Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (5 page)

O
UTSIDE THE MUSEUM the
New York Post
shrieks, MAN SHOOTS GIRLFRIEND SAYS SHE GAVE HIM AIDS, furnishing enough scandal to get the office workers home from Manhattan to Queens on the subway; inside the Metropolitan Museum, a marmoreal murmur fills the entrance hall, and I decide not to check my coat. On this early November afternoon, I have walked up to the Met from St. Marks Place to clear my head. Halfway between the two, the public library is flying a flag advertising
Ten
Centuries of Spanish Books,
one of which is the diary of Christopher Columbus, turned to a page written on his way to the New World the
New York Post
is now part of. (Did he think that it would lead to this? I wondered, gazing at his handwriting through the glass case.) The diary only put me deeper in the mood that brought me to the museum today: the desire to take a breath in some century other than this one. That’s what a museum provides. I’ve come to this one at very different moments of my life: as a student, as a tourist, as a grown-up New Yorker who wanted to show his boyfriend the Christmas crèche. In the seventies it was perfect for a hangover, cool and quiet; after I stopped going out, I would come here because there was nothing else to do on Sunday morning.

Sunday, in those days, began at four in the afternoon—you could not call anyone before then. So when I started rising early I would have to find something to do. After killing time looking at paintings in the Metropolitan, I would go to the pay phone and dial the number of a friend who lived a few blocks away. My first question was always, “How was the music? Who was there? Did you get laid?” (
Art calling Life
!) Then, if it was okay to visit, I would run down the steps of the museum into the cold, exhilarating air of winter, knowing that when I got to my friend’s I would very likely find, in his apartment, live originals of the faces I’d been examining in the silver light of the museum—especially the portraits on wood of Egyptian men of the Hellenistic Age in a small room just off the entrance hall, men with black eyes and black beards who uncannily resembled my favorite faces on the dance floor at Flamingo, when I was still going there.

Now the image of the handsome man has changed—he’s blond, clean-shaven, Anglo Saxon, Calvin Klein’d—but in the seventies those Egyptians with black beards and eyes were so like the men I’d seen in bars and baths, they provided the same eerie sensation of staring across an abyss of time that I’d felt looking at the diary of Christopher Columbus—a chasm only objects, not people, can cross.

Objects are what this place enshrines: so many, that walking through the rooms of armor, chalices, furniture, and paintings—the rooms of rooms—I think of some Henry James novel in which the contents of a house, the possessions of millionaires, are the goal of the protagonists, and the people themselves ephemeral. Museums are morgues, a friend of mine said once when he refused an invitation to come with me to this one; mausoleums in which plutocrats leave the booty they amassed during lifetimes on Wall Street, attempts, Freud said, of guilty businessmen to turn money (or shit) into Art. My friend’s right, but although I understand what he meant, I never felt that way to the point of not going. I’ve always loved coming here. Even when I was happier in the Rambles than I was inside this building, I would still stop in the Metropolitan. Even when a man on a rock in Central Park was more compelling than one on canvas; even when it made me angry that the museum got permission to expand backward into the park and gobble up several acres of green, to make room for, among other things, the dining room of a stockbroker hung with El Grecos, I kept coming—though the Metropolitan, it seemed to me, was big enough already, and suffered from the same elephantiasis that homosexual life in the seventies seemed to exhibit, with its bars, baths, gyms, discos, mobs of men. By the end of the seventies it felt like there was too much of everything—so to get through either one, gay life or the Metropolitan, to maintain one’s identity in this sea of muchness, I resigned myself to singling out a few favorite icons for which I reserved my admiration. Just the way we make a special place, in a museum like the Met, for a single cameo, a few paintings, some fragments of a torso, or a chalice, so I reserved my ultimate admiration for certain individuals in that mob of men on the dance floor at Flamingo.

Some of the homosexual icons are now dead, but in the museum the artifacts remain perfectly intact in its controlled light, humidity, and temperature. One of the great appeals of Art is that it has a very long shelf life. That’s why I’m here. Everything has been so bad lately, I’ve come full circle: The student who abandoned Art after he discovered Life has had enough of Life for the moment. The man who preferred to spend his afternoon cruising the Rambles now wants the company of the inanimate. Back and forth we go. Last evening at the Jewel I looked at images of the nude male on its movie screen, and today I’m spending the afternoon looking at more male bodies in oil paint and stone.

