Authors: Edmund White
Another member, Tom, had a rich, unspontaneous laugh and a resonant way of lifting his face upward as though he were a beautiful woman and not a prematurely balding, hairy-shouldered man. He could execute a pout that only half concealed a complicitous smile. He had mastered something we named a “lightning transition,” by which we meant he could throw his head back recklessly and emit his trademark laugh to indicate girlish merriment before turning on a dime to wide-eyed solemnity. He’d look at us reproachfully over the tops of his glasses (“Very
Our Miss Brooks,”
we’d murmur approvingly, referring to a pert, pretty schoolmarm on a popular television series). He pretended to find one witty because it gave him a pretext for fluttering his long-lashed eyes and pursing his lips forward as though in an isometric exercise for eliminating the marionette lines bracketing the mouth, the whole a hieroglyph for saying, “You’re fiendishly clever, you rogue.
Comme tu m’amuses!”
During a reading he would ask us to “leave our personalities at the door.”
He wore glasses though they seldom actually mitigated his vision; no, they were a prop he could nibble meditatively, put
on slowly while locking our eyes to indicate the reproach “I hope we’re returning to business at last.” Or he could snap them off like a collapsed fan to suggest exasperation or tap his forehead with them to read “It’s coming, it’s coming, I’m about to have an insight!”
Whereas all men and most women in Michigan spoke in a monotone, verbally trudging ahead in a straight line, Tom’s voice skipped and swooped in virtuoso cascades.
He knew everything about classic Hollywood films, Broadway musicals and Noël Coward comedies, and someone’s simplest allusion could trigger the recitation of pages of dialogue. Tom had learned them by heart, but all the rest of human knowledge passed his eager, absorptive intelligence by. His favorite actress was Helen Hayes and he was outraged when Mary McCarthy referred to her as “that brave little body.”
The last regular member of the Pancake Palazzo Circle was a small, boneless man with the pallor and wounded smile of the coprophile. We called him, I fear, Graybelly, since his color was as unhealthy as his small frame was bloated. His tiny moist hands seemed fetal, whereas his face was aged or rather ageless; we thought he was forty though he turned out to be thirty. He lived with an even older man in a farmhouse in the country reputed for its orgies and dungeon. Whereas the merest hint of sex would send us into fits of cockatoo shrieks and fierce fannings up imaginary skirts to cool off easily inflamed nether parts, Graybelly had a cool fetishistic way of burrowing into detailed discussions of foreskins, hair distribution and extent of rectal receptivity. We were a tribe of Lady Bracknells, he the solitary Walter Winchell of onanism.
He’d written a play based on Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, a choice that seemed all of a piece with his predilection for Wagner and his collection of German pornography which showed wavy-haired Teutons in posing straps stretched over—
and chained to—a mountaintop while an eagle soared overhead in a sky rent by lightning.
We all went to the opening night and it was there I first saw Randall Worth, who played Werther. He was small, shorter than the hefty Charlotte whom Graybelly had cast. He seemed suitably self-destructive although it was rare for so much melancholy to be expressed by so many unfocused smiles. His head was large and his profile old-fashioned. At first I thought he had a sleepwalker’s muzzy, wet-eyed seriousness, although later I figured out the fact his contact lenses kept floating free accounted for most of his characterization, the simultaneous vulnerability and unavailability. Graybelly, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “What he needs is ten inches down his throat and a profound colonic irrigation,” which seemed an unusual cure for adolescent self-consciousness.
The play was much too long, the monologues interminable, the prevailing punctuation mark an exclamation point. Tom was squinting boredom and hatred over the tops of his glasses toward an oblivious Graybelly enraptured by his own words or rather Goethe’s while our impatient sound engineer friend, seated appropriately in the royal box, was desperately slashing his throat and bugging his eyes, all to no avail.
I didn’t care about the tragedy onstage or the comedy in the audience. All I could think about was this aristocratic somnambulist onstage, this Sleeping Beauty waiting I hoped for a mere kiss to awaken him rather than ten inches, six more than I could provide. For some reason his suicide was preceded by a long scene in which Werther addressed the portraits of his ancestors; in this staging the portraits were conceived of as two rows of empty gilt frames suspended in midair to create a corridor on a bias brilliantly lit from above.
