Plays Well With Others

  ACCLAIM FOR Allan Gurganus’s

  Plays Well with Others

  “Captures the pulse and beat of an era and a world. Will remind the reader of F. Scott Fitzgerald on New York…. [The] narrator wants to write a book that will memorialize his friends’ short lives … something Gurganus himself has achieved in this vexing and powerful novel.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “A supremely affecting tale.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “With Southern aplomb that recalls literary forebears O’Connor and Faulkner, Gurganus makes his readers chuckle about the grimmest of circumstances.”

  —Time Out

  “Gurganus succeeds in capturing a vanished place and time with poignancy … compassion and wit.”

  —Boston Book Review

  “Gurganus is the worthy heir to Faulkner and Welty.”

  —USA Today

  “A novel that laughs through the pain. Nothing about Plays Well with Others is coy, demure or otherwise closeted. [Gurganus] grounds catastrophe with humor.”

  —Time

  “Gurganus writes without a safety net…. [He] can do anything he likes as a writer.”

  —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Nation

  For TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM

  and JOE CALDWELL,

  friends, artists, and two beloved

  heroes of our recent siege

  It pleases me to thank my friends, this book’s earliest readers. I am grateful to Mona Simpson, Helen Miranda Wilson, Joanne Meschery, Jane Holding, John Shoneman, Andrea Simon, Danny Kaiser, Tim Woodman, Chris Bram, Erica Eisdorfer, Charles Millard, Michael Pollan, Judith Belzer, George Eatman, David Vintinner, and Daisy Thorp. To my agent and compeer, Amanda Urban, warmest daily gratitude.

  I am devoted to my editor, Dan Frank, for his intelligence, serenity, and character. For being there at the creation, for patience and imagination, a godfather’s full rights.

  Thank you, friends.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  The Comedy of Friends

  BEFORE

  The Thrust of the Launch

  AFTER

  That Ship Left Already

  AFTER AFTER

  The Company of Spirits

  Appendix

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  During the terrible years of Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months in the prison queues of Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear (we spoke in whispers there):

  “Can you describe this?”

  I said, “I can!”

  Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

  —ANNA AKHMATOVA, “Requiem”

  PROLOGUE

  The Comedy of Friends

  Thirty Dildoes

  I.

  here are just two kinds of people in the world: those who will help you and those who won’t.

  In New York, New York, 1983, we—being this talented and so young—found but one roadblock to our careers.

  It was called getting sick.

  I myself seem able to help my friends. Know what?—I often hate it.

  Nothing roused him from the sweet ice of his final coma. Nothing till we mentioned his parents’ flying in today from Iowa. They’d arrive bearing baked goods and one greeting card signed by their entire Lutheran church—they would stay at our patient’s very own apartment.

  We’d tried everything to lift Robert, thirty-four, from his old-man stupor. We played him his favorite music: Mahler’s Fourth and Ninth; Peter Pears doing English folk songs; lots of Bach; three shrill emotions from a Callas Norma; one whole summer’s Donna Summer disco ecstasy. And I mean loud. Only after nurses complained did we clamp headphones directly onto him.

  Above Robert’s famous blue gaze, we held postcards—works by painters he loved best: “Here’s some Balthus, a Francis Bacon, here’s your top Vermeer … and, mmmm, Bonnard—look, a table in the garden, sunlight through trees, wine, fruit, nice lunch waiting. Like?”

  Nothing.

  We told Robert his own best jokes. Punch line hollered—“after all, what’s time to a pig?”— we hovered above the face.

  Still nothing.

  Even whittled, the face had stayed so beautiful it was hard to look at, but for new reasons. Rote breaths, one at a time, decided provisionally to, maybe/yes/no, continue.

