Authors: Edmund White
The opening night meant shooting a gold thread of glamour and wealth into my worsted life. Friends and relatives of Rhett’s thronged the little theater wearing diamond rings and
white-on-white shirts and suits of fabric as sumptuous as Cadillac upholstery (the men) or Bonwit Teller suits, gypsy spit-curls, matching black crocodile bags and flats (the women). They roared at the feeblest jokes, applauded the set changes and gave a standing ovation to Rhett, the leading lady, even me. Finally I realized they were all investors. Randall looked exquisite as Gainsborough’s
Blue Boy
come to life, but the wig and makeup actually diminished his delicate beauty or rather provided one that many other young men could have achieved just as easily. I didn’t tell Randall that my only fight during the entire rehearsal period had been with Rhett when he wanted to eliminate the scene with the Blue Boy altogether, which was slowing the pace and adding nothing to the play.
Even my midwestern father, a businessman, came to the opening with two of his cronies. “What’s it about, pal,” he asked me privately, a solemn smile on his thin lips, “the
usual?”
by which he meant homosexuality, which had been the subject of a short story I’d published under a disguised version of my name in order not to humiliate him (we had the same Christian name).
“Yeah, Dad, there’s some of the usual, but there’s also another theme—”
“I know. Niggers.” He threw away a half-smoked cigar and went in with his guests to see the first act. Somehow the season had drifted into early summer and even at seven-thirty it was too warm and sunny to want to enter the dark theater, a former burlesque hall on the far edge of the district (curtain time was an hour earlier than usual because of the newspaper deadlines). As Puerto Rican boys with bare chests played basketball on the street outside, Rhett’s diamonded and perfumed guests reluctantly closed ranks around the plump, ill-groomed critic from the
Times.
Later at Sardi’s, the Broadway restaurant, several of Rhett’s people told me I was marvelous and the show a big hit, then
they talked about their summer plans and about how long it would take to get Hal’s yacht from Miami up to the Cape. The cast members were upstairs in a special private room. I was downstairs at my father’s table. He was drunk and congenial and said he always knew I was a nigger lover but why not, that leading lady was a looker, and did I know Union Carbide was reorganizing the whole Great Lakes territory.
The
Times
was lukewarm, though it ended on a positive note, assuring the world that I
could
write. The
Herald Tribune
massacred the play and stated that the Negro in America had enough problems without my adding to them. We were living through the height of the civil rights movement and most white Americans felt that the race problem was well on the way to being solved. White critics couldn’t understand why I wanted to stir up trouble and portray black anger. Of course it was my own anger as a gay man I was tapping, even though I was unaware of it.
A week after the play opened Randall moved in with Rhett. I was scandalized. And hurt, partly because I’d been attracted to Rhett myself, partly because the closing of my play robbed me of whatever appeal I might have ever exerted over Randall. Mainly, of course, I just felt talentless and lonely. I had no one to eat dinner with. And these two handsome men had found each other and left me behind, plain and unwanted.
I called Rhett. “Hi. So what’s new? I guess Randy’s moving in with you.”
Rhett’s voice shot way up and he had to tug it in like a kite. “Well, yeah, for a while at least, although it’s awfully small at my place and I may be too neurotic to live with anyone, you know how crazy clean I am, hours and hours of ironing chinos….” The kite took a sudden nosedive to the ground.
“Well, he’s very neat and doesn’t take up too much room,” I said. “Besides, he’s always off at his classes or his temporary job. But maybe he’ll be able to stop his filing now.”
“Stop? Why? I’m not exactly rich—especially not now, after your play. And then I’m too young to
keep
someone.”
I thought, I kept him as best I could on a hundred dollars a week. But I registered Rhett’s reproach about my play, although I didn’t want to apologize for it again. “Anyway,” I said wonderfully, “I hope you guys are very happy together. I think Randy needs someone like you.” If I’d put sentimental gestures aside I would have had to admit that I knew I wasn’t in the same league as Randall as a lover, but as a brother I felt his equal—or rather I didn’t even think in those terms. I may have chosen Randall originally because he was a prize, but now I loved him because I’d slept beside him two hundred times.
