Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires

by Gilbert Adair

  What have I retained from the period? Mostly odds and ends, of no especial memorability in themselves but which have nevertheless taken root as memories will, whether ‘worthy’ of retrospection or not. Watching Don Giovanni from so high up in the Opéra gods I felt I had only to lift up my arm to touch the Chagall ceiling. Listening in rapture to Ralph talk of his unending quest for ‘the perfect shirt’, as one might say – as he did say – ‘the perfect boy’ (which he himself was for me). Laughing at a brand new recruit to the common room, a Brit, young, earnest, bespectacled, not attractive, who suddenly said, apropos of some conversational tidbit of Hollywood dirt served up by Schuyler via the Tribune which he, the new recruit, had overheard, ‘Excuse me, Zsa Zsa who?’ Managing to read A la recherche du temps perdu from start to finish – it took me five months, in English of course – and realising that if Proust comes up in conversation and somebody automatically mentions ‘the little madeleine’ you can be sure he’s never read him. Dining at Drouot and Chartier. Ejaculating alone chez moi, without manual assistance, while reading a newspaper article on hair-raising hazing rituals at Charlottesville U, South Virginia. And of course teaching, an activity I continued to enjoy, except that, as each new class replaced a previous class, as each new set of faces duplicated a previous, near-identical set of faces, I began to have the queasy feeling only I was growing older while my students all somehow stayed the same age.

  Then one day it happened.

  I remember the day if not the exact date. It came at the long-awaited tag end of winter and when I’d left for work that morning the trees lining the quai Voltaire were still stripped down to their own angular skeletons. It had snowed some, but nearly all the ground snow had been washed away by overnight rainfall, leaving only the odd stray patch on the kerbside like a glob of unwiped shaving cream under the earlobe. Then, in mid-afternoon, when we least expected it, the sun had come out and, by the time my classes were over, the air had begun to feel unseasonably and unreasonably warm.

  That evening the judicious ambush I had been laying in the café downstairs paid off handsomely. Schuyler was the first to appear and, instead of at once rushing off along the boulevard as he invariably would, he greeted me and without a word, without even silently nodding at one of the seats opposite mine, as though to query whether I minded if he took it, sat down. And just five minutes after him, before the waiter had brought him his kir, Ferey and Mick, having fallen in together while leaving the school, joined up with us for what Mick, who’d once spent a fortnight in Kenya, called a ‘sundowner’.

  We were all in a jocular mood, hooting with laughter at a fait divers in France-Soir that Mick read aloud about a party of deaf-mute gays who, late one Sunday night, had been flouncing up and down the avenue de l’Opéra and who, after some humourless local resident had rung up the police to complain, had all been arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace. Then, perhaps hoping to defuse the giggles that continued to erupt from one or other of us as ungovernably as burps, Schuyler proposed a game. We were to watch the passing parade on the boulevard and have fifteen minutes, no more, no less, to select one person with whom we fancied going to bed. If you chose somebody after five minutes, and then you spotted somebody far dishier after ten, it was too late to change your vote; if, contrariwise, you held off to the very last minute, you might find yourself obliged in extremis to resign yourself to the best of what was bound to be – sod’s law oblige – a bad lot. None of us, naturally, had the least chance of going to bed with any of our choices, but it was good fun. Try it.

  After ten minutes, after scores of couples had strolled past, and we were still all playing so close to our chests that none of us had yet taken the plunge (it was astounding to me that Paris, a city I’d always thought of as overpopulated with sexy young things, could offer such slim pickings as soon as limits of time and space were imposed on it), I made the offhand remark that, say what you will, whenever you see a heterosexual couple together, nine times out of ten the girl will be prettier than the boy. There are exceptions, but they really are exceptions, I insisted. And I added, ‘Let’s face it. Objectively speaking – I repeat, objectively speaking – the female is, as everybody has always said, the more attractive of the two sexes.’

