White Girls (7 page)

Since I have always preferred to live in the next generation of hope, it was the children of those art-world ladies who worried me. Living in their male-identified world of having it all, the mothers who toiled in the corridors of photography and literature and the like couldn’t be bothered with feminism because what is feminism but humanism; they didn’t want their children—particularly their girl children—to make the mistake they’d made at Brown or Yale or Berkeley or whatever, which is to say believing feminism and thus humanism had any value at all, and would get them anywhere in this stinking world. So they let their daughters say whatever they wanted under the guise of free “self-expression,” but what amused those mothers—the same mothers who would not mother SL’s longed-for career—was listening to, and watching, their daughters’ aggression. One such little girl told me that if I shaved my beard, I’d look like CeeLo Green. Another little girl told her mother that she didn’t like the way I smelled. Another asked how I could be happy, considering that I looked like a gay Unabomber? These were the children of the mothers SL longed to kiss, and protect, even as my wounds would not heal and shall never heal because now I have the hatred of a white woman and if SL doesn’t think his unconditional love of them and ultimately wary love of me didn’t contribute to the immense loss of our love, he’s crazy.

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But by 2006 my pain was becoming less real to SL; he was struggling for his own survival, but how do you do that when you’re a twin? Or what I believed to be a twin? That was one reason I encouraged SL to leave occasionally, and join the world of living white women: our twinship not only needed other blood to survive, but, until the end, and even now, we believed our twinship could take it. Our we could survive anything, including this fact: that SL knew perfectly well that my I liked skating on the edge of abandonment, it had always been that way, there was my father in one direction, and my mother in another, and it was their coming together at certain times—to protect me from a homophobic teacher when I was in elementary school, taking turns rubbing me with witch hazel as they tried to bring one of my childhood fevers down—that I relished more than anything else. But there had to be a split first so I could feel the full power of their subsequent Socratic fusion. I loved smelling the glue. I believed in destroying a home to make a more powerful, integrated home. So from 2000 on, and maybe once a year or twice, until 2006, when we parted, I would encourage SL to leave by introducing him to someone else. He was reluctant and obliging: surely he could meet white girls on his own? But that wasn’t the point: the ones he could meet on his own had nothing to do with me, just as SL saying that one reason he loved me was that I was such a respite from his normal life, why get all mixed up with his desire to begin with? But who doesn’t long to be mundane? To say who they are through domestic complaint? To have love every day? (SL laughed and loved me more than he could
say when, early on in our relationship, I said how marvelous it must be to be married; you could have sex whenever you wanted it. What did I know? I didn’t grow up with anyone who had been married in any conventional sense.) Having not grown up hearing complaints about the old ball and chain, I longed to be one; what a novelty, to be a source of love and irritation, all at once.

But I must have been, especially when SL, to accommodate me more than anything else, went out into the world of living women; he did it for me, our we, and yet it was my I who stood at the threshold of our imaginary house with blood in my eyes when I saw, upon his return, the long hairs across his teeth, and toes.

One thing that occurs to me now: perhaps SL left so he could return home to the happy news of my desire. Because in all the years I loved him, I did not say I loved him, or, more specifically, how I loved him. If I did, wouldn’t that end up in a garbage bag, too? My love for SL: this wasn’t the yearning one finds in early and bad Gore Vidal, or Edmund White, or James Baldwin novels; that is, I did not worshipfully suffer at the altar of SL’s love of women. If anything, SL was a supplicant at the prie-dieu of my queerness. As such, he was beyond heterosexual. Let’s call him something else. And it occurs to me now that the vengeful queen in me—the queen who wanted to extract his revenge for all he’d felt reading all that early self-pitying or romanticized or both Gore Vidal and James Baldwin—did have a subconscious interest in his pain for loving other kinds of people more than he could love me, but that wasn’t true, and yet I wanted it to be
because it justified my not saying what SL longed to be said, despite the hair across his toe: that I could not name my desire because he knew he was my desire and how can you describe yourself to yourself?

I think SL felt a very great sadness over my inability—my unwillingness—to express my desire, to say I want you, do you want me, such a basic thing, and, potentially, so beautifully expressed, as it was, for instance, by Diane Keaton, another white girl we loved, when she asks the Woody Allen character in 1977’s
Annie Hall
whether he likes her or not, but I just couldn’t do it, that meant everything was at stake, and wouldn’t someone leave or die because of it?

