Read You Can Say You Knew Me When Online
Authors: K. M. Soehnlein
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Literature & Fiction, #Fiction, #Gay, #Contemporary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction, #American, #Literary, #Genre Fiction, #Lgbt, #Gay Fiction
At this point the phone rang, and Ray sprang up, saying, “Hold that thought.” I stopped the tape while she spoke to her gallery, which was calling with news that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art wanted one of her landscapes—“my bread and butter paintings,” she said, when she got off the phone. With a gesture to the woman drinking coffee, she added, “No one wants the meaningful ones.” She called these her
quasi-self-portraits
, pointing out a few that she did after her divorce from
the dictator,
which had a liberated feeling to them—one showed a woman boarding a ship, having abandoned a large steamer trunk on the dock. Next was a round of paintings done after marriage number two came apart (she’d married
someone from the scene
on the heels of the first divorce). Moody, middle-aged women in the garish palette of a 1970s kitchen—avocado, goldenrod, sienna—parked on bar stools or surrounded by dressing-room mirrors, squeezing their fleshy figures into once-sexy outfits. These portraits struck me as didactic, but Ray said she wanted her viewers “to get every sentence of the message.”
I thought about Mom and Dad in the seventies, far away from singles bars and party outfits, driving my sister to dance class, driving me along my newspaper delivery route. This life of quiet routine had seemed to me, growing up, a given. Fated. But now I saw a glimmer of how my father might have taken a different course, not safely and smoothly into the nuclear family but deeper into risk.
Ray caught me staring off into space, and suddenly we were both apologizing, she for
the boring lecture
, and I for
zoning out
. She ushered me back to the table, the tape machine, the
RECORD
button.
—In the city, I was the new girl. The men liked to flirt with me, and the women took me under their wing and let me paint in their studios. When Teddy came along and wanted to be a painter—to him I was already a painter. He looked up to me. Though he had very different ideas about painting! See, back then you only painted in a studio. And he wanted to set up in the park. This just wasn’t the way you did it. The main thing for us was the brushstroke, the action of it, that was what mattered. Not painting pretty park scenes.
And then someone called him a “Sunday Painter.”
Oh, my gosh! I remember that.
I read about it, in one of his letters. Here, let me show you.
I retrieved the “Dear Teddy” letter from my bag. Ray looked it over, at first with excitement—“That’s my handwriting!”—and then, as she read, with obvious melancholy, morphing into one of her quasi-self-portraits. This was the aspect of reporting I liked least, the way an interview often pushed into emotional territory the interviewee didn’t expect. Just the same, I let the tape roll, wondering what I’d do if she got angry, or cried, or if she just stopped talking altogether.
At last, she let out a heavy sigh and began fiddling with the teapot, trying to resuscitate the sodden teabags.
Golly, that brings me back.
I’m sorry—I hope I didn’t upset you.
It’s not you. It’s just—the thing I remember is, I fell for Teddy, but more in a protective way, a sisterly way.
But you were lovers, right?
I don’t think we made love more than a couple of times. I mostly remember afternoons in the park, him with his easel and me giving him tips. We’d hold hands and walk together. He didn’t talk a lot around other people, but with me he had so much to say. He’d send me letters, care of Jane.
Did you save them? Because I’d love to see them, if you were okay with it.
Well, sure, but don’t get your hopes up. That was so long ago, I’d really have to dig. You know, it wasn’t a big, passionate thing for me, more like, oh, a heated friendship? Does that make sense?
I’ve had plenty of heated friendships myself.
Teddy was someone who needed to be taken care of. And how could I do that? With two kids?
That letter makes it sound like he was very jealous.
Yes, and that was not where I was at. If I was having an affair with X, then Y also knew about it, and so did Y’s other lover, too. But feelings did get hurt.
I didn’t mean to upset you. I’ve showed up out of the blue, and this is all so long ago. It’s just that with my dad dying—see, he and I didn’t get along.
