The Cosmopolitans (6 page)

Earl came to the answer to his own question. He'd said yes because he had nothing else to do. Even if he'd pretended that his man was waiting for him at home. It wouldn't be very long before he got there and was alone. That's why he'd said, “Sure.” So now he had to do it. Go to this goddamn party.

At the Union Square exit of the RR train, Earl stepped into the quiet of a phone booth to call his service. He closed the door and sat on the wooden seat, trying to recover while dropping nickels into the slot. It was an unusual choice, since he knew that no calls had come in. No auditions, no spear-carriers, no understudies, no one-liners sweeping up in janitorial uniforms. But he had to try. It was one last chance for the universe to rescue him from leading this woman on any further. He'd made a deal with fate. If only one good thing happened, he would free her and go home. But there was nothing. He was torn because he only lived four blocks away. He'd be home in five minutes, and miserable, escaping from the night into his apartment.
But then where would he go to escape from himself?

“Okay,” he smiled. “Let's go.”

When they got to the party on West Eleventh Street, it was packed. Folks lining the walls and crowding the stairs. It wasn't a home, really, more like a rehearsal room, but someone who didn't know much about carpentry had thrown up a couple of sheets of drywall and created cubicles where a few people seemed to be living. Each section represented a room with a bed and belongings, but there were no windows, and in some cases the drywall did not reach the ceiling. Doors were openings with curtains, hiding piles of books, clothes, fashionable Mexican blankets, drawings tacked on the walls, typewriters, notebooks, Chianti bottles covered in melted wax. Each one had been set up for the party with drinks, beers, remnants of food long gone. Guests had to poke around the tenants' belongings to find an opener for the beer. A number of the girls had unopened beer bottles that the men were cracking on the backs of chairs, showing off their manhood. Some good-looking guys, white girls with their hair piled high on their heads. Black girls outshining them at every turn. But the white guys could be hot in their dopey out-of-it-ness. They could act like they didn't want it, when they did. Or that they didn't know how much they wanted it, what was causing that rise in their pants. That was sexy.

He followed Lynette into the huge central area that was packed with young kids. Even younger than she was. Basically, it was a white kids' party with some black folks. Who did she know here? Didn't look like doctors. She gazed at him and raised her eyebrows.
He could tell this wasn't what she'd expected. She wanted a poetry reading or some shit like that. Some hip cats. Some weed, some drums. She wanted to show him how cool she was, but she wasn't. She was just a hardworking, good-looking woman who needed a man. He understood that. She had a fleeting fantasy that this man would be an artist or whatnot, but that was just whimsy. It would only give her more problems. Artists never make it, even if they should, and that's hard to understand and live with. No, she needed a tax accountant or a teacher. Someone solid who knew how to hand back the papers on time and wore a tie. She didn't belong at this party, and neither did he. It wasn't for them. That was one of the things he loved about being in a play, the camaraderie. Going out for drinks and ending up at someone's place with a handful of folks talking out their hearts. He loved that.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” he said.

Lynette smiled, nodding her head to the music some guys were making in the corner. Their sound was okay.

Earl pushed his way to the bathroom line. It was long and slow. Lots of girls ahead of him, smoking, laughing. Women take a long time in the bathroom. They have to look at themselves, prolonged inspection. It was a swirl of other people's dreams, their self-images, imaginations.

“What do you do?” a sharp-tongued white girl asked him. She was bold, he could see that. She had energy. She laughed and her eyes gleamed.

“I'm an actor. What about you?”

“I'm writing a novel,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, how do you do that?”

“Well,” she said. “It's hard to explain.”

Earl looked over her head. Lynette was talking to another woman, still swaying to the music, waiting for his return so she could pull him onto the dance floor. He needed to tell her. He needed to let her know that this wasn't going to happen. The charade was already too elaborate, had gone on for too long. Every minute more that he lied to her was a bigger waste of her life. He didn't want to do that, create disappointment for others. He had to stop this game now.

