Bettyville (17 page)

After dinner, we adjourned to the guest room where Steven was to sleep on one of my mother's most uncomfortable antiques—a creaky bed with a wafer-thin mattress dating back to the Civil War. I was embarrassed. Late that night, my father, in his underwear and demonstrating my family's continuing tendency to appear out of nowhere at the worst possible moments, caught us making out on the couch in the family room. Adopting our usual stance toward anything out of the ordinary, he had said nothing as I waited, anticipating the cardiac event that Betty had predicted.

At breakfast the next morning, after he saw Steven and me together, Daddy was quiet, not especially upset or especially friendly.

He was just blank, as if a lightning strike had left him . . . absent.

. . .

A few months later, all four of us were together again, on the afternoon of our graduation, drinking champagne at the apartment Steven and I shared. Before we left for commencement, my father kept getting up to look around the apartment. He lingered in both bedrooms, the one crammed with stuff with its double bed and the other with the tiny, narrow bed where, I hoped they believed, Steven slept.

My mother was calm that day, almost sentimental as she brushed crumbs off the shoulders of my suit and looked at me as if she could not fathom the speed at which I was traveling away. She smiled at me tentatively, as if expecting some sort of rejection, as if she were about to discover that I had somehow moved beyond her. She always believed that people who lived in other places or traveled more were bound to reflect her. That fall I would go to Boston, to graduate school. When I had told my mother about this, she was quiet, just shook her head. “Well then,” she said. “Good. You need to get out of here. I can send you a check now and then.”

That afternoon, after commencement, my father just could not stay in his chair. He seemed interested in every detail in our place, determined to uncover any clue he could find to the life of his son. When I walked into the bathroom, Big George was there, spraying a bit of Steven's Royal Copenhagen cologne on his fingers. Rubbing them together, as if he were wary of actually taking a sniff, he caught a glance of me behind him in the mirror over the sink. My face reddened as our eyes met in the mirror that Steven always kept so clean.

That night we had dinner with some of my friends and their parents. There was the feel of a festive evening, though I was nervous and just wanted to get it over with. We arrived at the restaurant, the best in town, before anyone else, and my father went to the bar. As my mother headed toward the bathroom, he began the process of slamming down four gin and tonics one after the other. He drank quickly, downing each in an instant.

At dinner, my mother sat up in her chair, growing stiffer and stiffer, her hand occasionally wandering to her head to secure an errant lock. The restaurant was filled with laughter, the cheerful noises of special occasions. In the corner of the room, a young man played cocktail piano. Not songs, just riffs. Before the dinner was over, my father, less gregarious than usual, got up, red-faced, and threw off his jacket. Then, moving to the side of the piano, he began, to the astonishment of his unwitting accompanist, to sing his song: “Old Man River.”

He sang as if the restaurant were his. He sang as if all the guests at Jack's Coronado Steak House had bought tickets for this occasion. He sang emotionally, his waves of feeling flowing through us all. The river rolled on and on, like time and change and all we might hold back if it were possible.

My emotion built with his every word and breath. The song, it seemed, lasted forever, my father's voice growing louder as he held out his hand, I believe, to me. Betty looked down at her unfinished food. When he finished, the room exploded with applause. That evening, my father was the star. Steven stood up to clap and my mother kicked him—hard.

It was a mysterious performance. I didn't know whether to consider it a blessing, a resentful usurping of the prominence of others that evening, or a crying out as the river's waters swept me from his world, his extended hand, the place where it was possible for him to try to save me.

W
hen you think about your mother, what do you remember?” my therapist asked. “Do you think you disappointed her? Do you ever feel guilty?” I told him this story.

When I was a kid, before I went to sleep, before she turned off the light, Betty reached for my book and closed it, took my glasses off, folded them, laid them on the table, and took my hand.

Then, closing our eyes, we said the “Now I Lay Me” prayer out loud, adding a list of blessings for those who needed them. Together, we named the names, always beginning with Mammy, Granny, Aunt Bess, and Aunt Winnie. We turned it into a sort of game: Making our way through Madison, from one street to the next, we asked for help for those suffering in this place or that, for people who were poor or who had lost someone, or those who had found themselves in trouble. We traveled through town, saying name after name.

“Just think of all of us together, all over town, asking help for each other,” Betty said. “Try to think of the people who have no one else to remember them.”

“Does it work?” I asked.

“It is something we can do for each other. Bow your head now, bow your head. Maybe there is nothing else, but we can do this for people. We can remember them when they are sick and remember them when they go. We have to understand we are all together here. We have to try and help people.”

If there was a time when I heard my mother say what it was she believed in, what she stood for, it was at these moments. Betty always wanted to try to rescue people who were sick or alone, to do whatever she could for those who had no one. She called and checked on those she barely knew when they came out of the hospital or if they were ill. She worried about people who were out there on their own. The worst thing she could imagine was being sick and alone.