I know all about it. I fought with my mother, and my kids fight with me. It’s the universal cycle.
But we had the gay thing on top of that. He had so much trouble—
He did? Because I thought—well, I wondered about it.
You wondered about what?
Teddy had gay friends and went to the mixed bars.
He did?
Everyone went to the mixed bars, the queens and the artists and the blacks. What was the famous one? The Black Cat. But Teddy had that friend—they were always together. A gay fellow, though not a queen. More rugged.
Danny? Danny Ficchino?
No, not an Italian.
He might have been called Dean Foster? A friend from New York—
No, not someone from New York. Older than we were. With the hamburger stand. Such a sweetheart, that one.
Don Drebinski?
Yes! Oh, you really are bringing me back! It was Don who introduced us. Don wasn’t an artist, but he’d feed the artists for free at his grill. I adored him! We’d tease Teddy, we’d tell him, “Come on, just dig the city.” Everything about it—the smells, the colors, the people—it was like going to the Casbah. But Teddy could be kind of tight about things. He was curious, but also kind of stuck.
Did you ever think—
—that my father and Don were sleeping together?
was the rest of the question, though it didn’t wind up on the tape because the machine malfunctioned. The tape just stopped, though the mic was still picking up sound, sending the needle bobbing. Later, this would leave me devastated, not only for missing the rest of Ray’s interview, but because I’d been using this recorder for ten years. This was the day it decided to die.
Ray’s answer to my question about my father and Don, as I remember it, was yes, it had crossed her mind, they had been so close. But she also dredged up a memory of my father’s fling with another woman, who’d also been older than him, had also been an artist—a poet, perhaps. She said
the times were different, the artists tried everything once, the spirit of the sixties was already in the air
—and so on. In her break-up letter to Teddy, Ray had written
love and dependence are the same thing.
But the San Francisco she spoke of to me was radiating with goodness, innocence, freedom from jealousy. And art, especially art. I wish I had on tape her exact words as she talked about color, about her husband yelling at her while she disappeared into thoughts about peach or cream or yellow, the next vibrant strokes she’d make on a canvas waiting for her in an artist’s studio in San Francisco. The city lived in her memory as Oz, where wishes were granted and everything reached out from a glowing horizon, beckoning her forth.
Riding home on the train, I sat across the aisle from a hip-looking guy, younger than me, who never turned off his phone, chain-dialing calls, broadcasting his personal life for all to hear. Cell phones were turning up everywhere lately, not just in the hands of businesspeople on the run, and were for me the most public sign of the new gold rush—a venture-capital-funded mania that had lured a hundred thousand newcomers to the city to get rich quick. Young people these days didn’t seem to be creating the next wave of the counterculture. Ray’s words still echoing, I wondered, What would the city look like to me, to my friends, four decades from now? Would we talk about love and creation, or money and technology? Even those of us for whom San Francisco had been a haven, a place for art and experimentation, a release from the great big burden of conservative America, even we struggled in the shadow of the city’s mythic decades. The Beat Generation, the Flower Children, the Gay Liberationists, they hovered about like older brothers and sisters back from college, reminding you how tame, how lame, your high school parties were.
And then there was another path, the one my father took: looking back in anger. Had his rejection of bohemia happened all at once, a big, loud “No sir, not for me!” followed by a dramatic exit? Or did a series of smaller choices slowly accrete until he was simply on his way home, putting behind him the abandon embraced by Ray? Somewhere in this grid of possibilities lay what I needed to know: why he fled Oz, and why he denounced it. Why he never looked back.
W
oody insisted that he take me out to dinner that night. “I want to reward you.”
“For what?”
“You took a chance, and it paid off.” I was still feeling guilty about letting him do anything for me—cheater’s guilt, stirring somewhere behind my eyes, weeks after my transgression—but I wanted to see him. To share Ray with him, the conversation, the new questions.