  This brought forth from Ferey and Mick the incredulous reactions I expected it would; but before either of them could respond, Schuyler turned to me and said, ‘I didn’t know you swung both ways.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ I replied, wondering where the conversation was heading. ‘Though I have to tell you my first love was a girl. And there have been others since,’ I lied.

  ‘It’s an option you might want to keep open.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, I’m not really sure,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I read a strange item yesterday in the Trib. I don’t know what it means – if it means anything – but some waiter has been fired from a fancy-schmancy restaurant in New York because he’s gay. He’s suing.’

  ‘I thought all waiters in New York were gay.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Schuyler, ‘they’re talking about some kind of a new cancer, you know? A gay cancer?’

  ‘A gay cancer?’ spluttered Mick. ‘What the fuck is a gay cancer?’

  ‘To be honest,’ said Schuyler, ‘I can’t figure out exactly what’s going on. But it seems like it’s a cancer you only get if you’re homosexual.’

  ‘Oh please, give us a break! What a steaming pile of horseshit. Next thing you know there’ll be a gay flu. Or gay gallstones.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what I read in the paper,’ said Schuyler calmly. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I don’t know why you call it horseshit. When I think of what you guys get up to with your bodies, it’s kind of staggering you’re all still here.’

  ‘Schuyler?’ said Mick.

  ‘Uh huh?’

  ‘Do us all a favour. Stick to your crossword, why don’t you.’

  Schuyler accepted the snub as unreproachfully as he accepted everything else life threw his way, and I must say that even if I myself had made no contribution to the exchange – which, anyway, lasted only a minute or two before we started playing the game again – I was with Mick on this one.

  It was two weeks later when the subject arose again. Perhaps because of how well we’d all bonded in the café, Schuyler asked the three of us to meet an English acquaintance of his, a musical-comedy composer who was stopping over in Paris on his way back from New York, where a show he had written, a jokey adaptation of the Odyssey, had opened and closed off-Broadway on one and the same hideous night.

  To begin with, I thought Schuyler was inviting us to a private supper in his apartment, an enticing prospect, since I’d long wondered how and where and above all with whom he lived; but as I ought to have realised, knowing him as I did, I’d pitched my expectations too high. He wasn’t up to that yet. (Nor would he ever be.) We were to dine – Dutch, for we were all equally on our uppers, the musical-comedy composer included – in what Schuyler called a bottom-of-the-range Chinese restaurant in the rue de Tournon, near Saint-Sulpice.

  Barrie Teasdale was the acquaintance’s name, and he was a wag in, I would guess, his late fifties. He was camp, but in the word’s theatrical as much as its sexual sense. He spoke in a transatlantic drawl, he said ‘Puh-leeze’ for ‘Please’, he divided the world (his world) into ‘those who think Miss Liza Minnelli is the greatest and those who know Miss Barbra Streisand is the greatest’ (sic – and Barrie was the sort of person who actually said ‘sic’), he held his cigarette in the most affected manner I ever saw, in the middle of his hand, as though he were wearing a ring between his fingers, and he was so boundlessly pleased with himself I kept expecting him to blow preeningly on his fingernails and polish them on his lapels. He told one name-dropping anecdote after another, in not one of which he himself featured. But then, he was one of those individuals who are terror-stricken at the idea that, caught off-guard, they might find
themselves saying something that isn’t funny, something that isn’t out-of-the-ordinary. Everything for Barrie was a joke, every line had to be a one-liner. It transpired, for example, that some years before he’d actually done time for having solicited what’s called a ‘pretty policeman’, and this is how he told the tale: ‘I was in London one wet Sunday afternoon and everything was closed’ – except your mouth, was my unspoken retort – ‘and I wandered into the Tate and I was looking at the Constables and I thought I’d pop down to the loo. Well, blow me if there wasn’t a constable down there too!’ So, yes, he was amusing, but he was also tiring (he sang for us all, along with our fellow-diners, in an excruciating Rex-Harrisonish sprechgesang, as though to leave us in no doubt as to why his musical flopped, its ‘show-stopping’ number – ‘I escaped the anthropophagi/ Outstared the beastly Cyclops, I/ Saw the Acropolis/ And a metropolis or two …’), and I could understand why Schuyler had elected to break the habit of a lifetime by deigning to socialise with us poor suckers after hours.

