News from the World (6 page)

Dwayne traveled to other cities with the ballet company, and Jack and I spent more time together. If he had something to sew, he brought it along and sat in my living room hemming the edge of a curtain, or the skirt of a suit for a customer. Sometimes he left early when he was planning to cook something elaborate. Mostly he made simple meals for himself and Dwayne.

He told me about a lover he had had for years before Dwayne who had been a well-known television star of the period and had played a ladies' man in a weekly series. We spoke of Hollywood, where I had lived for a time, then of clothes and opera singers and music. And of life itself and its strangeness. “Do you ever have the feeling when you're walking down a street—on your way to work or whatever—that you're not yourself but a mystery guest on someone's program? And you know nothing about the way you are and you don't recognize the shoes you're wearing, or your hands, and the moment isn't a moment but somehow . . . timeless?” Jack once asked, looking up blankly as he spoke. I said, “Yes,” in a voice unrecognizable to me, as though it might have issued from a chair or the open book on a table.

He told me on one of those afternoons how dreadfully his family behaved toward him—all except June, his mother—especially his professor uncle who, he said, hated him so much that when Jack's younger brother died in his childhood, his uncle had whispered to him at the funeral, “Why him? Why not you?”

One time he described a sexual moment between Dwayne and himself. Dwayne had returned home from the opening of a new ballet he was in, had stripped and lain down naked in the hall, curled up, and gone to sleep. Jack had jumped him and Dwayne, awakened, had behaved and talked like a street pickup, pretending he'd never seen Jack before and wouldn't see him again. Their late-night encounter had excluded all emotion but the driving force of desire, without mind, without heart.

Staring at my reddened face—I was not used to such confidences, even from women friends—Jack quickly said that it was “different” that time, that sexual fulfillment could be more than the sum of its bodily exertions. There was affection between the two of them, moments of tenderness.

A few months later I remarried. Martin, my children, and I moved into the A-line of the same building, into a much larger apartment on the fifth floor. A few days later when I was alone in the apartment putting away books on shelves, the bell rang and I opened the door to Jack's crumpling figure and stricken face.

“My mother—” he groaned. “She died.” He wept openly like a child, without covering his face, or like someone in the first moments of shock, before grief can be dissembled. I put my arms around him. We stood in the open door, holding on to each other. June, bittersweet brave June.

Martin and I moved out of Manhattan into an apartment in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn (as reported in “Light on the Dark Side.”) Jack and Dwayne were no longer lovers, although they continued to share 6E. After a month or so, Dwayne found a place of his own.

Jack had told me Dwayne was using marijuana much more as time went on, and the drug was beginning to affect his ballet career.

Jack visited us several times in Brooklyn, then moved to Melville, Long Island, where he'd found steady work in a small design firm. We didn't see each other for over a year but we spoke on the telephone. There were moments of comfortable silence in our conversations. I could visualize him sitting in a room, looking down at a little table or at the dust-free floor. He was, when it came to his surroundings, an orderly man.

Months later the firm went bankrupt. Jack moved back to New York City and I lost contact with him for over a year. By the time he turned up again, we had bought a house in a nearby neighborhood. He found our address in the telephone book and one afternoon came to visit.

He was much thinner than when I had last seen him, and for the first time since I'd known him, shabby, as shabby as a pair of rundown old shoes. He told me he'd spent months on the street—
“
and I mean on the sidewalks, honey,” he said. He'd sheltered in doorways when he wasn't chased away by irate tenants or landlords, covering himself with pieces of cardboard and rags when the weather grew cold.

“I didn't know how mean people could be,” he said. Then he laughed in his old way. “I always wanted to be a welfare queen but discovered I wasn't eligible.”

But his laughter held an underlying note of hopelessness. He had been rescued, he went on, by Ben, a young accountant, who, one frigid evening, took him home to his Greenwich Village apartment. When Ben rescued him that day, what Jack possessed were a worn navy peacoat, a T-shirt, and a pair of blue jeans, in his pocket a nickel and a few pennies.

Ben seemed to love him, and after a few weeks Jack was happy again. Or so he said. I felt street life had permanently scared and scarred him. Ben had a small dog, Ninny. One afternoon when I visited the cramped small apartment, Jack bent down frequently to caress Ninny. He looked up at me suddenly. “I was really bad to Kelly,” he said bleakly.

Ben came home shortly before I left. He was a small person, self-contained and unsmiling, but his eyes rested on Jack constantly, and I guessed he was devoted to him, his street prize.