Within a week Randall was back in his boarding house. He called and asked me if I wanted to have a bite with him. There was a new Greek place on the corner of MacDougal and Third Street that served hamburger steaks with chopped onions in them and gravy on top or thin-sliced London broil, same gravy, and a dollop of mashed potatoes. If you were lucky you didn’t have to sit at the counter but could find a two-person booth beside the window from which you could watch all the people go past.
“Hi,” he said after we’d chatted for half an hour. That was something he said over and over again throughout a conversation as if to make sure the signal was loud and clear, just as it was my habit to say “right,” vaguely, softly, to mean “wrong.”
“So why’d you move out of Rhett’s?”
“He was too neurotic. He didn’t want all his straight friends to know I was living with him so when the doorman announced them unexpectedly he locked me in the bathroom and went off with them and he didn’t come back for eight hours. I didn’t even have anything to read so I just took off my clothes and swallowed a sleeping pill and slept on the floor. What if there had been a fire? And instead of cheering me up and buying
me a beer somewhere or just giving me a little squeeze he was sullen and angry with me. At first he said he thought we’d been unfair to you but then he admitted it made him nervous having a live-in lover and his analyst thought he was just acting out—”
“I thought that
too!”
I interrupted.
But Randall didn’t want the focus to stray away from him to Rhett’s neuroses. “Hi,” he said.
And for the first time ever he extended his hand to me, even if it was only under the table. I, too, would have been embarrassed to hold hands with another man in plain view even though it was 1964 in Greenwich Village. We were comfortable holding hands under the table.
Dear Randall, think how many years have passed by, thirty to be exact, and now we live on separate continents and rarely see each other. You and I are both positive and our prospects aren’t exactly brilliant. When you discovered just recently that after years of testing negative, you’d goofed up and somehow become infected, you went into a dark, unshakable depression, like the ones you used to sink into in your twenties.
But now you’ve climbed up out of it again, thanks to the bouncy black humor you’ve picked up from twelve years in AA and the tender devotion of Saul, your Orthodox Jewish boyfriend, who after a summer in the sun could just about pass for an Indian on the back lot of United Artists. Before you could come to your present equanimity you had to live through your parents’ double suicide (your dad’s was rapid, bullet in the brain, mom’s lingering, binge after binge). You had to take too much acid and even get thrown off Fire Island of all places, but as you once told me, you’d been so disciplined and lonely as a teenager that your late adolescence in your thirties constituted the return of the repressed.
There was a long period there in the 1970s, five or six years, when you didn’t make much sense. You needed yellow jackets to go to work and black birds to smooth out your high and, probably, scarlet tanagers to sleep. You thought your lover of those years, Benny, had been converted to devil worship and was going to sacrifice you; all I know is that when you took refuge with me Benny mounted a machine gun on the roof of a neighboring building and threatened to open fire unless I released you. Of course you liked all the excitement, Benny’s station wagon with the quadraphonic sound belting out Diana Ross as you headed with eight hunky guys on acid toward the Killington ski slopes. It was only when you lost your job and had a seizure and broke a rib that you knew the seventies had run out. You and your Saul escaped out of the wreckage like Aeneas and Anchises from the fall of Troy—he the Aeneas who bore you, his small, handsome dad, on his strong shoulders.
How you’ve changed! We lived together for five years until my straight shrink convinced me I’d never “get well” until I left you. The day I moved out you kept playing a record called “Seven Rooms of Gloom” though we only had three. Who would have thought that proper Randall from Bloomington, Indiana, would go on to lead such a racy life? Mine was pretty weird, too, until alcoholism and the death of our whole generation caught up with me.
I sobered up and moved to France twelve years ago, but we spend holidays together every year or two. Remember when we went to Wales in November, of all times, saw Portmeirion in a hailstorm, a fragile make-believe summer resort of fake façades in nougat colors fronting smaller houses? Remember how I was so horny I had sex with the village idiot I picked up at dusk in the public toilet at Caernarvon beside the ruined black castle where the Prince of Wales’s investiture always takes place?
The last time we saw each other you came to Paris, just a year ago. We went to Malmaison, Napoleon and Josephine’s country house, and you enjoyed everything and wanted to know about everything, you who were so sullen and depressed as a youngster.
