All eyes turn toward the door, assessing the newly arrived pair shedding their coats, smiling greetings at the hostess—all eyes judging them—separate, together, eyes then turning back to drinks, each other, the door-entry score made as surely as at some Olympic diving event.
After that, Angie and I could split up, solo handshakers, sex-seekers unimpeded. And if I was still alone by party’s end, she’d be there to leave with. We could then do a long party post-mortem (best part?) on our train ride downtown.
Awkwardness set in when one friend found one, and the other was forced to subway it home alone. It could feel somewhat hurtful, your leaving the party unasked-for. Odd, it always seemed a judgment on your work.
The two of us soon fought like longtime spouses. Knowing how to wound each other best. (References, not to looks, but work—proved most painful.) Sure, I understood I was not quite Angie’s lover, okay, okay. But did any of Ms. Byrnes’s one-night-standers know, as I did, precisely what her uncle (Fern Jewel’s shrimp boat captain brother) had done to her, at age eight, behind a white sail at a Savannah boatyard? Which of Angie’s latest married executives knew that her cranky painter mentor, Joan Mitchell, had not co-starred with Bruce Cabot in some Lost City flicks from the forties?
The intimacy of sexual intimacy seemed, especially in a girl so bodily immodest, far down the list from the candor her average good-night phone chat to me yielded—about how slowly oil paint dried during a New York January this arctic, about recurrent yeast infections, about avocado facials and whether, come morning, strapped as we were for food, you dared eat the green you scraped off the face. But how flippant came the wink “my” Angelina snapped me as she oozed out of the party under the arm of some Cro-magnon. He appeared to be from Passaic, wearing gold neckchains, a doorknob-sized poly-tech class ring, trailing a store’s worth of Old Spice odor. Angie later said she’d wanted the dude in the worst way, and so—it turned out—did Connecticut and Rhode Island, for mail fraud.
—Yschh. Poor child had perfect taste in art, but as for clothes and men, hopeless. Her men friends, of course, excepted.
The girls that Robert and I now met everywhere (beginning not to like being called “girls”) were the same kinds of artists we men were. We all loved shoptalk. But, from field to field, it proved too specialized to bear.
Angie’s women painter friends discussed solvents, a brilliant new Japanese framer, and conspiracies. “During meetings, we mainly gripe,” said she, “but at a very high theoretical level. And for the best of reasons.” Her crowd was often taken for lesbians: They wore men’s jeans and knew what they wanted.
Our fellow artists, who happened to be female, did not resemble the sweet funny girls we’d vaguely dated back home. Friends here seemed to descend from a different species. The stronger.
They were so unlike the kind of tractable deb whose local life often meant decades of decorous waiting—near the phone for dates, then for appointments with Raleigh’s top society bridal consultant, then for contractions in the maternity ward, then in the van—with its heater on—listening to public affairs radio or advanced French tapes, hoping to outlast the son’s clarinet and daughter’s dressage lessons. Then the resigned wait for menopause, retirement, death of husband, own death.
No, here were singular New York single “girls” in denim, who, having found their gifts, having learned their own hard lessons early, were now mostly only in action.
Reversing the gravitational field of expected ladylike passivity, their forward motion required twice as much energy. The joy boys (who liked men) and these overdetermined half mannish girls (who also liked men)—banded and—our differences transcended—male-bonded. We were similarly disadvantaged and underrated, enraged by an itch that offered us artistic immortality in place of so much else that a “real” life daily denied.
We were serious. Which meant being seriously militantly playful. (A.F. ELF of C.I.O.)
The live-in half of Angie’s dive looked colorful if messy. Tonight its scent mixed turpentine and curry. There was a huge ugly Sears rag rug, “Early American,” braided like Saturn’s rings. But her studio itself stayed white, cleared, Windexed nearly scientific.
Seated, I now watched my harp-finder, four feet eleven (though she called herself five two and nobody’d ever had the nerve to contradict). You could tell she considered herself “Major” but only because she had no choice. Everybody in our VD holding-pen had known so too, on sight.