“Excuse me,” Earl said, and determinedly pushed his way through the guests, turned the corner, and without making the decision, simply fled down the four flights of stairs, and burst out into the night. He ran like someone mean was chasing him, and then, when he got to the corner, he was filled with indecision. Should he go upstairs to his apartment where everything was known? All the cracks, the dust, the sounds that entomb? Or walk around some more looking for something that wasn't going to happen?

Then Earl remembered his boyfriend, the one in his imagination. But where was the guy? He wasn't upstairs. He wasn't around the corner. He wasn't waiting in a bar or killing time in the park. Earl leaned against his building. The rough, cold bricks held his face. The concrete base scratched his palms. The support felt so good. He'd been tense all night. The mortar scratched his aching back. He turned and pressed his body full against 21 East Tenth Street. His toes, his thighs, his cock and balls, stomach, chest, his lips caressing her. He licked her. Buildings are “shes” like cities and boats. But his building was a flamer. She camped. She
was a queen, whose drag name was Mary or Helen. The bricks drank his tears. It was so comforting. His building was his boyfriend, that was all there was to it. That's how it was going to be.

Chapter 6

E
arl's joy carried Bette through the evening. The potential for his suffering to end would be so freeing to both of them, a great relief that she very much wanted to feel. She looked forward to the loss of an ongoing worry that he was always endangered.

A new chapter.

Just imagining the change unleashed other passions in Bette. Her mind floated and then lingered on faraway forgotten things, elements of the past like the smell of honeysuckle by the road behind her girlhood home. That had never happened before. She cut open an orange and brought it to her nose. Ah, delicious. Frank would do that for Earl. With kindness. She knew he could.

What is love?

Bette had wondered for most of her life. Her conclusion?

When both see the other as real.

What is real?

When both understand the feelings and perceptions and desires that the other holds, as precious, pungent, and meaningful as one's own. Their realizations are as powerful, and their deprivations are as grievous. To notice. To care. That he is listening, and she is listening. That one is not more important than the other.

What is listening?

What you say to each other is a promise, which becomes remembered, and then enacted. The spoken is transformed into the lived, deliberately. And the mechanism for this is cooperation. That is to say, the relationship.

What is a relationship?

To be awakened to the other, as though leaving a dream.

What do we want from life?

We wish the responsibilities, opportunities, and realities of the new day to be more delightful and enticing than the escape of sleep.

This is what she wished for Earl.

As for Bette, herself, she was quite a different type.

Bette loved her chair. She loved her cup. She loved the plant growing tall in the corner and the freedom of the evening before her. Everything had come through her labor, her imagination, her commitment, and now it was all in place. She loved the records standing strong on the shelf and the chance to both own and choose music without impediment. She was balanced, she had Earl to care for, and she had a job that didn't mean a thing. So she had feeling and relief from feeling.

After some thought, Bette selected the recording of
The Threepenny Opera
that Earl had gotten as a gift
from Marc, the show's translator. They'd met at one of those actors' parties where the exalted and their subordinates drink the same beer. Earl said Marc “had a thing for Negro men.” There had been a tryst in the man's apartment, but he would not let Earl stay the night. Too intimate. Instead, he'd signed a copy:
To Earle, Yours, Marc Blitzstein
, misspelling Earl's name and thereby nipping any potential romance in the bud. Earl felt that a person should take the time to learn another person's name. And he was firm on that matter. Bette had spent her early life being called “Betty.” But, ever since
Of Human Bondage
made Bette Davis a star, citizens of every country and in every walk of life had known how to pronounce it.

