Plays Well With Others Read online

  You can’t yet know that listed friendships won’t all last forever. You never guess that, with life being vapor, even good ink set into a costly high-rag-content durable book, doesn’t mean that much of Forever. —Never suspecting this, how happily you assemble names. You cannot know your players without a program.

  (After the disaster, you will tastelessly and giddily revise this phrase: You cannot know your players without a pogrom.)

  There are two kinds of people in the world, those who’ll help you automatically—even despite themselves—and those to whom that thought will barely occur. And both are lurking in your address book, side by side.

  Shall we keep them all in our mulliganstew of a ledger?

  How, in advance of trouble coming, might you separate the good stuff from the junk pulp? You can’t.

  You must first live through it.

  Appliance

  ully eight months after I led her to Robert, Angie admitted me to her place and, tat for tit, pulled a filthy Snoopy bedsheet off one large painting. I had not asked. It was understood how much I wanted to see.

  Enroute, I’d inquired again if she were “an abstract or figurative artist” (a pat respectable opening phrase I still clung to in those days). She shrugged and, greeted by her building’s stoop-sitting widows, “Ciao, bella,” Ang answered, “Little dis-a little dat-a.”

  The painting first appeared abstract, potently so. It had so much macho energy, you needed Ray•Bans to study it long. Done very wet with almost scary certainty, it was like a 1949 de Kooning, painted fast. Colors-rude combated colors-lyrical. Only slowly, as I backed away from it, did I see a second layer filming its surface.

  I was aware of her watching, not me—but, both hands on her hips—the picture itself. Its second level was rendered in a faint blue-gray of cobwebs sogged with beaded dew. This surface seemed a net, drawn in the same accomplished crosshatching she’d used to render that fine grin of an opened crotch.

  I at last detected—stretched like some tangle of knitting across a maelstrom or pit—one image, corny and overfamiliar. It’d been there all along but overshadowed by its complex surroundings. A kitchen, clunky forties appliances, plaster fruit plaques climbing the wall at a diagonal, one curtained window above the gleaming sink. This scene of certainty (and constriction) had been rendered within a circle. Like the china-painting done on some “display” plate. So prim a candybox interior was made disorienting, almost obscene, by its placement above the whorl and splatter of first paint. It stitchery seemed some webbed anchorfence—keeping us back safe, as behind zoo caging—just clear of the mad lava churning underneath. (I’m not describing this very well, I fear. You’d think I could do better after all the early catalogue essays I was soon to write. These essays about her work are mostly lost now, in brochures published by nowhere galleries, the endless series of such places where her painting languished far too long. In the days before commonplace Xeroxing, I did not keep copies of the essays and, for what it tells you, neither did she.)

  But if I might cannibalize from one such yellowing leaflet I do still own:

  “Ms. Byrnes’s ‘Appliance-Volcano’ is the admixture of comically male Abstract Expressionist underpaint—woolly-chested, outward, GI extrovert—and the clichéd femininity of a domestic ideal rendered, with self-conscious prissiness, on top, doilying the void.

  “It is this ply, conjoining impossible versions of a single world that marks the young painter’s almost folkloric frontality, that signals her gender-leaping ingenuity of imagery. In the execution, there is nothing provisional. Her dazzling technique is one that any seventeenth-century Dutch painter could well appreciate.”

  Bla bla blah. But heartfelt.

  That first day, I looked long, kept quiet. Angie’s place smelled of heavy solvents and light housekeeping. She said nothing, flats of her wrists still at rest on either hip, a cigarette burning, the smell of a bad mood. She tipped her head and squinted, time-out for a workshop elf. But my private showing felt like an excuse to let her peek at her own work one more time today. (I sensed she had a quota, to prevent herself from undoing what was good, from staying here full-time. She’d repeated Noël Coward: “Work is more fun than fun.”) I remained quiet for three minutes, an eternity when the painter stands right behind you, especially if the painter is someone with Angie’s edgy energy.

  “The bride’s kitchen painted here on top,” I attempted. “It’s hanging over the pit like a necklace. It has no power to protect, but it believes it’s an amulet, a good luck charm. The tension you get, sandwiched, is what’s unbelievable. The real painting happens on the level between the two you’ve actually set down….”

