Cel nods: she is done saying things for the day. She is thinking dully of what lies ahead—the lobby with its bustling, adamantine professionals; the farcical rigmarole of the subway; an evening of circling classifieds while enduring gales of optimism from Nikki. She could try to sneak out to the Comedy Cellar, maybe, though she probably shouldn’t be spending so much money. They have a two-drink minimum, which Cel objects to, deeply.
“I realized that when you asked if I’d worked with him awhile,” the large-headed man is saying. “The answer is yes. But I really wanted to say—well: yes and no. Because it’s like he kept changing when I wasn’t looking.”
He shrugs, and Cel shrugs back: she really, really doesn’t care.
“But the weird thing is, I’ve been looking the whole time.”
SIX
semi
1970
I was late to my dinner with Matthew Miller. The alchemy of strategic lateness is tricky, though I typically liked to time things so that the man didn’t realize he’d been worrying I wouldn’t show until the very moment that I did. This usually meant fifteen minutes. For Matthew Miller, I made it twenty.
The place turned out to be a Japanese restaurant and also in a hotel—odd, potentially promising details to omit. Matthew Miller was sitting at a table near the back, poring over a sheaf of papers, one hand cradling the base of a nearly full martini glass. When I saw him, I fell through the floor.
Oh, I thought. Oh.
Walking toward him was an ordeal. When I finally reached him, he said, “Hi, there,” and flipped closed his legal pad. “I appreciate your coming out.”
I could still feel the Oh echoing within me, as from the bottom of a well. He took my hand, and I could feel his pulse—or no, that was my own.
“Are you staying here?” I said.
“No,” he said, and dropped my hand. “I just keep continental hours.”
I nodded as though these statements were causally linked.
“I would have invited you to my office, but—” His eyes were insistently, parodically green. The only conclusion to that sentence was: but I didn’t.
“But it’s too—small?” I said. “But it’s too—messy?”
“Both, actually. And there’s nowhere to sit because the sofa is covered with paperwork.”
He laughed, and then I laughed, too, with a merriment completely disproportionate to the wit of what was being said.
“I’m not even sure I believe you have a couch,” I said, accusingly and for no reason.
He eyed me for a moment, then said, firmly, “There really is a couch. And it really does have papers.”
I suddenly had no idea what we were talking about. Had I really just been laughing coquettishly about a messy sofa? Matthew picked up his legal pad. The couch-papers exchange hung in the air, the silence compounding its original stupidity.
In desperation, I said, “So is it the Nixon joke?”
Matthew Miller looked up from his pad. “I’m sorry?”
The wariness on his face confirmed my worst fears about the way I’d just been laughing. “That’s why they’re really after Dougie Clay. Right?”
He touched his nose like, bingo.
“Seems like sort of a lot of paperwork for such a mediocre joke.”
“It isn’t really about the joke,” he said.
“Well, that joke isn’t really about Nixon,” I said. “So maybe that’s the joke.”
He looked at me again, then shook his head as though trying to clear a cloud of déjà vu.
“You artists get away with anything, don’t you?” he murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.” He uncapped his pen with a conclusive-sounding pop. “So, as I mentioned on the phone, I’ve got a municipal issue I’d like your advice about.”
“About New York?” He shrugged. “Aren’t you from here?”
“Anything truly worth knowing is impossible to completely know.” He leaned back. There was a martini in front of me, I realized, so I took a sip.
“That’s—abstract,” I said finally.
“What I’m looking for is fairly concrete—fairly narrow, actually. Background about your community. That sort of thing.”
“The theater community, I’m assuming?”
Matthew Miller’s eyes cut at an angle, but he did not quite roll them.
“What you want is an informant,” I said.
“Who doesn’t?” He took a long swallow of his drink. “But no, this is all very aboveboard, I’m afraid. All you get is a sense of civic pride, and a small stipend for your time.”
“A stipend?” This offer was beginning to sound unseemly—though really, what did I expect? “What stipend?”
“I have some discretionary funds—‘lulus,’ they’re called.” He cringed. “As in, ‘in lieu of,’ you know, whatever. Petty cash for miscellany. I’m using mine on policy analysts.”
I looked at him blankly. “Are you—is that me, in this scenario?”
“Or communications consultant. Whatever. You handle your own business cards.”
My attention had snagged a moment ago and I was now scrambling to catch up. The bottom line, it seemed, was this: Matthew Miller wanted to buy my time. Whether this was more or less than I’d hoped, I couldn’t say.
“But the money.” I lowered my voice. “I mean—in lieu of what, exactly? I mean, is this something you’re allowed to do?”
“You do realize I’m a lawyer.”
“You’re my lawyer,” I said. “And I’m sure we’d both agree I should know what I’m getting into.”
“I wouldn’t get the wrong idea,” said Matthew. This buoyed my optimism—since, in my experience, people usually only tell you you’ve got the wrong idea when they’re very afraid you’ve got the right one. But there was nothing on his face now: he looked unimpeachably practical, implacably benign—a man with many plans and many ideas and zero, absolutely zero, desires.
I leaned back. “Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded, I thought, a bit too vigorously.
