At the Strangers' Gate Page 12

  Still, making awful puns and creating candied alliterations was a thing I was actually good at. It was what I had been trying to do at the Frick Library when I should have been monitoring the pulse rate of artists, and now I could make a sort of living at it. It was better than talking about pictures, because it punctured the world; it was like drilling a toggle bolt hole right into the side of the big store of New York life. Now I could hang up my own shelf. I wrote it; a million print copies showed it. The space between word and reality was slightly disappointing. In my fantasy New York, well-dressed men had quiet assignations at piano bars in the mid-Fifties; in the real one, the “well-dressed” men were actually the anxiously dressed ones, and no one would be caught dead in the mid-Fifties. And there were no pianos.

  I became a fixture in the office. Eventually, I even got to go to the “Clements meetings,” named, I believe, after the weary-looking market researcher who presented them. These were high-nervosity, closed-door events, in which Mr. Clements would come in and supply information about how highly “scored” each page and feature in the magazine was. Invariably, the fashion pages scored high, the feature pages just behind them, and whatever little actual journalism or writing there was scored least.

  But the highest-scoring page, month after month, was always the same. It was the very last page in the issue: “Next Month in GQ,” simply listing, in bullet points, some of the features we would be running in the next issue. There were no pictures, no “tags,” no prices. That these features were always essentially indistinguishable from the present month’s features did not alter the excitement the page seemed to create among our readers. Next month’s issue is coming! Next month’s issue would be the one to read! At last! Here comes next month.

  I sensed then an essential truth—or at least as essential as truths can be in the magazine game. Magazines are—or were then, when they mattered more—essentially vehicles of fantasy, far more than even the most hardheaded ones can be of fact, or information of any kind. Every magazine in a sense only exists next month. They sell fables of aspiration, and get their power from being quietly attuned to a social class just beneath the social class they seem to represent. Playboys do not read Playboy, and voguish women do not obsess over Vogue, and twelve-year-old, not seventeen-year-old, girls read Seventeen. Our magazine, ostensibly directed to an audience of upwardly mobile young executives, was read by high-school students. But had we addressed them directly we would have failed, as the Playboy of those days would have if it had taken off its smoking jacket and put on the baseball cap its readers actually wore. An elaborate artifice of shared fantasy had to be sustained in order to sell advertising pages, which was, of course, the aim of the enterprise. The final artifice was…next month. Everything we did, we did in order to sustain the illusion of next month’s issue.

  And yet, even learning all this, I was happy, because at least it seemed a real thing learned. In the museum, the lessons had all been about the fixative power of fantasy: about how people could attach themselves obsessively to art in ways that really only illuminated their own desires. In the fashion world, the lessons were all about how fantasies got made and used and exploited and sold. I was a fish out of water, certainly (I always seemed to be a fish out of water, even when in a backwater pond, as at the Frick). One thing you learn about fish out of water, though, is that they are never really out of water. If they were really out of water they would die. No, what we call a fish out of water is really just a fish in another kind of water, trying to pass as another kind of fish. Since all fish are fish-shaped and live in water, they do better than you might think. A fish in a new kind of water is still…a fish in water. The real problem is that the water is almost always moving faster than the fish knows, and is part of a river or a stream or a current heading toward a bigger body of water with bigger, meaner fish living in it. A fish’s problems are not water. A fish’s problems are always other fish. It’s the neighborhood, not the water, that’s the worry for the fish.

  I had earned a reputation at the magazine as a dab hand with a sentence, and so, swallowing his pride of place, Evelyn, the cologne-and-aftershave editor, came to me one day with his copy. He was a gentle, mustachioed man, who had once been a small figure around the Warhol Factory and had now subsided into good smells.

  “I can’t solve this,” he said fretfully. “Would you look at it?”

  Eager to mend fences with the fragrant side of things, I took his copy and looked at it.

  “I can’t solve this,” he repeated, as though it were a quadratic equation rather than twenty-seven characters on eau de toilette.

  I looked it over. It read: “When she smells the residue of you she will—”

  “I just can’t finish it,” he wailed.

  “I like the internal rhyme,” I said, professionally.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “ ‘Residue’ and ‘you,’ ” I explained. He tried to look at once lucky and expert.

  “What if you just insert an ellipsis?” I said. “You know, three dots. When she smells it she will…You know. Leave it open-ended and mysterious. What will she do? We don’t know. Leave it to the readers’ imagination,” I said.

  His look of dumbstruck gratitude touches me still—it touches me almost as much as the ellipsis idea shames me. It made it all the way into the issue, too.

  I finally gave the seminar report on ambiguity and Cesare Ripa. As I have done too often in lectures—I still do it in keynote lectures at the obscure colleges where I tread to make my family’s living—I went a bridge, several bridges, too far, overloading or overlarding the talk, not content with the merit of the reasonable core insight that the play of light was symbolic of uncertainty. I pushed it past the point of reason so that chiaroscuro became the key to the whole period. I always did that. I do it still. At the end of the seminar report the professor said, “Thank you for a vivacious report.” It was far from an unambiguous success, even though the light in the seminar room was low. Chic suddenly seemed a more interesting path for those who cared for chiaroscuro than scholarship did. So that was the path I would now follow, wherever it snaked in the half-light of the fashionable.