I watched Ang—gossiping seven-deadly-sins art world gossip, making strong coffee, dealing with her gorgon phone and its twenty-foot cord plus our group’s first “call-waiting feature”—rush all over her tiny studio-apartment while stretching a canvas eight feet by eight feet. I watched her, phone still crooked against neck, grapple this immense white canvas across stretchers while stapling the cloth in place. She fired a few staples into the air just for playful emphasis. It was like studying a single if mighty quail—ropes bunched in its right claw—captain some four-masted schooner, and sail it very well.
Nothing about Angie had ever been miniaturized. She stayed Major, despite her frequent crying jags, despite an erotic interest mostly in the guys who answered her own dad’s appetite for waitresses. She was Major despite her professed insecurity that lumbered along on a scale only Cecil B. De Mille could stage if way overbudget.
Before canvas, squinting through the Camel smoke that seemed a byproduct of hyperactivity, she knew everything. In restaurants, she could never decide. Seeing her, staff hid. “But how do you personally feel about the chewiness quality of clams in your chowder? Because I’ve finally got it down to that or the tapioca you described so well,” she overconsulted our waitress (did she hate them all?). The woman gave Ang a look, pure blue-plate-special ptomaine.
Angie’s was a character that only seemed inefficient. As I envied Robert’s negotiable beauty and sexual prowess and social ease, I studied Angie’s character, tenacity, her tuber knottedness. I wondered, being milder myself, if it were learnable. Might I not render her daily forward traction into my own small achievable steps, a How-to Guide for Gaining the Necessary Strength Artistic? Paranoia prepared her: She had a teaching hospital’s worth of emergency generators forever backing her up.
Her paintings possessed the surest sign of early promise, an energy quite absolute. Three ideas were forever being worked out and with obsessive daily care. In bed, I’d heard, then heard from others, Ms. Byrnes was the most supple and specific, inexhaustible, and funny lover. Her eyes met yours and there was no deskclerk-negotiator on duty in between. You were already upstairs. It was a child’s guilelessness combined with lessons learned from her Poppa’s pals smoking their cigars and talking statehouse scandal on the mildewed side porch; while their wives, Mom’s friends, weekly presided over needlepoint loveseats, exclaiming, “Welll, see? Start with a can of Campbell’s Mushroom Soup, add …”
From her work, her lovers and friends, Angie held nothing back because, I later learned, she could hold nothing back. At the time, I thought she had a choice. Because I did.
She’d begun to show under the name “Alabama” Byrnes. That name outranked frilly Angelina; it had an edge over A. Z. Byrnes, an earlier try that meant to hide her sex from competition jurors.
One day at her place, as she upgraded to a rat trap and slathered the thing with Philadelphia Cream Cheese, I admitted that I found her new name memorable. “But, honey, how do you just pick a thing like that? True, I chose to use my middle name and not Dad’s first. But, I mean, have you ever even been to Alabama?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You’d remember.”
“Thomas Lanier Williams,” she answered, trap in one hand, loaded knife in the other. “Ring a bell? As a hint, I can quote you the low-on-potential opening line of his first story: ‘Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes.’ Does Thomas Lanier Williams not sound like some fifth-rate Midwestern college teacher poet with a rat-colored moustache and cracked white cheese for skin,
who writes about lilacs and cottages? Sure you don’t know his stuff?”
No. Angie told me that, since her mother was also a no-count Williams, she’d felt attracted to any Major artist who had survived the curse of so lackluster a country name.
“But ‘Tom,’ you see, Hartley, had the sense to do a factory recall on himself. Of himself. Recalled himself Tennessee Williams. He actually spent more time in Missouri. But … preferred the other’s sound. So I figured, being a Williams and his halfassed kin some way, I would join him. It’s true I come from Georgia but that’s already a woman’s name. No fun there. Besides, Georgia O’Keeffe beat me to it. She’s a sentimentalist, but a cagey one. Knows how to crop the image of a pebble, like some good photographer would. Her work reproduces better than it ever looks in person. Get up close, you see that paint’s just a means-to-an-end with her. And ‘South Carolina’ seemed a mouthful, besides I hate double Southern names for Sweet Briar belles like me. Which left me only Mississippi (which I was absent when the others learned to spell). So Alabama Byrnes it is.”
