Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  But for now, here on the train, to bear these select items even higher—scepters, majorette batons, my isthmuses worth crossing. Titanic and magnificent and clumsy, manly weapons. No one will come near me … and why? Because they guess that these I hold are souls. These—raw, toylike—are retarded but honest, the wasted overly-male souls I am still somehow in charge of. —These, my favorite thirty.

  Lord-Express have mercy on our stop-making, stuttering local. Place me expressly beyond these stares, past such terrible embarrassment. I say I do not feel it. I feel it. Credit me at least for trying to help my others. Let me trust your blueprint even though you’re really succch a bad designer. Let me know how best to clean up after people other people do not want … Let Ninety-sixth Street happen soooooon! Say my friends are at least as safe as they are dead. And since You’ve done all this to them, could You please just let them go now? Just leave my boys the fuck alone.

  Someday let me rest. Then tell me, You, O Lord and architect of suffering. Tell me, You:

  Is it going to have to get … Betterer, or Worserer?

  —Take me aside, and set me down on something soft—and, promise me just once, that …

  —All will be well, all will be well, and all will be wonderfully well.

  Amen.

  Won’t it?

  Catastrophe and Child’s Play

  Our life is based upon the mutual interpenetration of play and earnest. So long as this happens, we live in peace. In a catastrophe, the mixture is lacking. Just as it is lacking in the games of children.

  Catastrophe and child’s play are the two poles of all social life.

  —ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

  I.

  don’t consider myself psychic, just lucky—with friends.

  Shall we start with the recent playful miracle? How fast a migraine can clarify to the buzz of good champagne. I am riding a taxi toward La Guardia airport, I’m hurrying to the old house I now occupy. My ticket to North Carolina is nonrefundable, I feel glad to be headed south. I sit studying the purple turban of a driver whose name is, according to the card depicting him, Krishna.

  Suddenly my forehead—from just over the eyebrows to where the hairline once reigned—goes exquisite and sneezy as with some ice-cream headache. I look to the left of Krishna’s orderly topknot, I see a peeling decal: “I (Heart) New York.” I know.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Krishna, sir? We must do a U-ie. I am going to miss my plane. We will now be heading back into the city. There’s a little downtown street. I can help navigate. You will double-park, please. In thirty seconds I’ll know if it’s still there. I bet you anything it is.”

  “Is, is vhhat, szir?”

  “One chip of paint from the back side of a radiator near our table at the coffeehouse. We all wrote on it. That chip is lying on the tile floor underneath. Piece maybe five inches long. Tomorrow, she will sweep it out. I’m this sure. —Look.” And, through the open plastic panel, I shove my very-white-man-in-his-forties hand. It is trembling, that happy, wobble wobble. I feel proud of my hardearned uncontrol.

  Dark eyes in the rearview mirror gauge my blue-gray ones (brown can “go into” blue more often than blue’ll ever fit brown). Mr. Krishna tells me, “Szir, you are having veesion. I vill join you in showing I know what veesions are. Am off-duty. Krishna he believe your veeeesion.”

  I cannot say how much it meant to get a free ride, forty dollars’ worth. Of course, I later paid him anyway. That’s part of what you learn. From taking care of people. To accept whatever they can offer. Then you try and pay it back quick. That helps them to give more, which helps them.

  He speeds into the web of nighttime Manhattan; things either flash or hide; he finally stops, he activates the blinkers. I dash into a store all new to me. No coffee smell, no crowd. It’s become one of those shortlived shops selling African crafts. The entrance stands guarded by wooden giraffes, near-lifesized, spotted in darker shellac. A dashikied clerk chats up her only customer. I fake shopping. I pass bright crocheted hats you could fit over world globes. I find four bolt holes. Here our group’s table once stood. Behind it, the old bowlegged radiator we sat on during our worst winters.