  Anyhoo (to borrow one of Barrie’s own pet word-tics), we left the restaurant at eleven to have our coffees on the terrace of the Flore. Mick, an old habitué of the café, had once known our waiter biblically and now exchanged with him an inoffensive double-peck on the cheek à la française. Barrie, still tirelessly holding forth, watched these kisses, fell silent, if all too briefly, then curtailed his current story, about the Hollywood starlet Pia Zadora – it seems that, during some glitzy charity event in Manhattan, a sort of Night of 1000 Stars, the emcee had bitchily remarked that, if a bomb were to drop on the theatre, it would be Zadora’s big chance – to tell us another, very different one.

  ‘Funny, that – what you and he just did,’ he said to Mick.

  ‘Funny? Why? He’s a friend.’

  ‘Oh, because of something that happened to me in New York. I always stay at the Iriquois – that’s West 44th and 6th – and I have my coffee in the morning at the coffee shop there. You guys would find it a tad el-cheapo, I suppose, but it’s right there in the hotel and it suits me fine. Anyhoo, this trip, on the first morning, I go down to the coffee shop and I see Louise, who’s been there since forever – she’s the manageress, not as young as she used to be but she was really something in her day, she had this helmet of jet-black bobbed hair, very twenties, very silent movie star – I used to call her Louise Brooklyn – anyhoo, she greets me, and I go to kiss her the way I always do – and, well, she backs off. I mean, she’s polite and all, and she asks me about the show, and London, the usual stuff, but she makes it totally clear she’s not about to kiss me. So I ask her what her problem is, if maybe I’d said something – though I’d arrived the night before, so God knows who I could have said it to – and she doesn’t know what to say at first and then she says, then she says …’ – here he adopted Louise’s dem-deze-and-doze accent – ‘“Lissen, honey, don’t take it personal, okay? But what with this cancer business, well, who’s to know? You hear what I’m telling you? So why don’t you just relax and I’ll get you your coffee.”’ And,’ he concluded, ‘there you are.’

  Where were we, though? A cancer affecting only homosexuals? It was a joke. Crabs, rashes, inflammations, piles, sores, hives, hepatitis, all of these – none of which I’d ever personally had – go with the territory, as they say. But cancer? How can cancer know what you did in bed? Why should it care? Since when did cancer become a moral disease? And whose morality? And, anyhoo, why should we give a shit about the puritanical prejudices of a bigoted American waitress in an el-cheapo coffee shop?

  According to Barrie, there was talk of nothing else in the bars along Christopher Street and in a pair of Greenwich Village bookshops, both of them on Houston, in fact right next door to each other. One of them, run by the sort of prissy high-minded gays he called ‘male Lesbians’, traded in Vidal and Isherwood and Anaïs Nin and Edmund White and artsy-fartsy photograph albums of nudes by Horst and Halsman and slim volumes by slim poets laid out – the volumes not the poets, unfortunately (that was Barrie’s joke) – on a single long display table so you could ignore them all at once. The other one, run by common-or-garden, down-to-earth faggots, peddled what most of us were really after if we were honest about it: porn and poppers. Gay men would go into the first, put on their solemnest faces and sagely nod through huddled discussions on the worsening crisis; then, before starting home, they would slip into the second and slip out again with the scummiest mags they could find.

  He pattered on and on about Manhattan’s clubs and saunas and bathhouses and fleapit movie theatres and of course the ‘legendary’ Mineshaft, with its meat rack, its torture chamber, its glory holes, its piss-filled tub and the sign on one of its walls – they actually had to put a sign on the wall! – advising patrons that no shitting was permitted on the premises except in the john. Golden showers yes, okay, why not, if that’s what turns you on; brown showers, forget it.