  “Something like that. Well,” she shrugged. “Seemed a good idea at the time …”

  “No,” I urged her. “Don’t take it back.”

  “Oh, I’m not, Hart, believe me. Can’t afford to. It’s just—here, now I see it, now I hear you gasbag some, if well … it’s still too much an idea. As if I’m doing this just to make it easier for middlebrows to describe later. In my head, it’s so … but by the time I get it out … it’s mud.”

  I soon learned never to contradict, never to “cheer” her. She would later cure me of that by calling me, for three weeks straight, Hartley Hammerstein.

  Now, I kept my mouth shut. That in itself became, as silence found its fulcrum, a weight of respect between us, an early lesson. (When placing my own first stories into anybody’s hands, I usually turned into a babbling contortionist of apology and protective preemptive self-doubt.)

  “I’ve never seen anything like this …” summarized the gasbag in retreat.

  “Well,” she told me. “It’s archaic Angie. I know when I look back I’ll see I’ve barely started.” And she eased the sheet back across it, a hundred Snoopys on a hundred doghouses. Her short hands tugged the cloth straight with a motherliness, a modesty, I’d never seen the girl award herself.

  She turned to making coffee, her back to me. I loved her back. Almost a boy’s. I sensed she was upset. What’d I said? Already I was learning to read how her anger alternated with her breakthroughs, and from all angles. Through walls. “Did I do something?”

  She shook her head no. She was pointing down. In one corner by the sink, a mousetrap, not sprung but nibbled clear of most cheese left on its killing clamp. “Damn Minnie the Mooch rodent,” she said. “I would get a Ph.D. one. It holds the patent pending on this fucking trap. Thing keeps me up nights. I hate the sounds of scuttlings in the wall. Savannah all over again. It ate a half a tube of my cadmium red (light). How do they know which paint is most expensive? Damn damn mouse.” She acted stiff, as if I’d bashed her work.

  Had she gone rigid because a very red mouse was still at large, or because one overly white boy remained too-present? I didn’t know yet. I moved toward the door. She failed to stop me. I left before the coffee brewed.

  Know Your Whereabouts at All Times

  he city’s sense of promise is based precisely on its being all blinders, blinkers, chutes. Such tunnel vision means sudden awarded views that (on a good career- or love-day) can feel designed, singly, paradisal for you. The city offers you the whole Sun waiting (surprise) at your gray street’s very end. Sunlight is glittering on the godly Hudson River like some sudden fad, a fad with your name spelled dancing across it.

  —So, even in the memory of my later outrunning thieves (or not), there’s this glee, this wild survivor’s glee that’s beautiful, if quite inaccurate.

  Already boastful about our bravery, we didn’t yet know the ways we’d need it. Hold that off? Muggers, sure. Communicable venereal woes and age-old Heartache, fine. Weekly form-rejection slips from The New Yorker (“Does not suit our needs at this time”) okay. But hold the other off. Please hold it off awhile?

  Sure, being that young in Old New York, we were scared a lot, and as insecure as we were swaggering. But, ah, we took the art of partying to new heights. And, oh how hard we worked. Private effort, not group sex, became
the deep dark secret of our circle, and our age.

  Some evenings, I’d explore the used bookstore across the street. It was named The Honored Owl. Before it, a bird-shaped shingle hung. Rumor claimed it’d been painted during the thirties by Rockwell Kent between paychecks. (Someone later swiped the thing and sold it through Sotheby’s for a six thousand dollar minimum.)

  They let you read there in the Owl. We considered it a badge of honor to hang out and absorb without sullying our love of literature through actual cash transactions. You sat on books as you initiated other books. Some wise earlier shopper had stacked a makeshift all-book reading chair. It was made of Lamb, Amis, Lovejoy, and two complete Barchester Towers; wedged where your elbows fell, find opposing copies of A Farewell to Arms. Into the chair’s rearmost spine-support, A Pillow Book, and Henry Green’s great novel, Back. (New York is nothing if not allusive.)

