At the Strangers' Gate Page 11
The younger editors, on the other hand—one, the managing editor of the magazine while he waited for his career as a Neo-Expressionist painter to ripen, and whom I’ll call Stephen Jones, became a good friend—had few of the self-conscious traits of gayness. Stephen, if anything, cultivated a quiet power and reserve that came from a kind of calm judiciousness about appearances. He was far more naturally “masculine” than I was—able to negotiate restaurant lines and recalcitrant waiters and the little annoyances of New York life. Where the heterosexual man is always, Sinatra-like, the victim of his own perpetual fear of humiliation, of being made a social second, Stephen’s kind of homosexual had learned a more detached attitude toward the small social rivalries of the city—distance from the normal hierarchy of humiliations was essential to those creating their own new hierarchy of normalcy. When we left the building, I would, in those days, go nuts if someone stepped in front of me to hail a cab, in that perpetual bizarre New York game whereby the area controlled by a taxi hailer is so ill defined that no law, or social rule, exists to stop someone from doing so without apology. Stephen would not—some part of him knew that there would always be another taxi, and another part of him knew that making a scene was the sign of someone who was not significantly whole, integrated, and showing yourself whole against a background where you had long been made to feel partial was the real end of good behavior. Being dignified wasn’t just a good thing. It was the whole thing. Control was the essential emotion the times called for. “Control freak” was a new (it first appears around 1975) and far from wholly pejorative phrase of the time. To be controlled without being crazy seemed the wholly enviable goal. Making sense of being gay meant accepting all the ways in which normal masculinity failed to make sense.
And then, suddenly, it was the beginning of the plague years. I recall in 1982 and 1983 the first stirrings of gay plague, as it was called then. As always at the beginning of bad times, rumors of how easily the affliction might be dispelled were the signs of its seriousness. “If you drink plenty of vitamin C, you’ll be fine,” I recall the art director announcing over lunch. When the vandals surround the city, the first tone of the citizens within its walls is of reassurance, not panic. (“They can’t get in here. I have a cousin at the gates who says they’re starving and ready to go home.”) The rumor of an easy cure is the surest sign of an approaching pestilence.
The strange truth, taboo to say even now, is that the appearance of this terrible scourge—an often fatal infectious disease largely concentrated within a minority group—would result not in more persecution but in an open acceptance of the minority unprecedented in human history. The mechanics by which this happened are still astonishing to contemplate: basically, not that the sufferers became “victims” but that they became more than appetites. Images of suffering are humanizing to all but the hardened fanatic. Watch men die struggling for dignity and you cannot deny their humanity. If this is the “politics of victimization,” then all our impulses of empathy with strangers are the politics of victimization. We learn to care about those who are not like us not when we learn they want the same things we do but when we learn that they feel pain in the same way we do. They weren’t ennobled by victimization. They were humanized by suffering. That’s what suffering is meant to do. The trouble is what it does to those who suffer.
My incapacities for the job were many, but one of the worst was simple: I didn’t know the language of clothes. Shirts were shirts, pants pants, suits—even suits—were suits, and though I could tell a two-button from a three- and a double-breasted from a single-, I could not then have told a pinstripe from a chalk stripe, a gabardine from a herringbone. Though I now knew the names of the forms that you used to write about clothes, I had nothing to fit inside the forms. Since telling a pinstripe from a chalk stripe was all the telling there was to do in this case, I was stymied. “The Simple Logic of Summer Shirts” had been a serendipitous leap, where I could use a smartly abstract term to disguise my ignorance of the actual subject. I could have tried going on in this way—“The Impeccable Dialectic of Winter Scarves” and the like—but even I couldn’t have worked that stunt indefinitely.
It was made harder because the fashion “spreads” were laid out on “boards”—big heavy paper stand-alone “two sheets”—and they gave me Xeroxes of these to take home. But you could only make out the shape and general silhouette of the things from the black-and-white Xeroxes. All the subtleties that I had promised Peter to use my “well-trained” eye to note were lost on the copies, though they were clear enough on the “boards” themselves, color prints with a lovely veil of tissue paper stretched over them for protection. (These were the final versions from which the magazine would be shot in those days, the “camera-ready” art. The impeccable and untouchable Ur-text. Were these to be lost, all would be, the loser included.)