  At which point Mick, probably irritated at finding himself upstaged as our guide to the scene’s ‘underbelly’, our Virgil of the gay Inferno, pointed out that Paris too once had such a club. Called, appropriately enough, Le Manhattan and situated, less appropriately, on the rue des Anglais, it had been closed down by the police, who, raiding it, had discovered a draughty warehouse-sized backroom squirming with stark naked men. (‘Interesting, isn’t it,’ Schuyler interrupted, ‘that there are two things you can be stark: one is naked and the other is raving mad.’) But though Barrie found it depressing that Paris had become such a sexual backwater compared to New York, he had to admit that London was even worse. Nothing, he said, nothing at all was happening in London.

  When Mick and I took our leave of both of them on the place Saint-Germain, I couldn’t help noticing that they walked down into the metro station together, arm in arm, and it occurred to me for the first time – for nothing of the kind had been hinted at during the evening – that Schuyler might be putting Barrie up for the few nights he was staying in Paris. Could they, I wondered, be old flames?

  When perceived from a certain angle, living in a city is like living indoors – like living inside a castle, entire wings of which are left uninhabited, to moulder under dust-sheets. There were ‘wings’ of Paris that, while I taught at the Berlitz, I never got to know. My daily existence was bounded, triangularly, by my quai Voltaire hotel room, by the school building on the boulevard des Italiens, along with the twinned Drouot and Chartier restaurants in the same vicinity, and by the ‘village’ (as we locals like to refer to it) of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, my prowling patch to the extent that I prowled at all. I would make the odd detour: to the boulevard Saint-Michel for a veal-and-pasta in a self-service cafeteria frequented by students; or, if I felt like indulging myself, to an expensive cinema on the Champs-Elysées; or out to the bois de Boulogne to fritter away a solitary Saturday afternoon watching the clownish campery of Brazilian transsexuals so extravagantly coiffed and hatted, powdered and primped, they would have made Carmen Miranda look like Celia Johnson. But these were only detours. I had my regular newsstand, my cafés – Old Navy, the Apollinaire, the Rhumerie – my shish-kebab kiosk in the Latin Quarter.

  Money was a permanent problem. By the twenty-third of every month, pretty much on the dot, I had a shock when I did what I laughably called my ‘books’ and realised how little I had left till the twenty-eighth, which is when we were paid.

  And there was another, wholly unexpected problem in my life. I would start to find myself glared at by suspicious parents whose infants (of both genders) I’d been gazing at for maybe a tiny bit too long in the street. Understand me, my interest in these tots wasn’t at all erotic in nature; rather, I was discovering in myself the germ of a paternal and parental instinct. (Actually, when I think about it, I would make a terrible father but a terrific grandfather. What a pity you can’t leap a generation.) How lovely it would be, I thought, as I watched these families out on some weekend excursion, how lovely to have some infant’s trusting puppy-paw clutching my hand. I know how sac
charine such a sentiment must look on the page, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Having a child, I told myself, is the contrary of committing suicide, and suicide was an option I still hadn’t altogether ruled out. More and more persuaded that, a pitifully inept homosexual up to then, I could have made a decent, loving family man, I dreamt of what my life might have been had I been born straight (or else as sexually eclectic as the turn-of-the-century romancer Pierre Loti, of whom I remember reading somewhere that ‘he loved men and he loved women and, had there been a third sex, he would have loved that as well’).

  It’s happened to most of us gays, I imagine, at one time or another. Yet when, in a confessional frame of mind, I spoke out about my frustrations, Mick’s response was, ha ha, that he preferred to have other fathers’ sons (‘more variety’) and Ferey’s, just as predictably, except that his tastes always took me by surprise, that he preferred to have other sons’ fathers.

  Meanwhile, news of the gay cancer was beginning to filter through to us from Schuyler’s Trib. From what we could gather, and the reports were still confused and contradictory, the disease had the effect of provoking the complete collapse of the immunity system (from an abuse of poppers, some claimed), which seemed to imply that you couldn’t technically die of the cancer itself but, instead, of any malady from which under normal conditions that system was designed to protect you.