JD (9 page)

Villard registered our slightly tardy return with a faint smirk, then turned to resume his conversation with a guy
whose skull-like face I knew only from the papers. A composer, I think, who writes sonatas for pencil sharpeners, that kind of thing. I didn't get to talk to him, nor to the famous architect with the enormous spectacles, but I did after a while find myself sitting across from Dennis O'Grady, whom I knew from the bars downtown, the Poplar and the rest. Knew isn't right, maybe: there must be half a dozen people he and I have both slept with, but I don't think we had exchanged more than a dozen words until last night.

Dennis was listening to an animated--read flaming--youth who was perched on the arm of his easy chair. But he saw me sit down and favored me with a slow and infinitesimal wave, as if lifting a hand were exhausting. He murmured something to the boy--something about me, I guess, for the boy looked in my direction, squinted. The way he might have if, at a gallery, O'Grady had said here was a painting he needed to know about. Yes: I was, this party was, part of the tour of fairyland on which O'Grady was leading the neophyte. Here is Edgar Villard, here is Jonathan Ascher, well, you don't really need to know Jonathan Ascher, but here he is. So the boy noted me, checked me off, then went on gabbling. Dennis didn't even look at him, just rested one wiry, almost hairless forearm on the boy's thigh and closed his eyes.

Dennis is a poet. Not, like me, somebody who occasionally gets a line or two published, but a guy who--though he never gets published at all and has a day job running the gift shop at the Met, something like that--is understood by everyone to be a Poet. So he can wear a fraying undershirt and baggy gabardines to a party where nearly everyone else, even free-spirited Jonathan Ascher, has on a coat and tie. He can close his eyes, drum a finger on the boy's thigh in a rhythm entirely at odds with the smooth jazz Villard has playing on the hi-fi, and people will say he must be drumming to his own beat, for he is a poet.

I realized, as I sat looking at him and thinking these snippy discreditable thoughts, that I was jealous of Dennis O'Grady. Not because he's a better writer than I am. I've
seen his stuff, the mimeographed chapbooks his friends pass around, and it is, yes, better than mine. But I never said I was a poet. Jealous of what, then? The ease with which he works a bar, maybe, chattering with everybody and then heading out the door with some prize you could swear he hadn't spoken to all night? His looks, his smooth languid goyness?

I turned away, but not quickly enough. Dennis had opened his eyes, was looking straight at me with sharp interest and the hint of a frown, as if he had read my thoughts about him. He raised his empty glass, the boy snatched it at once and headed toward the bar. “So, Jonathan,” Dennis drawled, managing to find at least seven vowels in my name. “What are you writing?” Of course when a writer asks another writer that question, he is hoping the answer is Nothing.

“I've started another novel,” I said. “But I'm not sure I'm entranced with it.” All thousand words of it. Dennis nodded, gave me a nasty faint smile of mock-empathy. “I've sort of been itching to write a little bit about politics.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Politics?” As if he could more easily imagine writing about the New York sewer system.

“Not politics as in, ‘Who's going to win this charade of an election?' More about the … polity, do you understand? About society.”

“Oh. Sociology,” he hissed, sibilant as the fallen angels in
Paradise Lost
.

“No, no,” I said, and he politely leaned forward so I could explain just what I did mean to write. As if he cared, and as if I had an idea in hell. Here, maybe, was what I envied about Poet O'Grady. He may not know what he's going to write next, but he knows it will be a poem. While I don't even know what I'm failing to write.

Villard, mysteriously sensing my discomfiture from across the room, sidled our way to see how he could add to it. “Don't let me interrupt,” he said, perching on the arm of my chair just as Dennis's little bonbon retook his place on the arm of Dennis's. I did not have the prize.

“Oh, we were just talking about Jonathan's new book,” Dennis said. His boy leaned forward: gosh, real writers talking about books.

“Ah. Another
experimental
novel.” It is impossible to convey the precise twist Villard put on the word: the mix of condescension, wistful admiration for what he was incapable of, and just a whiff that I was some kind of Frankenstein, stitching together something monstrous and unnatural in my laboratory.

“No,” Dennis said. “He says it's … well, he was just about to say.”

“I was about to not say.”

