Everyone is Watching (5 page)

In his archive John McKendry lays out the photographs on the table that he will show to Robert Mapplethorpe. Robert must understand how his work relates to the art of other
photographers. It is essential that John choose the right photographs to show his protégé. These photographs show New York City throughout the twentieth century. Here is New York
during the Great Depression as seen in the work of Berenice Abbott. The city is not modern yet; here is a horse and cart in the street and a skyscraper in the distance. Here are Lewis Hine’s
pictures of workers balanced on scaffolding high above the city as they build the Empire State Building. Here are the photographs of Jacob Riis: children sleeping on fire escapes, men sleeping on
flophouse floors, families sewing garments in dirty tenements. And here are McKendry’s favourite photographs: the posed male nudes of Thomas Eakins bathing in a water hole. They are clean and
untouchable. They are perfect.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John stares at the suits of armour standing to attention. There are no bodies here – no men and no horses. Armoured gloves joust at
nothing – they have no hands. John raises his own hand to his body as if he too contains these gaps. He discovers again the contents of his jacket pocket. He is clutching jewels he cannot
afford to keep.

John McKendry dreams about Robert Mapplethorpe. Even in the daytime, even during dinner. When his wife Maxime says,
How was your day
, his mind is already filled with
Robert. They’re making a mess of the new wing, he says. But the mess is inside his head. The rubies and the diamonds feel heavy in his pocket. They are no longer amusing. If he gets them out
now, Maxime and her son will barely raise an eyebrow. This kind of behaviour is what they’ve come to expect of him. Tomorrow he will take the jewels back to the store.

John McKendry’s favourite opera is
The Makropoulos Case
. In it, the main character takes the elixir of life and lives for ever. John cries throughout the
intermission. At the end, John remains in his seat even when the opera has finished and the audience has left. If he moved, he would become involved in a sequence. If he moved, he would become
tangled in chronology. The ushers eventually tell him to leave. He stares at the empty stage. The characters have gone. He doesn’t want to die. It makes no sense.

John McKendry himself is small and feminine and his body has no shape. It is grey and fleshy. There is nothing to it but it always seems so heavy. His head isn’t right.
He is out of proportion. There is a problem with the way he carries himself. His limbs are pushed out into the wrong places. His poses are unnatural. He is gangly, small. He is unexciting. Nothing
ever happens to him.

John McKendry once fell in love with the moon. It seemed obvious; its face was very beautiful. He saw the face reflected in the surface of a lake. He thought – I love
that moon and perhaps that moon loves me. It was partly because of the distance between them. John McKendry saw the moon reflected in the lake as he positioned himself for the dive but also in the
mirror, which he had broken. He lay upon the broken glass, bleeding as easily as he wept. The tears formed a lake, or was that blood? The whole thing was hilarious. He thought – How easily I
fall in love. His flesh was torn by broken glass. He thought – I have been penetrated – the glass that reflects the moon now enters my body and we are lovers. I make love to the moon.
It is over too soon. He never returns my calls.

John McKendry just had to be with the moon, he had to go out there and he had to reach for it, so he opened up the balcony doors and he climbed out onto the exterior wall. He
did not fall – it was not that – but back inside the hotel room he saw the reflection of the moon in the mirror, and he ran to it, and the mirror smashed, and he lay there on the glass,
bleeding, and that was it. He nearly bled to death. When he got home he recreated the scene for Maxime and it was hilarious, for he could not walk. He staged the whole thing, even the part where he
was lying on the floor bleeding, and he could not get up, not because he was bleeding this time but because he was stuck there, owing to old injuries. Maxime walked out. She could not see the funny
side. She did not come back until that evening when she returned to find him in exactly the same place as she had left him, only this time in the dark, despite the moon being full.