  About to leave, I always stuck whatever three novels I was reading into some spots hard to reach, an advantage of being tallish. You could smell the great books disintegrating; their musty glue, their bitter ink and bandage spines, all acted on me like pipe tobacco or some form of dusty opium. I’d soon sneeze myself outdoors but I never lost the scent. Since the Owl’s half-blind owner was always pasting something, using clamps on leather bindings, the place retained the varnish odor of a workshop. Though decaying paper gave the air its stink, your final impression was, oddly, one of permanence. The paginated richness of others’ passions, yellowing yet legible. It sometimes sent me running up four flights, to type. I’d hold a blank white page and rub it till the urban oil of my thumb and forefinger ruined its perfection. How could I explain this to my parents? New York was not a sewer, it was an archive, a new bed, a wanted poster, a grape press, a new futon smelling of straw and possibility.

  Angie and Gustafson and I found we had skads else in common. The less we could control these ground-glass streets, the more we cared how our tiny “spaces” looked. We shopped alike. With serious skimming methodical glee. We boy-boys and straight girls had a nose for bargains and a penchant for extravagance and we guessed that these need not be mutually exclusive.

  Poverty-stricken spendthrifts. As good a description of Humanity as any!

  Once as we wandered Columbus Avenue, the stalky brilliant Marxist English actress from a great theatre family pounded Robert on one shoulder, handed him a twenty, smiled. “Never figured you’d get it back so fast this time, now did you, luv?” We walked on. I said nothing, practically rupturing my spleen, pretending that his heightened life was normal. One block later, Robbie greeted a Heineken delivery man, “Hot enough for you, Verne?”

  “How do you know all these damn people?”

  R. said he’d had five years on me here. “And it’s basically a friendly town, Hartley. Give them a chance, people’ll talk.”

  “People’ll talk to you.”

  It was often a call from Robert, mostly at the last minute. “Me. Come quick. I’ve just met a woman who worked as a Paris runway model with Jean Rhys, back when they were both sort of hooking on the side? And she has the most complicated accent and knew Joyce, then toured with the Gish girls, and you know how I am about Lil Gish. There are radioactive stories here and my big ole Geiger counter it’s a-clickin. Not to mention, she’s crazy to meet you, Hartley.”

  “As it happens, I’m done with work today and I’d love to join you. But, Robert, this old gal? she doesn’t know me from a cat’s ass.”

  “She will. You have so much that she’ll like.”

  “Charm, you mean?” Fishing, pitiful.

  “Oh sure, charm, but … charm is easy. The two of us put out more charm while flossing than most people do during their entire honeymoons. You know that, don’t you. —Charm? I’m told there’s even one New York cab driver who has some. No, you’ve got something far better than charm, Hartley Mims the umptyumpth.”

  “Yeah? Like … what?”

  “You have potential, Hartley. Such potential. We all see that. Problem is—you insist on writing about nice people trying to stay nice in only moderately tough test-situations. You need a higher octane of trouble. Only then will you find how decent or not they really are.”

  “But, Robbie? Just inventing tortures—feels so sadistic.”

  “That doesn’t stop God.”

  “What’s ‘God’? A category on Double Jeopardy?”

  He laughed, sad. “You’re not cruel enough to be a novelist. But at least you found the right city.

  “Assignment: Hartley must think up some dreadful things to jump the bones of his fictional darlings, by drinktime. Wild mushrooms that a family gathers then cooks into an omelette, but there was a misprint in their guidebook, see, and they picked four pounds of the wrong kind … And … what? … wait, some jerk’s trying to get this phone … Lead-based paint is chewed off a crib by the baby son of a professor and his wife and the kid is left a bit retarded. But, see, it’s the one thing, the boy’s being dumb, they cannot live with but they must. And I’m not even trying. Meanwhile, take the A train. Meet you here in twenty minutes.” He was gone.

  I now know: The term Fairy Godmother has many shadings.

  Never forget this is a fairy tale. Fairies make good subjects. Though they are very hard to keep around.

  A Fairy cannot Marry. A Fairy believes in Magic, because he cannot get a credit line in anything else. And since he so believes in Magic, he really gets to practice it at times.

