JD (13 page)

That's how his poems looked. This didn't seem as silly at the time.

Philip is in the apartment. I mean, one second I am standing in the doorway picturing Jonathan's typographically florid verse and the next second Philip Marks is behind me. I turn to find he has set his knapsack down in the foyer and is surveying the bookcase in the living room. Probably disheartened to see that it is filled with cookbooks; he must have thought that I would have kept Jonathan's library intact.

“You must love to cook,” he says. Perhaps there isn't really anything condescending about this.

“I do illustrations for cookbooks.”

“You do? My. All of these?”

“No. Some are the competition.”

He laughs. This surely is condescending: as if there could be any competition for work as trivial and superfluous as drawing vegetables. “May I see some?”

“Sure. I …” Which? Not which is my favorite, I know that, but which will impress him most?
Tuscan Winters
, probably, where is it? Except no: he'll think I was a little too influenced by Leonard Baskin. No, he'll think it's a cookbook. “Just take a look,” I say. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Water would be
won
derful.”

He waits at the kitchen door as I fill his glass. “I'm going to brew some tea,” I say. As I put the kettle on the stove I see from the corner of my eye that Philip, quite sneakily, pops a couple of pills, glugs his water.

Oh: he is sick. A sick homosexual. That used to be a tautology, back when I was young. I was only just getting accustomed to the idea that it wasn't a tautology when it became a tautology again. Now, for all I know he has allergies or high cholesterol or is just taking his Virilita because he has a hot date later. Why should I assume he—? And how can he be sick and so muscular?

But I sense he is: not just the pills, but something else, a tinge of smoke in the whites of his eyes, touches of matte in the gloss of his too-black hair. I guess they're living longer now, with all the drugs, maybe he'll live to be as old as I am. But he will be, all of that time, sick. His muscles are emblems of futility; he is a walking
vanitas
.

At last, tea-making and cookie-plating and every other diversion exhausted, I sit facing him in the living room. Sphinx-like, guarding the entrance to the Annex in Elizabeth and its hoard of papyruses.

I need to ask him something. I manage, “How did you get interested in Jonathan?”

“In … ? Oh.” He is, I guess, a little startled at hearing the first name. At being with someone who knew this figure who, to Philip Marks, is just a shelf of books. A short shelf. “Dr. Ascher was very important in helping me find my identity.”

This sounds like something a nineteen-year-old would say. The sphinx melts for a second. Until she realizes: “You mean in helping you … come out.”

He raises one eyebrow, just like Gregory Peck, then smiles. “No, I figured myself out before I could read. But I guess partly, yeah. He was sort of a model of how you could be both gay and politically engaged, not retreat into some kind of aesthetic—”

“He hated that word.”

“Aesthetic?”

“Gay. Jonathan hated the word ‘gay.'”

“Did he? That's very interesting. You know, I've read every word he ever published, and I can't recall that he … I mean, there's really no place where he talks about the movement at all. Even though Stonewall was, what, four years before he … before the …”

“Stroke,” I supply. He has no trouble talking with a widow about her husband's sexuality, but he is too delicate to say how the man died. “The
movement
. He didn't care much for the movement.”

“Really?” Marks says, raising the other eyebrow. “But he was … I mean, he was practically the patron saint. His frankness was an example to every—”

“He hated the word, he hated the movement, he would have hated being the patron saint of a bunch of fairies. That was the word he used.”

“Fairies,” he repeats. He looks down at the carpet and shakes his head. Maybe he is wondering if he couldn't have picked a better subject. He raises his head, looks back at me with an expression I can't quite read. “‘Fairies of North America,
Pájaros
of Havana …
Adelaidas
of Portugal.”

“What?”

“Garcia Lorca. He hated fairies, too. He wanted men to be able to love men without being poisonous fairies.” He chuckles. “I gather you don't much care for fairies yourself.”

“I—” I want to protest, just automatically, some of my best friends are. And some have been: our dear funny pal Arthur, who loved charades. Oh, and Clyde, who would sit on the beach with me at Truro and cluck as I recited the ups and downs of my summer affair, and … But I surely didn't want to hear about Clyde's summer affair. We could be best friends if they just wouldn't rub my face in it. “I think Jonathan's feeling was that people shouldn't put themselves in categories.”

“Yes, exactly.” He nods with excess vigor, the way people do when you've just fed them the cue line for their favorite monologue. He doesn't mind that I've changed the subject back from myself to Jonathan. After all, Jonathan
is
the subject. “As I said in my letter, that's precisely what I'm hoping to write about.”

“Oh. Is
that
what you said in your letter?”

“I'm sorry. I'm not very into all that highfalutin stuff myself. But you kind of … you gotta use the secret words before they let you in the clubhouse.” He chuckles again. Uncannily like Jonathan when he was being patient with me. “You were talking about people putting themselves in categories. So I was saying that what Dr. Ascher's work was about—I mean, partly, one of the things—was about discarding, getting past, gender categories.”

“Oh, no.” I practically moan at him. Why should I have hoped he had some insight to offer? “No, he didn't want to discard gender categories. He wanted his genders rock solid. Didn't you read
JD
?”

“Of course.”

“People thought—when he talked about the modern world offering no way to live as a man, people thought he meant the … the generic, human. But he meant a male, that's all he cared about. How to live as a male.”

“Well, I … you know, I was aware of the masculinist project of the book. But I see that as paradoxically protofeminist, inasmuch as it lays the grounding for a critique of all—”

“Protofeminist! He thought I was a vessel for carrying his son.” This thundering untruth shuts the little jerk up for a minute. And
how untrue is it? Surely Jonathan would never have thought of marrying me if I hadn't had Mickey. But in fairness: he married me without knowing if I was carrying a Mickey or a Michele.

