Authors: Edmund White
Every moment of George’s last four months had been absorbing. They quarreled a lot, especially about little dumb things, as though they needed the nagging and gibbering of everyday pettiness to drown out the roar of eternity. George, who’d never cared about anything except the day after tomorrow, suddenly became retrospective in a sour way.
They quarreled about whether Ray had ever needed George, which was absurd, since in the past Ray had been deeply reliant on George’s energy and contacts. Betty had repeatedly warned Ray against living forever in George’s shadow. What she hadn’t known was how much he, Ray, had always babied George at
home—nursed him through hangovers, depressions, business worries, even attacks of self-hatred after he’d been rejected by a trick.
George, of course, was the famous one. Starting in the early 1970s he’d been called in by one major corporation after another to give each an image, and George had designed everything from the letterhead to the company jet. He’d think up a color scheme, a logo, a typeface, an overall look; he’d redo the layouts of the annual report. He’d work with an advertising creative director on the product presentation and the campaign slogans. He’d demand control over even the tiniest details, down to the lettering on the business cards of the sales force. Since he was six-foot-three, rangy and athletic, had a deep voice and had fathered a son during an early marriage, the executives he dealt with never suspected him of being gay, nor was George a crusader of any sort. He liked winning and he didn’t want to start any game with an unfair handicap. George also had a temper, a drive to push his ideas through, and he wasn’t handsome—three more things that counted as straight among straights.
He’d also had the heterosexual audacity to charge enormous fees. His job as corporate image maker was something he’d more or less invented. He’d realized that most American corporations were paralyzed by pettiness, rivalry and fear, and only an outsider could make things happen. George was able to bring about more changes in a month than some cringing and vicious vice-president could effect in a year, if ever. George made sure he reported directly to the president or chairman, although as soon as he came “onstream” he solicited everyone else’s “input.”
On summer weekends George and Ray had flown in a seaplane to Fire Island, where they’d rented a big house on the ocean side complete with swimming pool. Around that pool
they’d spent twelve summers with just a phone, a little acid and thirty hunky men. They had, or Ray had, pounds of Polaroids to prove it. Here was the White Party and the house flying a thousand white balloons and Skipper in the foreground with his famous smile, the smile that earned him a hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Dead now of his own—not hand, but leap: he’d leapt from his penthouse on angel dust. And here was the Star Wars Party with George as Darth Vader and his arm around little Tommy as R2D2, the cute kid who wanted to be a DJ but never made it, though he did amazing disco tapes he sold to friends in editions of fifty.
And here was George as Darken. Older guys hated George’s dabbling in drag, since they associated it with the sissy 1950s. And the younger kids simply didn’t get it; they’d heard of it, although it didn’t seem funny to them. But for George and Ray’s generation, the Stonewall generation, drag was something they’d come to late, after they’d worked their way through every other disguise. For George, such a sexy big man with a low voice and brash ways, the character he’d invented, Darleen, had provided a release—not a complete contrast, but a slight transposition. For one thing, she was a slut, but an intimidating one who, when horny, yanked much smaller men to her hairy chest without a second’s hesitation. For another, she had a vulgar but on-target way of talking over George’s current corporation and reducing it to its simplest profile; it was Darleen in a drugged state who’d mumbled forth the slogans now selling seven of the biggest American products.
And Darleen had introduced a certain variety into Ray and George’s sex life, for she liked to be passive in bed, whereas George was tirelessly active. No one would have believed it, not even their closest friends, but Ray had fucked Darleen, whereas he could never have fucked George. After sex they’d weep from laughter, the two of them, Ray sweaty and gold
with his white tan line, and George, foundered, skinny legs in black net stockings and the lashes coming unglued on his, yes, his left eye.
When George died, Ray thought of burying him in his drag, but the two people he happened to mention it to (although fairly far-out numbers themselves) drew back in horror. “You’ve got to be kidding,” one of them had said, as though Ray were now committable for sure. Ray had wanted to say, “Shouldn’t we die as we lived? Why put George in a dark suit he never wore in life?”