When Jack told me he had AIDS, his voice held a note of insouciance as though he himself had not yet heard his own news. But I detected panic on his face, and my own heart, panicky, beat violently. I imagined him dying before me like the man who had been shot down in front of the apartment house where we had both lived years earlier.

The summer of his illness, my sons had jobs in the city and Martin and I rented a house in the countryside north of New Paltz. Jack was in a veteran's hospital on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I visited him twice, taking the bus from New Paltz to the city and back the same day.

The AIDS wing of the hospital was neutral-looking with its pale yellow walls on which hung several inane prints. Wasted men lay like sticks in hospital beds. Jack smiled up at me as I walked toward him, and I noted how his cheeks had sunk below his cheekbones. It was a sight that haunted me on the way home.

He had lost a lot of weight and looked as sick as he was. His face was covered with a reddish rash. As he gripped my hand, I felt his strength return momentarily, then fade, so that his fingers felt like a handful of pencils.

“A fine fix,” he murmured. “Poor me. Poor Ben. He has it, too.”

I nodded. I hesitated for a minute to tell him about a visit I'd had from Dwayne, but realized after my first words that Jack's former lover held only a faint interest for him now.

Dwayne had stopped by one noon at our narrow Brooklyn brownstone. When he was sitting at the kitchen table looking around restlessly, he suddenly said, “No lunch for me. Would you mind if I smoked a little pot?” I nodded. He took a hand-rolled cigarette from his jacket pocket. After half an hour, interminable to me, of a silence broken only by the sounds of his long inhalations and my own awkward words sounding grotesquely cheerful under the circumstances, Dwayne left.

Jack smiled again as he recalled his visits to our house. I had asked him to make a few things for us, curtains and the like. I was happy to see him the three or four times he came to our door. He greeted me once with, “Here I am! The gay caballero!”

I visited Jack again a few weeks later. His condition had worsened and he could barely move his head on the pillow. When he spoke, it was as if I was listening to his voice through a heavy downpour of rain.

“That book . . . ,” he said. “I picked it up in the lobby of the apartment house where we met. It was on top of one of the boxes the movers brought.” He ran out of breath and paused for a moment. Then he went on. “I needed a reason to meet you. I saw you smile at one of the movers. I wanted you to smile at me that way . . .
The Tender Night
. . . ,” and he smiled in a ghostly way. I remembered how he had told me he loved the title.

“Tender Is the Night,”
I corrected him softly. But he had closed his eyes. I left his bedside after a few more minutes for the long trip back to the mountains.

During those hours on the bus, I stared out of the window thinking about Jack and our years of friendship, our conversations, our closeness. He was going to die. I couldn't become used to that ultimate news.

The attending nurse had our summer telephone number and she called ten days later. Jack was dead. She told me then what I found hard to bear—his body had swelled up three times its usual size, although later, in the hospital morgue, it had slowly deflated. She also told me what I was relieved to hear. Jack's uncle, the professor, had at last come through. Jack's body, at his direction, was shipped south by train and buried in a cemetery just outside of Columbia, South Carolina.

Ben outlived him by three weeks. Toward the end of that time, I telephoned the hospital where he was a patient. He picked up the phone himself. I heard his labored breathing as I identified myself. He whispered that he was glad to hear from me. He fell silent for so long that I finally, after saying his name a number of times, hung up.

FRIEDA IN TAOS

I
N
1935,
WHEN
I was twelve, during one of the rare times my father came to see me in my grandmother's small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens, where she and I then lived, I astonished him by quoting a few words from a poem by Witter Bynner, the title of which I've forgotten. The words were, “ready for wine? There's a cup inside.”

My father had met the poet in Taxco, Mexico, he told me, when he and my mother traveled there on a brief vacation from Hollywood and the movie studio where he had worked as a screenwriter after their return from Europe the preceding year.

Bynner had been a close friend of D. H. Lawrence's, and he would amuse my parents with his lively descriptions of the frequent battles between the writer and his wife, Frieda, when plates and glasses flew through the air, hurled, he implied, with savage delight by both of them.

One evening, Bynner attended an all-night party given for Lawrence in New York City. After most of the guests had left, Bynner went to the kitchen, where he sat alone at a wooden table, feeling stale and desolate in the gray dawn. Lawrence entered the room. Seeming not to notice Bynner, he went directly to the sink, which, along with both counters, was nearly hidden by dirty dishes, took an apron from a nearby hook, tied its strings around his waist, and, whispering to himself as though reciting, began to clean up the night's excesses.

I have no idea why I memorized those few words and said them to my father. Perhaps I hoped to please him with a reference to his own heavy drinking. Perhaps not.