“Just look at how the tart’s dusted her hair with sparkles,
the huzzy,” Graybelly murmured, chuckling soundlessly. With a start I realized he was referring to Randall, for as the program revealed that was Werther’s name. Graybelly added professionally, “Not bad, that cross on the diagonal; got to hand it to Minny,” calling Winston, the director, by his
nom des plumes
, as we said.
None of the muggery in the audience could distract me from the vision on the stage. As Randall slowly paced his castle corridor, murmuring to the portraits, I felt he was moving a cool magnet across my brain.
I suppose now, looking back, I’d say I was attracted by Randall’s prestige as a beauty; if he would sleep with me then I’d demonstrate to everyone that I must be exceptional. Back then I didn’t think it out. I knew that if I cruised at the swimming pool or at the Flame Bar I wasn’t likely to attract anyone special. In the shower room I wasn’t endowed enough to interest a size queen; at the bar I wasn’t sufficiently lively to engage a loner’s attention. But if experience had taught me my erotic place, I hadn’t learned the lesson. I knew that if to all appearances I was banality itself, in my inner being I was convinced I concealed a rare quality, a frozen asset that could be awakened by—well, this very prince.
Perhaps such a theatrical act seemed plausible since given that I’d first seen Randall on the stage, in my last few months at the university—a time when I longed to change my life but feared the future and masked that fear behind an exuberance about my playwriting class, its sexual ambiguity, its daring exploration of artifice, its enabling recasting of reality into the shifting, insubstantial forms of fantasy.
“Tonight’s my twenty-second birthday,” I whispered to Graybelly. “I’d love to give the cast party at my place.” The playwright was delighted and during the curtain calls he went backstage and handed on the invitation to the eighteen members of the cast and their various girlfriends and boyfriends.
Everyone came and drank the ethyl alcohol my biologist roommate sneaked out of his laboratory, where it was used to asphyxiate or perhaps preserve rabbits. For days afterward it seemed I kept stumbling over unconscious actors passed out in yet another of the many rooms I shared with five other men.
Everyone came but Randall, who went off walking alone till dawn, rethinking his role.
Perhaps as a recompense for the party, a pleasure for everyone else but a missed chance for me, Graybelly arranged for me to meet Randall over coffee at the student union. “I’ve told him you want to write a play for him.” Maybe Graybelly just wanted another funny anecdote about us for the Palazzo Kids.
I don’t remember what we said, but I do recall how awkward the occasion was. That and Randall’s extraordinary beauty. The top of his head came just to my shoulder. But he held himself ramrod straight. He had abundant light brown hair with gold highlights which he parted severely on the right side, an arrangement that added to his clean-cut good looks, the looks of a young man in a shirt ad. His full but not overripe lips described a relaxed bow, slightly downturned … an Attic smile more sculptural than amiable. Attic also was his long straight nose that dropped without a bump plumb out of his strong, intellectual brow. His deep-set eyes glowed like sunlight dancing at the end of the tunnel on water seen in the afternoon when the late hour renders back the colors that noon had absorbed—you must forgive this fancy description, but this is more than a routine homage to just another cute guy. No, he had leading-man looks, all the more striking then before everyone had a great haircut, designer jeans, a gym body and perfect teeth. In the 1950s we thought beauty was God-given or at least a freak of nature. They say when Brahms first heard the Beethoven Ninth, he fainted, certainly a likelihood before records; by extension, imagine our awe when
faced with physical beauty before it became mass-produced.
He blinked uncomfortably and darted his eyes rapidly to one side, a tick provoked by his loose contact lenses. He had long, even very long, white teeth without a single irregularity or stain. Later I found out they’d been so long his dentist had filed them down; he’d even had a
second
row of canines that had to be pulled. A powerful lot of white teeth for just one small guy.
Because he wasn’t tall or white-blond or overly muscular or loud or surrounded by a spectacular entourage people didn’t notice him at first. You had to be seated opposite him at a table to notice his skin, which was uniform, matte, without the slightest blemish and peculiarly expressive; he changed color with every flicker of emotion. His skin seemed to be a layer of his brain, as the eyes are said to be neural—the feeling part, since it registered every mood. A mental map printed on the skin—quite literally a tactile map, since he had a rare skin sensitivity, you could write your name on his back with your finger and a moment later the letters would rise in painless red welts that would soon enough fade.