“Did you actually believe that stuff you said about Dougie Clay?” I said. “The John Stuart Mill, and all.”
I said it sort of feverishly; I could tell that I was blushing. I hadn’t meant to be so specific.
“Of course,” he said. “Why?”
I took a drink, and daubed my mouth.
“I sometimes wonder how much people mean the things they say in public,” I said.
He looked at me searchingly. The phrase quizzical brow jumped out at me from somewhere—from Austen, I understood, with a horror.
“Does this conversation count as public?” he said.
“Sort of,” I said. Then: “Not really.” Then finally, “Yes.”
He looked, in some obscure way, satisfied, which I wasn’t at all sure I liked.
“So what exactly is my area of expertise supposed to be in this arrangement?” I said. “The unsightly spread of the counterculture out of the Village?” I mimed clutching at some pearls. “Just turn Sixth Avenue into a moat and be done with it, I say.”
“We’re in a budget crisis.” Matthew Miller had an incredible, nearly undetectable deadpan. “In any case, there are these hearings coming up at the Assembly. I’d like your help with drafting a statement. As I said, I very much admired your play.”
I was flooded with a wholly uncharacteristic sense of goodwill toward men—the kind people usually only get from religion or decent drugs.
“I realize your time is much in demand,” he was saying. “But do you think you might spare some anyway?”
I swallowed and dropped the phantom necklace I’d been holding. I suppose Matthew took this as an affirmative.
“For you, honey,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as sincere as I already
, fatally, was, “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
* * *
—
Thus began a period of my unlikely and dubious employment by the City of New York. Like any good government employee, I was, from the start, a modest waste of revenue.
The hearings in question turned out to be The Hearings on Homosexuality—which were, it seemed, more or less what they sounded like. Though he’d pitched my role as something like consulting, what Matthew Miller really wanted, it seemed, was a speechwriter—a ghost-speech-writer, really, who flickered in for syntactical summits and then out again into the night. And hey, I asked myself—why not? I had a way with words—on this, everybody (St. Paul’s, my grandmother, even Brookie) agreed—and my play, secretly, was going nowhere. It was meant to be a meditation on the theme of transformation; it featured David Bowie, Duessa from The Faerie Queene, and the French Foreign Legion, and was hideously encumbered by an awareness of its own thematics.
In fact what Matthew and I were doing was not much: I helped with the rephrasing of phrasings that were already pretty good, sharpened the articulation of arguments that were nearly as elegant as I’d ever heard them made. It must be a part of Matthew Miller’s job, I figured: that ability to convincingly channel other people’s passions.
“Is that even possible?” I asked him more than once, when hearing of his hopes for the civil rights of the queers of New York City. Nondiscrimination in employment and housing. Public accommodation, even! He’d look at me strangely and say, “Anything is possible. Don’t you believe that?” And for a moment, I’d feel that perhaps I did.
Matthew and I met at odd hours. He always seemed to have just come from somewhere else—he’d been inspecting an illegal chop-shop dump, attending a meeting at the UN Plaza, hanging around with Red Hook longshoremen at four-thirty in the morning. I’d often recently returned from somewhere else myself: a dinner on Bank Street; a party in SoHo; some green bathhouse cistern, where I’d soaked beneath frolicsome male nude mosaics. The era of insomniac cocaine use was only just beginning; it was never the wrong time to be headed out somewhere else. If anyone asked, I’d say I was off to see a show at the Permanent or—less convincingly—that I was going home to write. I seemed to regard this deceit as a matter of civic duty. I was not at the time so much as registered to vote in the state of New York.
Matthew and I met at bars, in late-night diners, in cafes. We never, never went to his apartment. His energy was outrageous, no matter what the hour, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. Did I know that the streets in Greenwich Village were twisted because in 1811 a group of residents got the city to exempt their quarter from the grid? Did I know that Nelson Rockefeller had hired Diego Rivera to paint a mural in Rockefeller Center, then had had to hire workmen to tear down the resultant Leninist imagery? Did I know that they only began arresting people for singing in Washington Square Park when black people started doing it? Matthew Miller represented two such accused back in 1969.
What sort of rejoinder was there to these questions? No, I had not known—but now, it seemed, I did. I do, still, to this day. Just as I know that New York City’s law against cross-dressing stemmed from an old anti-labor statute aimed at preventing protesting farmers from obscuring their identities, and that when Grand Central Terminal first opened there was a Russian bath in the Men’s Waiting Room.
“Do you want me to put that in the speech?” I said, after that last one.
“No.” I wasn’t even mostly serious, but Matthew Miller cocked his head as though I might have been. “I just thought you might be interested.”
He thought everybody was interested—in everything, all the time—and being with him could make you want to be. He was familiar with every disagreement in that singularly fractious city. He knew these things because he talked to absolutely everyone; I was far from the only questionable character he fraternized with. The newspapers loved to run photos of Matthew speaking with such people: Matthew chatting with a homeless man standing on an actual soapbox on MacDougal and Third; Matthew taking notes on a legal pad while talking with a scare queen, a second pen tucked behind his ear. Matthew stationing himself outside a subway station—listening voraciously, democratically, to anyone who had something to say to him.