Bette and Earl had gone to the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street to see the production of
The Threepenny Opera
, and both loved it. It was so sophisticated. The story was about the poor and their own version of society, rich in passion, deceit, and dreams, just like the rich. But making dreams come true when one is a prostitute or petty thief is hard because they don't really know how things work, and live in illusions that something might go their way. That it might all be about luck, when actually most fates are predetermined, she knew, just by where and how one is born. The music was dreamy, eerie and evocative. Like the sound of mist. And they both loved the words, which were deadpan and deep and frighteningly true. It kind of summed up the historic moment: complexity explained with words that anyone could understand. Bette's favorite lyrics came from Mack the Knife's pronouncement that the play's lovers were caught in an
illusion of faith. That they were trapped in a false wish over which they had no control.

              
They've got that . . . moon on a dark street
.

              
They've got that . . . I feel my heart beating true
.

              
They've got that . . . anywhere you go, I will go with you
.

It is a kind of disease. Like pneumonia. Love fills a woman's lungs with fluid and then she drowns. Bette knew.

Earl's favorite song was performed by an actor he'd met named John Astin, singing about joining the army. Earl had gotten his draft notice after Pearl Harbor and barely discussed it. Hanging in the air were thoughts about Anthony, who was still alive in the Philippines or Iwo Jima, somewhere hot, dangerous, and buggy. Earl, at that point thirty-two years old, had gone off to the physical and came back with a big H stamped on his card. Bette knew he had caused that, decided not to go, that much was clear. Exactly why or how was not something he'd cared to share. To die looking in the swamp for Anthony seemed to Bette not enough of a motive.
Freedom
was a qualified word. Certainly fighting Hitler was right and many black men were signing up to do just that. But she knew Earl had his reasons, and, after all, this was a decision that Bette would never have to make for herself.

For the next two years, Earl tried to find out the details of his love's whereabouts, but the guys coming back had no news, until one showed up at the Lazios' in uniform looking for a job, and gently reported Anthony
dead. On that beach. That's when Earl had stumbled home, in tears, and finally explained to Bette that he just didn't want to go through it. He didn't want to go through segregated units and cleaning white men's latrines, and being excluded and worse for being a fag, and eating substandard segregated rations and sleeping in segregated mosquito tents, and coming back to nothing. It just wasn't what he wanted to do. So, he'd told them the truth and they'd let him go home. That's why his favorite song from
The Threepenny Opera
was “The Army Song.”

              
Let's all go barmy, live off the Army

              
See the world we never saw
.

              
If we get feeling down, we wander into town

              
And if the population should greet us with indignation

              
We chop 'em to bits because we like our hamburgers raw
.

Together, the song that Earl and Bette both found themselves humming was “The Useless Song” because it said more than two things at once, and they both enjoyed that sort of intelligence.

              
If at first you don't succeed, then try and try again

              
And if you don't succeed again, just try and try and try
.

              
Useless, it's useless, our kind of life's too tough
.

              
Take it from me it's useless. Trying ain't enough
.

              
Since people ain't much good. Just hit them on the hood
.

              
And though you hit them good and hard, they're never out for good
.

              
Useless, it's useless, even when you're playing rough
.

              
Take it from me it's useless. You're never rough enough
.

When the record was over, darkness had muffled public life. Commerce, routine, the actions of measured time that occurred by day were over. Night was when the free self emerged, when passion was expressed, and when people made grand mistakes. Murder took place at night, and sexual pleasures and violations and combinations thereof. Lies were told at night because “it's getting late” meant the clock was ticking and what a person must have, had to be. These were the hours that Bette saved for a good book.

Tonight she would conclude a novel that had carried her through the last three evenings. Some more hours were passed thusly and then the final pages were turned, conclusions artfully revealed. Bette liked a novel whose insights into the human mind were not predictable and yet, upon revelation, were stunningly and obviously true.
People are not as we wish ourselves to be. And yet facing the truth is what makes us fully alive
. In this novel, the hero deserved praise after all, and Bette was relieved about its ending. In her nightgown, she asked herself,
What do I remember most?
and then enjoyed recalling the mountaintop scene. When the hero looked out over the countryside and realized
that the entire world was one living thing, as energetic and filled with beauty as the horse by his side, as himself, well . . . Bette sighed, and held the volume to her chest in an appreciative embrace. The gift.