I had found the thin volume of Bynner's poems on one of three shelves in my grandmother's skimpy bookcase, nearly invisible among a set of
The Books of Knowledge
. I guessed it had been left there by Leopold, one of my grandmother's four sons.

Three years later I was standing before a large bookcase in the living room of a Montreal boarding school where I had been sent by Mary, my father's second wife. Behind me, two other students whispered about a third. But my attention was drawn again and again to a book,
Sons and Lovers.
I reached for it ardently, much as, I came to believe after I had read it, it had reached for me. The author was D. H. Lawrence. Many years later I read a short paragraph written by his widow, Frieda.

“His courage in facing the dark recesses of his own soul impressed me always, scared me sometimes.”

The sentence was from a book written by her,
Not I but the Wind
, which my father scornfully retitled, “Not I but the Windy Old Bastard.” By then I had realized how his bitterness and disappointment had deformed nearly everything in his life.
Sons and Lovers
remained for me a lighthouse of consciousness. But his mockery had recalled something to me, the story he had told me, related to him by Bynner, of Lawrence washing dishes the night of the Manhattan party. How much like Paul Morel that had been, how like his delight in helping his mother with household tasks in that novel.

Another ten years elapsed. I was half a mile from Taos, New Mexico, with Richard, whom I would marry in a few months. We had found a place to stay in the tack room of an unused stable owned by Mrs. Lois Holmes, a widow who rented cabins.

We had driven west from New York City with our cat, Edna. After a week of confinement in the car and hotels, she went wild with freedom and raced about the grounds of the Holmes property, pausing to dig shallow holes at the base of trees whose names I would learn later.

Richard had quit his job at a Manhattan public relations firm where I also worked. Our limited funds were not enough to afford a cabin. We told Mrs. Holmes that, and of our wish to spend several months in Taos. She suggested the tack room in the stable. After her husband's death several years earlier, his racehorses had been sold at auction. We took the tack room gratefully.

The stable had been painted red at one time, but the color had faded and the building had a long-forsaken look. The tack room was divided into two large spaces and two cubicles, one a toilet, the other a rudimentary kitchen with a two-burner kerosene stove, a small tin basin with one tap, and a dust-laden shelf above it that held a few rusty pots and a small frying pan.

In one of the two big rooms, a post ran lengthwise from a wall, with a saddle on it that had slipped sideways, so that at first glance it appeared as if someone had just dismounted. Worn harness straps and a bridle with a corroded bit hung from two nails that had been hammered crookedly into a narrow rafter. Spider webs, the spiders long gone, hung slackly from ceilings, in the corners where walls met, and even over the dirty glass of a big window opposite the entrance, itself a wide plank with a two-foot-square opening covered by a wire screen.

Mrs. Holmes hired two Indian men to move a few furnishings from a cabin she rarely rented. It was too close to a shed that housed three toilets and a shower room for most travelers. We made an arrangement to store food in her refrigerator.

I observed the two Indians carrying from cabin to tack room two cots, two chairs, two small tables, and lamps, along with a few plates and a handful of cutlery. There was no expression I could name on their faces, but later I concluded that it had been a kind of implacability, a resolve to endure all the abasement that came their way as though it were a triumph of a sort.

I was in my early twenties, young enough to feel the enchantment of new places. Even the metal forks and knives and spoons were thrilling to hold in my hands. Richard's divorce seemed to be taking an eternity, but divorce was a complicated process then. Our hope was to start a new life together. We both intended to write. I didn't think, beyond the next month, where we would find the money to survive. Or that there was no such thing as a new life.

Richard, born in Oklahoma, had spent his childhood and youth in New Mexico. He had gone briefly to college in Albuquerque before getting a job as a cub reporter on a local newspaper. He had wanted for years to return to New Mexico, he told me, and his long-held wish and my deep conviction about the virtue and rewards of living far from cities had carried us all the way to Taos. That first dusk we sat outside in two chairs we had brought out, holding drinks in chipped cups and watching Edna play with a bit of tumbleweed blown here and there by a fitful breeze.

The desert twilight fell like gauze over us, the stable, the cabins we glimpsed near the road. The deep quiet stilled my excitement. My thoughts had the formless drift of wind-stirred clouds in an expanse of sky, a feeling I had not experienced since childhood.

After a while, in silence, we went to the tack room. I cooked something for supper, then we washed and dried the few dishes, unpacked our portable typewriters, and went to bed.