Philip leans forward, full of solicitude. “Is that how he treated you?”

I just look back at him, partly because saying exactly how Jonathan treated me is complicated. Partly because he has so deftly steered us into biographer-interviews-widow mode. No, I have steered myself. I hadn't seen: there is a temptation here, I could tell him every lousy thing Jonathan ever did. In which case, even if Philip believed me and duly reported all of it, I would just be a woman to whom lousy things were done.

“We got along all right,” I say. “He was just a little more liberal about some things than others.”

“I see.”

“All of his gang, maybe. With all their isms, I never ran into one that really made a life for both genders. They all thought men should roll up their sleeves and build skyscrapers, and women should pack their lunch pails.”

Philip smiles. I wonder if he doesn't feel the same thing. What
do
homosexuals think about women?

“If you're going to expose his thoughts to a new generation,” I say, doing my best to sound neutral as I repeat this inanity from his letter. “You need to expose all his thoughts, including the silly ones.”

“You think? Nobody gets through a lifetime without ever being silly. Anyway …” He clears his throat, then repeats “Anyway,” an octave lower. “If we go ahead with this, you need to understand, I … I'm the guy who decides what gets exposed and what doesn't.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I mean, I'm not going to agree to any kind of approval of the manuscript.”

Oddly, I haven't even thought about this. If he hadn't brought it up I wouldn't have. “I don't know what's customary. It's something I'd have to talk with Laurence Ramsey about. That is, if we think about going ahead.”

“So you are at least thinking about it?” He clasps his hands, like a little boy praying.

“I don't know. I wish I really understood why you want to write about Jonathan.”

He twinkles, deliberately. “Got to write about somebody.”

“What? Oh. You mean, to get tenure or something.”

“Couldn't hoit,” he says, with a Borscht Belt inflection. “Actually, I have tenure. But it might …”

“Get you out of Delaware.”

“I've tried clicking my heels three times.” I force a little smile, though he will hardly win me over by sprinkling his conversation with Judy Garland references. “But I'm not going to get out of Delaware. I'm fifty, if I won the Nobel prize I wouldn't get out of Delaware.”

“My, you don't look fifty,” I say. He shrugs; he hears this enough that it isn't even flattering. Fifty: almost Mickey's age.

“I'm fifty. Which means it's thirty years now since I first came across Dr. Ascher's poems in my college bookstore. I opened this little book and there was a man telling in such a plain voice … the truth. I mean, my truth, a guy who could say outright what was beautiful in the world, which was the same as what I thought was beautiful. And even the things he did at night, everything I was aching to do. And it wasn't some sleaze in a porn shop, it was this elegant little book published by the Aurora Press. Right there in the remainder bin at my college bookstore.

“I remember, I blushed when I got to the cash register. As if the clerk had any way of knowing what was inside this book called
Poems
. I blushed because
I
knew what was inside, and because the clerk was cute and he was holding all my secrets, there in his hand.

“I must have read it through twenty times that first night. Poem after poem telling me, so simply, that I was the most natural thing in the world.”

Poor baby, he won't have to get any farther in the journals than I have to learn that Jonathan was telling him something very different. But maybe he wouldn't learn. Maybe he would read the journals the way he read the poems and probably
JD
: everything just telling him what he wanted to hear. Telling him his own secrets.

“So Jonathan made you feel all right about yourself.” This comes out almost as a sneer; he leans back a little, as if I have punched him.

He musters a smile. “No, he didn't. For years after that, I went on resisting. Fucking like a bunny but joylessly, in the middle of the act looking down at myself with utter loathing. When I went into a gay bar or even, once, to Provincetown there were all these …” His smile broadened. “Fairies. I couldn't be one of those. I knew I couldn't be anything else, but I couldn't let go, for the longest time. And all those years, it took years, the book was on my shelf. Murmuring that I could, too, be myself. Maybe Dr. Ascher would have hated me, I guess that's what you're telling me.”

“No, I—”

“But his poems loved me.”

I almost laugh at this. I do not, because he is so earnest and his eyes are so dark.

He sighs. “Seriously, I regard Dr. Ascher as a major figure, and I think I have interesting things to say about him. That's all. And, you know, this could be my …”

I wait, but he doesn't finish. His what? His masterpiece, his road to fame and fortune, his—last book, that is what he will not say. Too tactful to make this appeal. Or shrewd enough to know that I will complete the sentence on my own.

Last book—not because he's sick, if he is. But because he's fifty, and has written one book, and he has just this one idea left in him. That's what I saw in him, as he stood in the kitchen door, watching me make tea. Not death, but the drying-up. What happened to Jonathan, in the eight years he lived past
JD
. The drought, the wastebasket filled with shreds of Corrasable Bond. He didn't crumple his false starts, he tore them into bits. As if I would have wanted to read them! Though I suppose Philip Marks would have.

“I'll have to talk to Laurence,” I say. “And, you know, we already gave somebody else permission to use the papers.”

“Really? When was this?”

“A long time ago.”

August 4, 1964

We are at the end of the course. The students don't write a paper or take an exam; the only exam they have to pass is at the start of the session, when their check clears the bank. So on this last evening we just chatted about what we'd learned and how reading all these books had enriched us.

Glover noted that there seemed to be all kinds of ways of looking at the world and it was good to be exposed to them. Except--seeing as how everybody in these books winds up unhappy--probably the normal American way of seeing things was best.

I nodded and glanced over at Bentley the Negro. Hoping he might point out there's more than one American way of seeing things. But he just looked blandly at Glover, with a tiny smile that Glover might even have taken as a concurrence. I guess Bentley doesn't think it's his job to educate the world. I've just spent a few hours trying to overcome the complacency and myopia of these people, and all I've done is tire them out, and myself. Imagine spending a lifetime having to smile and nod to them.