White Girls (6 page)

A year or two after that, my mother gave birth to Hilton again: myself. My mother named me Hilton for her friend’s stillborn baby. The minute I was born, I was not just myself, but the memory of someone else. And I belonged to two women who identified with one another for any number of reasons, my mother and her friend, the one who bore death and the one who bore the rest.

As boys, we went everywhere together, Hilton and I, my ghostly twin, my nearly perfect other half. He was perfect because he never seemed to need anything, even though we grew up in the same family.

We lived in Brooklyn then, in a two-story house in East New York. It was a place of spindly trees. We had four older sisters who dressed like the Pointer Sisters on the cover of their debut album. We knew we’d never get over them, or our younger brother, whom we adored. And our Ma, who raised us all. We never knew what any of those people were talking about when they used I as a pronoun—they were all the same. They were annoyed by anything they perceived as the catalyst for separation. Evil forces from the outside world included: boyfriends, anyone else at all. (They didn’t know I had a twin. They would have resented him.)

Our Ma. We were all the same to her. We were her we, a mass of need always in need of feeding. Standing over a pot of boiling something, waiting for what she called “the last straggler” to straggle in to dinner—our brother Derrick, say—she would call out each of her children’s names, as if naming off all the parts on one body: “Sandra! Diana! Louise! Yvonne! Hilton! Derrick!”—before giving up and giggling and saying, “Whoever you are, whoever I’m calling, come in and eat.”

I was fat and drank so much soda and Kool-Aid, you wouldn’t believe it. By the time I was thirteen, I had enough fat to make one thin perfect Hilton, so I did. I was the stronger twin. I was a little smug because I had a twin, not unlike Ramona, the smart glutton who invents a thin twin for herself in Jean Stafford’s brilliant 1950 short story “The Echo and the Nemesis.” At the end of the story,
after Ramona’s been found out as the mythomaniac and hoarder of food she is by her classmate Sue, Ramona still feels she has reason to gloat. Glittering with malice, she tells Sue she will “never know the divine joy of being twins,” and ends by calling Sue “provincial one.” Sue is a “one” and Ramona is not and a double is more, in every way. Exactly. Exactly. For Hilton and me, knowing each other made us feel exalted. Everyone else was a plebe. We knew so much about so many things! We read about identical twins, two beings split in one egg. We looked at pictures of twins by marriage—our favorite being Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. We loved pictures of them by the sea, standing close together, split from the same romantic egg, one pretty, one not so pretty. We looked at art books, at the work of Gilbert and George. We read astrology books. We knew how to look at clothes. We knew how to write short stories.

At the end of our thirteenth year, there were many changes outside our control. We moved to an apartment in Crown Heights, among other West Indians who called themselves a we, one political body, proud of their association by birth with former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. By the time we moved into that apartment, a lot of our sisters had moved into their own homes. Another change was Hilton and I went to a predominately white high school in “the city.” It was the first time we had ever been around white people much, so it was strange to consider our own bodies next to theirs and it made us hate each other for the first time—Hilton and I. If only we could be rid of one another, we would be the one that another one could love. But since there was two of us, there was two of everything no one seemed to want, including, or specifically, our coloredness, our
double lovesickness. How strange we must have looked, walking down the street! Like thieves in wait for someone to give up something we could not demand, because we could not speak. Our demand for love felt cruel, even to ourselves; to speak it would be a crime.

We followed the white people we liked home. They lived, most of them, in tall apartment buildings with doormen. We couldn’t stand in front of those buildings for long without being glared at by those doormen, so we had to imagine the person we had a crush on, on the long subway ride home, to Brooklyn. We imagined them going up to their beautiful home in an elevator and going into their bedroom (their own bedroom!) and turning on their desk light and putting on a record by some singer we had overheard them talk about in the school cafeteria (Bob Dylan, Van Morrison), and then taking off their jeans, their leg hair lying flat on their legs like stockings. Our imaginings split us up—Hilton and I. We wanted to be a we with one or another of the people we followed home, so we split up to make room for those other people, who were never coming and sometimes there and whom we always partially imagined. And in this way, years passed, until I met SL and became a we with someone entirely different.

But we never actually lived together, not really. About twenty years into our friendship—this was in 1998 or so—I still lived in the Brooklyn apartment I’d rented since before I met SL. It was less a home than a place I could say I was going home to. What it was, really, was a stage set, as provisional as that, and one I longed to strike at a moment’s notice, but that moment never came. Besides, where would
I go? SL lived somewhere else and frequently with someone else.

