Everyone is Watching (21 page)

A man leans over to the reporter and says, Do you know that this fair doesn’t really exist? It doesn’t have the backing of the Bureau of International Expositions. Moses charged
exhibitors to erect their own pavilions but that’s against the Bureau’s rules. When they told him he wasn’t allowed to charge he said to hell with you. So they’ve written
him out of the history books. They won’t endorse it. It’ll hamper its chances. But Moses is a stubborn bastard.

Want to say that on the record?

Speak out against Robert Moses? He laughs. You’ve gotta be kidding.

You’re not writing down what I am saying, says Walt.

Bucke looks down his notebook. The pages are blank.

When the body slows down, one thing goes and then another. It is like there is a list of final things for the body to do and once whoever it is who is in charge has given
permission then that’s when it starts, one thing followed by another. Everyone is watching Robert Mapplethorpe. They say this is how it should be for a photographer. As someone who has spent
his whole life looking, in the end, it is him who must be watched. They say, Robert would want this, Robert would want that, but Robert can no longer speak.

He is dreaming of the Brooklyn docks. There is no grinding of ropes or hollers of foremen. No swing or snap of cargo and cranes. New York Bay is an inky swell of moonlight.

Then Midtown: cranes stand arrested in the night sky, great limbs, reaching for the morning. Scaffolding holds up newly constructed towers. The buildings are empty glass structures, an outer
layer with nothing inside. They show how everything is formed – first the exterior is built and then it is filled. One day someone will look at the city from the other side of the glass and
take a picture.

Welcome to the sixties.

Welcome to the last gasp.

Welcome to the hill brow.

Welcome to the shoulder stretch, the great dive, arms outstretched, where Robert is standing in a muddy trench in Brooklyn during his military initiation, naked now, his feet sinking into mud,
cold rain forming rivers of clear, pale skin down the length of his shins, and his whole body is aching. He is laughing.

Robert dies on the morning of March 9th 1989 at Deaconess Hospital in Boston. In his last moments he suffers a seizure, a terrible spasm, and then he is gone.

A necklace is lying on the bedside table. Edward has never seen Robert wear it. It is exotic, Persian. The plaques shimmer in the light. He looks at the necklace. He will take
the necklace. He will give it to Patti. It was hers to begin with. He has heard the story many times.

Edmund showers and shaves. He arranges his hair. He sets out all of the bottles of toiletries neatly on the bathroom shelf. In the past he did not wash before going out. Now he
wears aftershave and moisturizing cream. He wears hair cream and eyebrow gel. He wipes the steam from the mirror and looks at himself. He dresses in the bedroom, pulls on a pair of chinos and a
loose-fitting shirt. He ties the laces of his shoes. He waits a moment to collect his thoughts. He reaches for the apartment door. He stops for a moment to look at his manuscript, the pages of
which are loose and spread across the floor.

It happened for the first time when I was at work, says Walt. I had been feeling unwell all day and so I left work and walked home. When I got there I went straight to bed. I
slept like I would never wake. I woke hours later. When I woke I could not move my arm or leg. I went back to sleep. When I woke again I could not move my body. I remained in bed. Time moved on but
I could not. These attacks have persisted ever since. Though I am usually well, sometimes I find I cannot move. What do you think of this paralysis, Bucke? Is it a sign of something else, do you
think? You are a medical man. Is there something I am doing wrong? I must finish my books. And there are so many letters to write. There’s pleasure, Bucke, and love. What will happen when I
am gone?

Bucke picks Walt’s clothes up from the floor and folds them. He takes down the suitcase from the overhead compartment and lays the clothes neatly inside it. Bucke folds his own clothes and
lays them in his trunk. Next he spreads his books evenly across the clothes to distribute the weight.

I recovered in my brother’s house in Camden, says Walt. There is a railway track across the yard and all the trains in it are rusting. I lay very still in bed, surrounded by all the books
and scraps of paper on which I had written many letters and poems. I realized this was the bed in which my mother died.