As usual, he worked late—later even than the late he’d anticipated—and I spent the evening in my apartment reading
On the Road
. I was surprised how fast time flew by while I got sucked into Kerouac’s never-sitting-still characters and their exuberant proclamations. They all seemed younger than I’d been at that age, and freer than I’d ever been, period. The men, anyway. After my day with Ray I was newly aware of the lot of women amidst the men’s club that was mid-century bohemia. Nearly every woman in Kerouac’s book is determined to be an obstacle to male friendship, male mobility, and is, sooner or later, denounced as a whore. In this context, Ray’s escapes from the boonies to the city seemed to me as risky as a trek across America.
My phone rang after nine. It was Woody, shouting to be heard above a crowd.
“Where are you?”
“Impala.” This was the restaurant around the corner, the one with valet parking. Woody said they’d have a table ready for us in ten minutes.
“Let’s go somewhere else, please.”
“Come on, Jamie. I’m standing at the hostess station. I’m handing her a twenty so we can get seated as soon as you show up.”
“You’re not.”
“I am. But—” His voice fritzed out. The poor connection had a particularly clipped quality to it.
“Are you on a cell phone?” I asked in disbelief.
“Shit! Busted.”
“Whose? Yours?”
“Mine. Well, Digitent’s, actually. They’re paying for it.”
“You better put that thing away before I get there. I am not going to be seen at Impala with you on a cell phone.”
“No one will see you. We’ll hide you in the crowd. Don’t argue—come now.”
He hung up without saying good-bye. I guess that’s one of the perks of having a cell phone. You snap it shut dramatically, no need for formalities when you’re saving every minute in your
plan
.
I had scorned Impala from the outside, but I’ll admit I was curious. I showed up smoking a cigarette, exhaling a gray streak through the crowd on the sidewalk (cologne, khakis, phone chatter). Inside, the art on the walls was painted to look like a pixilated computer screen: colorful, pleasing and absorbed as quickly as a glossy magazine layout. The hostess wore fashionably slender heels, defiantly inappropriate for a night spent on her feet. I spied Woody at the bar, lording over two enormous pink cocktails and holding his phone—a little silver
Star Trek
-y thing—to his ear. He broke into a smile when I wagged a finger at him. “Please explain to me,” I huffed, “why you can talk on that thing in here, but I can’t smoke.”
“Some public nuisances are more okay than others,” he said. “Kiss, please.”
The hostess led us three paces to a cramped two-top in the middle of a long row of cramped two-tops. The menu revealed itself to be the latest rage:
comfort food
. Big portions of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, chicken cutlet and roasted carrots, pasta, pasta and more pasta—all stuff you could easily whip up in your own kitchen but probably wouldn’t because you were in your twenties and busy spending your new money at a new restaurant. In the eighties, a place catering to urban trendies would have featured a menu full of snobbishly exotic cuisine—foie gras on brioche toast, squab with chanterelle reduction, gnocchi in squid ink. This was the antithesis of that type of fussiness; you were secure in your hipness even though you hadn’t strayed very far from the kitchen staples of your formative years. It cost too much, though not too-too much.
“I can’t believe we’re here,” I said. “Aren’t we, like, against this place on principle?”
“Order another Cosmopolitan,” Woody told me. “You’ll feel better. Or should we split a bottle of wine? Or both? I’m paying. Get whatever you want.”
“I think what I want is to get out of here,” I said.
“Have you ever heard of the phrase
guilty pleasure
?”
Our appetizer was the chef’s specialty, something like sliced bread soaked in Minestrone soup, then pan-fried. The waitress had gushed over it
—
“
It’s really popular
”
—
but basically it was a snack you’d make for yourself as a kid, home alone from school on a sick day.
“Do you think the chef’s specialty is whatever’s left over from last night?” I asked Woody.
“I like it,” he said with his mouth full. “I feel popular just eating it.”
“It’s way too salty.”
“Jamie, if you don’t start enjoying yourself, I’m getting on my phone and calling everyone I know.”
“Why don’t you call everyone
I
know, so one of them can save me from this place?”