Fortunately, I did know someone who did know all those subtleties, by nature and by nurture both. Bringing Martha up to the eighteenth floor to tell me what I was looking at seemed plausible but difficult. It seemed simpler to contemplate taking the boards home to her. Even now, thinking through the enormity of this action, I blanch a little. If I didn’t then, it was mostly because I was moved by desperation. I had to show her the clothes to find out what they were. So I waited until the end of the day, and slipped into the art director’s emptied office and put the boards under my overcoat—an awkward fit—and took them down in the elevator, and then took them on the subway to the Blue Room.
That night, after I had made our “French” dinner and cleared the cockroaches away from the stove—they came scurrying out when you lit the burners, an odd little Dr. Seuss–style action that I had become accustomed to in a frighteningly short time—I sat down with her. (I made elaborate French dinners, most often from Pierre Franey’s 60-Minute Gourmet collections, night after night—poulet Eugénie—or things from Simca Beck.) She was freezing, she said. She was always freezing, and how fetching she looked in her flannel nightgown and bikini panties, her usual at-home garb. Looking thirteenishly lovely, she pored over the boards, the thrill of illicit congress complementing the pleasure of expertise—as though the “boards” were diagrams of a Nazi blockhouse that I, a Polish patriot (played by Matthew Broderick), had smuggled out of the headquarters and that she, a Dutch woman physicist (played by Geneviève Bujold), would now have to study, so I could sneak them back (to music tense and percussive, by Elmer Bernstein) into the German headquarters before they were missed.
“Now, this shirt is linen, so it has a lovely weight and a glow. It glows against the dark background—don’t you see?” she said. “A glow like chiaroscuro.” I wrote it down.
“It’s the chiaroscuro that makes them special,” she said firmly. An inspiration dawned on me, and I passed a line through the existing two-word blurb, authored by the poor, mere fashion writer, and…edited it. I gave it a new two-word tag. I looked at it several times. I read it out loud to Martha. It seemed like a breakthrough.
“That’s delicious!” It was later that week, and I was in the office, and Peter, the editor, had come round himself to praise my little alliterative invention.
“Chiaroscuro Chic!” he repeated, for that was the “tip-in” I had invented. “You know, that could actually be the spread title. ‘Chiaroscuro Chic!’ ”
I kind of hoped he would declare this, but he didn’t. “This is delicious,” he merely repeated.
I cannot, over the long abyss of time, describe, or for that matter defend, my pleasure in the praise. Partly because I always take undue pleasure in praise, and partly because it was the first time anyone had ever praised my writing as writing not for the artful deployment of argument, but for the potent combinations of words. I felt like Charlotte the spider, having landed on “Some Pig.”
Eight weeks later—there was a two-month lag time between the last changes to the copy and the appearance of the magazine—we happened to go to Barneys.
“Look!” Martha called out.
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br /> I did what I think our fathers would have called a spit take, or I would have if there had been coffee in my mouth. There, across the room, was a five-foot blowup of the spread with linen shirts—my two-word benediction now almost the size of our blue room: “Chiaroscuro Chic.”
It was my first time putting words into the center of anyone’s consciousness, and I felt unreasonably pleased—no, I felt reasonably pleased. All writers ever do is take pre-existing units, words, arrange them, and insert them into other people’s consciousness. Words are always arranged, never invented. That these words were cloyingly arranged and inserted not so much into anyone’s higher consciousness as into the maw of commerce did not alter the poet’s satisfaction. The bard singing Beowulf for a bad king gets as much pleasure from his alliterations as the one who sings for the good one. What he’s after is not the virtue in the listeners’ hearts but the look on their faces. Getting the thrill of the look on their faces is why he invented Grendel. Getting more of it is why he went on to invent Grendel’s mom. The essential magic of writing is elemental—and unlike any other art form. You’re not really making something so much as assembling something—once the assembly is completed, you hope it gives the illusion of originality. Like my professor’s Renaissance man dressing in the morning, you reach into the sock drawer of words hoping to find an interestingly mated pair: among many choices of mismatched socks, some mismatched socks match surprisingly well. The socks, or words, exist already; the eloquence of their mismatch is your own to make.