  A few months later, everything changed. I was away from the office on Fridays and Mondays, and, having left on a Thursday night, I came back on a Tuesday to find that the entire staff had altered. Entirely! A new editor-in-chief was in place, with a new assistant editor, and a new fashion editor. In those days, mass firings were part of the glamour of magazines. (Now they just shut the whole thing down, and no one notices.) Usually in the days after Christmas, long-standing editors-in-chief would learn that they had lost their jobs in a morning column.

  The coming of the new editors, who had been instructed to turn the magazine into a “general interest” men’s magazine, modeled on the old Esquire, was an accident of great good fortune in my own life. On that Friday morning, the publisher had come in and fired the entire staff. Off at school, I was in the position of the mob guy who had, luckily but unknowingly, fallen asleep under the Stutz Bearcat while the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was going on. On Tuesday the new editor, Art Cooper, called me into his office. Bearded and besuited, in Ralph Lauren worsted, he had none of the gentle nimbleness of the old editors, but he had far more literary heft and purpose. His ideas for the magazine’s future were in an odd way antiquated, or seemed so: he wanted to restore it to the manner of Esquire magazine in the sixties, when that magazine was sort of the distilled genius of Madison Avenue, wise-guy covers and pinpoint prose. Still, it seemed like a good ambition. I explained that I had just published my first short story, which I had, though very obscurely.

  To this day, I don’t know if he thought I had been planted on him by Personnel or if he acted on a hunch, of exactly the kind the new mob boss might have had in Chicago, that a guy this lucky had been saved by the Fates for a reason, and might bring us all luck, could be the clubhouse rabbit’s foot. In any case, he told me to go out and hunt for “q
uality fiction” for the new magazine, and I did. It was a wonderful break, a kind of ascension, from grooming editor to a literary one in a year and a half. I doubt that I was sufficiently grateful.

  Yet, oddly, considering I was far more at home and better employed in the new regime, when I think back, it is the older one that educated me. Style, as I had assured my readers, seeps inside your skin more than you know, and the gallantry of gay style, that equanimity that saw the absurdity of dressing up and still thought it worth doing, illuminates my life still. After the end of the decade, in the early nineties, I looked at the masthead of the magazine I was first hired by. So many of them, the men I had known and worked with, were dead. The ambiguities of ambition might be half lit, but life and death are binary. “Does God ever judge / us by appearances? I / suspect that He does,” Auden wrote once. It might have been their epitaph, and their entry to heaven.

  Anyway, I learned a lot then, and from them. I still like ellipses and alliterations. I still try, every morning, to leave the house taut, moist, and scented. I will always wait for next month’s issue to arrive.

  7

  Men Making Pictures of Women Wearing Clothes

  When I think of those years, and of the moment we left the Blue Room for a wider world, I think first of all of the light writer. “Light writing” is the root meaning of photography, and it was Richard Avedon, the photographer, who became our surrogate father, a best friend, a mentor of a kind—he was our introduction to the world of power and glamour in New York, and, in another way, the source of our first disillusion with those things.

  The experiences I’ve related in these chapters are mostly the ones everyone has: a small apartment, a silly job, another silly job that gets more sensible over time. But the experience of being adopted by a charismatic mentor, though in one way it’s what we come to New York for, is not the experience that everyone who comes to New York gets. When we get it, we know it. Everything after seems imprinted by its good fortune. Those first shaping experiences move us from being strangers to citizens; the experience of a charismatic mentor changes us still more, from citizens to subjects, people who, for a little while, have the illusion of themselves as privileged, members of the court.

  It is the norm of city life for the dukes to sweep away the D’Artagnans in their carriage. (Auden says somewhere that as an old man he still expected exactly that, an aristocrat to swoop down, saying, “You please me, child. Jump in.”) The duke’s motive may be partly careerist—dukes need spry young aides—or even carnal, but it is most often an older version of the same ambitious urge that strikes the young. That primal motive of ambition, which I had first sensed giving talks at the museum, is not to be “major” but just to be there, seen and heard, and our pursuit of being present, right in the center of things, the room where it happens, often takes its first form in our adoption by some charismatic pseudo-parent. (Among my closest friends, one had William Maxwell as an editor-writer father, another had been adopted by Nora Ephron, still one more by a great movie critic.)

  The duke’s reasoning is not that different from the recruit’s. I have passed through there and made myself “here,” the duke thinks, but it will mean nothing unless I impress my hereness on one who has not yet quite got there. In the end, though, time defeats experience, as it always will, and the protégé almost always outlives the mentor—the one who is not yet there will still be here at the end, and D’Artagnan writes the book about the duke.

