Authors: Cynthia Ozick
At the time it seemed a long friendship—Chester’s with Ben—and, except for that single aching afternoon in Pelham Bay, which came like a fever and passed like a fever, I was as wary of Ben as I was of Carla, as I was of Chester’s entrance into Tatyana’s apotheosis. Like Byron’s sister, I wanted Chester for myself. I soon understood that it was useless: he was a public magnet. Everyone was his straight man and acolyte. To be with Chester was to join his gang at the edge of bohemia, or what was imagined to be bohemia, since all the would-be bohemians went home every night, by subway, to their fathers and mothers in their Bronx and Brooklyn apartments. In our little house in Pelham Bay, I had my own tiny room, flowery with the do-it-yourself yellow wallpaper my mother had put up as a surprise. Onto this surface I pasted, with Scotch tape, a disjointed Picasso woman, cut out from
Life
magazine. She was all bright whorls and stripes and misplaced eyes and ears. She had whirligig breasts. She gave me pride but no pleasure. She stood for eccentricity, for the Unconventional—she was an inkling of what Chester was more consciously heading for. There was nothing of any of this in Ben—no scrambled testing-grounds, no pugnacity, no recklessness, no longing for the inchoate, no unconventionality. No intimations of unknown realms. He was a solid student, with inconspicuous notions; he was conspicuously good-looking, in the style of the familiar hero of a 1940’s B movie: broad-shouldered, square-chinned, long-lashed. His chief attraction was the velvety plenitude of his deeply black hair: one wavy lock dropped in a scallop on his forehead, like Superman’s. Ben was rarely seen in the commons. He was not one of Chester’s cosmopolitan hangers-on; he was too businesslike, too intent on propriety.
But he represented for Chester what my Picasso woman represented for me: the thing closed off, the thing I could not become. I could not become one of the bohemians: I was diffident and too earnest, too “inhibited.” I was considered “naive,” I was not daring enough. When Chester’s gang began to meet in Village bars after classes, I envied but could not follow.
Yellowing on the yellow walls, my cut-out Picasso lingered for years. Chester’s attachment to Ben was, by contrast, brief, though while it lasted it was a stretched-out, slow-motion sequence—the stages of a laboratory experiment requiring watchful patience. Ben had the glamorous long torso Chester would have liked to have. He had, especially, the hair. Ben was a surrogate body, a surrogate head of hair. Girls were smitten by him. He was an ambassador from the nation of the normal and the ordinary. When Chester cast off Ben, it was his farewell to the normal and the ordinary. It was the beginning of the voyage out. In the commons one day, not long after Ben was jettisoned, coming on Chester surrounded by his gang and dangling, between third finger and thumb, a single hair, I asked (the innocent candor of an assistant clown) what it was. “A pubic hair,” he retorted.
He was never again not outrageous; he was never again soft. He had determined to shut down the dreamy boy who mooned over girls. Either they rebuffed him, or, worse, embraced him as a friendly pet, good for banter or hilarity. He was nobody’s serious boyfriend. Tatyana, after Carla’s party, had gone on cosseting him as a plaything to tantalize. Diana, always empathic, withheld the recesses of her heart. I was a literary rival, a puritan and a bluestocking. Carla was an old shoe. What, after having been so much crushed, was left for Chester’s moist sensibility? It dried into celebrity. It dried into insolence and caprice. Chester’s college fame depended—was founded—on the acid riposte, the quick sting; on anything implausible. He flung out the unexpected, the grotesque, the abnormal. Truman Capote’s short stories were in vogue then, miniature Gothic concoctions specializing in weird little girls, in clairvoyance, in the uncanny. Chester began modeling his own stories on these. He committed to memory long passages from an eerie narrative called “Miriam”; he was bewitched
by Truman Capote’s lushness, mystery, baroque style. In his own writing he was gradually melting into Truman Capote. He opened his wallet and pulled out an address book: that number there, he bragged, was Truman Capote’s unlisted telephone, set down by the polished little master himself.
All this while Chester was wearing the yellow wig. He wore it more and more carelessly. It was as curly as a sheep’s belly, and now took on a ragged, neglected look, grimy. It hardly mattered to him if it went askew, lifting from his ears or pressing too far down over where the absent eyebrows should have been.