Then, outside her door, she heard the sounds of two laughing, flirting drunken men passing by. She could hear Earl slurring.

“Here we are.”

Then she heard the other fellow. That must be Frank.

“Come on, Mary, you can do it.” He seemed happy and also drunk. “Okay, you're too stewed. Give
me
the key.”

Then she heard Earl's lock turn across the hall, she knew the particular way that it clicked and scraped, the familiar whine as his door creaked open.

“Nice place,” the visitor laughed.

Was he being sarcastic or truthful? The answer would reveal his position in the world. If he had nothing, Earl's place would look grand. If he had everything, it would feel impossibly poor. If he had just enough, Frank would understand that it was waiting for him to make it a real home. The door slammed shut.

Bette picked up a new book of poems she had been saving for last. She'd admired it repeatedly at the Eighth Street Bookshop, which was her test. No matter how much a book beckoned to her in the store, she had to step away, and then be pulled back. That was the sign, when she didn't want to leave it. To spend her evening with that volume in hand, and have it join her home, was an investment. Every time she looked at the binding of a book she loved, she remembered its treasures
with a shiver. The contents of that object could never be known with a glance and brief assessment. It had to be delved into, opened, held, and respected for the relationship to take hold. This particular book was called
North and South
by Elizabeth Bishop. Eli at the store had recommended it. And all the bookshops lining Fourth Avenue from Fourteenth to Eighth seemed to carry it. Bette returned to the poem she had loved the night before, “Casabianca,” and read it out loud again.

              
Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

              
trying to recite “The boy stood on

              
the burning deck.”

There was the sound of sex from next door. The bed was banging against the wall and there were moans.

                                        
Love's the son

                    
stood stammering elocution

                    
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Bette listened. She put down the book. And then she stood, without thinking, and was propelled, as if by motor, toward the telephone table by the entrance. She picked up the letter from Ohio, still unopened. Stared at the return address. It was a familiar but lost memory.

“Oh God,” Earl gasped.

Bette put back the envelope, turning it face down, and walked to the radio, which she kept by her bed, yet could play loud enough to be heard in the living room
and barely in the kitchen. Someday she would have a second radio placed over the stove, but not yet. Turning it on and off was often her final engagement of the day, and then again the first one to greet the morning. She liked to hear a voice. Normally she would have read more poetry before going to the radio, but she wanted to give Earl the privacy he deserved.

There were not many stations on at this time of night. Her habit was to listen to the news or a commentator, the quiet murmuring of his voice in the dark. Tonight, however, his soft voice did not create the insulation she desired, and since the moment called for music, the options were even more limited. There were bad recordings of classical symphonies, which she couldn't stomach. She would only listen to the Bach cello suites on record, never on a radio. There was no dimension. The only other possibilities were static or rock and roll. She could not decide. Static? Rock and roll? Static? Rock and roll? Defeated, she turned off the machine and listened for a moment, still standing. Something was wrong.

“Hey!” she heard Earl yelp. It was an unusual tone of voice for him, nervous surprise. “What are you doing?”

“Shut up,” the other man yelled. He no longer sounded drunk.

“Give me my wallet!” That was Earl.

“Shut up!”

The bad one was not Frank, Bette was sure. This hostile voice was much too young.

“Hey!” Earl tried to yell.

There were sounds of violence. A gurgle, gasping
for air, a violation that was inarticulable. A lamp got smashed.

“Asshole,” she heard the bad fellow say. Then there was a terrifying thud of someone being hit, his body falling to the ground. Which one was it? Which man had been damaged?

“HEY,” she shouted through the wall. “HEY! What is going on over there?”

She paused for a moment, and then threw open her apartment door, boldly yelling down the hall. “STOP IT!”