Skinned Alive (27 page)

He wanted to know how to enjoy these days without clasping them so tightly he’d stifle the pleasure. But he didn’t want to drug himself on the moment either and miss out on what was happening to him. He was losing his best friend, the witness to his life. The skill for enjoying a familiar pleasure about to disappear was hard to acquire. It was sort of like sex. If you were just unconsciously rocking in the groove you missed the kick, but if you kept mentally shouting “Wow!” you shot too soon. Knowing how to appreciate the rhythms of these last casual moments—to cherish them while letting them stay casual—demanded a new way of navigating time.

Maybe that was why these days were so beautiful. Hadn’t Joshua quoted the poet he was working on, Wallace Stevens, who’d said, “Death is the mother of beauty”? Joshua had explained that eternal, unchanging beauty would seem insipid and not at all beautiful—“a bore.”

The maids, mother and daughter, arrived at noon and began the never-ending task of washing and polishing the
pavimenti.
They preferred working together, since that way they kept each other company. Joshua liked them and he kept giving them little presents—an extra coffeepot, an old typewriter, some picture books devoted to Venetian painters. In fact, Mark noticed that Joshua was silently disposing of most of his belongings;
they carried down a sack full of old clothes and left it with the garbage outside the
portone.

Then they sauntered across Campo Santo Stefano in search of lunch. Joshua looked leaner; there was something gray and slack about his cheeks. He who’d always suffered from writer’s block was now working with greater fluency than ever before. Tap, tap, tap—the typewriter pecked its way across the page. At the pool they’d gossip. Sometimes they’d assume new characters, loosely based on their own but exaggerated toward archness. With Hajo, Mark impersonated an adult; with Ned, a child; but he and Joshua styled themselves as fantasy versions of themselves—themselves in their role of bored Venetian housewives
(“carissima!”)
or as catty Milanese queens in the rag trade, an act which would provoke astounded laughs from the two thoroughly American fellows inside them.

The days were sunnier, the nights more ambrosial than ever before. At the Ca’ Rezzonico they looked once more at the
pulcinelli
playing obscene leapfrog, but it was downstairs, as they passed a banal Canaletto, that Mark realized these palaces had been here for centuries past and would still be here for centuries to come. Only the people came and went, supernumeraries. He wanted to ask Joshua if this Venetian eternity was a consolation or an insult, but he didn’t know how to broach the subject.

Hajo called him every day from Berlin. “I’m so glad you’re with Joshua,” Hajo said. He told Mark about his friends who were dying; Mark told Hajo about Joshua. When Hajo said that both of his friends who were ill had fooled around for years at the saunas, Mark flared up. “If Joshua had sex ten times in the last five years that would be a lot. It’s not a reward for promiscuity, Hajo. It’s just bad luck.”

Mark knew they’d always be friends, but the sexual tie between them was broken now, that tension that had kept drawing them back to each other. Now Mark wondered if he’d
ever sleep with another man. If he met someone new he’d have to say he was positive. In the past he’d sometimes imagined he’d end up with a woman, even father children, but being positive had scotched that little fantasy.

Although he avoided newspapers, he picked up the
Herald Tribune
one day and read that India was planning to require blood-test results before granting visas to tourists. There went the notion of being cremated on a burning ghat.

He missed Ned.

After the regatta, Joshua decided to leave Venice. He stored a summer fan, a box of books, and his beach things—“for next summer,” he said with deliberation. He’d given away everything else; this little pile was his sole lien on life. A water taxi pulled into the
rio
under the library windows. The driver, a portly, sunburned man in a starched white uniform who stood and steered with one hand, backed them out into the Grand Canal. A barge went past carrying the stacked bleachers from the regatta viewing stand. They looked up at the new wooden Accademia bridge, then downstream to the white stone lions sipping water at the Guggenheim and beyond at the gold ball above the old customs house agleam even on this cloudy day. As they were pulling away, they took a last look at
their
palace and, smiling shyly at each other, pushed the tears aside.

In Milan Joshua boarded his plane for New York and Mark flew home to Paris. Mark behaved well at the airport, just as though it were a question of keeping up a good front until the company had all left. Maybe because his life had been so charmed (Ned called Mark and himself “the brat brigade”), the hardest thing about grief was just to accept it was happening “live” and not like a commercial on a videotape that could be edited out later.