One night, I decided it was time that I said my prayers without my mother. It was after one of her eye surgeries and I was scared she was going blind. I wanted to ask God to look out for her and it seemed she should not be present. I didn't want to make her think of what might happen to her. The idea of praying for her in her presence was embarrassing to me.

When I told Betty that I needed to say my prayers on my own, her face changed. She dropped my glasses on the table and looked down at her lap before pulling away. I wanted to take it back, but it was too late, she was gone. She left so fast. She didn't bring it up, but the next night she did not come to my room. Never again would we have our special time. She would not risk being sent away again. I grew up to be just like her. Like my mother, I flee at the slightest suggestion I am unwanted.

. . .

I was twenty-four, finished with grad school in Boston, new to New York, with no job. A few weeks before, I had found myself sitting in the lobby of a building on East Thirty-second Street, about to meet this man, this therapist who could supposedly help me. My friends were all employed and my afternoons were hard to fill. It was late fall 1983. I was living in Carroll Gardens, a Brooklyn neighborhood that felt like a small Italian town. Sports bars played Connie Francis and Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady.” Our landlord was named Carrado Carbone. There were dozens of bakeries that sold beautifully decorated cookies that all tasted terrible. In the apartment I shared with three Californians, a previous tenant appeared to have done engine work in the bathtub, which was smeared with black.

I wanted to be an editorial assistant at Knopf or Random House. Dressed in my suit and scuffed wingtips, between interviews I set up a sort of office in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, where instead of proofreading my résumé I found myself scoping out the bar to see if any of the women were prostitutes. My first interview was at Random House, where a senior editor named Joe Fox, a gentlemanly sort, asked what subjects I intended to make my specialty. I said, “Fiction and nonfiction.”

He smiled and said, “No, that is too general. You are supposed to say something like sports.”

I was crestfallen and beginning to perspire, fearful of leaving sweat prints on the upholstery. I said, “Not sports.”

He said, “I do sports.”

I said, “I swim like a fish.”

He said, “You remind me of Truman Capote.”

Although I had in the previous weeks spent hours in front of Tiffany with a cinnamon roll or two, I considered this a private matter.

“Does Truman swim?”

. . .

My interviews were all failures. Every time I tried to impress someone, I left myself, abandoned ship— the old problem, and it still happened on dates. At a party, a friend gave me the card of a gay therapist. She said I needed help adjusting.

“To what?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said.

Aside from Pinky, I had never been counseled, though my handwriting had been analyzed by the mother of a friend of mine, an extremely slender woman from Los Angeles who practiced something she referred to as grapho-therapeutics.

“There is fear here,” Mrs. Asher had determined after examining my signature.

I just could not get a job. “Come home,” my father said on the phone. Not Betty. She held firm. She knew how much I wanted to make it in New York. “Don't be a quitter,” she said. “I'm putting my foot down on this. Do not come back here with your tail between your legs. Something will happen. I have told everyone at bridge you are working there. When was the last time you got your hair cut?

“Don't give up,” she whispered before hanging up the phone after my father had already gone off to bed.

My counselor in New York, Paul Giorgianni, asked about my family, my life, my feelings, sex life, vices. When he asked if I used drugs, I said only when they were available. He asked if they were a problem. I said not for me. He said I should not use them as an avoidance. Why else I would use them?

“You don't have to entertain me,” he said.

“Then what are you paying me for?”

“You are hiding from your feelings.”

“Can you teach me how to hide a little better?”

“Why did you come here?”

“Lobby art.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Because I can't get a job.” I explained that I could not get through an interview and that I kept making a fool of myself on dates. “I lose myself,” I told him. “I go away. I can't be there when I need to be. I go away.”

It all came out. “You know that cat in the cartoons that gets scared and winds up clinging with his paws to the ceiling? I feel like I am up there, upside down, barely hanging on and there is just the shell of me in the chair, looking desperate. Can you help me not go away?”

He was Freud. I was Dora. He was Dr. Wilbur. I was Sybil. He gave me a discount, and, considering my estimated neurosis-per-dollar ratio, it seemed a deal.

“How long will it take to stop this from happening?” I kept asking him. He didn't know. “Can't we please hurry?” I asked.

Just before Christmas, I actually got a job at a place called Yourdon Press where they published books about systems analysis. When I read the ad, I thought that was health-related. Something to do with kidneys.

My job was writing advertising and catalog copy. My computer went down about every fourteen seconds. In the corner of my screen: a tiny picture of a tiny man in a tiny boat. When things were purring along, he smiled. When technical disaster struck, he frowned. It seemed that every time my fingers neared the keyboard, his expression changed to that of a
Titanic
passenger. Constantly I found myself on the phone, pleading, “Please send the fixer man!” The IT specialist and I became so well acquainted we could certainly have adopted a child.

At night I wrote letters, sent résumés to real publishing houses, got some interviews, and finally secured a new job, not in books, but writing pamphlets for a Wall Street firm. My boss—a young Harvard guy from Cleveland—was good to me. “Why did you hire me?” I asked one day. “I don't know a bull from a bear.” Looking out of his glass-partitioned office at the collection of middle-aged men on the other side, he said, “Look at them. They are boring. Your job is to talk to me about the movies. You are interesting.”