Did I mention his hands? His fingers were short and stubby, the nails shell-pink and glowing, the backs unveined and hairless—a baby’s hands, and he held them out at the odd, stiff angles a baby presents to the world, as though faulty coordination makes the infant think he’s reaching for you whereas he’s actually doubling back his chubby hand at the wrist and shoving it toward the ceiling in an unintentional gesture of festive irresponsibility. Randall wasn’t limp-wristed or archly gestural; on the contrary, his baby hands, frozen at improbable angles, were the only part of his self-presentation he hadn’t entirely polished. I once praised his “baby hands” and he never forgave me the praise.
Oh, and his voice could be a problem, too; in true mid-western fashion it could cut glass when he was excited. Again,
not a queen’s shrill cry. No, more a young salesman’s tenor tirade amplified.
Enough descriptions. I’m trying to throw in a few minor criticisms to suggest I was—or at least am now—objective, but in truth back then I was besotted. In high school I’d had a persistent fantasy about inviting Marilyn Monroe to my prom; in college the idea of going out with Randall seemed every bit as glamorous and unlikely. Yet I told myself I might become a playwright; hadn’t Marilyn married Arthur Miller?
I went to a party at Randall’s where he drank so much he rushed outdoors, lay down on the ground and flapped his arms to create an angel in the thick new snow. He let me kiss him but he was so drunk that he thrashed in my arms with pointless, driven energy. I was drunk, too.
Soon I became aware that everyone in the Pancake Palazzo Crowd was in love with Randall though they all said bitchy things about him. He and I would have coffee in the student union and I could barely concentrate on what he was saying. If I told him how much I liked him he turned on a smile, as blind as it was blinding. I thought he was indifferent to my homage.
He told me that he was from a good family in Bloomington, Indiana, where his father owned a printing press and his mother was the local gossip columnist. Every night both his parents drank themselves into a rage (mother) or stupor (father). Randall despised both of them as well as his four younger brothers. He hid himself in his room. He locked his door and prayed they wouldn’t break it down.
He had a television set in his room and watched westerns late into the night. He found his penis became erect whenever he saw a bare-chested Indian on the screen, though the only person he trusted enough to kiss was Lynne, a girl in his high school class who wore a heavy leg brace and mocked him and adored him. Her love was as potent and irrational as Elektra’s.
Before he met Lynne the only affection he’d ever known had come from the black maid, who liked children so much she kept taking them in, all her great-nieces and grandsons. He was a conscientious but not inspired student. His mind wandered. He played no sports. Lynne offered him not kindness but an ancient Greek passion and a modern American irony, the passion as sharp as steel, the irony as corrosive as rust.
Only at the University of Michigan did he discover he was handsome. Through a mixup at Student Housing he was put in a dormitory room not with another freshman but with a graduate student, a math whiz who promptly fell for him. The mathematician had never been in love before, so he assumed his feelings must be reciprocated. But Randall had not escaped his family only to fall into the hands of a new tyrant. He was ostentatiously indifferent to the mathematician. One afternoon Randall came back to the room to find it full of poisonous smoke. His roommate had sealed the window shut and gone to bed with a block of dry ice; he was inhaling its fatal fumes under a sheet. Randall merely opened the window, threw the ice out and left, never to come back.
He moved in with Tony, a theater major, who was hopelessly in love with someone else—oh, I don’t remember all the details. I just remember that the mathematician was sent by Student Health to a mental institution for six months and that Randall renounced love forever when he realized he’d never win over Tony, a skinny, bespectacled guy whose hairless torso resembled an Indian’s only if one squinted at him from a distance. Randall had found the one homosexual student on campus who didn’t desire him.
Randall’s selfish, irresponsible father gave his son the same weekly allowance he himself had received twenty-five years earlier. Randall was too proud to ask for more so he worked thirty hours a week at the library for a dollar an hour and ate so little that he lost his boyish plumpness and became hauntingly
pale and thin. Lynne wrote him daily letters denouncing the foolishness of everyone around her at the University of Indiana. She reserved a belligerent, mocking affection for Randall; when she wrote it out every other radioactive word was sealed between asbestos quotation marks.