A few weeks later Mark and Ned went to a Robbins-Balanchine evening at the Paris opera house. They were happy to be back together. They had so little money now, it looked
as though they’d be going home soon; if Mark didn’t make an effort, his business would surely go under.

The Robbins ballet was new, but the two Balanchines were old friends,
Apollo
and the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. They were both nicely danced, but the somnolent audience scarcely applauded and Mark felt offended. He’d never been able to make Parisians understand that the lobby of the New York State Theater had been the drawing room of America and that we, yes, we Americans saw in the elaborate
enchaînements
onstage a radiant vision of society.

Hadn’t Robbins called his best piece
Dances at a Gathering?
The old hymn said, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.” Now there was no Lord left to ask anything of, but in the book on modern poetry Joshua was struggling to finish hadn’t he quoted Wallace Stevens, who’d said that if Americans were to have a god now it would have to be art?

The last movement of the Violin Concerto was clearly both Stravinsky’s and Balanchine’s homage to the square dance, and just as clearly these Parisian dancers had never seen a square dance in their lives; nor had the people in the audience. The idea of a courtship dance held in the midst of a whole smiling world of grown-ups (“Alleman left and do-si-do”)—oh, the sweetly unsensual spirit of checked, flouncy dresses and hand-held Stetsons—eluded these bored Parisian performers, all state employees eager to wrap it up and head home.

Mark wept at this old mirror, leprous with flaking silver, that was being held up to reflect the straight young features of Balanchine’s art. Ned held his hand in the dark and Mark spoiled Ned’s silk
pochette
by blowing his nose into it.

Ned whispered, “Are you crying for Joshua?”

Mark nodded. Seeing the beauty he’d known with Joshua so distorted made him feel all the farther from home. His muscles registered the word “home” with a tensing, as though
to push himself up out of the chair and head back toward home, to Joshua and the stingers at the Riv and the wild nights of sex and dance, but then he relaxed back into his seat, since he knew that home wasn’t there anymore. Ned was the only home he had.

I’ve written various versions of my youth but I’ve always left out my first real lover, a man I lived with for five years and whom I met in the spring of my senior year at the University of Michigan. He’s been stamped onto every page of my adult life as a watermark, though sometimes faintly; the French would say he’s made his appearance
en filigrane.
His name was Randall Worth and I liked to think he was a descendant of the great Worth, one of the first Parisian couturiers of the 1890s, but in fact he was from a long line of Episcopalian ministers in Canada and small midwestern merchants.

In old-fashioned comedies the star always makes a late entrance, as will Randall, just to build up the suspense.

I’d known a few older gay men while I was still in junior high school back in Chicago and from them I’d learned to camp outrageously, as we used to say. At least I could report on it and feebly imitate it, even if I didn’t have the guts to do it
publicly. Camping meant to make a spectacle of yourself, a loud, hissing, gender-switching, self-dramatizing piece of street theater. You might take over a busy corner with a “girlfriend” and start to denounce him: “You vicious quane, I saw you makin’ goo-goo eyes at mah man.”

To which the “girlfriend”—a skinny six-footer in ballet slippers, wheat jeans, powder-blue angora sweater and full, glorious makeup composed of every color of an industrial sunset—might reply, a grin on his lips to indicate it was all a contest, though no less likely to tip over into a cat fight, “Girl, why would I ever make a play for that overgrown matron, that lisping, limp-wristed tired old fairy you call your husband? Honey, she’s pure gal, you can just hear those estrogens surging when she gets near a real man like my George, why she’s the only person I know who wears knee pads to a public toilet. They’re attached to her garter belt. If she’s butch she could die with the secret….”

And on and on. Because I’d learned this shocking dialect, this role-reversing, value-toppling form of self-display, this mock hostility trembling on the edge of real hostility and unaware of the distinction, I enjoyed a certain cachet among the five other middle-class gay men I met in a playwriting seminar at the University of Michigan. I taught them how to be gay, how to denounce each other humorously or “read each other’s beads,” as we said. Up till then the only homosexuals I’d encountered had been either these street-fighting queens in Chicago or wary, self-effacing professors in Ann Arbor who recognized (but would not directly acknowledge) an affinity with me. But in the playwriting seminar everything was funny, even “naughty,” and charged with an electrifying energy. We kept egging one another on toward excess.

