Authors: Edmund White
I was too much in love to resent Randall’s newfound interest in me; in fact I was grateful for the leverage.
By September I’d landed a job at Time-Life Books and found
a walk-up railroad apartment on MacDougal Street between Bleecker and Houston, once the heart of the Village. The hippie movement was just beginning and the streets were thronged with young people in beads and velvet and rayon polished to look like silk. On a Saturday night cars could scarcely breast their way through the throngs of pedestrians. All the noise and activity, though, were in the streets; the street-level Italian restaurants—serving their heaped platters of spaghetti
vongole
, garlic bread, stuffed breast of veal and sweet, heavy cannoli—were as empty and tranquil as ever as the old waiter with his sparse hair dyed black and his red jacket and black clip-on tie changed the dishes with a mournful sympathy. The cafés, however, with their hissing espresso machines, opera records and wallpaper made of yellowing French newspapers, were crowded.
Two cultures were coexisting uneasily, one young and hip, the other aged but fiercely entrenched and territorial. The hip culture was symbolized by a new shop in which customers could create their own abstract canvases by dribbling acrylics onto squares of white paper spinning in a cylinder. The old Italian ways seemed to be represented by the giant pair of alabaster urns, lit from within, just inside the window of Procacino’s Funeral Home.
I brought Randall to my apartment in September when Cy broke up with him and he found himself homeless. Randall had decided not to finish his degree back in Michigan.
Nothing, I suppose, is as powerful for me as the idea of actually living with someone; “living” and “sleeping” are transitive verbs for me, intimate and cherishing ones. Once Randall was in my possession I was happy. I’d rented our tiny three-room railroad apartment furnished from a girl named Sandy who kept threatening to come back to New York but never did. On Sandy’s fold-out couch bed with the humped back and broken springs, we tossed and turned, while all around us our
old Italian neighbors sang, called to one another from window to window, heated up tomato sauce and cranked laundry across the narrow space between one tenement and the next. In the Midwest we’d lived in seemingly empty spaces where, nevertheless, everyone spied on us; here we saw and heard people on every side but they were profoundly indifferent to us.
The first time we made love I saw my hand marks raise temporary red welts on Randall’s extraordinarily sensitive skin. To look at those gray-blue eyes an inch away from my own or to click my teeth against those brilliant white teeth seemed a profanation. We read Cavafy’s poems and believed we were his decadent young men consumed by vice, our eyes bistered by desire.
I discovered Randall was subject to deep, annihilating depressions that would last for days. He would go out walking in thin shoes through rain or snow and return at midnight as pale and silent as before. Dejected, he would sit before a cup of tea I’d made him and not even sip it. I felt his unhappiness was a reproach to me. Confident in my powers as a psychologist (hadn’t the girls at the office told me I’d really, really helped them?) I told Randall that depression was not an ungovernable act of nature but something one could fight.
“Your trouble,” I said, “is that you’re too proud to admit that a small slight to your vanity could send you into such a terrible decline, so you prefer to invent some vague cosmic reason for it—the meaninglessness of it all.”
Hamlet did not want to be cheered up. I sank to my knees before him at the kitchen table and begged him to feel better. He gave a small wintry smile but I felt he was very remote. It was as though he were looking up at me through a small bathysphere window and I was just a distant, flickering fin.
Our love worked well because Randall was the one man in a thousand who welcomed devotion and who, like a medieval princess, believed in it only after it had been proved by many
deeds and long trials. Most men like chasing after—rather than being—the quarry and flee someone too obviously in love; being adored suffocates and gives them too little imaginative scope. Only someone unobtainable leaves enough room for dreams, inspires longing, promotes scheming and implies a rival, whereas a quick and total conquest is the last act and one that abrogates all needs for the preceding drama. But Randall had had enough strife at home and wanted to be cherished.
I so enjoyed serving him and supporting him and listening to him that I forgot my own existence, certainly my own uninteresting face; if I would glance at my own reflection after a long evening spent with him I’d be offended by the reminder that such sustained communion hadn’t improved my looks.