Bucke places his notebooks on top of his books and closes the lid of the trunk. He pushes the trunk and the suitcase towards the door where the porter will find them easily.

I arrived at my brother’s house in time to see my mother die. She was no longer hungry. She could not eat. Her face was pale and sunken. She could no longer cough. Through the gap in the
curtains I saw the rusting railway yard. I thought of other locations where I have known love.

Bucke separates the curtains and ties them.

I used to ride the streetcars in Washington. The ticket boy, Peter Doyle, had a pleasant face. He clipped my ticket many times on that first evening. He sat down beside me and placed his hand on
my knee.

Bucke pulls on his overcoat and secures the buttons. He sits down before Walt.

As a printer I am aware of the shape and form of the poems on the page. It is not just the contents of a book that is important but also the parts that are left out. I print a page to see where
the spaces are and then I know the poem I must write, I know its length and therefore its subject. I know how best to fill the space. When I look back through the book I can see the people
described in it, the people who have inspired the poetry and the space in which they now reside. I see how they have now been reformed by the new context, in the pages of a book that forms a unit
in itself, that is in itself whole. It starts with the recognition of blank space. It starts with a beginning, how we see the things that could begin and then how they continue. It is in the spaces
of the streets where we walk, long, wide avenues and the spaces in between them. It is in the organization of a map, laid out in a grid and the buildings that will one day be built within those
spaces. I can see the borders of the island, how far we could go, and where we would have to stop. For isn’t it true that this is life, that there is no end to this life, that we all are made
from one another and will continue to form new time and new people and new ideas, and even when we are standing on the shoreline, stopped only by a body of water, we know we will continue like
pages carried on a breeze. It is impossible for us to stop. I can see it all from above as if the city was a model on the ground. I see the blank spaces in the city and I can see how they might one
day be filled. I see the pockets of neighbourhoods and their spreading outwards towards the shore. I see my beloved Brooklyn, and, further, the rest of Long Island. I see how each place is
connected, how the rivers and ocean prevent them all from touching yet they are all connected under the water. It is all contained within me, this body. I am also a blank space, the space where
things collect and form within my mind and within my body. I am the house and the book. I am the stanza and the sentence and the idea. The borders of these things are difficult to see. Ideas are
not like islands for they cannot be fixed entirely on a map. I am finally putting it all into place. I have bought a plot of land, Bucke. I will be buried there. It does not matter where I am
buried for when I am dead I will be dead in all places.

Edmund walks down Eighth Avenue, past KFC, Duane Reade, a Fashion College, three gyms, two dog parlours, West 23rd Street. People are mingling on the streets. The night is
balmy and close. An orange glow cuts across the wide black avenue. Cars speed up then stop at lights.

Edmund hails a cab. The cab smells of cigar smoke. This makes him think of his father.

The cab drives through the orange fog. The streets are full. The stores are open. The restaurants are busy. All these things are familiar – the accents and the people speaking them,
restaurants, delis, double-parking, but they have a different quality now, like Edmund is slowly losing his wider sense. He is extremely sensitive to vibration. There is a sense of the street
rising to meet him. There is the movement of shadows, a tingle in his fingertips, in the end of his dick, an eyelash caught in the corner of his eye but when he feels for it he finds nothing there.
The distant rumble of the subway, the thud of garbage being dumped in a basement, the scrape of a lock – the chain fence being secured across the Staten Island Ferry gangway, the slippery
shift of feet upon metal, passengers eager to look out at the Statue of Liberty – oh, I thought she’d be taller, grander, still, this ride is free.

Edmund looks in the restaurant window. A family is crowding around a baby. A group is singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a friend.

Yes?

A waiter beside him.

Edmund manages to say his own name.

Come with me, please, the waiter says. He is shown to a table and handed a menu. He surveys all the other tables around him. Edmund orders a carafe of wine. He has not drunk for many years.