  Which the duke both wants, and doesn’t quite. All intimate relationships are complicated, and the ones we have with adoptive charismatic fathers and mothers perhaps the most complicated of all. Not that ours was ever unhappy. From the day we met, in 1985, until his death in 2004, every morning, across twenty years and two continents, would begin with a phone message, and every evening ended with another from Dick, and we were always glad when the phone rang. Sometimes, often, we spent hours together between the messages. The joy lay partly in the specificity of who he was. Irving Penn, the other great photographer and rival in the same fifty-year marathon of art and fashion, once called him a seismograph, an instrument for measuring tremors. Dick hated the implicit condescension of Penn’s remark, its suggestion of instinct and journalistic brio rather than intention and art. (You knew it infuriated him, because he mentioned it, often.) But it was not entirely inapt. There was something tectonic about him, something of eruptions and shocks, radiating out through the seams into other lives—fault lines within a single personality that, sheared together, made inordinate waves. He always shook a little, with emotion, and he shook others with his own. When I think of him, in any case, I see a needle leaping on graph paper, oscillating highs and lows, more than a scroll unrolling with stately sentences. Love can never explain itself, but it can bear witness to its movement: the paper rolls, the needle leaps, and if nothing is really understood, still, the tremors get set down.

  No, never unhappy, but always complicated, and relating it in a way seems too final, too valedictory. I have never felt ready to write about Dick, or us, because to do so, I now suspect, would seem to surrender the boyishness in which we both participated—and which, in an odd way, we both believed in, as a role to play—for a note of mature retrospection, of appraisal and reflection and even, I suppose, regret. To remember is to keep alive, they say piously. But to remember is actually to entomb, to inter emotion, at least a little. At least, I have never committed a vital memory, a moment of bliss or confusion, to paper or pixels without seeing it dim a little in my own recall, even evaporate entirely. The living emotion seeps into the page, where it fossilizes. What we care about most needs to be spoken of in a present, or anticipatory, tense—Someday I’ll have to write that story down. Written down, it’s over and done. Epitaphs are chiseled, and they speak less of the permanence the epitaph aspires to than of the full stop, the ending, it superintends.

  With all that sticky stuff said, let me now recall in large, handmade letters—less like the epitaph engraved than like a quick, improvised series of postcards—how we three met and lived together for so long, and hope a touch of incoherence will be the stuff of life.

  We met for the first time in July 1985, when I was working at GQ. He had finished his great work In the American West, portraits of working people and drifters, and each of the fashion magazines, noblesse oblige, was required to send a writer up for half an hour’s interview and a photograph. Art Cooper sent up a staff writer, and he ordered me to go with him, knowing my background in art history. Of course I was curious, and so I went. Avedon was a hero in my arty and intellectual family—but, by an irony that he could never quite understand, it was the fashion photography that a family raised on irony loved most. My little brother, Blake, had spent his teen years trying to launch a career as an Avedonian fashion photographer, complete with whatever white no-seam backgrounds he could find in our austere house—in a house painted exclusively white, it wasn’t hard—and whatever models (chiefly Martha) he could find to arrestingly estrange from their white surroundings. Then he had succumbed, as we all did sooner or later, to the family curse of academia, and went dutifully off to Oxford to study art history.

  The wryly wrought surface of fashion photos, that was what we were taught to love—and the passionate, earnest, and finally sincere portrait photography that Avedon made, the work of a boy who had come of age in existentialist Paris—was, we thought, a bit jejune, a little naïve. (Over the years to come, I would spend an undue amount of time trying to convince him that the sincere existential portraits were really fashion portraits, and that the fashion pictures were existential. There was enough truth in this idea to float an argument, though not really enough to land it safely on the ground without a horrible, Hindenburg-style explosion.)

  The writer Art assigned—his name comes back to me, as two oddly matched monosyllables, like a title: Pope Brock—and I went up together to the studio, a red-brick townhouse off First Avenue on Seventy-fifth Street. I would go there again so many time
s that the layout became as familiar to me as a lyric from a pop song. Downstairs was the studio, where Bill Bachman, his PA, sat behind a desk, composing a simple white card with Dick’s appointments for the day, from dawn till night, typed out. The famous photograph of Dovima and the elephants flew overhead like a flag—the only fashion photograph on display. Nearby, Norma Stevens, his personal manager, kept busy, always warm, always alarmed. A small kitchen to the right was filled with granola and muffins and, often, with impossibly beautiful women, waiting their turn. They looked, somehow, younger and thinner and, though certainly not plainer, simpler than one had imagined, canvases to be painted. Only up close did one recognize the perfection of each feature. They were usually unstimulating—underdressed, without makeup, tall, more thin than slender, in overalls or black leggings—less like beauties waiting to be immortalized than like oddly attenuated stevedores, waiting in a union hall in Hoboken for a job call. A small army of assistants paced seriously back and forth, ears almost visibly twitching, waiting for a command. They were, exclusively, men so small as to be practically dwarflike, since, as one of his art directors pointed out to me, they all had to be smaller than he was. This was a choice he must have made unconsciously, since when it was pointed out to him he was genuinely astonished. If a model stood next to an assistant, they looked like Boris and Natasha in a Bullwinkle cartoon.