In 1966 he published a portion of “The Foot,” an abandoned novel that is more diary and memoir than fiction. By then his style was entering its last phase, disjointed, arbitrary, surreal—deliberately beautiful for a phrase or two, then deliberately un-beautiful, then dissolved into sloth. The characters are mercurial fragments or shadowless ghosts, wrested out of exhaustion by a drugged and disintegrating will: Mary Monday and her double, also named Mary Monday; Peter Plate, standing for Paul Bowles, whom Chester knew in Morocco; Larbi (“the Arab”), Chester’s cook, servant, and sexual companion. All changing themes and short takes, “The Foot” is part travelogue (portraits of Morocco and of New York), part writhing confession (“my long idle life, always occupied by suffering,” “I am afraid of who I am behind my own impersonations”), and part portentous pointless fantasy. The effect is of a home slide-show in a blackened room: the slides click by, mainly of gargoyles, and then, without warning, a series of recognizable family shots flashes out—but even these responsible, ordinary people are engaging in gargoylish activity. In this way one impressionist sketch after another jumps into the light, interrupted by satiric riffs—satiric even when mildly pornographic—until five heartbreaking pages of suffering recollected without tranquility all at once break out of their frames of dread, cry their child’s cry, and fall back into the blackness. “Do you let a book like this, this book, go back into the world just as it is—with its wounds and blemishes, its bald head and lashless eyes, exposed to the light?” the section starts off, and darkens into a melancholy unburdening:
I was fourteen when I put on my first wig. It was, I believe, my sister’s idea. So she and my mother and I went—I forget where … Simmons & Co?—some elegantish salon with gold lamé drapes where they did not do such splendid work.
I sat and accepted the wig. It was like having an ax driven straight down the middle of my body. Beginning at the head. Whack! Hacked in two with one blow like a dry little tree. Like a sad little New York tree.
I wore it to school only. Every morning my mother put it on for me in front of the mirror in the kitchen and carefully combed it and puffed it and fluffed it and pasted it down. Then, before going out of the house, I would jam a hat on top of it, a brown fedora, and flatten the wig into a kind of matting. I hated it and was ashamed of it, and it made me feel guilty.
And so to school. The Abraham Lincoln High School.
Up until then I’d gone to a Yeshiva where all the boys wore hats, little black yarmulkas. I too wore a hat, though not a yarmulka, which only covered the tip of the head. I wore a variety of caps. I’d wear a cap to shreds before getting a new one, since I felt any change at all focused more attention on my head.…
Coming home from school was a problem. As once the world had been divided for me into Jews and Italians, it was now divided between those who could see me with the wig [and hat] and those who could see me [only] with a hat. Only my most immediate family—mother, father, sister, brother—could see me with both, and only they could see me bald.
Hat people and wig people. Wig people at school. Hat people at home. The wig people could see me with both wig
and
hat (hat-on-top-of-wig, that is). But the hat people must never see me with wig, or even with wig and hat.
This went on for years, decades.
The terror of encountering one side in the camp of the other. Of the wig people catching me without the wig. Of the hat people catching me with it. Terror …
And then, there from the corner where the trolley stopped, if it was a fair day, I would see my mother and maybe an aunt or two or a neighbor sitting on our porch in the sun.
Hat people.
Horrible, unbearable, the thought of walking past those ladies to get into the house.… Sometimes I would go around
corners, down alleys, through other people’s gardens to reach our back fence. I’d climb over the back fence so I could get into the house via the door which was usually open.
A thief! Just like a thief I’d have to sneak through the side lanes, unseen across backyards.…
I could bear no references to the wig. If I had to wear it, all right. But I wasn’t going to talk about it. It was like some obscenity, some desperate crime on my head. It was hot coals in my mouth, steel claws gripping my heart, etc. I didn’t want to recognize the wig … or even my baldness. It just wasn’t there. Nothing was there. It was just something that didn’t exist, like a third arm, so how could you talk about it? But it hurt, it hurt.…
My second wig was a much fancier job than the first. An old Alsatian couple made it; I think they were anti-Semitic, she out of tradition, he out of fidelity to her.
When the wig was ready, my father and mother and I went to collect it. Evening. I wish I could remember my father’s reaction. Mama probably fussed and complained. I imagine Papa, though, like me, simply pretending that the whole thing didn’t exist, wasn’t even happening.…
Anyway, most likely, he said something polite like—how nice it looks!…
But the evening of the new wig we went to a restaurant, me wearing the wig. A white-tiled Jewish restaurant. Vegetarian.… With fluorescent lights …
I just want you to see the three of us—even at home we never ate together—at that white-linened, white-tiled, blue-white-lighted restaurant.…
I wonder what we ate that night or why the evening took place at all. It is such a strange thing for Papa to have done. Gone to the wigmakers at all. Met me and Mama in the city. Taken us out to supper.