The one thing you haven’t lost is your beauty, though sometimes your hair color, shifting from ash to straw, seems too much an improvement on nature. To me you’re just good old Randy, sometimes too much a motor mouth, sometimes spookily religious (you’re always threatening to become a monk), sometimes almost unbearably flippant about all the tragedies we’re forced to live through, although I approve of the style and get into trouble with pious friends when I try to emulate it. To me you’re just Randy, but when I introduce you to Parisians they often say to me later, “But that’s the face that launched a thousand ships!”
I’ve gotten fat and gray and creak when I stand up, but you’ve still a thirty-inch waist, lots of ash hair and unspotted baby hands you hold at improbable angles. Politically correct gays don’t like it when writers praise physical beauty but they should understand your beauty imposed a scenario on your life. You never had to go after anyone; your looks brought them all to you. Two straight guys you worked with told me later that you were the only man they ever went to bed with, but no wonder, no one could or can resist you. You talk all the time to your intimates but early on you learned to be silent in company and just turn on your klieg-light smile. People would hate you or love you but no one could be indifferent. Sometimes in New York you’re at a party where everyone is black or Puerto Rican or, as our parents would have said, “ethnic,” and suddenly someone looks at you hard and says “Shit, Randall, you are the
only
fuckin’ Wasp!” And though that identification means nothing to you, you’ve learned to live with the reactions it provokes in other people.
For so many years you were the B.B., but now as the Beautiful Man you take care of lots of lost people, the young drunks in AA or the homeless vagabonds whom you bathe and feed at St. Luke’s. You even spend the night with your homeless men once a week, watching out to make sure no one robs or attacks someone else or cracks a rib in a seizure, as you once did after all your black birds and yellow jackets flew away.
Naturally I’ve left out the most important thing in these vignettes—your decison to leave the theater. Once my play flopped you turned your back on the commercial theater and acted for another two years at the Caffe Cino, the minuscule forcing-shed in the Village for a new, burgeoning performing spirit (I’m sounding like a publicity release). There as Joe Cino hovered in the back and squeezed espresso out of a noisy machine, you and May would stand on the tiny stage, all nine square feet of it, and declaim for the three full tables and four empty ones. I was too snobbish to write for such an amateurish joint after my professional launch in the uptown theater. Now I see what a fool I was. The only good playwrights of the period—Lanford Wilson, Leonard Melfi, Robert Patrick—got their start at the Caffe Cino.
Despite that thrilling interlude in your life, you decided one day you didn’t want to stand up before one more audience or submit to one more audition. You were no longer willing to walk down Sixth Avenue wearing a sandwich board just because it was a chance to be seen. You went off, as Americans so blithely do, into another career altogether, a much more respectable one which required you to wear a three-piece suit and beautiful silk rep ties five days a week, a charmingly preppy foil to the antique terror of your beauty.
I wrote play after play, all duds, none optioned, a waste of six years of my life. Now all I have to do is just think of writing the words “Act One, Scene One,” and I become as sick as Pavlov’s dog. Because of my failure I now pretend I left what
I grandly refer to as the “Theater,” sweeping up my skirts in a huff, but the Theater never knew I existed and when recently I was in Newport and met that old cousin of the Windsors who’d written the only positive review my play had received, he had no idea what I was talking about, he the only person who’d vindicated my grandiose ambitions.
By the way, Graybelly became a theater critic in New York and Tom a director of an important regional theater.
What we learned from the theater, improbably enough, was how to be gay. You were in gay plays by those pioneers at the Cino, the first harbingers of the New York Spring that would explode in 1969. As far back as the Pancake Palazzo I was learning that if one wore
enough
pancake one could be a convincing enough Regina in her very own itty-bitty Pitti Palazzo.
But if we’ve both left the theater, I still see our first apartment on MacDougal as a stage set and I’m at the door now, dull and tired from another idle day at the office, though once I make my entrance and hear May’s and your voices “off,” I smile, call out, “Hi!,” light a Kool and sit down to a cup of instant and listen, smiling, resentful, to your hissing, urgent voices.