“Quite right,” Villard said. “We authors find that nothing can jinx a book more than talking about it.” With this he patted my shoulder--gave it, rather, a glancing touch before pulling his hand away. I suppose he was trying to be collegial. And what he said was, after all, true: once you have boiled a book down to the two- or three-sentence abstract you can rattle off at cocktail parties, it is never quite so vital again, turns somehow into a mounted skeleton at a natural history museum. Then all you have ahead of you is the long slog of adding enough stuffing and feathers to persuade the rubes that you've written a real book. If I shuddered, it was perhaps at Villard's presumption that he and I were of a kind. Authors. It occurs to me now that he must have thought he was being generous, admitting to his guild a sucker who'd never even gone into a second printing.

Dennis said, “It's all about politics or society or something.”

“Well, that would be a turn, wouldn't it?” Villard said. “Something a little more
engagé
?”

“Gee, I thought I was plenty engaged.”

“Oh, perhaps. But peopling your novels with Negroes and dwarves doesn't exactly get the masses to the ramparts, does it?”

I was surprised he had any idea what I had peopled my novels with. “It doesn't even get them to the bookstores.”

“Then you must reach them as I do, in the drugstores. You can find me just to the right of Leon Uris and to the left of Irving Wallace and Herman Wouk. In all senses.”

I wasn't sure if this was bragging--I suppose his sales aren't far from their bracket--or self-deprecation. “That would put Jonathan Ascher just to the left of Jane Austen,” O'Grady put in. “And she was a definite parlor pink.”

Villard chuckled, but his beady eyes made it clear that he was trying to find a topper. Not trying to coin one anew, but hunting in his bank of previously rehearsed epigrams. There is a word in Yiddish,
trepwerter
, for all the witty answers that come to you only as you are going down the stairs, after leaving the party. Villard probably has his thoughts going
up
the stairs, and waits for the chance to deliver them.

Before he could, I said, “Edgar, where's the john?”

He scowled--I had ruined his timing--and gestured vaguely toward what I suppose must be called the East Corridor. “Just past the library,” he said. Not grandly, casually: as one says it if one is grand enough to have a library.

Just past the library I found what must be called the powder room, which had flocked wallpaper and pink plumbing and, directly above the toilet, a large photograph of Villard, with a sort of fuzzy benevolent glow on his un-lined face. Perhaps it was taken through gauze as if he were a screen star. I had a little trouble peeing with Villard looking right down at me, but the flow came quickly enough when I pictured peeing on Villard.

Prolific Edgar Villard. Who doesn't, I think, do it for the money, though God knows he rakes it in. He just affects to do it for the money because that is, in this crazy country of ours, more respectable than admitting you do it because there's stuff you have to get out of you.

The contrapositive being that, if you don't write, it must be because there is nothing left to get out of you. Then why the itch, why the feeling that I should be writing something less ephemeral than this schoolgirl's diary that has become my only literary endeavor? (I have suddenly a wonderful picture of a girl from St. Swithin's, in her white pinafore, coming home every night, unlocking her diary with a little key, and writing in neat Palmer script about the men she blows in the subway station.)

I wasn't in any hurry to get back to the party. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stop myself from continuing to babble about a book I wasn't writing. Funny: I've known a fair number of guys who stopped writing, but not a one who has declared that he has stopped writing. Because if you've once called yourself a writer, how can you admit such a thing? It would be as if Fido announced that he had given up being a dog.

I stepped into the library and, as long as I'm on a
Paradise Lost
kick, felt what Satan felt when he looked at that new Jesus kid who had stolen the Father's affections: a wave of envy so strong you'd tear down Eden if you could. Villard, with his damn drugstore money, had bought himself the Edenic library I dreamt of as a kid. The ceiling-high shelves with the sliding ladder, two club chairs. On the leather-topped table, the
TLS
and other tony periodicals, with a dash of levity provided by a three-year-old copy of
Punch
. I was looking over the shelves, annoyed to discover that Villard actually had good taste in books--more precisely, tastes not dissimilar to mine--when his guy Robert slipped in.

“Looking for yourself?” Robert said.

“I--” I didn't deny it: I hadn't been, but I would have soon enough.

“Edgar does it all the time. We can be in Nowheresville and we'll have to run into the library to see if they got all his books.”