They move John into hospital. The staff are non-committal about preservation. They are here one minute and gone the next. They do not follow orders. They run things their own
way. Researchers come with their overcoats and clipboards – sometimes they bring tourists with them to observe – they get in his way. They sit down and ask him questions that have
nothing to do with Robert Mapplethorpe. One time they stick needles into his arm. They have moved him into a room with windows. Here, he can see the city. At night he can see the moon. He is over
it. There is too much work to be done. These people do not take art seriously. The pictures on the wall are low rent, tacky. Something has happened to all the other pictures. There are spaces on
the wall where the pictures should be. There are too many electrical sockets. It is good that the researchers wear rubber gloves. They will not ruin the photographs. He must get rid of these
people. He must fire them. He fires them all. His rubber gloves have disappeared. Without the gloves, he gets ink on his hands. Now they are angry with him for marking the walls. But what is he
supposed to do if they don’t give him any gloves? They tell him to sit down but he is already sitting – do they want him to lie down? They say someone is here to see him. It won’t
be the person he wants but the vision that comes in through the door is the vision of what he’s always wanted. It is too cruel, this final view. He cannot look at Robert Mapplethorpe. He
looks up into the air instead. There is a blinding light. He thinks of lightning and the white surface of the moon, what it must be like to have the mind completely clear and finally wanting
nothing.

In Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph, John McKendry’s face glistens in the light of the flash. Freckles cover his skin, ears, eyelids. He looks up. On the wall
behind him there are two sockets. The first, complete with plug, is positioned in the top left-hand corner of the picture. The second socket is unoccupied. Next to the sockets is a blank
rectangular panel, painted white. The photograph has been cropped in such a way as to suggest a link between John McKendry’s face and the panel. John McKendry does not seem aware of the
camera. He looks as though he has let go of something and is watching it float away into the air.

No ballgames. No nudity. Bathers must shower before entering the pool. No bobby pins. No jewellery. No outside food or liquor.

Gee, they know what they want, the boy says.

Regulations, says his friend.

The boys move through the parking lot and under the expressway. They enter Jones Beach by way of the east swimming pool. They carry towels over their shoulders and an illicit supply of Scotch in
a beaker wrapped in a lilo, rolled in a duffel bag. It is the weekend. This is what summer will mean from now on, weekends at the beach.

The first boy loves the newness of the signs and the crisp-neat uniforms of the pool attendees. His friend loves the brass-band music coming from the pavilion and the ice-cream sellers in
candy-striped boaters.

They stand beside the swimming pool. The first boy has never seen a diving board before except for the pier in the East River where he so often launched himself in summers as a kid before the
rot took it under. Then, you would swim in fear of your life for the river was cold, dark and deep. Here, the water is clear.

The girls come giggling down the path. They are dressed in matching bathing suits. They clutch their handbags in the crooks of their elbows. Their sunhats are bigger than Liberty’s
crown.

What are you boys waiting for? says one.

Nothing special, says the second boy. The girls drop their act. Have they come all this way to be insulted?

We’re watching the divers, the first boy says. Wanna jump with me?

The girls’ humour is quickly restored. Easy with this boy. Forever the clown. Safe with him. Looks good in the sun. Nice and tan. Can see his future. It’s all mapped out. Could go
far with him. He’ll take you out of the city. He’ll find you a new place to live. He says he wants to be a newspaper reporter. He could be your ticket out of here.

They settle on a bench to watch the divers. A woman is standing way up on the high board. She’s a real beauty. Bright red swimsuit and matching red cap. Her body is as tight as the heat of
the day. She is a dream, needs rescuing – what the first boy would give to – yessir – this is the right place to be, watching from below, not a thing he can do in the world except
watch. You can’t fight nature. He feels the first girl’s upper arm pressing against his. The woman on the board stretches herself into a pointed rocket – hard, sleek, silhouette
against the sun.

She caught your eye? says the second boy. Not a question. Caught his also. Have you ever seen anything like it? he says.

He has never seen anything like it.

They flock to her, the boys, the men. Watching from below. Moving closer.

The clean concession stands and squeaky-clean attendants gleam in the sun. Smiles beam across the water. Everyone’s eyes are stinging from the chlorine. This place is clean all over. The
woman on the board could have been hired for the part, she is so beautiful. She is brand new, without a story. She makes the first boy feel like a child. He feels fresh. He never wants to take
another drink in his life, or do anything unclean.