  Robert must’ve overheard: “His parents’ flight gets in from Cedar Rapids at, what? noon? And, since they say they ‘don’t feel comfortable paying New York hotel prices,’ his folks asked to crash at Robert’s place. And we just couldn’t think fast enough to say why not … Of course, somebody’ll have to wait over there and greet them, and explain about the six keys, and warn them against taking sugar cookies to that lunatic Serb Rasta man next door, and where not to wander after dark and …”

  Robert had lain silent for three weeks. This boy so gently forward in life now hid far back in a cave he must’ve told himself he was learning to almost like. He lived beneath the manhole of a mask he left us on his pillow. Where his sexy raucous grin once worked, find only an “Occupant” sticker. By now, his body was crafted mainly of aerodynamic holes. “O! that this too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” Hamlet predicted a disease. Our friend’s body, once lusted after citywide, had become all chiseled bone, Henry Moore’s finest work. “Human form” rendered as hat rack.

  “The prettiest boy in New York of his decade.” You only get ten of those per century and here lay the incidentally living remains of the greatest beauty of the late 1970s Manhattan nights. Robert, his platinum hair once shaggy as some fashion-conscious Tom Sawyer’s, Robert in a tailor-made bottle green velvet suit (created “on” him by his next-door neighbor, an ancient African-American seamstress who’d once Singered acreage ruffles for the Ziegfeld Follies); Robert pedestaled upon platform shoes as steep as cinder blocks; Robert sporting a tasteful rhinestone lapel pin shaped like, what else, a single star! It helped that he moved like a high school band major on Orange Bowl Day. His exceptional male stuff got so strutted, you laughed with the joy of watching him maneuver it, his.

  Everybody wanted Robert, girls especially. Many got him, boys especially, once he finally declared. Back then, in ballrooms lit by mirrormosaic spheres that were half joke, but mostly magic—it was Robert Robert Robert. A common name, but one he made glamorous and, even odder, fully only his.

  Now, face up, eyes closed, doing what some witty visitor had recently called “Robert’s exceptional Pharaoh imitation,” our friend managed one final feat—superhuman.

  The closed right eye trembled in sneezy little spasms all its own. Then both his eyes tore open with such sound, twin zippering rips, no louder than a mouse’s scream, and exactly that terrifying.

  We, lolling on windowsills, slumped in tacky plastic orange chairs, rushed to Robert’s bed as if summoned by a thunderclap and forty French horns.

  Radical as only being alive can make a guy, Robert strained upward to answer. I bent my head against his mouth. (We would press a compact mirror here in just four days.) Now, gusts of hard-earned air bore sound waves as Robert managed: “Kee po. Dee do. Gee ou. Fo com.”

  I had learned the language of his language ending. Not unproud of how my skill had evolved to coil inside the nautilus spiral of Robert’s own exquisite devolving, I translated for marveling friends.

  “Says, ‘Kiddie porn. Dildoes. Get out, before The Folks come.’”

  We watched him nod, our pal, Robert, the composer (already diatonic whe
n only joyless twelve-tone cacophony still counted; already wooed and won by our best judge of male beauty and symphonic talent, Mr. Copland). Hearing his own last words replayed aloud, Robert nodded so.

  “Don’t tire yourself, Babes.” Somebody touched his spindle shoulder. And one gigantic grateful tear—the size of something sold in your better gift shoppes—slid from the outer corner of a glazed crystal blue eye. It was one of two baby-blues that’d made Robert briefly yet intensely popular at steam baths and in the backs of parked trucks along West Street, where forthright boys passed fluids to and fro, passed jets of spit and spunk, a secret virus riding all that liquid living pleasure. Tax. Everything good is taxed so. On a 30 percent pleasure, a 1001 percent tax. Is that fair?

  “Robert? Okay now, Robert ours.” I drew closer. “I know you’re listening and, buddy, look … no, here. —I’m guessing as how the kiddie porn is stuffed into that steamer trunk beside your bed, okay? ’kay … good. But where’d you tend to stash the majority of your dildoes, honey?—Robbie?”

  There came the deepening dent between eyes. There came a setting of shoulders: A launchpad is readied for eventual rocket. You saw how much energy his speaking up from such a cave-in void would cost him. And, vertical achievement, here it came: “Boo ca.”

  That said, he fell so far back into pillows, it seemed he’d dropped down all nine floors, clear to Manhattan’s cold stone platelets supporting this—our diseased, endearing St. Vincent’s Hospital.

