Skinned Alive (29 page)

In his junior year, when I met him, Randall switched his major from history to theater. His inebriated parents didn’t even register this troubling change. In his acting class he was discovered by Graybelly, who was visiting all the workshops in search of Werther. It was Graybelly who introduced him around; perhaps as a playwright he wanted to see what kind of havoc so much beauty would wreak on his friends.

Randall also knew other acting majors. Artaud and Brecht were their gods and I had to hear hours and hours of theorizing about “cruelty” and “alienation.” Not from the Palazzo Crowd, interested only in repartee in which each line “capped” the preceding one, or in the “build” of an act to a thundering climax, even if the closing thrill depended on nothing more than “shtick.” If the Palazzo Boys were, despite their Protestant midwestern origins, given to Yiddish words and were very showbizzy and “commercial” (a positive word, as in the question, “Yes, but is it commercial? Will it run? Will the little old lady from Topeka get it?”), the drama majors, by contrast, were beatnik intellectuals who thought theater should be all at once engagé and avant-garde, Marxist and Freudian, somehow both nonverbal and rhetorical, ritualistic as the mass and revolutionary as a bomb. We Palazzo Queens were willing to appropriate an idea or borrow a word here or there from this tangled discourse in order to intimidate our play writing teacher or beef up a graduate school application, but only the true drama majors could contemplate selflessly taking their plays into the streets where they might reach the people. They longed for an unspecified sort of spiritual renewal,
but they could only imagine instigating it through a populist staging of
Coriolanus
or
The Cenci
(“They’d have better luck with a glitzy production of
Oklahoma!”
Graybelly opined).

Randall and I were bedeviled by these issues but we remained, in very different ways, untouched by them. I wanted to be a rich and famous playwright so that my father would not think I’d ruined my life and Randall would love me. Otherwise I found the ideas animating theater talk in Ann Arbor contradictory and certainly irrelevant to my ambition. Like the Palazzo Kids I was concerned primarily with results, even with effects, though I doubted that another well-made Terence Rattigan comedy, even if it was a hit, could provide the frisson my spirit longed for. For me the Palazzo Kids were fascinating not because of the plays they were writing but because of those they were living out as they struggled to invent a style for their homosexuality.

Randall was idolized as a beauty and mocked as an artist; paraphrasing Dorothy Parker, Tom said, “Boy gorgeous is actor lousy” and “He runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” But for Randall acting as an art was only a means to the end of being universally admired. He liked Stanislavsky’s theories more than Brecht’s because the Russian’s doctrine of “sense memory” in
Building a Character
made self-absorption sound productive. Randall might have been a good movie actor since his best moments onstage were those when he spoke calmly and nobly to someone silent, his eyes lit with a sad, angelic wisdom, his golden head inclined slightly downward, his full lips wreathed in a complex smile, one baby hand raised at an improbable angle, as though unscrewing an invisible light bulb.

I wrote a poem for Randall in which I referred to myself as an older man smoking cigars (rather than the Kools I really smoked) and contemplating my younger beloved dancing (the sex of the dancer was carefully veiled). Randall scanned it
quickly, ransacking it efficiently for compliments; when he discovered my admiration was vague and general, he folded the sheet of paper neatly and put it into his briefcase.

I complained to Graybelly that I was getting nowhere with Randall, who’d granted me only one drunken kiss in the snow. “She’s a snow queen herself,” Graybelly advised, “and you’ve got to rape her. That’s what she’s begging for. Climb into her window and rape her.”

That night I drank lots of Drambuie and wandered through the Arboretum past lovers, homosexual and heterosexual, writhing beneath old trees like exposed root systems come to life. I felt seized by a great, unspecified emotion that was certainly pagan, so imbued was it with a reverence for nature, so musical was the way a single melody or sentiment encompassed so many notes or invocations to the worship of the body, Randall’s body. For the moment, fame and riches no longer interested me; now I just wanted to turn and turn with Randall on a narrow white bed.

At last I had worked up my nerve sufficiently to climb into his basement window. He woke with a start.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said.

“Yeah, I see, but—what time is it?”

“Late. Very late. I just—well, can I sit down on the edge of your bed?”