In class we’d discuss our work while the professor nodded uneasily, his smile fading while we doubled up with incomprehensible
laughter or gushed over with extravagant praise. We’d brook no contradictions, for we were affirming our absolute sovereignty as arbiters of taste.

Each one of us would be given one session to present his work, which meant reading it out loud and playing all the parts. Then all of us in the inner queer circle would declare loyally that the play was stunning, a triumph of calculated wit and sophisticated repartee.

Our professor, a soft-spoken old man considered too important to allow to retire, had cobbled together a theory of play construction thirty years ago, one that had reputedly guided some of the leading names of the American theater to their current success. It was a stolid, workmanlike theory that held that every script must pose a MDQ, a Major Dramatic Question (Will Hamlet avenge his father’s death?) in the first scene, flirt with possible solutions and doubts in the development (Yes, but can the ghost be trusted?), before terminating with an answer (Hamlet will assassinate his uncle) and, as an added fillip, Hamlet’s death, a transposition of the resolution into a higher key that brings the drama to a surprising but inevitable close. Throughout, the action must advance and retreat in a “wavelike motion” as it phrases and revises the MDQ.

The professor had an unwelcome knack for dismissing our most potent verbal effects, our most thrilling
coups de théâtre
, in order to uncover underlying flaws of construction. He might as well have reproached a bitchy, camping Chicago queen after a tirade for having committed a small error in grammar or told a panting diva at the end of an aria that she’d not dotted her eighth notes. Dr. Smith seemed unimpressed with the “vehicle” Tom had written for the Lunts, a sex farce about an aging actress who runs into her first lover, a retired matinee idol, at Baden-Baden. Nor did he much like my Ionesco pastiche
about a black maid who destroys the white family she works for, then goes mad.

Dr. Smith’s cavils would be forgotten as soon as we queens withdrew to a restaurant for an after-class session. “Darling, your curtains are impeccable! That second-act finale!”

“Oh, you’re talking about my play, I thought you were talking about my home decoration.”

“I’m serious, it gave me goosebumps, hardly a look suitable to the extreme décolleté I happen to be wearing.”

“My pet, is it wise to wear something so diaphanous given your full figure? And is
green
altogether suitable to a
gel
no longer in her first youth?”

“I treasure the advice of an older woman.”

We sat upstairs at the Pancake Palace (the Palazzo to us) and camped outrageously, our lips stained blue from the sweet blueberry sauce we’d been pouring over our stacks. Soon we were a bit sick from the endless cups of coffee, the bottled fruit sauces and the ambition to be as bitchy as the dialogue in
All About Eve
or
The Women.

Of course we were the sons of plumbers or salesmen and their idea of conversation was the unseasonable weather or the fine mileage that little Chevy’s been getting; not all of our sweaty determination could turn us into sassy Hollywood smart alecks. We could roll our eyes, do double takes, coo and murmur like pouter pigeons, but still silences would creep into our dialogue and our snappy comebacks would go soggy. If accused of something I’d describe a great arc with my hand, touch my chest and ask, soundlessly,
“Moi?”
exhaling a mouthful of mentholated cigarette smoke. Of course even our most extravagant gestures and whoops were muted as we oscillated between our desire to establish an identity and our fear it would be discovered. The Chicago queens I knew “turned out,” as actors said, that is faced the audience and projected their
voices; we turned in. Whereas they were itching to radicalize every Elevated car or coffee shop they entered, the minute we left the Palazzo we reassumed the protective coloring of forgettable fraternity boy, silent classmate, invisible passerby.

One member of our group had worked as a sound engineer on the student station and knew how to undermine someone else’s monologue by flashing all the hand signals used in radio to indicate just one more minute to go (a forefinger held up), a half minute (the finger crooked), closing moments (a finger turning wildly like a sweeping clock hand) and time to wrap it up (a finger slashing a throat below bulging eyes). He’d start flashing these infuriating signals the instant one of us would launch into a speech.