  “‘Broom closet.’” I beamed.

  And Robert, though hearing me, though gladdened that my translation proved correct, Robert was so asleep, we heard immediate snoring. Half comic. Half. We’d just received his final words. My friend, Robert Gustafson, composer of Symphony no. 1, his final words: “Broom closet.”

  II.

  he parents would meet me at their only son’s fourth-floor walk-up. Rain seemed likely. After last month’s hurricane, any sign of black sky brought merchants scurrying forth to roll up their awnings. The whole town still looked piratelike and scarred, plywood baffles left in place.

  Just as the Gustafsons’ plane was landing, I unlocked Robert’s apartment, the red fire door. I figured I’d have time to haul incriminating loot to my place. Then I’d catch a subway back downtown and just wait on Robert’s front stoop. His folks were strangers. But how hard could it be to spot a cab unloading the Lutheran minister and his wife, two silvering blond Iowans, tall—blinking around, toting Saran-wrapped date-nut bars?

  Beside Robert’s four-posted bed, a steamer trunk that once contained his carpenter great-granddad’s tools, all brought by boat from Sweden. The family name (also the name of their return-address village) was still spelled here in a Gothicy milk-based blue. Inside the heirloom trunk lined with 1840s chromolithos of fjords, I found Robbie’s kiddie porn.

  I’d feared something virulent. That had been disloyal. His proved mostly benign Swedish nudist pix, circa 1953—healthy male children, undraped al fresco, just before the onset of that mixed blessing called “the Pubic.” Boys, colt-legged and scarily pretty, were shown sawing wood, getting into or out of some lake, then toweling each other off, a lot. Boy-children of Sweden sure must swim often.

  They must be all platinum and blush. Photographed in black and white, shown silver in an evergreen landscape, they made the most innocent meringue. I sat here on Robert’s immense Federal bed, sat flipping pages—feigning a prim reproach of sorts. My erection shamed me. Then I remembered my mission. The preacher and his organist floral-print wife, bound here in minutes.

  Robert’s merciless if fond tales about his folks made them seem so real to me, made them seem already present in these rooms, present and watching me scout for cupid Bobby’s little quiverful of dildo love projectiles. I felt (and fielded) their conventional toxic questions: “Why, son, in two rooms this postage stamp-tiny, would ya keep a four-posted bed the size of a cabin cruiser, Robbie? Not to criticize, mind you, just asking. Hmmm?”

  They wouldn’t know that Robert composed his music here (his Symphony no. 1, subtitled The Titanic, was already half afloat). Robert created while stretched out naked. It helped that his eyebrows and lashes were platinum. Leg hair by Harry Winston.

  Given his looks, Robert’s talent seemed redundant. He had the goods for immortality, according to “Mr. Copland” as Robbie called him, even after long sleepy weekends spent at Maestro’s Peekskill retreat upriver. Robert’s musical gift felt a spendthrift oversight by some God too briefly in too good a mood.

  One snowy Manhattan night, we’d stood outside a famous club where everyone but Warhol got auditioned at the velvet cord. Robert, seeing that we two would not make the cut, called above crowd sounds, “Take off your shirt.” Because he stripped of all finery, I undressed, my breath clouding blue. The bouncer, appraising Robert’s flesh, considered. But I held us back. My chest was a solid A minus, not theatrical Manhattan’s normative A plus.

  “Pants,” Robert barked. So we shucked off, despite its being four degrees. And got waved past an awed mob’s tickling furs. I remember the sight of Robert’s pink-gold back tapering before me. The respectful crowd divided, his head was crowned by platinum curls—snow had casually gathered there, forming natural Fabergé leaf shapes. Once into the sound, we checked everything but our jockey shorts. And, shoeless, stripped, we were soon offered hand mirrors spread with powder—white and snortable and, for us then, unaffordable. So, till dawn, we redefined fun. —Copying Robbie, I became immodest as a god.

  The Gustafsons could not know how often and successfully their gorgeous charitable boy had entertained in this bed. They would not recognize the names of the many models and film stars of both sexes who had achieved out-of-body bodily experiences here with the help of their cheerful, guiltless Swedish-American boy.