“OK, but no funny business. You see, I like you tremendously, but not like that.” And yet he went over to the sink and brushed his teeth, which surely he wouldn’t have bothered to do if he didn’t think I’d kiss him, would he?

I kept remembering Graybelly had said Randall needed to be raped, but I was too much in love to do anything except smile nervously. When he came back to his bed he hugged his knees. He was wearing Jockey shorts.

“Do you mind if I kiss you just once?” I asked. “Come on,
it won’t kill you, just once. I know we’re just friends, but you can’t imagine how long I’ve thought about this moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, you know, just sitting next to you, all alone, you’re so … gorgeous.”

“Really? Do you really think so?”

“Of course. For me you’re perfect.”

“I’m too short, for one thing.”

“No, you’re compact and—may I?—your skin is flawless.” At that point I began to kiss his shoulder and to put an arm around his waist. I had no desire to go any further, nor did I that night, though I knew Graybelly and my other Palazzo Pals would laugh at my timorousness.

Holding him was like holding some improbable gardenia, something at once noble and sensual—which must be the definition of “romantic.” I’d thought about him so long that he’d become nearly mythic for me, so that it was his actual presence that was the improbability, like the host which is at one and the same time Our Lord’s body and a nearly tasteless wafer consumed in Holy Apostles Church in Akron, Ohio, say, on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1962. The insertion of a myth into a precise moment and place is both miraculous and fairly humorous. I tasted the comic tang of kissing Randall.

He didn’t ever clearly reject my suit that last spring in Ann Arbor. Perhaps he sensed that my devotion was deep and would last. I tried to spend as much time with him as possible, but I noticed that he’d see me only by day, never at night. I asked him endless questions about his childhood and learned that he lived only nominally in the present. Most of his daily energy went toward staring into the flickering images of his erotic fantasies and blocking out the sound of breakage. Randall lived a tidy, Spartan life, rushing from an acting rehearsal to a workshop on movement and speech and then directly on to the
library, where he returned borrowed books to the stacks. I loved his library job since every day at certain hours I would know where to find him, briskly re-alphabetizing the novels of Pearl Buck or inserting the second volume of a government demographic study of Wisconsin between the first and third. He wore white gloves for the job, which gave him the look of a West Point honor guard; surely it was no accident that they contrasted so nicely with his blue crewneck sweater and darker blue trousers.

I allowed myself to imagine that every night he was rehearsing a scene for class. But one day over pancakes Tom said, “You poor big distraught girl, you must be heartsick about Randall’s new love.”

Does he mean Lynne? I wondered. Or his favorite instructor, a married graduate student from New York who might be gay but who didn’t fancy Randall (the instructor had told me so himself between discussions of Ugo Betti and Dürenmatt).

“Which lover?”

“Oh, Mother!
Edith!
You mean you don’t know about his
affaire du coeur
with that excessively fetching Cy? How could you have missed him? They’re joined at the hip. And though your sweet Randall is modest and sincere, that fetching Cy just fetches and fetches, oh, here he comes fetchalizing now
à droite et à gauche
even as we speak.”

Down below on the ground floor of the Pancake Palazzo a taller, cruder version of Randall with a big smile and a booming laugh was making his entrance alongside a girl, the one who’d been the stage manager for
Werther.
I thought, Obviously Randall would prefer a tall slender blond with too much jaw to me.

Randall’s favorite graduate student had cast him in a workshop production of a play by that (as he said) ‘incorrigibly kitsch but wildly theatrical’ Thornton Wilder (a writer I accordingly sneered at but whom I’d intensely admired until this very
moment, the only contemporary “man of letters” I knew about and a model for the career I hoped to have). I nursed along my friendship with the director so that I could attend rehearsals and observe Randall. I had to remember to take mental notes in order to have something to say later both to the director and to Randall. Left to my own devices I would have just stared and stared, addled by desire and hurt.

