After a definitive gesture — I cross my hands over each other several times — I stand and look directly into Yannis’ dark, angry eyes. When he seems as if he is not going to give ground or relent, I brush past him, insisting, in an aside, Telos, telos, endáksi, okay? He turns abruptly and stares at Gwen, glowers at her I think, then retreats into his room. I’ll deal with him later.
Telos, she repeats. Quel droll. To know the end now, Lulu. Wouldn’t that be marvelous? The puffiness and dark circles beneath her eyes cast her as the sophisticate, a moody one at that. She could never play the naive ingénue. They never go, she says, touching the soft skin beneath her eyes, the area she designates as her pillows of tormented pillow talk. I brew some coffee; she stretches out on the chaise longue and lights a cigarette. She is about to spin a tale for me, I can tell, and I get as comfortable as I can, hoping that my bones won’t ache from sitting and that my fingers won’t go numb. I treasure Gwen’s stories.
In New York, Gwen was caught between two friends who had become lovers and who were fighting like mad and drawing her into the fray. Daily telephone calls lasted for hours, first one of the furious lovers, then the other, to tell his or her side of it, the recent split-up, and there were threats of suicide as well as indiscriminate pill-taking by both parties. Mandrax was the drug of choice; an orgy drug, for some, she adds, waiting for me to react. I don’t. Gwen was not beyond reproach from either of the lovers, since when they made up, which was as often as they split up and as impermanent, both would vent their fury upon her. Why had she said this to that one and so on. Comical and boring, a miserable situation. One of the pair had slept with the enemy of the other, and the question was: Was her sleeping with him a deliberate attack on the other’s career? Quel drag, Gwen intones.
Then there were her own intimate relationships. She was still seeing the Hunk — Gwen has a nickname for everyone — the married man. It was abundantly clear he wouldn’t leave his wife, and it was also clear that Gwen’s remaining close to her friend, his wife, was entirely untenable. Untenable for ten years, I remark, not without some acerbity. She ignores me as only she can.
The New York scene was appalling. Tacky. The boys were becoming younger, and she’d slept with two girls, both of whom became serious about her, the older woman, much to her chagrin. Life was dreary. The seventies were boring to her, in one way, and outrageous in another, and they were half over. This too was depressing. She was unable to get into punk. She was tired of the clubs, none was what it used to be. I’m not what I used to be, she says. She feels old, but can’t stop herself from devouring whatever’s around, tawdry remakes of the un-original. Rebellion had reached new lows. A teenybopper punkette spat on Gwen’s neck at a club called CBGB’s. She wasn’t sure at first what it was — perhaps a leaky roof. She looked up but saw nothing. It happened again. Finally Gwen turned around in her seat to find the idiot child smiling at her as if she’d given Gwen a gift. Gwen was too drunk to respond. Small indignities reminded her that the times were truly silly. Quel zeitgeist.
She was drinking too much, sleeping with too many kids, or tots, as she calls them, staying out until all hours, not getting anything done. She hadn’t accomplished any real writing in months, almost nothing on her script, Dark Angels, nor had she done any research in ages — she’s exploring the relationship between Emily Dickinson’s spare poems and some nineteenth-century American painting. For money she was editing manuscripts for several publishing houses and was doctoring one low-budget movie script. She has written several dissertations in her time, earning doctorates not only in art history, which is her field, but also surreptitiously in American literature, sociology and German history. Gwen considers herself a ghostwriter with range. Her only release and comfort is in reading. She visits with some of the old crowd from Cambridge, but there are new friends too, who come and go.
My life is a revolving door, Gwen says, not the door itself but the spaces in between. Lulu, she opines, we’re all stale as week-old white bread. We are not vrai gay.
But Gwen’s eyes light up gaily when she talks about him, the great passion, passion criminelle, of her life. The leather-jacketed rock-and-roll singer still invaded her dreams and bruised her life. He was around, as she puts it, a vague expression to match his vagueness, around even if around meant only late-night telephone calls which woke her from tortuous dreams of him. He might appear at her apartment at 2 A.M., eat a peanut-butter sandwich and complain of problems with his group. She might meet him at an after-hours club where they’d talk and drink and then she’d find herself alone again, alone and high. That was all. Her feelings for him were not at all vague. They were, rather, pitched at a high frequency and quite romantic for someone as cynical as Gwen claimed to be. She is feverish about him, in fact, after all these years. I am always true to him in my fashion, she laughs dryly.
Gwen is a dry martini, shaken briskly, with a small onion, no, an olive — the green and red go well with her skin. The rock singer’s habit was more for heroin than for heroines like Gwen. She knew she wasn’t his type: she was too bookish, not sexy enough, too small. Perhaps, we both speculate, he likes boys better. Gwen interjects that she likes boys better, too. Maybe, Lulu, she speculates dispassionately, I’m a faggot like you. Gwen looks down at herself, taking her own measure or casing her body as if it were merely clues to herself. There is wan dismay on her thin face.
Dramatically I exclaim, I’m a Victorian faggot. Then, bending from the waist to produce a small bow, I pour us more wine. No, you’re not, you can’t be, Gwen goes on tipsily, there weren’t any faggots then. Wilde was a homosexual, which was very avant, but he was no faggot. If he had been, he wouldn’t have sued Lord what’s-his-name. Gwen drags on her cigarette. Lulu, let’s think of you as the Sugarplum Fairy. She chortles and finishes her glass of wine. Sugarplum indeed! Hummph, I respond, much like a foppish Father Time. I finish my wine too. I’m an Edwardian faggot, I utter finally, or I am no faggot at all. Terrible word really for us, I insist, bunch of sticks on peasant women’s backs. I’m thinking of course of my day with Helen in the country and the peasant women in the road, but Gwen doesn’t, cannot know this, and she arches one eyebrow.
A faggot might indeed sue Lord what’s-his-name. Mightn’t he? I wonder. I feel quite ill at ease, truth be told, with some of the young gay men who come here from the States from time to time, given my address by Gwen. This might be because they are so very young, chic and high-spirited, but it may be other things too. I was raised in a much different time, after all, and though I am sympathetic to the cause, still they sometimes strike me as bumptious and nearly patriotic, in a sense, to their newly fashioned identity and freedom. Their fervor I do not completely or comfortably share. I wouldn’t admit this to Gwen, although she may agree, being herself no patriot about anything. Roger calls people such as these enthusiasts. I would argue with him to the death about such a term, if he used it pejoratively in relation to our brothers. For I feel I ought to experience such — a brotherhood — and yet I am disquieted by it, with the notion itself. Camaraderie has never been easy for me. In any case I am an ambivalent enthusiast. I am also too old to mend my ways, if indeed they need mending. I am not sure that one ought to be proud of anything, though I do take pride in some things. On the other hand, I do recognize that self-esteem is important.