But in 2007 someone did die. She was one of my first I’s, and integral to all the years I’ve described. I’ve waited until now to talk about her because that’s the way she would have wanted it. She was a great believer in traditional story structure, and would say, apropos her appearance here, what readers crave most, what fills them up, is the story of love, and how it ends. As a spoken-word critic—one of the very best—she knew what was real when she read it because she trusted her gut. Indeed, she had a great interest in her gut; she was always thin, but she ate more food than any human I have ever known. (Even after she got sick she longed for me to describe a dinner party I’d attended. She licked her lips. “I’m always hungry,” she said.) She came to the first reading I ever gave, at my college, and while I read she sat in the front row with her then boyfriend, eating a hoagie. After the reading, she said that I needed more stuff behind me while I read, to lively things up. Lights? A video? But I am getting ahead of my story.
She was our first home, no, she was our tree, and we hung in her young branches, our bodies swinging like flags in a permanent sweet chill, then a little sunshine through the branches, some bird sounds and maybe Jesus floating beyond the birds. No, she was our ground, and we would die to be closer to her. No, she was a white girl, whatever that means. No, she was colored because she preferred colored men to most white people. No, she was words, and they always came up short against her presence, and if you were a poet whose vocation it is to take the words out from in between other words, and relish white space, then you would be more suited to the task of relaying who she was, as Wallace Stevens seemed to do when he wrote, in 1947, twelve years before she was born, and sixty years before she died, in his poem “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”: “She floats in air at the level of/ The eye, completely anonymous, / Born, as she was, at twenty-one, / Without lineage or language, only / The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture, / Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.” What can I tell you about her that might not sound trite by comparison, well, there are mundane details that don’t diminish her, she loved proper storytelling, the details and hidden meanings and facts and all, but let me just say that the details—how we met, how she and SL met, how she died, how SL and I died—diminish me, or, rather, the whole storytelling enterprise does, words limit things, that’s what I told her once, we were sitting in her little house near a pond on Long Island, she had said good-bye to Manhattan years before but she was made for New York, she was beautiful and made no sense and made perfect sense, just like Greenwich Village, or the Bronx. We were sitting in her little house, and she was so sick, Jesus help her, and I was saying how much
I loved her without telling her that because that’s how we talked—by not talking. We didn’t want speech to limit us. Instead we did things, like making a chicken, or, the first time we had SL come over to her place in New York, and to accommodate his vegetarianism, a gratin dauphinois. Sitting in her house, I could not say how much I loved her even though time and her body were saying I wouldn’t have many more opportunities to do so but we never talked much and as SL said during that time: Why start now? SL understood, intuitively, which is the best way to understand anything, my thoughts on that particular subject: if I said I loved her, it would limit her to my love just as a tree, once described, becomes just a tree, or your tree. I always wanted others to know her and cherish their perspective of her; that would mean there was more of her in the world, how marvelous, and other men aside from SL and myself who felt as one of my boyfriends felt when he said, after meeting her: Whatever that girl has, someone should bottle it.

Let me just say one reason I can talk about this at all is because of SL and Mrs. Vreeland—as I called her. They wanted my I, more than most other things, and what is writing but an I insisting on its point of view, fuck them for making me do it, fuck them and love them for making me do it. Let me just say, I never wanted my love or language to limit her and relegate her vibrancy, but that’s what time and illness did anyway, confine her body to a wheelchair, such sadness, I can’t even tell you. Imagine Holly Golightly or Sally Bowles or Maxine Faulk or Vera Cicero in the 1984 film
The Cotton Club
, infirm, not walking down the street or swimming with their boys in the sea, sick and feeling useless to themselves after all those years of
creating such lasting, vibrant images in someone else’s mind, artists and writers for the most part, images that might include this one: a city girl walking somewhere, sometimes with a purse in hand, her fur wrap pulled tightly around her, a little snow falling, the memory of a lover’s kiss somewhere on her person, so many opportunities; sometimes life offered a quick, synthetic fix that felt like a million roses smothering them but then nothing, and that remarkable white girl rose from that temporary death to soldier on, and then her body struck down by some uncontrollable internal malady and tell me, SL, or someone, what’s left of that body and its own memories, the beautiful things artists who admired her made out of her? Wallace Stevens got it right when he said, in “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” that his white girl was actually “This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” I can’t write one complete sentence about her because she was her own complete sentence, and her sentence about herself was better than anyone else’s because she uttered it sort of without thinking while thinking too much, I can’t tell you how unusual that is in a world where, nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script. Still, her brilliance was in part contingent on knowing how the New York City script—a story of youth and ambition and race and blood and money—works and needs to work in order to be a story and therefore of value to other people; the human mind cleaves to details and what-happened-next so it can imagine what happened next, and I haven’t even told you enough of the story so you can imagine who she was and take it from there. She was a white girl who, while growing up in New Jersey, read Kurt Vonnegut and listened to punk music, and jazz. In high school, she sported a beret à la Rickie
Lee Jones. She was a newspaper freak and, as a young woman, wrote letters in support of Rajneeshpuram despite the facts. She wanted to protect the faithful from the faithless. She regarded SL’s vegetarianism as a kind of faith, and she admired it, but how could she give up her belief in bacon? Her attraction to men who had language was profound. Sometimes she’d visit me at the weekly newspaper I worked at back in the day because she was also drawn to a pasty gay journalist who spread his body anywhere there was available space. She called him the Answer Grape because he looked like a grape, and he had all the answers. She was the daughter of Europeans, immigrants who’d survived a world war to find something like stability in North America, and their survivalist instincts may have contributed to her own, which included being very protective of her fun. When she was up to no good you could see it on her face, so, to some extent, she was always an innocent, albeit one who thought: You could consider doing the right thing, but you could consider doing the wrong thing, too. For as long as I knew her, she walked a moral balance beam in high heels without chalking up her hands; she was as interested in sometimes falling off that beam on a friend’s bad side as well as their good.