Perhaps there were a lot of mirrors in that restaurant. Catching a glimpse of myself, wig or no, is dreadful for me. I have to approach a mirror fully prepared, with all my armor on.
But I have a turn-off mechanism for mirrors as well. The glimpse-mirrors, I mean. I simply go blind.
When Chester set down these afflicted paragraphs, he was thirty-seven years old. He had long ago discarded the wig. He had
long ago discarded our friendship. He had ascended into the hanging gardens of literary celebrity:
Esquire
included him in its annual Red Hot Center of American writing, and he was a prolific and provocative reviewer in periodicals such as
Partisan Review
and
Commentary
. He had lived in Paris, close to the founding circle of
Paris Review
; at parties he drank with Jimmy Baldwin and George Plimpton. He had been drawn to Morocco by Paul Bowles, the novelist and composer who, according to legend, ruled in Tangier like a foreign mandarin ringed by respectful disciples and vaguely literary satellites devoted to smoking hemp. In Tangier Chester finally took off the wig for good; I, who had known him only when he was still at home with his family in Brooklyn, never saw him without it. His anguish was an undisclosable secret. The wig could not be mentioned, neither by wig-wearer nor by wig-watcher. No one dared any kind of comment or gesture. Yet there were hints—protective inklings—that Ben Solomons had somehow passed through this taboo: on the rainy day Chester brought him to Pelham Bay, it was Ben who, with a sheltering sweep around Chester’s shoulders, made the first move to raise Chester’s jacket up over his matted crown.
Gore Vidal, in his introduction to a posthumous collection, including “The Foot,” of Chester’s fiction (
Head of a Sad Angel: Stories
1953–1966, edited by Edward Field and published by Black Sparrow Press in 1990), speaks of Chester’s life as “a fascinating black comedy.” “Drink and drugs, paranoia and sinister pieces of trade did him in early,” he concludes. I suppose he is not wrong. Yet “sinister pieces of trade” is an odious locution and a hard judgment, even if one lacks, as I confess I do, the wherewithal—the plain data—to see into its unreachable recesses. Vidal calls Chester “Genet with a brain.” But if Vidal is alluding to the bleaker side of homosexual mores, Chester himself can be neither his source nor his guide; Chester’s breezy erotic spirit has more in common with the goat-god Pan at play than with Genet in prison, scratching a recording pencil across brown paper bags. (Genet’s portraits of homosexuals were anyhow tantamount to heartbreak for Chester. “The naked truth of Genet’s writing,” he remarked in a 1964 review of
Our Lady of the Flowers
, “continues to be unbearable.” And
he noted that even “the ecstatic whole of [a] masterpiece” is “cold comfort to a man in agony.”)
Except for that single passage in “The Foot,” nothing in Chester’s mind was not literary. His life, nearly all of it, was a lyrical, satirical, or theatrical mirage. In the end the mirage hardened into a looking glass. But what was not strained through literary affectation or imitation or dreamscape, what it would be cruder than cruel to think of as black comedy, is the child’s shame, the child’s naked truth, that hits out like a blast of lightning in the middle of “The Foot.” The child is set apart as a freak. And then the bald boy grows into a bold man; but inside the unfinished man—unfinished because the boy has still not been exorcised—the hairless child goes on suffering, the harried boy runs. “I did have the great good luck never to have so much as glimpsed Alfred Chester,” Vidal admits; nevertheless he does not hesitate to name him “a genuine monster.” It may require a worldly imagination of a certain toughened particularity—a temperament familiar with kinkiness and hospitable to it—to follow Vidal into his conjectures concerning Chester’s sexual practices (“sinister pieces of trade”), but one must leave all heartlessness behind in order to enter the terrors of the man, or the child, who believes he is a monster.
And it was only baldness. Or it was not so much baldness as wig. From any common-sense point of view, baldness is not a significant abnormality, and in the adult male is no anomaly at all. But the child felt himself to be abnormal, monstrous; the child was stricken, the child saw himself a frenzied freak tearing down lane after lane in search of a path of escape.