I have since published five-hundred-page books, have official pages that argued for classical liberalism, been whimsical with children and passionate about gun control. I’ve even seen some of the results translated into Italian and Korean—but the secret guilty pleasure of the writer, as opposed to the citizen the writer may also be, is simply the sneaky delight of seeing the words strike home. For the first time in my life, they had. And what home was more home to us than Barneys on Seventh Avenue—how much closer to home could it get than to see your words mounted so big among the actual shining shirts and glowing sweaters they superintended? I was, professionally, happier than I had ever been, and as happy as I have ever since become.
“Chiaroscuro Chic”—the two words shot me to the top of the ladder, although in this case, of course, the top and the bottom were so close together that you could hardly tell them apart. Really, on the strength of eight words and two phrases—“Chiaroscuro Chic” and, before that, “The Simple Logic of Summer Shirts”—a career in fashion editing opened up before me. “Delicious!” he had said. Greatly encouraged, I began to meditate, and then deliver, ukases and interdictions about fashion and grooming from our basement room on East Eighty-seventh Street. Shave only in the shower! Apply moisturizer no fewer than eight times a day! White socks with jeans were now acceptable! (They were to me, but I had to dress that way.)
I realized that writing with certainty was all the certainty writing offered. If you said it, then it was so. I wandered the five steps from the “living room” to “the kitchen” and the bathroom and, on Martha’s parents’ old jumpy Olivetti, I pounded out, with ever-increasing confidence, rules and diktats and nonnegotiable dogmas on grooming. It was slightly frightening to realize how easily fashion and grooming rules and tips could be conjured out of nothing—that out of nothing was in truth the only place whence they could be conjured, since the truth of it was that the obvious rules (soap, toothbrush) were the only rules that counted, while the rest were not rules but mere tics and half-truths and why-nots. I busied myself rewriting advice that the staff writers the magazine employed had offered on how to style your hair and how many times a week to shampoo it, given all the styling.
The truth is that there is no right way to, say, apply moisturizer, because there is no wrong way to apply it. The verb and the noun are the same, the action and the item identical. You…moisturize. You don’t moisturize well or ill. You’re dry, then you’re…moist. Yet, having invented a rule about, say, shaving in the shower, I followed it religiously. I became a true believer of a faith I’d fabricated. Indeed, to this day, when I read something in a fashion magazine on a plane—a nutrition tip, a recipe—in Men’s Journal or Men’s Health, I take it instantly to heart, and attempt to apply it, despite knowing, in some recess of my consciousness, that it must have been invented by a freelancer just as young, ignorant, and pressed as I was. I have drunk eight glasses of water, started the day with coconut oil, fasted for eighteen hours to improve my digestion….Perhaps the truth is that fashion can only be diktats, and our respect for fashion is our secret respect for the necessity of an arbitrary principle in life. If there were a logic to summer shirts, after all, everyone would have learned it by now.
Not long after, the English editor called me in—I was at first in a Frick-like panic about having somehow lost the key—and offered me a promotion. I was offered the full-time, in-the-office job of grooming editor. I pointed out that I would still have to be at graduate school, but, somewhat to my shock, they agreed to let me come into the office three days a week, while devoting Mondays and Fridays to school. Eight words had done all that, lifted me from the ranks of the indigent freelancer to the truly employed, a man with a job. (I devoted Mondays and Fridays instead to my own writing, but they didn’t have to know that. Meanwhile, studying for the Ph.D. orals would somehow take care of itself, though how I wasn’t sure. The habit of dividing myself, amoeba-like, into new entities, each part assigned an ambitious piece of work, so that there could end up being five or six simultaneous versions of me, all working on different projects, was something I picked up then, and never entirely lost. It means a lot of work gets done, but a lot of details get dropped. The inter-amoebic communication, so to speak, can get disjointed.)