I learned what a burden beauty can be. Drunk men at parties would take an instant dislike to Randall. Eventually I figured out their reasoning: I want him—he thinks he’s too good for me—the
bastard!
He didn’t want to be liked merely for his looks but needed to maintain them
just in case.
To dress to go down to the corner deli could take an hour and necessitated trying on every garment he owned (he didn’t own very many). When he’d meet new people he’d turn on a totally fake smile that struck me as ridiculous but that seldom failed to seduce a newcomer. He worried about being too short and always walked on the inner, supposedly higher side of the sidewalk (“Of course it’s higher, so the rain will drain into the gutter”). He knew where every mirror in the neighborhood was and if I thought he was cruising someone I usually surprised him looking at his own reflection. Girls at the Herbert Berghof acting school fell in love with him and spent hours with him discussing his profile, composite, soul. He even slept with one girl who gave him crabs—or so he told me. More likely it was a man.
Not that we ever pretended to be faithful to each other.
Through jokes and the implied morality underpinning apparently casual remarks, we nudged each other toward the promiscuity we longed for, which was integral to our idea of bohemianism. Since he was handsome his affairs were long, romantic seductions that started when an admirer sent him a free drink or whistled at him in the street; the top fashion designer of the day screeched to a halt in his sports car, took Randall’s address and messengered him plane tickets to Egypt, which Randall returned with a coolly polite note in his best Palmer-method script. One day I had sex with a brassy young playwright who said, “You make love just like this kid I met yesterday, Randall Worth. What a beauty
he
was!”
I wasn’t a beauty. I looked like everyone else, and frequently people greeted me with the wrong name. Because I was so average my sex life was catch as catch can. I let the Village monster, a Frankenstein-monster lookalike, lure me up to his apartment and take pornographic pictures of me. More than once Randall looked at the very men I’d been fucked by the day before and said, “What is that man staring at? How can these
trolls
be so shameless? Does he honestly think we’d want to talk to him?”
I was never envious of Randall. I was proud of him. His beauty seemed heraldic and I felt custodial if elaborately casual toward it, exactly as though I were to introduce a girl with dirty hair and dark glasses to someone as “the Princess Palatine.” We made love to each other only rarely. Randall had never been excited by me, since he was drawn to scrawny, dark boys.
I lived day and night beside the hothouse flower of Randall’s body and woke to see the faint morning light being absorbed by his porous skin—it was like waking up beside Antinoüs. One night I was still sleeping when Randall entered me, which was a sensation so sweet and soothing—if separated out from the turbulent feelings of guilt when I was awake and being
fucked—that I was shocked by this proof that I’d become really and truly gay. Until now I had imagined it was a vice that had something to do with the will. Yes, homosexuality was a disease of the will, yet this deep satisfying pleasure was wholly involuntary.
We weren’t snobbish in any of the usual ways. We didn’t care about money. Someone—was it Oscar Wilde?—had said that for him the necessities were luxuries, the luxuries necessities, and that became our creed. Randall’s necessary luxuries were all the trappings of his acting career. Every day he sent out pictures and résumés to producers mentioned in
Backstage
, the paper for the acting trade. Over endless cups of coffee we would discuss the implications a busy stranger in the profession might draw from one glossy eight-by-ten head shot rather than another. I was earning only a hundred dollars a week. Randall was bringing in another thirty or forty as a filing clerk hired by the hour through a temporary agency. He couldn’t take a real job since that would be paramount to admitting he was really an office worker rather than an actor. Accepting a nine-to-five meant one was no longer in the business.
Yet he had a mordant sense of humor about his situation. He made fun of the illusions he and his tribe nourished about themselves. If that friend accepted a real shit job as a dishwasher in a celebrity restaurant, Randall would say, “Well, gee, after all, it’s a chance to be seen. Anyway, dishwashing is just a job-job. He’s really a Shakespearean leading man and Broadway chorine.”
Once every two weeks he’d have to act before his scene study class. The texts were often bits of dialogue from fiction. I’d come home from work to hear Randall whispering something hateful to May, his favorite partner. I’d sit over a cup of instant coffee and a cigarette in the kitchen while they hissed and laughed and sighed in the living room, sitting on our bed
retracted into a couch. They were very good and sometimes I couldn’t tell whether they were acting or just talking.