He shook his head. “Think of all the self-righteous mileage you’ll get out of this later.”
“True.” I sipped the Cosmo, which was strong and tasty. “Look, I’m sorry. My mind is full of 1960. I’m experiencing culture shock.”
I launched into my day, what Ray had revealed to me about my father, about their short-lived affair, and how she’d once thought he could have turned out gay because he had all these gay friends and went to gay bars. I told him how there was no mention of Danny and about the omnipresence of Don Drebinski, who seemed to be my father’s link to both the gay world and the Beat scene.
“So now you think he was a fledgling faggot?”
“I don’t know. The sex he was having with Ray seemed pretty underwhelming.”
“God, this is just like
American Beauty.
The homophobic guy is the secret homosexual. No—how about
The Lost Language of Cranes
? Next you’ll find out your dad’s been secretly visiting gay porno houses on his lunch break.”
My mind flashed quickly on a certain East Village porn palace I’d frequented back in the day—a pattern of shadowy hallways, the air bitter from poppers, the floor sticky. I imagined my father in the blue light of a dirty-video projector. “Yuck. I’m not sure I can go there. It’s weird to think about him being sexual, period.”
“I got it!” Woody exclaimed in the middle of a gulp of wine. “Maybe Ray’s actually a transsexual. She was this guy named Raymond and—”
“There’s the small detail of the two children she gave birth to.”
“Or maybe he was peddling his ass for money, getting passed around in some sordid beatnik orgy—”
Woody went on, having a tipsy good time “solving” this mystery. But I got caught up in a memory triggered by the word he’d just uttered:
sordid.
In one of the arguments I’d had with my father when I first came out to him, he’d used that word:
I know all about the sordid stuff that goes on in gay bars
. At the time it had sounded like the raving of a sheltered man who got his news from the tabloids.
I related this to Woody, who leaned closer and whispered in a slightly slurry voice, “I’d like to further examine these sordid concepts with you. After this dinner, as a matter of fact.”
“You’re drunk, cell-phone boy.”
“Yes, drunk and sordid.”
He was cute when he’d had too much—boyish, corruptible. And indeed, all this what-if speculation, the supposing-this-happened, the sending-myself-back-in-time-as-a-twenty-year-old-on-the-verge-of-sexual-awakening, was starting to fire me up. It was indeed peculiar to be trying to recreate my father’s erotic life, but, in truth, I
could
go there
—
my imagination was stirred. “Teddy” had become a kind of character for me, not my middle-aged father, but someone out of Kerouac, an erotically charged young man from San Francisco past.
Back at my place, Woody oohed and ahhed over the knives but claimed he’d be best served by leaving them with me. “We both know who’s the cook in this couple,” he said.
Later, after some quick sex in which I managed to keep any of my possibly tainted fluids out of his body, I sat awake in bed with my notebook in my lap. He whimpered in his sleep next to me. In the half-light I watched his eyes flutter under their creamy lids, a vein pulsing rhythmically in his long neck. Blood flowing through him, part of me in there, too. I wrote:
It’s strange that my father never met Woody. Woody’s probably upstanding enough to have impressed even Teddy. Strange also to take notes about him as he lays next to me unknowing. But I want to remember the details, because it all seems so precious and fleeting, impossible. Why is that?…His eyes open. “Are you writing about me?” he asks/I write. “Yes.” “Will you show me one day?” I can’t answer.
Woody’s phone jolted us awake, its chimey space-age ring like a call from the mothership. Indeed it was the mothership, Digitent, tracking him down because he was late for the mandatory morning meeting. He sat at the foot of the bed pulling up his pants, his back to me before I’d fully come to consciousness. His long, beautiful back in the orange morning light returned me to the night before, the haze of kneeling in front of him, licking between his legs—a reverie curtailed by Woody jumping to his feet, barking, “Why didn’t you set your fucking alarm?”
“Why didn’t you remind me?”