  The owner seems occupied and I, clear of sight lines, now drop to my knees. I reach, blind, beneath a radiator still half-warm. I pull forth a handful. Paint chips, each flake no longer than a feather. My palm closes, careful not to crush even one. I thank the woman, praise her loot, swear I’ll be back, and, smuggling litter, jump into Krishna’s chariot. It, participatory, squeals off.

  When he sees me sorting through my lead-based tea leaves, sees me tilting toward street lamps and stores’ neon, Krish, unbidden, ignites the overhead lamp. “Here we are!” I call.

  “You are finding, good. What exactly are finding, szir?”

  “We all signed this. One night, half-drunk after performing for each other, our works about Paradise, we piled downstairs, needing caffeine, we make a pact to live forever in and out of art, to visit one another’s podunk hometowns. Then each of us, using her yellow felt pen, let a single line spell all our names as one long, perfect, brand-new word, Mr. Krishna. —My head doesn’t hurt now, I feel ecstatic.

  “Krishna, sir? How’d I guess that a woman would sweep it away by noon? How’d I understand our name was still tucked under there tonight only? How’d I know that, buddy?”

  Came the calming word. “Veesion.”

  II.

  As one of their caretakers, I am taking care to save a record.

  (Somebody has to.)

  By now, my nerves are shot but the news is good: today, at last, my every dying one is safely dead.

  —Right now, a Thursday, for the first time in over a decade, this very morning—sunny, slight breeze from the Northwest—my dry-cleaned funeral suit slid back into its closet, I am allowed to guildessly ask, “So, Hartley, buddy, how ‘bout an onion bagel? Sound good? Maybe squeeze those navel oranges for juice.” My last sick friend found peace in this very house, ten days back, upstairs, in an antique bed, inherited.

  —This might not sound like much of an achievement, but oh and oy, is it ever! Maybe my rejoicing strikes you as a wee bit weird? I know only this: I can wake up and not wonder first thing, “Has the gasping started? Will they return his apartment’s security deposit? Which of his aunts did I forget to phone?”

  Now … Where was I?

  If you go down on the Titanic—the saga of your drowning becomes just one gust in the vacuum of a famous ship ending. The vessel’s destruction outranks your own. Who will see your last three air bubbles rising to the surface of that much-black ice water?

  We have all been upstaged by the newsworthiness of our particular disaster. This is just one of the ways History snubs us.

  I now make monthly payments on this clunky, comfortable house (circa 1900); I own that dull Ford wagon (circa 1990) parked out back. Without quite trying, by default, I am hiding here. I am not quite safe, but I’m not dead, either.

  This, you see, is my life’s A.D./B.C., revolution. I, Richard Hartley Mims jr., am briefly returned to my home state, to bovine health, to my own care-taking. So nice you’re here; you, alive, too. What a coincidence. That gives us something undeserved in common. I need to testify. The tale of them should ride one long gasp across this first morning I feel fully off-duty. I need to tell our history quick.

  I want it stated in a way as literal as those guides so popular at our public libraries.

  How to Tile Your Own Patio in Under Six Hours, No Previous Experience Required!

  I want it rendered into mild, safe steps.

  How to Survive the Loss of Your Beloved Address Book in Under Fifteen Years, How Not to Numb Every Inch of Your Interior While Doing So, What to Make of Their Remains, and How to Go On, Having Forfeited Your Pals and So Much of Your Previous Experience! First Time Every Time.

  The relief today feels like this: having borne all the children you could ever want, you finally choose to get your tubes tied. No further worry about prev
enting other babies, ever. The perilous fertility has ceased.

  My own artistic generation, gay and not—so essentially and goofily good—idealists for just as long as we could be, longer—is now, before age fifty, often good and dead.

  There is one big advantage to getting left back:

  Now I know I am alive. Turns out, that is a huge plus. It makes you concentrate. Suspecting you’re fairly strong, you let cabbies rise, godlike, to your own occasion. Your duties as a nurse force you to half-medically forgive yourself.

  There’s another main joy in being the representative left behind: I am allowed, encouraged, to remember them. You will not believe these people I got to love for years. I still do!

