kill?

  One day my book was finished. My mother, my brother Robert, and I wound about the kitchen table collating the original type-script and three carbon copies of the almost 800-page novel.

  * * *

  I was on my way to return the rented Underwood typewriter. I could not. I bought it for fifty dollars, knowing that I would keep it forever.

  Galley proofs arrived. The book was all wrong! I panicked. With a pencil, I began making small changes in the margins of the proofs, then bigger ones—and then I found myself revising long passages, typing them on pages I pasted over the galleys. By the time I had finished reading the proofs, I had rewritten, in pencil, ink, and on the typewriter, at least one-third of the novel. The announced publication date had to be postponed while the expensive changes—backed strongly by Don Allen—were made.

  It was then, when I faced the fact that this book would definitely appear for anyone—anyone!—to read, it was then that I was jarred to realize that I had betrayed the street world I had lived in, in yet another way than by exposing it: In writing about that world, I had in effect hidden it again, pushed it all, all those lives, into the limbo of fiction. Wasn’t that dishonesty, a license to conceal? I had tried to inject meaning where I had seen none. Major dishonesty—to order chaos.

  Not only in writing about the night world of Times Square and Pershing Square had I used the out of fiction. In writing about my father—the intimate moments when I sat on his lap, on the laps of his laughing friends—I had blurred it all. Don Allen had detected that in the first finished version, had insisted I deal with those moments clearly. Instead, impulsively, I removed the incident entirely—and, finally, at Don’s insistence, I restored it, toned down, and that’s how it appeared.

  But wasn’t greater honesty also possible in fiction, to relegate to invention what can’t be faced otherwise? If, throughout interludes in my street life when I was playing the roles I chose, I had been dishonest, wasn’t I, in fiction, being truthful?

  Those confusions, contradictions, festered as the time for the publication of City of Night approached, a time I dreaded and anticipated.

  Would I ever be able to write about my life without the scrim of fiction?

  City of Night was published in 1963 while I was still in El Paso. It was greeted at first with strident reviews. The first of many was shrill, appearing in the New York Review of Books; it was titled “Fruit Salad.” The reviewer questioned my existence, suggesting that Grove Press had concocted the book in its offices. It was clear to me that the reviewer, notoriously disturbed, was trying to wish away the authenticity of my book, was threatened by it; he was well known for hiring “dumb hustlers,” an identity contradicted by me and my novel.

  Still, his shrill review set off a wave of speculation about the “real identity” of the author, speculation fueled by the fact that I refused to promote the novel, chose to remain apart from it. Articles in newspapers, magazines, and tabloids purported to identify me. Impostors claimed to be me and made news in columns. One imposter drunkenly proclaimed his assumed identity in New York’s gay bars. Another was in Fire Island, the guest of a rich man. Another appeared in Paris. By keeping my identity private, I was making it possible for others to claim it.

  For years I battled with Barbara Epstein, the editor of the New York Review of Books, to grant me space to respond to the venomous review. That space was finally granted, thirty years after the bitchy review had appeared.

  There were more reviews, hundreds. Almost daily I would receive a batch from Grove. Soon, the reviews turned to praise.

  * * *

  In my hometown, my novel was sold under the counter in some bookstores, kept in a private collection at the public library I had frequented so often. Few people in the city knew I was in El Paso.

  The guilt I had tried to keep in abeyance while writing about lives I was now leaving far behind resurged once the book was published. That awareness reverberated throughout the day, at night.

  And yet, I told myself—

  Pete, the shrewd Times Square hustler, would be always young and desirable in my novel. (But how old was he now, how quickly aging, where now?) Miss Destiny would always be yearning for her wedding in my recounting of he
r impossible hope. (But how soon would she weary, give up, surrender?) Skipper, Jocko—in my novel they would always be left on the edge, surviving. (But how soon after that did the inevitable falling occur?) … All those lives lived frantically would go on beyond what I had written about them. Yes, I had been true to the exhilaration allowed only to those exiles, those outlaws, an excitement I would substitute for nothing else.

  But I had escaped—I hated that word. I had survived—I hated that word, too …. I had escaped the final dangers of that world only through the accident of talent. Guilt at times became so suffocating that I gasped aloud, with anger at myself, with sorrow for the lives abandoned.

  My novel became a top best-seller, going into printing after printing, published in foreign countries. Yet I was broke. No royalties would be payable for months. Soon, I would have to ask Bob to stop sending me money; the book was finished, the goal met.

  I had to buy my mother a house of her own.

  I applied to a local bank for a loan against future royalties. As “security” I took copies of best-seller lists on which my novel rode high. The loan was refused.

  I wrote to Don Allen about getting an advance. He consulted Barney Rosset. I was advanced $5,000, a sizable amount at the time.

  Joyfully, my mother and my sister Blanca went hunting with realtors for a house. They found one that my mother loved, a white duplex with a rose garden, nothing ostentatious, no, not yet; it was an attractive house in a good neighborhood—away from the projects.

  I did not want to see it until everything was in order, with new furniture that the advance would cover. I wanted to see my mother in it.

  That day arrived. The house was furnished, freshly painted. On the day she was moving in, my mother hugged me, tightly; I held her. “Thank you, m’ijo, thank you for my house.”

  She paused on the step before the government unit she would now be leaving. She looked about at the other units, where the Mexican women who had turned to her for advice, for solace, lived and would remain.