He was out the door without even a perfunctory kiss.
I e-mailed a few producers I knew around the country, pitching the idea of a story about Ray Gladwell. I used the language of the news clipping Anton had given me:
the last of her generation, deserving some much-delayed recognition,
and so on.
A dynamic woman,
I wrote.
A survivor.
No one bit, not even Brady, who wrote back:
Maybe you should be thinking TV for this one. Visual art on the radio? Not such a good fit.
Thanks, Brady. Not that I have any TV connections, but thanks. He ended with an invitation to dinner.
Me and Annie want to have you over, find out how you’re doing.
Before I could reply, the phone rang.
I answered it gruffly, as I sometimes do: “I hope this is good news.”
“The time is now.”
This was, in fact, excellent news. “Hooray! Come rescue me!”
“Name the place.”
“I don’t know. Pick me up and we’ll go somewhere?”
“It’s going up to eighty degrees today,” he said. “San Francisco’s yearly February heat wave.”
“Should we go to the beach?”
“Excellent choice.”
That was the entire conversation. That was Ian.
The time is now
was our secret code for
Stop everything, come out and play
. Years ago Ian had announced that being his friend meant being available for spontaneous getting-together. At the time I was involved in a semi-steady thing with a guy named Stu (squeezed into my failed relationships between Nathan and David), and Ian felt neglected. Ian took action. One afternoon I heard a persistent, alarming tapping on my front door. Ian had gotten into my building and was nailing a homemade sign into the wood:
A MANIFESTO REGARDING THE RIGHTS & EXPECTATIONS OF FRIENDSHIP
Whereas it is acknowledged that friendships are The Relationships We Choose for Ourselves & are in fact the very things That Make Life Worth Living, & Whereas it has been noticed that friendships often Suffer Ignominy & Neglect when a “lover/boyfriend/some guy you’re seeing” comes into the picture, & Whereas it is true that Frequent Booty is a splendid thing, especially if you can make an argument that “love” has entered into the equation, It is nonetheless noted that Friendships will always be Superior because they A) last longer, B) are marked by greater honesty, & C) are not exclusive. It is hereby Proclaimed that you, Jamie Garner, A) Will Make Time for me, Ian Gillespie, when I request it, & B) that such time Will Not Be Subjected To a Long, Drawn Out Process of “Finding an Opening in Your Schedule.” The intention of this proclamation is to demand & encourage the very thing that lovers take away from friends, which is Spontaneity. Both parties will work to not abuse the terms of this proclamation (for example, No interrupting an act of Booty already underway & No interfering in the Making of One’s Living), & both will enter into it freely and willingly, with as many Other Friends as possible, the ultimate goal being to MAKE ADULTHOOD SAFE FOR FRIENDSHIP AGAIN. NOTE: Ditching friends for lovers is unacceptable behavior according to this Manifesto & will be prosecuted by full-on social shunning.
We both signed it, and it cemented us. Our cue had developed over the years. One of us would place a call beginning “The time is now,” and the other one would be required to drop everything and name the meeting place. “The time is now” had led to some of the best times we’d ever had—helmetless motorcycle rides along the coast, all-night problem solving over greasy diner food, life-altering hallucinogenic episodes—and also some of the worst. We hit a rough spot when I first started seeing Woody, leading to an episode of
full-on social shunning
that made me believe, for about two weeks, that Ian might never talk to me again. But Woody solved the problem by marching over to Ian’s apartment and hand delivering a proclamation of his own, “The Noncompetitive Clause Between Boyfriends and Best Friends,” which declared that the role of friendship was to
subvert the pressures of being a grown-up,
therefore making someone feel shitty about his new boyfriend was
counterrevolutionary
. Ian was so impressed by Woody’s act—Ian and Woody share this in common, a love of the grand gesture—that the air was immediately cleared, and we’d all been living happily ever after since. Well, sort of. Ian’s still kind of jealous, which is what it all comes down to, but even he understands that frequent booty has its privileges.