  I have always been so lucky in my friends.

  Just tell me I am not the jinx that “disappeared” them.

  A week and a half ago, right after the exit of my best surviving pal, one of the Titanic’s final survivors died. She had been just five when the liner sank. Last words her father spoke to her from deck?—“Hold Mummy’s hand very tight. Now go and be a good girl.”

  She recalled everything. Considering the darkness, certain noises stayed especially real. After the hulk’s immense last gasp, from one cold lifeboat where she drifted bundled with her mother in her mother’s coat, the child heard many swimmers scream. Such cries.

  But, she reported, what soon sounded even worse was the quickly spreading silence. One by one, from a darkness out of Dante, so very fast in water this freezing, all the screaming singly ceased.

  It was, this old woman (never married) recounted, the stillness afterward that scared her most.

  “Out there, floating, in the black, it became so quiet, you could not believe a single noise was being made anywhere else on earth.”

  That is where I live this morning.

  The phone is idled. I now take messages for no one else. True, my grandmother’s mantel clock ticks on. (Not even silence quite stifles that.) I tell myself I mustn’t burn my only bagel.

  These days, people newly sick with it expect to live much longer. Great. But not my crowd. Always pirate pioneers, we were, alas, among its first. The long-promised boat, tiny but already there at the horizon, seems finally to be coming in.

  It is a boat my darlings missed.

  Now everything is slowed and eased and lazied. Medications?: one daily vitamin. I have just myself to care for. I am, increasingly, a cinch. Keep it fed, keep it warm, keep things quiet. The complex loss, it simplifies you. Last night, showering, I shocked myself. I almost hummed—four bars from an old Lerner musical.

  I begin to guess what has just happened—what delicate, expensive ship so recently slid under. Look, I’ll squeeze those twelve nice oranges. They’ve only just begun to “turn.” Too much juice for one bachelor, but it’ll probably get drunk. A few sure things now get me through.

  Today, no waiting for doctors’ grand rounds, no faux cheer around my sick. Which reminds me of a tacky joke.

  It was told at the start of the plague. It was told about a stunning Miss America, disqualified. The committee found that, precrown, this ambitious, hard-working girl had made some lesbian porn. A girl has to eat.

  “Q: What is the difference between that Miss America and the Titanic?”

  “A: At least you know how many people went down on the Titanic!”

  My dead friends, see, just urged me to offer you this sleazy riddle. Departed, they can bear most anything but solemnity, especially solemnity about them. My circle misses noise, brass, vamping, and action for the sake of action’s being pretty. Our patron saint was Saint Adrenaline.

  Now I can bear everything but loudness. I live in a small village. I love its evening train whistles, its morning mockingbirds. I dread New York’s career of frenzy. Now I sit here in a foursquare kitchen five hundred miles due south of Manhattan. I’m saved from the wild silver city I still adore.

  Here, I feel determined to stay basic.

  How to live at 6:40 a.m. How to keep your house hushed. My phone is yet asleep, if not quite dead. Out there, garbage collectors keep banging cans so loud, cleaning up after the spoilt sleepers they secretly hope to wake. —I identify with those garbage men.

  Wake up, beloved litterers of my life!

  O, I long to tell a Fairy Tale. It is a true one. Not to give away the end, but most of the best fairies die. I want to tell about our crowded hearty “Before.” It will, I hope, outlast my pals’ more recent spindly “After.” Now we have floated to smoother waters, a continental divide, the “After After” of this plague. From here, to me, “Before” looks even holier. We were children. We thought no one had ever been wilder or smarter than we.

  My boys and girls were gorgeous, strong-backed, impenitently sexual, ambitious, irritating, adorable, high-energy, lost and found then lost, the best hopes for our passions that now seem so antique—painting, writing, composing.

  Don’t worry: I can still be amusing. They always liked that in me.

  Even their sadness often happened very funny. Disaster never rushed you from the direction that you bravely faced. It played too well with you. It did play very rough.

