White Girls (8 page)

I met her through some queens I didn’t like but thought I should like, because they were queens. It was also the summer I met—through the same queens—a Dutchman who was spending time in New York; he had swapped his apartment in Amsterdam for a small place on East Fourteenth Street. (That’s the same Dutch guy I visited early on in my friendship with SL, when SL offered to come along to Amsterdam with me and I freaked out, early love will freak you out.) Eventually Mrs. Vreeland took the flat above him, he found her the place, and that was one of the things I never noticed about her until sort of late in our friendship: part of what her love demanded was to live in or near your actual home, I never understood what that meant other
than the obvious. She was her very own crew on her very own Flying Dutchman. I fell in love with the Dutchman who ended up suffering a variation on a garbage-bag death, but in those years I was really much more in love with K, my college friend, the guy I would mourn in my stage-set apartment, sometimes with boys I paid to look like him. K was my heart’s desire, I took him to the bar where Mrs. Vreeland worked maybe a week or two after I met her because I loved her and I loved him, and the world was amazing! Amazing! Amazing! including Mrs. Vreeland’s willingness to be a Projection C as Wallace Stevens defined it. “She is half who made her. / This is the final Projection, C. / The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist.” Mrs. Vreeland not only affected this writer’s vision but the visual artist’s vision, too, Jean-Michel aside, there was SL remarking, soon after he met her, in 1988, referring to her carefully applied makeup: I’ve never known a white girl to use such colors, plus she doesn’t even like the Beatles! Later, looking at family photographs, SL pointed to a Modigliani reproduction that hung in his family dining room and said: I knew you before I knew you. SL also discussed, with a Japanese friend of Mrs. Vreeland’s, how her facial proportions resembled those in eighteenth-century ukiyo-e, or Japanese woodcuts. Also, curators who worked in the art field got her, too. One such curator said about Mrs. Vreeland once: I get it. She’s an old black man. Yes, I can see a little old Bojangles in her, why not, I saw everything else in her, she was one of life’s last great journeymen not to turn that experience into a career, she traveled from house to house learning from what was in her way but even though she longed for someone to make her a home I can’t ever remember her bringing a suitcase to that wish, she was always moving on, looking for a friend
or a family, sometimes leaving whatever she’d acquired on her travels but more likely just throwing it away to stay light and keep everything moving, and it’s okay, Mrs. Vreeland, I’ll keep it with mine, like old Bob Dylan said, I’ll keep it with mine. But would she let anyone keep her but herself? She used to joke with SL and say that he was married to himself but Mrs. Vreeland you were like every human being on the planet in that what you saw in the person you loved most was the person you were frightened of most, which is to say yourself, and so I guess the world is full of twins, beings who are attracted to themselves even as they’re repelled by and drawn to that same-only-different equation. You spoke our language even before SL and I became a we. In the bar where we met I heard your tone before I heard what you were saying; each was interesting but let me just say I find nothing more charming than a white girl who speaks with a slightly black syntax. Then I heard you say: I looked up at the sky and booga oog fletmarx Karen Horney exstasis! Then you worked in a clothing store or somewhere else and you said: Aeghtakeeywow! Then you got married and went to Europe and Jean died and you said: OoopfmaniklyatranonicpooReich! You said: Eeegarwooootick! Radicalismoooggamindfloatchic! after you looked at SL for the first time, or maybe it was the third time. That was in 1988. You lived in a small walk-up in the West Village with your husband, who had a number of business concerns in the East Village. Life was just chugging along, and we weren’t even thirty. Suddenly, there was new love. What I recall of that new love was its beginning, which included SL and me escorting you to Jean-Michel’s memorial, and I could see as you sat close to both of us—we were your sentries, silent and stalwart—how you were moving away from one marriage
to be married to SL, and did you ever know how that completed my we with SL? From the first you were necessary to his body and thus soul, and his loving you was one way for me to love you, too, without thinking my body would reduce you to a garbage bag. Jean-Michel died in August 1988, I can’t remember the day exactly but when I think of it the memorial service was in the fall, and by that winter you and SL were together, and I never told you how bereft I felt when you and SL would go off together to be married in your way and I just waited for my heart’s desire to return and then there you were again with the curl of your hip. But I don’t want to make a romance of their romance, which feels like such a slight word compared to marriage, which doesn’t do it, either. Shall I call it as I saw it? A twinship? In all our years together, I don’t think Mrs. Vreeland had much interest in people who weren’t romantically connected to other people she loved. And because she loved you, she wanted to have your experience not in a purely selfish way, but in an empathetically selfish way. She wanted to wear your heart on her sleeve. I can’t say she wanted to be me as I was in my we with SL, but I will say that she found our us as interesting as her considerable I. (One reason SL was attracted to the women he was attracted to, he said, was their self-interest; they weren’t ambivalent about his love and strengths, except when he wouldn’t let them have their way. From the first I was greedy for SL, too. I was always starving for him. I loved to learn, and he had so much to teach, ranging from his interest in graphic design to the world, with its multitude of worms. I know I loved SL, too, because he was an artist. My mother—my soul’s twin—somehow communicated to all her children that artists were exalted beings, and some of us fell in love with them over and over again. The
world and the times she grew up in prevented my mother from being the dancer and artist she longed to be; she wore too-tight shoes for years to disfigure her feet so she would and would not remember that she had wanted to be a dancer in her youth. She wanted to prevent her children from going through any of this.) SL’s attachment to me wasn’t divisible from what she found such a turn-on about SL, which included his language, his authoritative, circuitous sentences and unimpeachable logic. Once, just for fun, I read to my friends from a story Veronica Geng published in 1978 called “James at an Awkward Age.” The piece sounded the way SL’s beautiful Negro speak sounded, and made Mrs. Vreeland feel. Maybe Mrs. Vreeland loved SL so because her soul felt like the way he sounded. Geng wrote:

The NBC-TV sitcom “James at 16,” canceled in 1978, will inevitably resume in a new format. Episode One, “Pop Quiz”:

Segment 1: Interior, the Berkeley Institute, a boys’ school in Newport, Rhode Island. The Reverend William Leverett has just finished lecturing on “Cicero As Such.” Boys stream from the classroom into the hall. JAMES and his only friend, SARGY, meet in front of James’s locker.

       
SARGY: James, my man! (
They shake hands
.) Isn’t Leverett something else?

       
JAMES: As to what, don’t you know? else he
is
—! Leverett is of a weirdness.

       
SARGY: Say, my man, what’s going down?

       
JAMES: Anything, you mean, different from what is usually up? But one’s just where one
is
—isn’t one? I don’t mean so much in the being by one’s locker—for it does, doesn’t it? lock and unlock and yet all unalterably, stainlessly, steelily glitter—as in one’s head and what vibes one picks up and the sort of deal one perceives as big.

       
SARGY: Oh, I wouldn’t sweat it.

Once, as another kind of joke, the always formally attired and layered SL—being colored, clothes were his other complicated language; trying to be “normal,” or white for a minute, I complained to him at one point about the layers black men wore, even in the summer, and he said: Son, we didn’t wear bikinis in the desert—put on a pair of Mrs. Vreeland’s blue jeans and walked around a parking lot. On Mrs. Vreeland’s videotape of the occasion, you can hear her husky laugh. But the truth is we were both enthralled by SL’s irreducible visual sense and language. There was nothing like it. We tried to imitate his photographs when he gave us cameras or lent us his own. We tried to sport hats as jauntily as he did, but our heads seemed to miss the point. We tried to go to as many movies as he did, but fell asleep in them. We tried to do with as little sleep as SL seemed to live off, but had to dream and be hurt or happy in our dreams. We tried to speak with his authority, but could only manage to blow baby bubbles. Once, by way of illustrating Mrs. Vreeland’s frustration and fascination with SL’s powerful linguistics (he enjoyed frightening people with his speech, sometimes, or putting them to sleep), SL told me that they were having an argument and he used a word she didn’t know
and she said so. He suggested she look it up in the dictionary and she cried: You have all the dictionaries! In 1988 and 1989 and 1990, as their love grew—they didn’t officially break up until Mrs. Vreeland, per her usual program, found someone else in the mid-nineties; in any case, none of us broke up, really, until 2007, when she died; I haven’t seen SL in a long time now, but he never broke up with her, even after she died; I knew there was no way he couldn’t identify with her until the end, and beyond: she was a white girl—my happiness for their fate and
in
their fate was often marred by the way they sounded. For a time, their language was indistinguishable; they used the same words and phrases—“Did that feel well?”; “Yikes”; “I love you”—that drove me mad: they were becoming twins. Did that preclude my twinship with SL? My twinship with Mrs. Vreeland? It was maybe a year or two after they got together, and Mrs. Vreeland and I went to a record store near her home to ask after a recent release. We were living in an rpm world then. And if this was 1989, we were probably looking for De La Soul’s first album,
3 Feet High and Rising
. Or if it was 1991, we were probably looking for De La Soul’s second album,
De La Soul Is Dead
, because without articulating it, we loved those boys best because of their SL-like language, particularly when, on 1989’s “D.A.I.S.Y. Age,” we heard this:

This is Posdnuos

The president of a paragraph

Paragraph, president

President preachin’ ’bout the on-tech

Known for the new step

Stop and take a bow...

Fill you with my vocab

Hope you have a spoon...

We ate any version of SL up. At the store, and for no apparent reason, a group of teenage boys of color, three or four at the most, started to circle me. I didn’t feel threatened so much as I felt the energy of an exchange with them I didn’t understand; they were animals responding to another animal while Mrs. Vreeland, a white girl, stood outside the circle. The whole event was profound, inexplicable, and silent. Afterward, as Mrs. Vreeland related the experience to SL on the phone, I felt myself in her: those boys looked at me not as one of their own, but as something as familiar and foreign as a white girl. And in terms of how people responded to us—they either wanted to fuck or fight us, someone said—Mrs. Vreeland and I were the same and even though I thought it was impossible for SL to love us the same, he did until he didn’t.

I was away on a reporting trip in 2006 when Mrs. Vreeland’s body started to fail her. She was as conscious of her body as she was fearful of it; in short, she was a woman. In the letter she wrote me about her condition—tumors, she would not say cancer, she would cure it all homeopathically, homeopathic medicine was her faith—she sounded just like SL in his letters; even though they hadn’t been together in about eight years when Mrs. Vreeland left to find another house, and leave her suitcase someplace else, the body of his language was in her.
Which was the feeling I had when they were together: they were more themselves together than they were apart. They were twins. And, as such, SL was equally interested in Mrs. Vreeland’s language. Indeed, he loved her literal transcriptions. He had her write words out on pieces of paper and he then put those pieces of paper in his films, and in his photographs. Looking at Jean-Michel’s paintings, SL swore he saw Mrs. Vreeland’s distinctive handwriting in some of the work. I could believe it. Just because she was SL’s twin doesn’t mean she hadn’t been someone else’s.

In 1981 Jean-Michel Basquiat painted
Arroz Con Pollo
, a big picture, dominated by yellow and white. The artist made the work when he and Mrs. Vreeland took a holiday together in Puerto Rico, she had to pull the canvas in off the balcony of their rented house because after Jean finished it he left it outdoors, and it began to rain. I love art the artist wouldn’t mind getting disappeared. But
Arroz Con Pollo
exists still; it’s outlived both subject and artist. The painting is a kind of double portrait about aesthetic and political twinship; both Jean and Mrs. Vreeland were Projection A’s: Jean was a black man in America, let alone the primarily white art world, and Mrs. Vreeland was interested in men of color as much as “ordinary” white girls pursued white men with real power. It was only recently that I noticed in the painting that Mrs. Vreeland is baking a chicken. Later the same year—the year she went to Puerto Rico—Mrs. Vreeland spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. This was after she left her job at the bar, and after that Dutchman left New York to return to Amsterdam. It was 1981 and
I was living with relatives in Brooklyn, ostensibly finishing college, but mostly what I was doing was mourning a first love that wasn’t really love, which turned out to be the only kind of love I knew for a number of years. The phone rang, and everything changed; Mrs. Vreeland was on the line. Why not come to Martha’s Vineyard? Why sit there more or less by yourself? The sky here is ooggboogasensationalughalicDe-Kooning! And unlike myself because she was unlike anyone else and sometimes one is enough of a person, I found myself on a boat within a few days after her call and then there she was on the other end of that journey wearing a white shift, her dark hair darker still under her straw hat; the shadows made her face dark but not her arms, and they were reaching up and up and everything was amazing! Amazing! Amazing! And I got off the boat and she said, by way of greeting: Come on, let’s go to the supermarket and get a chicken.