“Has a sort of Sherman’s forced march feel to it—I see torches, mansions. And it does sound male. ‘Gary Cooper is Alabama Byrnes.’ Has a sort of macho violence about it.”
“Male. Good. Scorched earth. What every girl who stands just five foot six needs—name that sounds like some dude with a twelve-inch dick, going on before …” We broke into “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” I knew the most verses.
Finally she retired this subject, and kicked the loaded trap under her paint cabinet. “I do hope a person can become what she calls herself,” Angie said, husky, sober. “I reckon we become whatever it is we play at hardest. Take a wimp like Thomas Lanier Williams. He would never even attempt to write a work as ferocious as Streetcar Named Desire. Only a Tennessee Williams could. See, Hartley? I call that self-knowledge. Which is your Alabama’s favorite form of self-defense.”
“And public relations.”
“And public relations. Let’s us go eat.”
Robert, Darling
t’d be wrong to say we two competed for him. Instead, especially when he was out of town, we sat at Ossorio’s and made tireless catalogues of R.’s merits. How his eyelashes, caught by a peculiar late-day rosy light off the Hudson, glinted like silver. We anatomized his hard herbal smell. I said it resembled crushed geranium leaves; she cited nutmeg cut with fresh basil. We once tried writing down his better-known conquests but soon gave up, very hurt. We’d both caught him climbing out of some limo three blocks from here. That way it’d seem he had come home by subway like the rest of us. We said how, on the aristocratic scale of blondness, yellowblond is country tawdry; silverblonds alone truly reign.
Sometimes he’d disappear for ten whole days. No advance warning. Ten. It drove us crazy; his answering machine would be off, too. We considered phoning the cops, but a quick visit to his place showed no signs of struggle.
Then he’d simply be back at our table in Ossorio’s, sitting on the radiator for direct heat. He never explained, he just resumed. “Away. Needed a change. Had to see a man about a bet.” (That was one of his lines I’d copied.) He would either return to us tanned in January or else with a greenish pallor, sooty rings disfiguring his eyes. Once he showed up with his ear pierced but, as he never wore an ornament, it soon grew shut. I told him, “Either you’re IRA, or still in that three-way with Mick and Bianca. Or there’s a li’l opium-eating prob.” The look he gave me was God Viewing a Bug.
Home among friends, within three days he grew lustrous as some nicked road-warrior tomcat, limping to ensure his lady owner will put out real cream. R. grew mainly only gorgeous again, if with a certain growing sense of the mileage still tailing him.
I now told her Robbie had just left two sentences on my answering machine, “Lord Airedale, I don’t feel we’ve been using the word LAD enough. Lovely tartany sort of nappy feel to LAD, so do remind us, love.”
But we did worry about his music. At his jumbled apartment, with Robert seated before the upright piano, he admitted to us he was writing a tone poem based on the launching then the sinking of the Titanic. “Oh?” I asked. It sounded like an idea so good its results’d be pretty terrible. Then Robbie confessed the piece would have two major themes, a sort of Before and After. Maybe we’d like to hear them?
We two sat clumped high on his high bed, riveted by the sight of his outward-tapering chalice of a back. He now played—with old-fashioned Lutheran Sunday school rectitude and flourish: “Bicycle Built for Two,” then “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Robert turned, saw our faces, laughed until he wheezed. “You guys are already too sophisticated for the likes of this simple-simon preacher’s kid.”
“I don’t know much about music,” Angie started. “I mean I’m sure you’re a genius, don’t get me wrong. But I personally think it’s fairly corn-ball even when Bach recycles ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ in about eighty other pieces, and he wrote the fuckin’ ‘Fortress,’ right? At Sweet Briar, in art class, all these twitty debs would clip out their favorite Vogue models—including that trampy girl-child you’re shtupping—and they would glue photos to canvas board and think they’d actually done something. If I can’t paint it from scratch, I never use it, except maybe some real object I’d fasten directly to canvas. But then, I’m old-fashioned. I have an aversion to quoting if it’s only lifting. But that’s just Modernist me. So your pop song and the hymn, I guess they were really played the night it sank?” He nodded. “Robbie, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, darling. If not, there’s always a place for you in Male Prostitution. Matter of fact, my Granny Byrnes just sent me this fifty-dollar bill. What can Hart and I get off you for that, you OrganGrinderMonkey?”