I rarely had guests. How can you host in a theater? But if you looked behind the flats where, variously, my double bed had been sketched, along with a tea cup, shower curtains, and a stove, you’d find the same dull isolated crud you’d see in any number of apartments occupied by men who could not move on from AIDS. In any case, moving on was a ridiculous phrase, given the enormous physical memory of your loved one being stuffed in a black garbage bag; that’s how the city’s health-care workers dealt with the first AIDS victims, stuck them in garbage bags like imperfect pieces of couture. So much time and effort had gone into creating this dress or that person, but it was imperfect, and its imperfections could contaminate the rest of the line, bag it up fast, seal it off, and move on.

In any case, “moving on” was a ridiculous phrase in this context, as was the trite idea of closure, and yet I was supposed to be alive, moving on, and what was that? Sometimes I moved on to a few boys who looked like the trashed and bagged loved one—especially around the eyes and feet—but they didn’t lie on my stage set’s double bed without getting paid: actors for hire.

I did not want SL to die remembering the look of a thousand garbage bags in my eyes. I loved him more than grief. So, periodically, I pushed him away into the world of living white women. The ostensible reason was ecology. Our twinship wouldn’t be a living thing without other living things. He needed to live for us because he could. (No one he loved had ever died, including the people he didn’t like very much.) SL’s favorite religious group was the Stoics. He had grown up watching two people not take love—least of all from him—and so
he knew people in general could not take love; other people are always our parents. And so his self-appointed job, his brilliance, really, was in staying, and taking what you threw at him, and not engaging the crap, because that had been his job, ever since he was little: staying. That’s what made SL such a turn-on, especially to white girls who lived inside and outside the privilege of their skin, and their horror about what they shared with their white male oppressors: their skin. White girls could rant, weep, treat him like a servant, like the girlfriend in the Prince song he loved so (“If I was your girlfriend... / would u let me dress u... / If I was your one and only friend / would you run 2 me if somebody hurt u / even if that somebody was me”), and he could take it and more while styling what you should wear on a night on the town, with or without him, but there was always this unspoken, distinctly male caveat in the air: he could leave when he wanted to. That’s one reason those girls and queens loved him. His authority. He could put on his boots and leave. Even when he didn’t, he could. (When his girlfriends were annoyed with him they’d telephone and yell at me; they were too frightened of him to talk shit to him directly. One of SL’s former partners said, vis-à-vis his various strengths and enviable stoicism and love of other ladies: “What is this? Fucking
Ivanhoe
?”)

I remember standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Nineteenth Street with SL once, chatting. It was a sweltering summer day in 2000, and SL had on a dark blue jacket, silk knickers, and boots that went up to his knees. He was bareheaded and bare chested. As we chatted, a man rode up to us on his bike. He made a pit stop in front of SL, looked him up and down, and exclaimed, “Cute!” before riding off. SL didn’t blink an eye.

That was a large part of SL’s fabulous allure: his resistance to his audience’s self-dramatization, especially when it came to their desire for him, a single twin who did and did not want to be wanted. As a husband who longed to be a wife, one of SL’s favorite movies was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
. Petra is a German fashion designer who falls in love with Karin, a young model. Karin torments the besotted Petra with tales of her other lovers, specifically a black man with a large penis. While all of this is going on, Petra’s assistant, Marlene, who never speaks, goes about the business of running her abusive boss’s life, down to coming up with the designs that have made Petra famous. One thing and another happens, Karin leaves Petra in a cloud of degradation—the tormentor is tormented—and, thus chastened, Petra turns to Marlene, longing to treat the woman who was in effect her slave as an equal. But Marlene will not have it. Moments after Petra reaches out to her in a human and humanizing way, Marlene packs her bags. She doesn’t want freedom and equality. She’s gone.

SL said a number of things about himself through his movie stories; that’s how he talked his desire. (SL on sex: “If you have to talk about it, it’s not happening.”) Marlene: was she part of SL’s love, or identification? For SL, those two things weren’t mutually exclusive; he loved Marlene because he felt he was, or wanted to be, Marlene: a silent wife to other wives, a wife who could play what looked like degradation because he could not be degraded more than any woman, including his mother, whose marriage had degraded him.