Randall’s love for Cy (I’d already promoted it into love) made me wince with pain and toss and turn on my narrow bed when I’d try to sleep. The warm weather had finally come to Ann Arbor. I’d won the school’s major literary prize for my Ionescoinspired play and with some of the money I bought a case of Asti Spumante, which I chilled and served with melon balls inside a hollowed-out watermelon, my idea of casual sophistication. Like all boarding-school boys I was used to Spartan simplicity but prized my little luxuries, which were usually eccentric. I served this sweet but sparkling concoction to all my friends one Saturday afternoon but Randall didn’t drop in.

He was just a junior and had one more year to go at the U. of M., but I was being graduated. His plans were to spend the summer in New York with Cy; they’d stay with an older, established actor, a friend of Cy’s, and find odd jobs and go to casting calls. I returned to Chicago and drove a panel truck delivering fruit juice and eggs in Des Plaines. I was supposed to go to Harvard in the fall and work toward a doctorate in Chinese, but I was terribly lonely for Randall. I was living with my best high school buddy at his family’s home in Evanston. He was learning to drive a city bus. One night I picked up a boy prostitute on Rush Street; two nights later I had my first case of gonorrhea. I lied to the doctor and said a girl had given it to me. A day after I received a penicillin shot I was cured, but I felt dirty and ashamed.

I flew to New York on July 19 in order to surprise Randall on his twentieth birthday. I checked into the YMCA, then
headed right over to the address he’d given me. I walked the entire way, a good forty blocks, through a stagnant heat held clasped between the uplifted hands of seemingly empty skyscrapers. Occasionally a subway would rumble by and animate a ghostly dance of old newspapers above a grate. Cars manned by drivers with loud voices sputtered past. The length of lower Park Avenue was almost empty; the traffic lights changed all at the same time like sentinels presenting arms. The last rays of sunlight struck a white fire off the highest windows in towers opulently trimmed in bronze; New York seemed rich above, poor below, truly a stratified society, as we’d learned to say in sociology class.

The squalor of my venereal disease, the cruel tedium of my summer delivery job, the vertigo of being out of school for the first time in my life and on the loose in a strange city—these were all things that made me feel uneasy. Suddenly my university years no longer appeared to me a frustrating prelude to a wonderful life to come but rather a lost golden age. I was sure that Randall must have maintained his verve and momentum even in this soggy, dirty city, a vigorous gentian springing up out of the asphalt.

Randall wasn’t there. No one answered the doorbell. When I finally found a phone that worked, no one picked up. Of course it was his birthday and Cy had undoubtedly asked him out to dinner. As a midwesterner, I assumed even the most gala dinner would be over by nine—just an hour to go.

I waited till dawn on the step next door, my heart pounding at the sound of every approaching footfall in that big, abandoned summer city. At six in the morning I started to tremble from the cold and weariness. Whatever small self-assurance I’d had about being a pleasant surprise for Randall had vanished. I’d been demoralized by the Chinese torture of waiting. All night I’d alternately tingled with excitement and then been anesthetized by boredom. Now I was exhausted and empty-headed.
I ate a lonely, bitter breakfast in an all-night diner and headed back to my room at the West Side Y. I felt that everyone else here was at home in a city as stony and upright as a cemetery, stele after stele.

I finally got Randall on the phone that afternoon. “Hi. It’s
me!”

“Hi. Where are you?”

“In New York. I came to see you for your birthday.”

“My birthday was yesterday.”

“I know. I sat on your doorstep—”

“—stoop,”
Randall corrected, using the New York Dutch word.

“Yeah, and, yeah, I sat there for half an hour, then I realized you must be out celebrating, so I made other dinner plans with friends.”

“Friends? So how long are you staying?”

“Forever!”

“Really? Until you go to Harvard, you mean.”

“No. I’ve given all that up. I’m looking for a job. You know, a play of mine is going to be produced in New York.”

“You’re kidding …”

“No, no, I’ve got an agent at William Morris who’s looking for a producer.”

“Too bad there’s no part for me.”

“But there
is.
I’ve rewritten it and now there’s a juicy—” I caught my breath, realized my voice was pitched too high. I said in what I hoped sounded like a sexy whisper, “What are you doing for dinner?”

“I’ve got a scene study class at Herbert Berghof’s till ten, but we could meet then and grab a bite and you could tell me about the part.”