Edmund looks up to see a man waving in the doorway. He is blond and athletic with a small, slender waist. He walks right over. Of course, he recognizes Edmund White.

Edmund, says T.

Edmund offers his hand. T shakes it, presses his fingers in.

You’re early, T says.

I was in the neighbourhood. Would you like some wine? Edmund asks.

T sits down and takes the glass.

I can’t believe you agreed to meet me, he says.

You said you were cute.

And am I?

Edmund smiles. This boy is very young. He is less than half Edmund’s age. He is chewing a piece of bread and gulping his wine. Edmund feels a pang in his stomach as strong as any he knew
in the past.

When the food arrives, Edmund is cautious not to eat too quickly. He doesn’t want to be seen as having an appetite. He cuts his steak small and chews it slowly. He watches T take large
mouthfuls. T is on his third glass of wine already. Their silence is disguised by the noises of others. Edmund wants to reach out his hand to touch T’s. Years ago he would have done this. He
would have reached across the table and taken his hand. He would have crawled under the table. But he doesn’t do that now.

The painting depicts a dark room viewed through the segmentations of a chicken-wire screen. There is a black-sheeted bed, and the floor is black. The walls are black. At the
end of the room is something red, a sofa or a table. Along one wall are two large windows. Here, sunlight hits the floor. Other sources of light include an overhead lamp and a mirror framed with
lit bulbs. The glass mirror is bright white space. Nothing is being reflected here. There is a ceiling fan on the far side of the room. The room is empty. It is empty and dark except for the light
coming from the mirror and the light coming in from the street. The artist has tried to replicate the feeling of the man through his absence. There is a sense in this painting that the man is out
of the picture. There is a sense that this is as close as we can get. There are no people here. The painting is not realistic. The painting does not depict a real room. This room was never
inhabited. It is the impression of a room. There is something of Robert Mapplethorpe in it, even though Robert Mapplethorpe has never been here. Perhaps it is more correct to say that we simply
don’t see him.

Patti handles the Persian necklace. She fingers the plaques and the clasp. She fits the necklace around her neck. The plaques are cold. They are heavy. Edward’s fingers
as he handed her the necklace looked for a moment like Robert’s fingers. She unfastens the clasp. She places the necklace back in the drawer and switches off the light in her white room.

On the last day of the fair, two friends make their way to the General Motors Pavilion, where they have heard there is an exhibit about the future. The women get into the car
and wait for the narration to begin.

It’s almost a shame to know the future, one woman says.

I don’t think I want to know.

But the car is moving. They come to a diorama of the Moon with its large craters and grey, dusty surface. Animatronic men power lunar rovers to and from arrival pods. The Earth can be seen in
the black sky.

The car climbs away from the Moon into Life Under the Ice where scientists are testing equipment in an ice-framed shelter. The narration explains they are testing weather monitors. One day they
will be able to predict all future weather across the Earth.

Life Underwater follows. The woman begins to hold her breath. People are extracting minerals from the seabed. Vacationers peer through the glass walls of their hotel into the underwater
wilderness.

Will we ever live in the jungle? The next diorama claims that we will. Trees are being knocked down with laser beams. Trees lie on the ground ready for processing. A machine is levelling the
ground behind the fallen trees, creating a multilane highway behind it.

How awful, the woman says.

They are being pulled along the track to the land of the desert where crops have been planted and are thriving in specially irrigated fields. These crops do well in the sun, creating plenty of
food for a rising population.

And then the City of Tomorrow. Monster skyscrapers and moving sidewalks, high-speed buses and mid-city airports. No one is walking any more, and everything is new.

Oh God, get me out of here, she says to her friend.

We can’t just get off, her friend says.

She sits back down and waits for the ride to end.

When the ride is over, they hurry through the exit and into the fresh air. They fight their way through the crowd to the nearest patch of grass.