“Which they probably do.”

“Sometimes not all. He's wrote eleven of 'em, you know.”

“I didn't know.”

“Yep. Eleven. I don't know how you guys write even one book.”

“Me either, lately.” This isn't true. I know how it's done.

Robert shrugged, as if to say: you've written one, why would you need to write another? And that is the question, isn't it? Not how to go on, but why. For who needs another volume of Negroes and dwarves?

There was a little silence. During which, I swear, I didn't so much as glance at Robert's trousers. Nonetheless he grinned again. “We ought to have a drink some time.”

“Um. Sure, some time.”

“Let me give you the number. Case you're ever up this way.” He wrote on a pad on Villard's desk--pressing so heavily he must have left a detectable imprint on the next sheet. Where Villard, if he played detective, would find only his own number.

“It's okay to call?” I said.

“Sure. Her highness never answers the phone.”

Me either, I realized, unless Martha's away. Does this make me a highness?

Robert handed me the number with his left hand and, with his right, patted my lower back, just above my butt. I'm a head taller than he, he was wearing a goddamned paisley ascot, yet what would happen if I called was already … firmly established.

Back in the living room, the tenor of the party had changed, as thoroughly as if Robert and I had been gone an hour. Pretty much everyone more famous than I was gone. Dennis O'Grady's catamite was still perched on the arm of the chair. Dennis's eyes were closed, but he was absently scratching the boy's head as one might a terrier's. Over in a corner, Willis and some guy were holding hands like eighth-graders at the kind of party where they play spin the bottle. His dancer friend? If so, considerably butcher
than I had expected, with huge shapely Mycenaean thighs and a five o'clock shadow so deep he must have to slap on an inch of powder before he can prance on stage.

In another corner Villard was murmuring to a boy I hadn't seen before. The boy, tiny but powerful, like a bantamweight boxer, gazed at Villard, spellbound I thought last night, but maybe calculating is more like it. Figuring how much, or how little, he would have to give up in return for whatever he wanted. A Swiss watch? A promise to send his short story to Arnold Gingrich? Maybe just an anecdote for his old age: when I was a kid, I boffed Edgar Villard. If, unjustly, people will still remember Edgar Villard when this kid is old.

Villard, just then, noticed my return. He was visibly torn: he wanted to go on chatting up his bantam cock, but he had also, in my absence, thought of something witty to say to me. Amazingly, id triumphed over ego. He turned back to the boy.

My id whispered that it was time to hunt elsewhere, and there was no superego to cast a vote, so I got the hell out. Snuck out, through the kitchen and the delivery door, because I didn't want to interrupt Villard's smooth seduction. Rather, because I didn't want Villard to
tolerate
my interruption.

I made my way back to the IRT, thinking maybe as long as I was on the East Side I'd hit the St. Mark's baths, or was it too early? Lonesome, half wishing I had a little pal of my own like Dennis O'Grady's. So is that all, that I wish I had a lover and not the stream of fucks that is flowing, rather haltingly, through my summer? No: I don't want a lover, I'm not even sure what that is. Maybe I wish to be admired. Not worshipped, not celebrated, just happily admired: the way O'Grady's kid looks at him. As if the kid were lucky and proud to be perched on the arm of O'Grady's chair.

In the end I decided I was a little tired of fairies. I just went home.

July 8, 1964

Today I am still thinking about Dennis O'Grady and his adoring catamite. Did anybody ever look at me like that? Martha maybe, when we first started out. Almost, though I guess she never outright adored me. She was too acute to admire anyone without reservation, even when she was so fresh out of Smith she still had a little baby fat.

I haven't thought of this in years, meeting her at that party at Vogel's. Who introduced us? I can't remember. But I can remember flushing with pleasure when whoever it was described me as “promising.” So if I blushed the guy must have been a big shot. When he had gone, I said, “Promising. Makes you think of somebody who goes through life writing IOUs.” She smiled just a little: she had gotten the joke, it wasn't a great joke. She was just a girl, yet I was stunned by the
precision
of that smile, the alertness and calibration of it. I felt it all the time, those first months together, that somehow we were both as alive and percipient as--what? People in Henry James. If people in Henry James fucked every night and also Sunday mornings.