“For fifty? How you two feel about some dandruff?”
Others, referring to our composer, resorted to the radiant. “Robert’s so bright, brilliant really, outshines others, such a fuckin’ star.” RobertRobertRobert.
Usually, familiarity breeds disinterest. Just our luck, she told me, we get the one on earth where familiarity only … breeds.
He liked boys. Then he liked girls, then a girl’d introduced him to a former boyfriend. Conversions abounded. I reminded him, I was a boy. Ang a girlie, why not just stay home, give at the office? Why not do some Hospitality pineapple popovers for friends?
His glitzy or dorky or well-known boys, the ones he brought to an ever-busier fourposter, I only scoffed at. Angie shredded his showy taste in starlets and Carnaby bird leftovers. “Cheap,” Angie judged them. “I hate to use the word ‘cheap.’ I do. But they paint their lips, and some I’m told actually henna. What are they, in the larger moral scheme of the universe? Buncha fuckin’ whores.”
Robert Christian Gustafson was seeing the post-deb daughter of a UN lady personage who’d been Adlai Stevenson’s mistress, a spoilt Madeleine who now modeled just for fun, not needing the money. Her advanced makeup and tulip of a face were on every fashion mag that year, making Angie insane with jealousy and vicious jokes. (She acquired a Vogue subscription and a dartboard the same day.)
Angie told me my big problem, when it came to ever getting into those most ideal of velvet pants (long since copied, even by Alexander’s, kiss of death): I considered Robert perfect. “And nobody is ever turned on by real worship. Fake worship, okay. But you, you’re idolatrous. I find it increasingly hard to watch. Especially when he sometimes almost notices you.” I denied believing in the Gustafson perfection.
“Okay then. Name three of your Robbie’s very worst bad faults. Now.” She stomped one high-heel boot.
“Well, he’s too busy to see us often enough …”
“That’s not a fault. That’s a scheduling glitch, you besotted idiot. Now, me? I do his laundry. I see he has li’l mishaps, has certain fluids to him. Angels don’t. See? Angels never sweat. Distressed angels give off a form of powder. At most. I know this from a former life. It’s why I’m still so mad for Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder. I do iron Robert’s jocke
ys, I understand accidents happen. But, tell Angie true, sugar—you’ve got a key, you’re over there constantly—have you ever taken home his used undies, tell me true now.”
I said absolutely not. No way. Then, faking shamefacedness, I hung my head. “Do … socks count?”
She threw a pillow at me.
We were often the only people alive who thought we were the only people alive worth laughing at. When we got going, we could clear the room. We rarely noticed.
Fact is, we were both really waiting. For our Robert to “declare.” We both assumed that only a few details and the right mood-lighting stood between us and Robbie’s down-on-one-knee offer of a betrothal eternal.
“But what if he actually chose one of us?” I asked her, frowning, shocked at the idea. “What would that do to our friendship?”
“Our what? Who are you? I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Seriously, Angina. If one of us got to see and feel all of him instead of his wasting it on these inferior society types he keeps balling, then what? I mean, if I found that you’d so much as touched him twice, down there, in the powdery floury part? It’d kill me, honey, wouldn’t it you?”
“But, for drill, and to take a more reasoned view (that’s how my darling Jimmy Stewart GP of a daddy talks, you’d love him), might it not be better to keep it in the family?—Okay, honestly? if you ‘get’ Robert before I do? I’ll kill you. On first hearing, I might consider killing you both. But, in the end, after careful consideration, you’re the only one that’d have to go.”
“I understand.”
Robert Christian Gustafson was that baffling creature, someone truly bisexual. Nobody can break your heart like a bi-, babes. Imagine what a long-shot percentage true love really is. Got the odds? Now, from those chances, deduct fifty percent.
Plays Well With Others Page 11