There are too many, of course, but I have never been quite so open to them all as I am now. In the first room I enter, a curator and a preparator are hanging a painting from the Middle Ages. The curator stands back to see if it is crooked, directs his helper to pull the rope so that the painting rises on the left, and says, “I think that’s right.” Once, serving drinks at a party in a gallery, I bumped into a Monet. The host laughed at my chagrin, readjusted the painting, and said, “So much for the grandeur of Art.” Paintings, after all, are just things hung on walls, but at the Metropolitan, in the silver light, they seem like religious objects. Many are. I walk through the rooms filled with images of gods and goddesses, Christ and the saints, heroes from the Bible. If you stop in a church on Fifth Avenue these days, you are often completely alone; you can sit there in a pew and rest, one thick door away from the hustle of the city. With the passing of the Age of Faith, more people come to
this
temple than all the others dotting Fifth Avenue all the way down to Washington Square. We no longer cherish God to the degree we cherish our artifacts, ceremonies, myths, and treasures. God is dead, Vermeer lives. This is known as humanism, and it makes Fundamentalists gnash their teeth. Yet today this museum feels like a refuge, a cathedral in a land of violence, as I walk through the clean, well-lighted rooms, past innumerable Christs on the Cross, and Holy Mothers, on my way to the newest thing, the American Wing.

The American Wing is part of that structure that gobbled up the green grass of the park and now regards the remnant apple trees as a vast, smooth wall of masonry on which tiny sprigs of ivy will be busy the next forty years climbing their way to the top—like so much else in Manhattan. For what? Looking at the American paintings in the new wing, they seem to me as lonely and isolated as I feel at the moment. Even the Winslow Homer of boys playing crack-the-whip in a meadow in New England looks far more austere and cold than the image reproduced in art books. There it has a Norman Rockwell quality, here the light on the meadow is thin and anemic. One can feel the chill of the pale air, the stony high-minded sobriety of New Hampshire, of cold floors on winter mornings. Several more paintings by Homer of waves crashing on gray rocks; landscapes by the Hudson River Valley School; and portraits—from colonial times to John Singer Sargents—deepen this sense of solitude. Only Eakins shows the naked body, but with the same light that’s in Homer’s New England meadow. Santayana said life in America reminded him of the New Haven YMCA: sober, Christian, devoted to self-improvement. We were Puritan till very recently. Now we’ve been told it’s our right to take a winter vacation and to find our G-spot. At the baths in Berlin last year I saw, on the screen of the TV in my room, forty nude Californians surround a swimming pool in a daisy chain, a Busby Berkeley homage to fellatio. Maybe the real American contribution to civilization, the last refuge of the male nude, is pornography. It is somehow the flip side of these sober paintings. We have always been two countries—Puritan and Cavalier—as there are two cities in New York right now: the infected and uninfected. One country is chaotic—illegal immigrants, heart transplants, pornography and drugs, homosexuals and AIDS. The other has been around much longer, and speaks from these paintings. Nothing decorative, nothing baroque. No crosses, and no Virgin Marys. No birth, and no death. Just the trackless forest, the mountain pass, the shaft of sunlight landing on a clearing in the valley, the solitary sitter. The New England soul Hawthorne and James described. The preexisting bedrock, as hard and gray as the Maine shore that Homer’s waves crash upon. The country that sits and watches all the changes but does not really change, approve, or like them. In Santayana’s novel
The Last Puritan
, two men are contrasted: The Italian is the happy connoisseur of life’s pleasures; the American is a moralist too finely constituted to flourish, an idealist estranged from this earth. I think of them as I leave the forlorn light of the American Wing and walk back into the flowers, white arms, breastplates, helmets, velvet, and gold of Europe. The people, one feels, in the European rooms are not lonely.