I got a real full-time salary—less than it would now take to put a New York child through one month of private school, not counting lunch, but at the time it was all we needed to stay in New York. We could even think of finding a new apartment. On the day I got the promotion, it began snowing on my way home, and I found Martha and we went out to dinner at one of the German places—we called this one, Kleine Konditorei, “Austrian,” out of some bizarre geographical instinct. The snow fell harder, and we were all alone. I had goulash, and she had goose. Martha had a marzipan cake and I had Black Forest cake. The snow kept falling. We leapt home, one block, through the snowdrifts, even though my sneakers got soaked. Martha’s La Squadra sweater set, with its woven top and big zigzag pattern, made her look like a sexy Charlie Brown—or like the little red-haired girl wearing Charlie Brown’s sweater. The snow kept falling outside our window. Once again, I was happier than I had ever been. I haven’t been happier since. I would never be so happy again.
They put me in charge of all the grooming copy in the magazine—lotions, conditioners, cover-ups, and shampoos. Not a line about moisturizers could go into the magazine without my scrutinizing it first. The one thing I was not allowed to touch was the thing I liked best, the fragrances. I had loved men’s colognes since I was in college, and would have loved to try my hand at editing their copy. But the fragrances belonged to an editor of their own—being a thing of such delicacy and refinement, I assumed, that they demanded a separate set of skills. In reality (as I later learned), it was because they were such an important advertising category that they needed to be treated with more diplomatic expertise—knowing who got how much copy, line for line, Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren, depending on how many ad pages they’d bought—than I was thought to possess.
I was given, at last, my own cubicle, commensurate with my stature—in a room that I shared, three days a week, with two other people, a fact-checker, the only woman at the magazine; and an accountant, who had been called in to bring some order to what was, apparently, the magazine’s confused balance sheet. He was a subject of secret fun among the staff, who mocked the stiff, Styrofoam (polyester, really) jackets he always wore. He had an accountant’s dogged sense of the real amid the rich fan
tasy life of the editors.
This fact of the extreme simplicity of grooming products, especially compared with fashion spreads, was reinforced for me by the most acidic of the older generation of gay editors. “Let’s face it,” he said. “There are two kinds of lotions: one tightens the skin, and the other moistens it.” He shrugged, and then developed a mildly devilish little grin. “Skin is like sex, you know. You can either make it tighter or make it wetter. That’s all. And either one only lasts for minutes—hours, at most.” I blanched a little, but he wasn’t trying to tease me. He was right: everything in life is either tighter or wetter. Astringents and lubricants were all we had to sell, and both were, in every sense, temporary solutions.
The attitude of the editors toward their readers, I learned in more detail in my three days a week at the office, was not hostile exactly. But it was condescending, taking the form of absolute refusal to actually use any of the “products” we turgidly analyzed and eagerly pushed upon our readers. “Fashion victims” was their not always unkind phrase for the people who took our counsel seriously. This didn’t make them less eager to impart it pompously. “All I know of fashion is how many white shirts you have for summer,” the editor-in-chief confessed, and he was wise enough to know that Gatsby’s famous abundance of colored shirts in Fitzgerald’s novel was a sign of a touching vulgarity, not high style. There were certain words—I suppose like the words of a sermon, “faith” and “transcendent” and “sacrament”—that they never said, but that still had to be used in print: “sartorial” was one; “stylish” still one more. We might produce a magazine devoted to sartorial stylishness, but we weren’t dumb enough to believe in it ourselves; that’s what gave us style. It was a confounding formula, and, in its way, a disillusioning one: Martha and I had believed in all those pieties, at least a little, had thought that having the one right dress and suit would matter. In the temple, they disdained the holy things. Getting educated, I was finding out, was always a business of discarding pieties for practices. The pieties might be art historical ones at MoMA or “sartorial” ones at GQ. They were still pieties, and needed to be replaced by the daily fullness, the lived experience, of the practice they encoded, no matter how absurd the practice might be. (That the pieties might be replaced with actual principles was a revelation that would arrive—or that I would postpone—until much later.)