The woman curls her toes over the edge of the board, dizzy at this height, and the ocean in the distance, and the men crowding round the pool, jostling for position.

Jump! cries one. Then they all cry – jump! Jump! Get that sweet ass in the pool. The lifeguard blows his whistle and points to the sign – No ogling.

Sweet ass!

The lifeguard marches over and hustles the man away.

Jump, will you?!

She is already falling.

Edmund unpacks the rest of his books, those about France and the travel books and the biographies he wrote about Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet and Marcel Proust. Next he unpacks
his novels. Then come the works of journalism and memoir. Here is the entire range of Edmund White: the Edmund White who is him, the Edmund White who is based on him, and the Edmund White who
resembles him only.

He looks down at his hands. His fingers are long and slender. His knuckles are red. His palms are fleshy. They have held many other hands. The cuffs of his shirt pinch his wrists. His right
wrist is strong from decades of writing. His arms have encircled many bodies. His chest is soft and tender. It contains his beating heart. His stomach has consumed the world. His hips are the
parentheses for what lies in between. His penis is cold and independent. He has described it in the pages of these books.

He picks up another book he’s brought back from Paris, a book about the photographer Alvin Baltrop. The black-and-white photographs contained within it depict New York scenes from the
1970s. They show the Hudson River Piers when they were dilapidated and deteriorating. The roofs are loose and the floorboards are broken, yet life exists here nonetheless. In the photographs naked
men lean against sun-bleached walls. They share cigarettes, conversation, oral and anal sex. They are kissing. They are sleeping. They are hanging out.

Edmund remembers that the vast interiors of the piers could alter one’s perception of reality. In the same way, these photographs, presented as they are from the vantage point of present
time, also mean something new.

These photographs show human interaction as blades of grass growing through the hard earth. The subject depicted is love.

Edmund picks up his own novel,
Hotel de Dream
, whose main subject is the writer Stephen Crane. The book describes Crane’s last days and a novel that he is rumoured to have written
about the life of a young male prostitute he once met in the Bowery. Crane’s book, if it exists, has never been found. In the absence of the real thing, Edmund wrote it himself.

He discovered that in order to write about the American Civil War in
The Red Badge of Courage
, Crane studied photographs taken during that period. He looked at the work of Mathew Brady
and Alexander Gardner, the black-and-white photographs of desolate battlegrounds, gaping-mouthed corpses, shadowy figures in distant fields, fallen men lined in neat rows in the grass, portraits of
distinguished soldiers and commanders, the wise, chiselled faces of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.

Edmund tried to be as thorough with his own research. He read many books about New York at the turn of the twentieth century and he looked at many photographs. He walked in the footsteps of
Stephen Crane, imagining another time. He walked through the Lower East Side and examined the low-rise tenements, imagined the slums and the dark, narrow alleyways. This was where gangs of boys
lurked in the shadows, where filthy laundry hung strung up between the buildings in a latticework of depressing garments. He imagined the cries of babies going hungry and bedraggled prostitutes
half-dead in the street. Edmund put himself in another time and in another reality. By writing about real subjects in the form of a story, he created a book that was both fact and fiction.

He called the prostitute in the story the Painted Boy. This boy still seems very real to Edmund.

He stands on a New York sidewalk. He is young and naive. He has no family or connections in Manhattan. He learns to survive by selling himself. He hustles on the street and in local theatres. He
doesn’t fully understand his power over people. He takes money from the men who love him the most.

Looking at the novel now, Edmund wonders what it is really about. Could it be that he, Edmund White, is the Painted Boy? Or perhaps he is the writer Stephen Crane. Crane was a journalist and a
novelist. Crane wrote fictionally about real life. These things are also true of Edmund White. The main theme of Edmund’s work is love. Edmund has carried love around with him his whole life.
Love has accumulated like time. Edmund carries love with him still. He has brought it back from Paris, the city of love. He runs his fingers along the spine of
Hotel de Dream
. His
signature is written upon the title page. Here is his photograph on the jacket. When Edmund looks at the photograph he is staring back at himself.
Edmund has called this book a fantasia on real
themes provided by history. Here Edmund stands in the flesh in the twenty-first century.