The first time I saw her she was a waitress in a gay bar, were we even twenty-one years old? She was the lovely, ebullient, practical mind artists always love having around to remind them that the world exists, and Con Edison would like to hear from you—all while they painted her portrait. She worked in that bar in 1980, or 1981, and she was close to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988, the summer she
went to Europe with her first husband, a beautiful Berber boxer who was so kind to me, and when she got back from Europe we drove out to Brooklyn in her little car to visit Jean’s grave, just me and her, SL didn’t even know about that pilgrimage until after 2007, and at Jean-Michel’s grave in that Brooklyn cemetery, she kept saying, Poor baby, poor baby, as she toed the dead leaves away from his grave’s mouth. Standing there, looking down at her looking down, I remembered that Jean-Michel was indeed a baby when I met him; he was seventeen and I was sixteen. We were introduced by a fat and funny white girl who had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But is it an introduction if one of the two people won’t say hello and just stared? Because that’s what Jean-Michel did when he met me. We stood in that girl’s attic room in Brooklyn Heights; Jean-Michel had a Mohawk—I had never seen a black man with hair like that—and he was wearing a green mechanic’s jumper. He was so vibrant and hungry,
predatory
might be the word, he wanted to get somewhere, and he kept staring at me and it wasn’t until years later that I heard he liked black boys as much as he liked white girls. So I wonder what it was like for him when I showed up with Mrs. Vreeland—I called her Mrs. Vreeland from the first because she was stylish, and everything she wore was unfussy and the opposite of fashion and what did the first Mrs. Vreeland say about style? “It helps you get down the stairs.” My Mrs. Vreeland got down the stairs all right, but sometimes she tripped or stumbled, which is a form of being graceful, too, since what is grace but the desire to forget one’s body, or share it with others? She did both; I saw it all at one of Jean-Michel’s first big exhibitions. He was part of a group show called
New York/New Wave
, and oh my God I just looked it up—the show took
place at PS1 in 1981. Like an Adrienne Kennedy heroine I would give anything just now if I could talk to Jesus that night, and just once. I would tell Jesus what I remember about that night. I would tell him what I remember about that night. Were we even twenty-one? Yes, we were, just, and I don’t think I even put the Jean who wouldn’t take my hand in Mrs. Vreeland’s presence together with the artist whose work I saw in a show I had admired tremendously some time before—
The Times Square Show
, a show that combined the refined and the dissolute: how perfect was that, since New York was a disaster area then so why couldn’t an exhibition be a disaster area, too? I don’t think I took much notice of Jean-Michel’s paintings at PS1, though, since what was interesting to me that night was watching and not watching as the artist sometimes watched me and looked at Mrs. Vreeland; I’d give anything to talk to Jesus about it just once because it was one of those moments when life was changing me and she was life, a skinny white girl talking to an existentially freaked black man and already I was in love with Mrs. Vreeland’s bravery: how many white girls do you know, Jesus, who didn’t grow up around colored people, and who step outside of what life is supposed to look like for them—which is to say, white—and put on a party dress to look pretty for, and try to please, a black man who almost never has any power at all? Those impulses are rarer than you think. I seem to remember the dress, if not the material, then the shape she wore that evening at PS1. The skirt was reinforced with a little, not much, crinoline. The artist and his muse talked to one another as lovers do; he was living with another woman by then, but I’m not sure if that was a heartbreak for Mrs. Vreeland because other people interested her as well. Besides, she liked her heart’s desires
being a secret, a story only she could tell when she wanted to tell it. She was so intelligent about men and had realized at an early age that, despite the bluster, they were essentially passive creatures; you could get one if you wanted one, no problem. She was Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker in that she was aware that it took two to have an accident, but she was herself when she said to me, once, as I tried to learn how to drive a car and was too frightened of other people: They have brakes, too. As Mrs. Vreeland and Jean talked to each other in a conspiratorial way at that opening, I became what I would always be, later, in her and SL’s presence, a kid loving the smell of their adhesion. How did people talk the way that Jean-Michel was talking to Mrs. Vreeland now, in the utter privacy of their souls, and yet in public, for all the world to see? To talk to myself, even, I had to turn off the lights, as in a cinema.