“Sometimes I think so,” I said, “and sometimes I don't.”

. . .

At the beginning in New York, while my roommates, who were straight, had dates, I went to Uncle Charlie's, a gay bar on Greenwich Avenue. Although the guys still laughed and drank; although Madonna kept on pushing her love over the Borderline, it was the beginning of AIDS, wartime. The newspapers were filled with photos of men with lesions from Kaposi's sarcoma. Reality had turned on us; we were very young but it didn't matter. At Yourdon Press, a woman joked, “Who will do my hair?”

“Maybe,” I replied, “it's your chance for a makeover.”

By the time I heard the fourth or fifth person my age say they did not expect to be alive in a year, I stopped going to Uncle Charlie's. For a while, I avoided all gay men. As the disease got closer and closer, I began once more to pray before I went to sleep every night. I said the prayer that Betty and I had said, way back. It was just a child's prayer, but that was how I felt, like a kid far from home.

It was a fast shot to this new place; it was such a fast shot from being young and hopeful to young and thinking about dying. I was twenty-three years old.

The disease was all we talked about and all we didn't talk about. I didn't know if I was sick, but all I could think of was George and Betty finding out not only that I was gay, but also that I was dying. It would kill them and they would be disgraced: I was not even certain that the people in Paris would hold my funeral in the church. Someone told me that back in Missouri, in Columbia, where I had gone to the university, a woman had circulated a petition to drive some gay men from her neighborhood. In the newspapers, there were stories of parents who sent their sick sons away and religious groups who screamed of God's wrath. I knew my parents would care for me until I died, but every day, every minute, looking at their faces would be worse than dying alone. I decided not to tell them if I got sick. I would write them a letter for them to find later, a message saying I did not mean to hurt them, that I loved them.

Again and again, I tried to start this letter, just in case. It would be easier to write beforehand than from a hospital bed. When it was finally finished, I left the envelope on my bureau, glanced at it some mornings as I thought of my mother at home, sitting at the breakfast table reading the bridge hands in the
Globe-Democrat,
adjourning to the bathroom for a secret cigarette. Reopening the letter many times, I subtracted, edited, threw in some jokes so they would think I was able to laugh in my last days. I wanted to leave them something to keep. I wanted to remind them that I was more than someone who died of sex.

I thought of my father; he would have no friends to talk to if I died. There were the men he played golf with, the women who sang with him in the choir at church. Maybe they would be kind to him. More likely, they would not know what to say. There would be no one to help him understand. When I thought about my parents, I felt ashamed. They suddenly seemed so vulnerable to me. I did not want to cause them pain, but all over the city of New York, mothers and fathers were crying.

. . .

My friend Ned, who was older than I, seemed to know only dying men. Visiting a friend of his, Kevin Hayne, in the hospital, I held Kevin's hand while the nurse tried and tried to find a usable vein for his IV. The needle hurt every time she jabbed him and he cried out. His thin white arm was a long history of sharp, hasty stabbings. When she finally succeeded and hit a vein, he screamed out loud and it seemed to me that his pain flowed through his fingers into me, like a shock wave. I yelled too, and ran to the bathroom, trembling. I wanted to get out of there. But he could not. So I could not. I hoped he would not die that night with just the two of us there. I had no idea who to call.

It was a Sunday night. On the subway, the 2 or 3 train, I remember black women in their church hats coming back to Brooklyn from uptown, Harlem. In the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights, a row of grimy homeless men. At home I threw up and did not close my eyes until I fell asleep in my cubicle at work the next day. My boss just let me be, and when I woke up, everyone was gone except him. He was there, at his desk behind the glass, waiting to ride back to Brooklyn with me on the F train. I never outed myself at work, never ever talked about my personal life; I did not think that this was considered appropriate. All around were married men with shiny shoes who talked about women and money, rich young guys from Long Island who did coke and got quiet when I appeared in the doorway. But my supervisors understood who I was and what was going on out there. They were kind, but that confused me. I have always felt immediate reciprocation necessary with every form of giving. Never have I been willing to owe anything to anyone. People being nice made me uncomfortable.

Rapidly, Kevin was transformed into an elderly man with a curved back who always seemed on the verge of tears. He referred to his mode of transportation to and from the hospital as “My Beautiful Ambulette.” When he died, I didn't have much time to take it in. Steven, who had also moved to the city, had found out he was positive for HIV. If he had it, I thought it inevitable that I did too, but I felt nothing for a while. I was numb. As I had on the football field in high school, I disconnected somehow, put the feelings somewhere they couldn't get me, ran from the pictures that came into my mind, shoved it all in a box in my head that I tried to keep sealed. But every time I did anything, I asked myself, “Is this the last time I'll see a movie?” or “Is this the last time I'll eat roast beef?” I told no one because I could not imagine anyone who wanted to know.

I didn't want to know. I tried to avoid going home unless it was Christmas. Parents and family were not people I wanted to gaze upon.