But he didn’t say anything, and George was buried as his parents wished. His father had been a cop, now retired, his mother a practical nurse, and in the last twenty years they’d made a lot of money in real estate. They liked fixing up old houses, as did George. Ray had a superstition that George had succumbed to the illness only because he’d worked so hard on his own loft. George was a perfectionist and he trusted no one else to do a job correctly. Every little chore, and most especially the lacquering of the loft walls, was something he’d done by himself, again and again to get everything right.
Now he was dead and Ray had to go on with his own life, but he scarcely knew how or why to pick up the threads. The threads were bare, worn thin, so that he could see right through what should have been the thick stuff of everyday comings and goings, could see pale blue vistas. “You must look out for yourself,” George had always said. But what self?
Ray still went to the gym three times a week as he’d done for almost twenty years. He never questioned anything here and resented even the smallest changes, such as the installation of a fruit-juice bar or a computerized billing system always on the blink.
And then Ray had Anna to feed and play with. Since she’d
been George’s only other real companion toward the end, she felt comfortable and familiar. They’d lie in bed together and purr, and that was nice but it wasn’t a sign pointing to a new life, only a burned offering to his past, itself burned and still smoking.
He thought he was too young to have had to renounce so much. He’d always known that he’d have to end in renunciation, but he didn’t like being rushed. He thought of George’s long femur bones slowly emerging in the expensive coffin.
And of course he had his job. He did public relations for a major chemical company with headquarters on Sixth Avenue. It was a gig George had found him; George had done a total facelifting for Amalgamated Anodynes. Nearly everything about the company was reprehensible. It had a subsidiary in South Africa. Its biggest plant was in South Carolina, precisely because there the right-to-work laws, as they were called in the best Orwellian manner, had banned most of the unions. A.A. had produced a fabric for children’s wear that had turned out to be flammable; Ray had even had to draft for the president’s signature some very high-level waffling as a statement to the press. And Amalgamated Anodynes had a lousy record with women and minorities, although a creepy Uncle Tom headed the company’s equal-hiring-practices commission.
Worst of all was Ray’s boss, Helen, the token female vice-president. Helen was by turns solicitous and treacherous, servile to superiors and tyrannical to her staff, an old-fashioned schemer who knew more about office politics than her job.
Following a run-in with Helen a few days after the funeral (which, of course, he hadn’t been able to mention), he’d locked himself in the toilet and cried and cried, surprised there was so much mucus in his head. Where was it stored normally, in which secret cavity? He was also surprised by how lonely he felt. Lonely, or maybe spaced. George had always been barking at him, scolding or praising him; now the silence was oddly
vacant, as though someone had pushed past a last gate and entered into the limitless acreage of space and night.
In order to cry he had to say to himself, “I’m giving in to total self-pity,” because otherwise he was so stoic these postmortem days that he’d never have let himself be ambushed by despair. Why did he keep this job? Was it to please George, who always wanted him to go legit, who’d never approved of his “beatnik jobs”? George had used “beatnik,” “hippie” and “punk” interchangeably to dramatize the very carelessness of his contempt.
Ray had grown up on a farm in northern Ohio near Findlay and still had in his possession a second prize for his cow from the state fair; he’d sewn it and his Future Farmers of America badge to his letter jacket. What big-city sentimentalists never understood about the rural existence they so admired was that it was dull and lonely, unnaturally lonely, but it left lots of time for reading.
He’d read and read and won a first prize in the Bellefontaine spelling bee and another as the captain of the Carey debating team against Sandusky on the hot subject of “free trade.” His grades were so good he received a scholarship to Oberlin, where, in his second year, he’d switched his major from agronomy to philosophy.
From there he’d gone on to the University of Chicago, where he’d joined the Committee on Social Thought and eventually written a thesis on Durkheim’s concept of “anomie.” His father, who wore bib overalls and had huge, fleshy ears and read nothing but the Bible, but that daily, would shake his head slowly and stare at the ground whenever the subject of his son’s education came up. His mother, however, encouraged him. She was the school librarian, a thin woman with moist blue eyes and hands red from poor circulation, who drank coffee all day and read everything, everything. She’d been proud of him.