  One rainy day, Robert, holding forth at our table, using handy sugar cubes, built a vertical white temple. “Doric?” Ang, entering, asked. “No,” he quipped, “Doris. —Why?”

  Ossorio’s other clients soon noticed, bringing over sweet contributions. Watching Robert’s steady hands, the old guys made bets about when it’d all fall down. The structure didn’t, not for years yet.

  Since the table was rarely wiped clean, since Ossorio respected it as Ours, a changing toylike pile of doodads often held its center. The interlocking white cubes lent our leavings an Incan nobility: Lost earrings of Angie’s, a Santa Christmas ornament found unbroken on the sidewalk, stacks of matchbooks and untraceable keys. And, once, a short dildo nobody would claim but all the regulars nicknamed, made a pet of. All this got wedged into pounds of pretty, then dingy, chunks of sugar. As we slumped here—discussing life and death, meaning art—our voices raised amid the clatter from dominoes and dice, we, still such kids, barely noticed constructing it all, everybody working on another end of it.

  Sugar-cube boats wore toothpick-and-napkin sails—a frosted city sprung up here, mutating amid and among us. The sandpile. Anyone’s.

  On Being Overly Active Sexually

  oung persons, fairly new to New York, hoping to appear cool, must lie about many things. Running with my flashy favorites, I’d begun to fib, as camouflage.

  Restaurants conquered, celebrities or celebrities’ support staffs slept with, advances paid. Hard-bitten hipness was often faked. And eventually-just when you’d prefer not—your own pretended speed catches up with you. It shoots you past where you’d hoped to stop. And, by the time you need not fake anything ever again, you’d truly prefer to.

  For several years I’d pretended going (many times) to the St. Mark’s Baths. Most everything I’d heard about the place scared me. Though it appeared a hygienic steambath committed to public swimming, weight lifting, and recreation, it was actually a maze devoted to sexual stalking. No panthers worrying their cages can suggest the crouched energy of Type-A male New Yorkers set down in a plywood maze, goal-oriented, on the humid trail of Same.

  (Once a week, on slow Tuesdays, they tried Lesbian Night. Then the corridors emptied. Mostly the gals just sat around the TV room, wearing towels, eating potato chips, and telling their life stories.)

  The procedure for getting through the front door spooked me most.

  If only Robert would go with me. His beauty friction-proofed all entrances; but then I would be lost in the backwash of that very lubricating allure.

 
I feared making some gaffe during the gatekeeper’s questions about lockers, deposits, codes, towels worn around waists, towels tied shut with the rubberized binding on your cubicle key. It seemed too codified to let a first-timer fake finesse. That mattered to me back then.

  As for parading around half naked, I was at my hunky peak and, though insecure as hell, I at least grouchily sensed that.

  One night, stood up by a date at an Indian restaurant nearby, I coasted past St. Mark’s stainless door and saw a line atypically short. I pulled a U-turn, then circled the block six times. Finally I vowed to follow strangers in and do exactly as they did. If cautious French-accented Canadians could risk it, so could I.

  One assumed that one was, by now, unsurpriseable. But what I found at the “tubs” (can we finally talk here?) shocked me. It just did.

  I had been memorizing Blake epigraphs. Now the scent of steam, poppers, rubber soles brought one to mind. “Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.”

  Well, you got to start somewhere.

  Having surrendered my clothes and checked my shoes, I found that what really made me feel nakedest was peeling off that last black holey Orion sock! How pale and huge and North Carolinian this foot looked. After wrapping all of me in a smallish white towel—Miss Sarong stalks Mr. Right—I set out to try and seem, not naïve but, native.

  Three hundred people circled each other, seeking sex from the one person not present. I read a sign THE ORGY ROOM. I entered, prepared to see three seated elderly gents, their midriff terrycloth sorely tested, discussing the rumor that Callas died of tapeworms she’d consumed to control her weight. Instead, I found one hundred males, all young to recently-so. Each was naked, all were working on each other in a tumid smacking hellish lovely silence, nearly post-Titanic. In the so-called orgy room, I met the last things I’d expected: no room, an actual orgy!