My first year in New York I came here often to see a painting called
The Forge of Vulcan
for the smithy’s graceful body and muscular back. There was a correspondence then between the faces and bodies in the paintings and those on the subway. They were connected, the men on their bunks at the baths and the gods depicted by Velázquez and Titian. There is nothing, of course, so voluptuous as a naked body in the American Wing. Only Eakins, who was fired from the art academy in Philadelphia for exposing the women in his life class to the pelvis of a male model, painted the nude—and then under the guise of boxers, athletes, young men at a swimming hole—that lonely, virtuous, Arcadian swimming hole! When an antisexual society decides to have sex, does it cease being antisexual? No. There was something compulsive, frantic, competitive in our quest for transcendent sex—Ahab in search of Moby Dick. Today the museum is full of youths staring, like deer in a forest, as they press the buttons on the tape machines that begin the recorded tour: American originals who wander somnambulistically through the rooms looking as forlorn, as scrubbed, as the boys playing crack-the-whip in that adamantine meadow. Their youth, their innocence, their health depress me in some way, since I came here today in part because a friend who stopped having sex nearly four years ago—in order to save himself—just got pneumonia.

In the next room two middle-aged couples sit together on a bench in front of an El Greco. One man says to the others, “You know, a lot of Jews went to Portugal when they were expelled from Spain, and they just converted. So there are a lot of Jews in Portugal no one knows about.”
Who’s counting?
I think
. They are
. Jews worry about Jews, homosexuals about homosexuals. Everyone else is largely indifferent to both. AIDS in America belongs to gays. That people care about the number of Jews in Portugal seems minor to me today; that youth has been sent to gape dutifully at the great works of art equally remote. I am looking for something I cannot find in either the American or the European rooms, and that is why I walk out of them to the top of the main staircase, turn right, and enter a room few people are ever in.

“They did
nothing
but make vases!” a German friend said one day, exasperated, when we entered this gallery. “In Berlin they store them in bomb shelters!” They do seem alike. Perhaps it is the monotony, the apparent sameness of the Greek vases, that numbs the viewer, for the same reason a crowd of men at Tea Dance leaves one blank: They cancel each other out. Reproduced in great numbers, even the beautiful item is meaningless. All the vases are of the same color, and, with variations, the same shapes; there is even a large chart against the wall explaining the functions of each, like an exhibit illustrating the various coins of a foreign nation. I could not tell one from the others for years. Then the
New York Times
carried a story one day about the acquisition of a vase depicting the death of Sarpedon; and a friend told me about Leagros. That was enough. When it seemed to me that the crowds at Flamingo, with their redundant physiques, were missing the point—when the tambourines and ethyl chloride, the rites of Tea Dance, seemed as suffocating as any law prohibiting sodomy—I would come into this pale room whose wooden floor creaks, and go to the glass case that holds a vase depicting the death of a warrior in the Trojan War. There, above the frieze of men in armor, the fallen hero with a wound in his side dripping blood, is an inscription in Greek that says,
Leagros is fair
. It is a mash note written to a youth the artist admired. We have been around a long, long time.

Bitter, dusty death—the death Homer speaks of so frequently in
The Iliad,
the death that comes to men so pitilessly—lies just beneath the words of praise. The death that does not figure in the American Wing, or even much in the European rooms, but which is so strong a presence in ancient civilization that when I leave the Greek vases I realize what it is I have come here for, and go downstairs to the room beneath this one that contains statues of Greek gods and athletes: the stone torsos whose beauty is so direct, so naked, I feel, at some level, embarrassed to look at them and always flush despite myself on entering the room. So undisguised is their celebration of the male form, they make me—covered in clothes, disguised in an age that makes my admiration guilty and concupiscent—uncomfortable. Their beauty stares the starer down. In life we try to possess it in the flesh; reproduce it in our gyms; ignore it with so much trivia—so much talk, and partying, and going back and forth—but here it is in its elemental form, freed of the decay of the flesh, the nonsense of daily life. Along the wall are glass cases containing objects the Etruscans made for people in the next world—a world we do not much believe in anymore—including a tray of food not unlike the one we could pick up in the museum cafeteria today. The stone torsos, the Etruscan chariot, a pair of Hispanic guards talking about their weekend, are at my back. But as I stare at the funeral artifacts, it seems to me this room contains only two elements: Beauty and Death. No castles, flowers, tunics, breviaries. Just The Nude and The Netherworld. I cross the hall, through the tourists buying postcards, the roar of an enormous train station, and go into the Egyptian wing.