But she too had had her doubts when, after he received his doctorate, he’d drifted to Toronto and joined an urban gay commune, grown his blond hair to his shoulders and done little else besides holding down part-time jobs and writing articles analyzing and lamenting the lesbian-gay male split. In the doctrinaire fashion of those days, he’d angrily denounced all gay men and assumed a female name for himself, Anna. The name wasn’t intended as a drag name (although later George had insisted he use it as one), but simply as a statement of his position against gender distinctions. Only his friends in the commune could call him Anna with a straight face.
Unlike most of the other early gay liberationists, Ray had actually had sex with other men. His affairs were shy, poetic and decidedly unfancy in bed. Despite his political beliefs, he insisted on being on top, which he admitted was a “phallocratie” hang-up, although nothing felt to him more natural than lavishing love on a subdued man, similarly smooth-skinned, slender and ponytailed.
Then one summer he’d met Jeff, a New Yorker and a contributor to the
Body Politic
who was every bit as ideological as Ray but much more muscular and amusing. When Jeff’s Toronto vacation came to an end, Ray moved to New York to be with him. He justified the move to the other communards by pointing out that New York was a literary center. “So is Toronto!” they’d objected, for they were also Canadian patriots.
Ray had inchoate literary aspirations. For years he’d dutifully kept a journal. When he reread it after living in New York awhile, he found: the voluminous self-analysis neither true nor false; the recorded ideas a good deal sharper than those he was currently entertaining; and the descriptions of nature accurate and mildly, solidly of value.
When he looked for a job as a writer in New York, all he
could find, given his lack of credentials (his Ph.D. in philosophy counted as a drawback) was a position on
Conquistador!—
a sleazy tits-and-ass magazine for which he penned the picture captions in the centerfold (“Lovely Linda is a stewardess and flies, natch, for Aer Lingus”). The indignities (plus low pay) of that job he tried to compensate for by reading manuscripts in the evening for Grove Press and evaluating them artistically and commercially. Since he’d read little except the classics in school, his standards were impossibly high, and since his acquaintanceship till now had included only Ohio farmers, Chicago intellectuals and Toronto gay liberationists, his grasp of the potential market for any particular book was skewed.
He drifted from job to job, ghosted several chapters of a U.S. history college textbook for a tottering publishing house, worked as a bartender in a black-glass, red-velvet singles bar, taught one semester at a snooty Episcopalian boys’ school in Brooklyn Heights, spent one winter as a stock boy at a chic Lucite boutique some friends owned, fled another winter to Key West, where he wore short shorts and served rum-and-coconut “conch-outs” around the pool of a gay guest house (he saw the coconut shells as shrunken skulls). He was hired because he’d long since joined a gym, acquired a beefy but defined body, traded in his ponytail and severe manner for a ready laugh and a crewcut (“Wear a Jantzen and a smile,” as the old swimsuit slogan had put it). Naturally he no longer insisted on being called Anna. He’d also moved bumpily from one affairlet to another and had been embarrassed that most of them had ended in squabbles over money or fidelity.
Into this confusion, so rife with opportunities he was unable to see how little hope it held out, George had entered. They were both guests at someone’s house in New York, and when they helped out washing up, their hands met under the suds. When he later tried to pinpoint what had made this relationship
take and stick he thought it could be seen as a barter—George’s forcefulness for Ray’s beauty, say. George was homely if sexy, yet he didn’t sense his own appeal and he dwelled on all his imperfections. Ray on the other hand was “pretty” in the special sense that word acquired in the mid-1970s to mean massive shoulders, shaggy mustache, permanent tan, swelling chest. He was also pretty in the more usual sense, for his full lips seemed to be traced in light where a slightly raised welt outlined them, his deepset blue eyes contained an implosion of gold particles falling into the black holes of his pupils, his jaw had comic-book strength and his teeth were so long and white they looked dangerous. And now that he was in his twenties one could discern brown-gold hair on his chest spreading wings over his lungs like that goddess who spreads her arms to protect the pharaoh from all harm.