We worked in the mornings and took long drives in the afternoons. Three or four narrow roads led out from Taos. One day we took the north road and drove into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and found a sheep ranch where the herders were Basques from northern Spain.

I was fluent in Spanish, but I noted that two of the herders seemed reluctant to speak it, although they too were fluent. I didn't know then that the Basques had their own language, only discovering this decades later when, with ignorant familiarity, I spoke Spanish to a Basque cook employed by friends. With barely concealed offense in her voice, she said to me in a heavily accented English, “We have our own language.”

We visited the ranch once more later on. The Basques were shearing the sheep. A few of the animals bleated loudly and plaintively. The large metal teeth of the shears moved in wavelike arcs, the wool fell in piles to the ground. Sometimes the shears nicked the pink flesh of a sheep, and it ran away hastily, pitiful in its nakedness. The herders laughed among themselves, but I thought I heard an underlying sympathy in their laughter. Later the wool would be washed in the large metal vats we had seen at the edge of the corral.

In the evenings we occasionally drove out to the valley a few miles east of Taos, where a gambling casino had been set up in a barn. The Taos sheriff, I noted, was in charge of the roulette wheel, and the Basque sheepherders were losing all their money at the crap table—money they had saved for months for their return to Spain, now gambled away in a desert in a far-away country.

Their melancholy stoicism about their own weakness, the ironic acceptance that underlay it, were not new to me: I had seen it in the faces of Uncle Leopold and my grandmother. I had imagined that it was only familial, but now I saw it anew, a Spanish way of responding to the self's conflicting impulses. It overcame what I had grown used to in myself—the denial of such double consciousness and a hard intention to win even as one lost. That evening in the gambling hell I wanted to touch their faces, as though in that way I might acquire some of what I imagined as the peacefulness of their resignation to their own natures.

Driving home later, Richard turned off the narrow highway onto a dirt road. In the moonlike landscape of the desert, we bumped along until we arrived at a lengthy, deep crevice. We parked and walked to its edge. Hundreds of feet below us was the Rio Grande River.

It was a brutal-looking stream of rocks and eddies and deceptively still pools of black water. In the daytime, we had waded in it. The water's force had toppled me. I went under, laughing, until fear and water stopped my mouth.

A wooden bridge built by one of the early inhabitants of Taos, John Donne, crossed the river a quarter of a mile farther on, looking, from where we stood, like a giant clothespin. I recall asking someone how his name was spelled. The answer was, just like the seventeenth-century poet's.

A few days later, I drove to a large adobe house owned by a woman who employed Indian workers to make Navajo souvenirs, including the one-toed, heavy velvet foot coverings the Pueblo Indians wore. The employer had gone to Albuquerque for the day. On a circular staircase in the entrance hall I found her daughter. She might have been fifteen, a very fat girl with a moon face from which two small eyes, dark as raisins, stared down at me. Her plump left hand gripped the railing. She had heard me arrive.

The way she stood halfway down the stairs, the fear in her face, her right hand rising suddenly to point toward the work area, didn't look convincing to me. Her voice quavered as she said, “He's drunk!”

She whispered loudly then about “his” intentions toward her, sexual, the same intentions all male Indians had toward white girls.

I didn't know what to say, so I left her there and walked to the work area. In a large room, two steps down, I found a handsome Indian youth at a workbench, very drunk indeed.

“I make you shoes,” he said in a slurred voice, smiling up at me, and held up in an unsteady hand the black velvet slippers I had ordered and paid for. I thanked him and took them. When I passed the stairs, the girl was gone.

On the way home, I passed the estate of Mabel Dodge Luhan, an heiress who had established a literary colony in Taos in 1919. Tony Luhan, her husband from the Pueblo, was standing before a cluster of the hundreds of wooden birdhouses he had made for her. His back was toward me and his long black braid hung straight down like an exclamation point.

We often drove past the Taos Pueblo a few miles from the town's main square. Gaunt horses grazed in fields that adjoined the walls of the Pueblo. I sensed a multitude inside, moving about their lives. The place emitted a secret energy I hadn't detected in the facial expressions of the Indians I had seen. It was a hidden country within a country. The horses were ill-nourished—there was hardly any sustenance to be gotten from the patchy ground. Pueblo Indians kept horses, I'd been told, because they symbolized wealth and power.

One afternoon, Richard and I went to the one movie house in town. It was showing a western to a few patrons, among whom, close to the screen in the front row, sat a few Indians. When the screen filled with light, it revealed them in outline wrapped in blue or pink Sears, Roebuck blankets, as they watched Indians on horseback being chased across a prairie by yippying cowboys.