But I could not be Petra. I had learned about love at home, too, but in a different way than SL; despite my parents to say the least
interesting ideas about intimacy, I never felt they equated it with brutality, or lies. My parents didn’t stay together for the sake of the children because they weren’t together, not in any traditional way; mundane daily closeness would have hurt their mutually lonely skin too much and encroached on their independence of mind. This was light stuff compared to what SL observed of love at home—he called me, somewhat condescendingly, a brilliant normal person; oh, what hadn’t he survived! Oh, what had I not survived!—an experience that prompted him to say to married friends who were intent on teaching their children how wrong love could be by staying together when they shouldn’t, but their vanity said otherwise: Don’t stay together for the sake of the children. Look at me.

I loved looking at him. I loved listening to him. In 1999 he said about me to me: “You have infant schema. Children and animals will always love you.” In 2000 he said: “The downside about what you’ve written is the special pleading angle. You’re not greater than the subject.” In 2001 he said: “Are we codependent? Beyond.” He also said: “I don’t care.” In fact, “I don’t care” was his most frequently spoken phrase. That was the worst kiss ever, I don’t care. I’m so glad you like my pictures, maybe the world at large will never see them, I don’t care. From 1999 on I wondered how I could make him care. I saw our twinship dissolving in words I could not control, words that stressed SL’s Billie Holiday, don’t-careish attitude, even as my I stressed itself on page after page. Neither of us could stop himself: by 2002 we were breaking out of our we casing through an explosion of self-expression, and the disavowal of self-expression the world would not look at his pictures, and his love, the world, would see
me no matter how much I tried to hide in my universe of stage sets and the crud behind it. I would not leave him, and yet he felt I had already left him, the words were going out into the world more and more frequently from 2003 on, even as I loved SL’s pictures, body, and voice, more than my words, and always more and more; but that wasn’t the point, the attention I received wasn’t happening to him, and in any case, SL implied, as our talk went on, even as it dried up, that, as an unreconstructed seventies lesbian, the commercial world of magazines and praise was corrupt, why would I want any part of that, why care, I don’t care.

Blame it on capitalism. Despite SL’s Laura Nyro–like abhorrence of business and his utterly touching and captivating struggle with modesty, he tied himself up—as he tied himself up in a Comme des Garçons shirt, or lovely turban—in a debate about the meaning of his I, the ego as a form of aggression. He would not put that fellow—his I—forward; he gave SL the spiritual creeps. And yet there was his I, who was a superior artist, and art must be seen for it to matter to other people. In any case, what colored person has ever handled attention well? For years there was no Michelle Obama. And the colored people we saw become famous—Jean-Michel Basquiat and the like—could not reconcile all that love with their former degradation. I could not handle the attention I received for my writing; it was not separate from SL’s relative invisibility on the art market. Despite the fact that SL always married stars who knew he was a star, the world can absorb only the obvious, and for whatever reason I was
more obvious to the world at that time than my twin, the same as me, only different.

SL’s struggle for recognition became my own. I didn’t mind. In fact, I loved the process. It all felt like an Earth, Wind & Fire song, full of effort and hope. One helps, and there is sometimes less of oneself, or one’s I in the effort. SL and I were comrades, we would get through it, the world would love him as much as I did. But the world would not. Once, after we became friends and SL moved on from the weekly where we met to a magazine that was part of a big, lady-centered corporation—they published magazines whose major themes were weddings, eyebrows, and the like—SL would describe how few black men worked there, and how they never talked to one another. Some time later, I got a job at the same company—by then, SL had quit to pursue his own work—and as he waited in the lobby for me one day, SL looked on as I talked to two black men who worked in fashion. As we walked away, SL exclaimed: “Oh, my God, when I saw that, I couldn’t believe the building didn’t explode!” Presumably the city’s cultural life—which, after 1980 or so, was dominated by white female gallerists, curators, critics, and the like—would have exploded if it had accepted SL’s photographs and video work along with my praise, and that is how they treated him: as being too much. In 2001 his pictures were too much. In 2002 his appearance was too much. In 2003 his morals showed people up too much. Where was this man of high principles supposed to fit in the highly unprincipled worlds of art and fashion that he aspired to and disdained, a world where success
was based as much on personality, body type, and eye color as it was on any recognizable skill (sometimes more so)? And by aspiring to those worlds, was SL not returning to Europe in a way, hankering to love that which he could not be, which is to say a white woman?