  This youngest Eagle Scout in Cedar Rapids history had, around 1980, right here, fucked a Rolling Stone, then his wife, and then once more the Stone, whose rocky butt was surely gathering no moss whatsoever. Here, Robert made history, and most everybody else. He enabled many stars to use these four posts, isometrically. Plaques of bronze have been attached to vessels far less culturally seminal.

  The uprights were topped by carved pineapples, huge owl-sized things like phallic hand grenades. Robert had lovingly recalled how his mother, on seeing pineapples anywhere, could never refrain from saying, with the sealed sententiousness of someone thoroughly middle class, “Pineapples symbolize hospitality.” Looking up at these four, I thought, Yes, alas.

  12:03 p.m. Robert’s innocent folks would now be waiting at the brushed-steel luggage carousel. Most domestic flights to Manhattan land at La Guardia. Theirs arrived at Kennedy—as if their trip were international. And, considering the distance they had come from Lutheran Youth Fellowship socials on the Iowa bluffs, to this world of skeleton gods and boy-children forcibly undressed, to 120 blocks of talented people selling their abstract ideas first, and then their bodily presentation of those ideas, and eventually, in several cases, their bodies—considering the Gustafsons’ flying into the joy of careless rapture naked, with today’s total stranger naked too, and the single night (the night he wore the 1970s inaugural bottle green velvet suit), the night a whole decade elected Robert “The Sexiest Boy Alive in Town Right Now,” this poor couple’s flight, it could’ve been interplanetary.

  If they didn’t already know some of this, the poor things soon would. In his kitchen, I picked up an old Easter basket; I emptied it of vintage fountain pens, commenced harvesting raunchier images from under the fridge door’s magnets. Now to open Robert’s freezer, find an igloo with one central peephole and—in it—a single geological cannoli, one half-pint of sludgy Stoli circa 1979?, plus nine small brown glass screw-top bottles. I dropped these into my container, singing, to console myself, “Pickin’ up poppers, puttin’ ’em in de basket. Pickin’ up …”

  I felt glad, at least, that his folks wouldn’t find their ancestral tool-trunk stuffed with peach-fuzz swimmers. And, God willing, I�
��d at least have purged the place of their son’s few store-bought boners.

  Basket over arm, I finally opened the broom closet. One broom tilted there, leaned on by a dingy mop. I had expected oh three dildoes, tops. I found about thirty.

  Thirty dildoes are a lot of dildoes.

  They were piled knee-high, like cordwood. Propped, bald, ridged, and spired. Set on end, they formed a little onion-domed Kremlin. Some used adjacent cleaning products as their splints. Clumped there, the dildo quorum appeared unionized yet disgruntled. —Like toys caught in the act of trying to become the Toy-maker. Here were Toys that’d crawled up off the floor, yeah, into an erect position, okay—but had not evolved much beyond.

  Striving? yes.

  Brainy? no.

  They seemed to sniff up toward me, weak-eyed rats, startled by daylight. Their pointed ends—the business ends—considered my new scent. The dildoes resembled some half-familiar form of household tool (actually, I guess they were). But their reiterated shape fell somewhere between a vacuum cleaner’s “wand” and the fuselage of an old-timey batter-beating Mix-master. They seemed hybridized with that lanky, shameless, duck-faced go-between, The Plumber’s Friend.

  I counted thirty-two, then quit. One was red and white and blue. Most showed that sickly pink shade combining chewed bubble gum with old eyeglasses’ nose rests and ear hooks meant to simulate Caucasian skin tone. Others, browner, Latin or African, appeared tree-sized, ropey saplings. And all were lasciviously detailed: lariats of vein, cobra cowls that flared—fair warning.

  They gaped up at me like an open-mouthed choir of retarded children, looking heavenward.

  Some, I recognized, were actual casts from living porn stars; there was a Jeff Stryker, a monster, but somehow Roman in its genial fluted civic beauty. One such menace proved double-headed as the Russian imperial eagle.