May was a twenty-year-old temperamentally unsuited to her age. She was destined to become a motherly forty-year-old leaning over a counter in a diner to console a girlfriend or, giggling, whisper something dirty to a boyfriend. Most of the other Berghof students were anguished about their future and believed that only stardom could redeem their lives of insecurity, humiliation and poverty (an unlikely happy ending in a city where only five hundred actors out of seven thousand actually worked in any given year), but May was thoroughly pleased with her life as it was. She’d guessed Randall and I were gay and winked at it. She liked the theater milieu more than actually being onstage; or rather she saw every moment of her life as theatrical. She’d say, as she headed to Brooklyn for dinner with her parents, “Sorry, hon, I’ve got my family gig tonight. How do I look? Convincing?”
Whereas most of the actors we knew thought they were right for every role that came along and were willing for the sake of an audition to put on accents, false hair, years or take off pounds or panties, May had such a strong personality she couldn’t shed it. She patted boys almost unconsciously on the rump as though they were horseflesh. She never counted calories but was convinced she was beautiful despite a strong overbite and a second chin. She’d receive a compliment with a big, split-level smile and a fluttering of fake eyelashes that hovered between parody and sincerity. If asked to sing she’d grab an imaginary mike, pull down one side of her sweater and kiss her shoulder, then murmur a Kurt Weill ballad in a husky voice at odds with her cracky speaking voice.
Sometimes I’d resent coming home, still in my hated coat and tie, from a job that was difficult only because there was so little to do, to find our minuscule apartment full of May’s
smoke and giggles. For her time didn’t exist. She had a gig as a waitress twice a week in a Village restaurant just for lunch; that was her job-job. Otherwise she was free to shoplift, read her chart, shop, cruise, rehearse, window-shop, take in a movie and eat a hoagie.
Like most young actors she was good at imitating other people’s gestures and intonations, and if I screwed up my body into a strange pretzel position in pursuit of an elusive point, I’d see her frowning slightly as she studied my posture (and ignored my idea), then worked her own body into the same puzzle. Only after she’d found the exact combination would she show by her huge two-tiered smile and raised brows that she was all ears or at least eyes. “Stop
indicating,”
Randall would grumble affectionately, an actor’s way of saying she was miming attention without actually giving it.
At that time I met a young straight couple who’d just been graduated from the Northwestern University drama school, where they had studied with Viola Spolin, a legendary figure in the Chicago school of improvisation. After two minutes with this tall, blond, self-assured actor and actress, my heart sank. I learned they already had an agent, that they were already cast in a frothy, Broadway-bound sex farce and that they were agreeing to do only those commercials that were extremely lucrative or pertinent to the image they were cultivating. Whereas Randall’s scene classes resembled pointless, deeply disturbing psychoanalytic sessions, these blond victors spent their days with their lawyer, a tailor, a masseuse, or they were off to a facial or a voice lesson with the top musical-comedy coach at a hundred dollars an hour.
I loved listening to Randall and May’s shop talk, even though I suspected now that it was merely abstract and would never lead to a job. If one of them wept and shook all over in an emotional scene, the other would launch into a monologue: “Yes, but can you sustain that eight performances a week,
fifty-two weeks a year? Of course I know your performance must evolve and the only way you can keep it believable is by constantly finding new sense memories and by digging deeper; that’s why American actors are so much better than the English, who have loads of technique, sure, but you don’t believe in them for a moment. Not that I’m against technique. That’s why I do so much voice and movement work and why I’m starting gymnastics; after all my body and voice are the tools of my trade. I try to respect them and not drink or smoke too much or stay up too many nights in a row. I’ve been rethinking your work on this role. I think your concentration is excellent. I’m not sure you’ve found everything in the part, though; there are still some colors missing. You’ve got the basic motivations down, you’ve done some important character work, but I’m not sure you’re respecting the period style. I know, I know, that comes later…. Maybe just for now you should figure out some new business for your entrance.”