  Look, I’ve squeezed this juice, for us alone. Such a color! Let me pour yours into Granny Halsey’s only leaded cut-glass tumbler not yet broken. With your permission, and in your warming company, may I award myself a morning off? A whole one, too. No changing sheets. No dealing with the parents. No talk of sick, sicker, sickest. Let’s end all emergency thinking. Please.

  I inherited those crystal pendants there from Robert. I strung them in three eastern windows that’d feed them each dawn’s best. I cannot say I bought this house just because its kitchen faces sunny-side-up; but the brilliance of those crystals has become, for me, our Robert’s own.

  I’m now an early riser. One blessing of the plague—I need less sleep. Even when I try to force myself to stay in bed, I wake by sitting upright, feeling stressed but needed.

  I rest here with my coffee in night’s final dark. I wait for day’s first color. My hot mug, caretaken, is circled by two hands merely warm but still glad to feel useful. I welcome light. I dare it not to come.

  You may think me superstitious. (Oh, by now I’ve grown quite pagan!) But, some mornings … I speak to hatching prism brilliance. There’ll be a first wink, usually redness, then an almost-comical glimmer, all points. —“Well, star, hi. Look at you, back everywhere. RobertRobertRobert.”

  I have a minute now my friends are finally courteously (slowly, then suddenly all too quickly) dead. All of it remembers like some inlander’s tale of a great luxury liner that sank. It fell asleep, and settled on the bottom, and only a few of us woke up in time, got out.

  Now, lucky, later, we are allowed to dive back down among the wreckage, gathering precious evidence. Here, a long name on one piece of paint, the magic beans—retrieved. I finally get to spill them.

  Unfair, my friends are dead. Unfair, I’m left alive. And yet, here’s what’s miraculous:

  We have only just begun to know each other!

  Oh, but we thought we were truly something.

  Boy, but I have really meant to get to this.

  BEFORE

  The Thrust of the Launch

  No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

  —E. B. WHITE, “Here Is New York”

  here are just three days in the history of Manhattan: the day you first see it, the day you get to move there, and the day you, far smarter, much less intact, still find the strength to leave.

  Seeking my fortune, I swept into the city two years before the ultimate careerist, a disease, did.

  The Pastoral Symphony offered shepherds an idyll, quickly followed by a storm. I arrived just in time to witness the exuberant peasant dance, midglade, midtown. I felt those first fat playful droplets cool the dancers before lightning struck us. With malice aforethought and damn good aim.

  For the next decade and more, I somehow kept myself afloat on a pure stone islan
d overstocked with jesters royal, too many contenders for King, and a whole of lot of queens. I founded my own handhold on this piece of castle rock surrounded by moat. With friends’ help, no thanks to centrifugal force, I clung there all those years and for dear life.

  Everybody knows NYC is a cliff dwellers’, mud daubers’ generative and wondrous mess. Weaklings don’t last long here. This town is reserved for what Strindberg called “the Stronger.”

  I unzipped both plaid canvas bags when I, newly into address book number seven, was thirty-three. I’d planned on becoming a New Yorker since the age of eight. You must hail from rusticated eastern North Carolina—its topography flat as a table—to understand how very much the erect and steely city truly means. Being so upright, it is visible, self-reflective, from a long way off. From the chem swamps of stinky reedy New Jersey. A citadel for hopefuls, it looks mainly at its own profiles in the cubistic caverns of sky-like mirror it provides itself. Open compacts everywhere.

  Early in my stay—drunk on city life, glad for its free tickets and dollar pizza and standing room, I told my new friend Robert how much I really loved it here. Really. I admitted that my dingy minuscule apartment reminded me of van Gogh’s simple room at Aries—bed, chair, desk—everything a guy might ever need. Robert laughed his pirate baritone. “You know what you are, Hartley, pal? Down deep, you’re basically a happy person.”

  “No!” I said, looking around, half-shamed. I stood here, on public view, accused of having “a talent for happiness.”