And then he’d be off again—off to listen to the little boys pushing sailboats in Central Park. (“I’m not sure they’re going to grow up to be your voters,” I told him. “I was talking to the nannies,” he said.) Or to Rikers, where he apparently had many correspondents. He told me once that he answered all his letters from prisons—all his letters, in fact, from anywhere.
Though who knows if that, or anything else, was true.
* * *
—
If asked what I know about Matthew Miller—in a court of law, say, or on a talk show—I could only swear to what he told me.
He said he was born in Crotona Park, that he grew up in Kew Gardens. His mother was a devoted Catholic; his father, a Jew from Galicia.
Matthew’s grandfather’s name (he said) had been changed from Milgrom at Ellis Island—though perhaps really he changed it himself, in the same spirit of shape-shifting that Matthew would prove to have in abundance.
Matthew Miller loved wrestlers as a child. As an adult, he still remembered their names—which means I’m condemned to remember them, too: Gorgeous George, Antonino Rocca, Haystacks Calhoun. So this much, probably, is true.
When Matthew Miller was ten, he said, the family moved to Newark. They told everyone in Crotona they were going to Coney Island.
In Newark, Matthew Miller delivered newspapers—getting up in fierce dark winter mornings, blowing on gloveless hands, balancing his bicycle through the deluges of spring and trying not to get the papers wet. He worked as a hatcheck boy for tips at the local movie house. He said his mother never let him miss a day of school.
Now, it all seems a little much—a little prefab-American-wet-dream. But every political genius must have his origin story: Lincoln his log cabin, Clinton his prophetic photo with JFK, Cuomo his grocer father saving crusts of bread for those hungrier than he. By those standards, Matthew’s ferrying smeared newspapers through unlovely, industrial-scented predawns is only modestly inspirational. Perhaps we should have known he would never advance beyond local politics.
His success owed much to timing, he always said—he’d benefited from the expansion of NYU’s law program under the GI Bill; he’d never had to go to war. He’d known Alice from Newark, from forever—every summer morning she would be sitting on her porch with a Popsicle, and after a while she started appearing with two—and this was an anecdote you couldn’t have invented for a politician, even if you’d had the stomach to try. He married her right after completing the New York State bar exam, immediately before submitting to the “character committee”—no minor ordeal, he said, for an immigrant boy without connections.
I listened to all of this throughout the city. I listened beneath flapping Puerto Rican flags; I listened under blossoming apple trees. I listened at Tiffany’s coffee shop in Sheridan Square, right underneath the gym. At just the right angle you could catch glimpses of the weight lifters on their breaks: I was too busy not-watching Matthew not-watch them to watch them myself. I listened beneath an enormous spray-painted whale; it was gray and saturnine and nearly life-sized, it seemed, though really I had no idea. I listened in parks decaying into mud. I listened on a mostly looted bench one day when the light did something strange to the mansard roofs in the distance—turning them nacreous, subaquatic, in a way I’d never seen before in New York City and never would again.
When I got home from these excursions, Brookie would say some variation of: “Must have been some experimental theater!” Then he’d smirk.
I don’t know why I felt the need to be so secretive; Matthew Miller had never made me sign anything. And yet still I found myself (already!) willing to l
ie—to Brookie, of all people, which was a lot like lying to myself. Together we’d been boarding school untouchables and terrified first lovers; we’d been on-and-off-again everything and more or less permanent roommates; we’d been voracious consumers of each other’s business and opinionated keepers of each other’s secrets. I’d visited Brookie at St. Vincent’s after he’d been dishonorably discharged from his brief, ludicrous stint in the navy, and I knew that for all he bragged about his time in San Francisco, he’d in fact been very lonely there. I knew his navy release papers had been marked with not one but two of the three military codes for deviancy, and I knew that any time this came up in conversation he’d say, “Should have pissed the bed to make it a hat trick!”
He knew things about me, too, things I’d managed to keep from everyone else in New York. Brookie knew that I was not only from the Midwest but also—even worse—from money. New Yorkers cannot easily conceive of any sort of overclass west of the Mississippi; when people heard I was from Iowa, they imagined straw hats, some tragic lower-middle-class living room, maybe a collection of porcelain rabbits or something. I never corrected this impression. Brookie knew all that. He knew that my mortification, while vast, was also completely unprincipled; he knew I’d inherited money when my parents died, and that instead of nobly refusing it or using it to underwrite the revolution, I’d spent it on the production of my first, truly dreadful play. Brookie never said anything about this, not even after he went full-blown Marxist and became totally insufferable at parties. And while many people knew I’d ruptured with my grandmother, and several people knew I feared her, only Brookie knew I still respected her, somehow, and gave her quiet credit for much of who I was. Once, during a St. Paul’s Family Weekend, she had tried to give him her drink order.
Brookie even knew my real first name. He never said it—not even during fights, not even after he began to hate me a little.
And now I was lying to him—to Brookie, who had circumnavigated me many times over; who had known me more completely than anyone should have the misfortune to be known.
The Spectators Page 9
