As the years passed and I regularly brought up the memory of the dress cutting, she just as regularly denied its veracity. So we went on, with me not believing her, and not believing her, and not believing her. Then one day, quite suddenly, I did. On a cold spring afternoon in my late fifties, I stepped off the Twenty-Third Street crosstown bus at Ninth Avenue, and as my foot hit the ground I realized that whatever it was that had happened that day more than half a century ago, it wasn’t at all what I remembered happening.
Migod, I thought, palm clapped to forehead, it’s as though I were born to manufacture my own grievance. But why? And hold on to it for dear life. Again, why? When my hand came away from my forehead, I tipped an invisible hat to Leonard. Me too, I said silently to him. “So old and still with so little information.”
* * *
For the longest time, the strong, sweet happiness Manny Rader and I experienced that first night we lay down together continued to exert itself. Romantic feeling welled up in each of us with astonishing regularity: in elevators, at bus stops, in restaurant doorways, in the darkness of the movie house, in the glare of an all-night diner. Suddenly, from one or the other of us would burst, “I love you oh God I love you I can’t believe how much I love you.” It was hard to account for the irrational swell of joy we called love, much less for how entirely it overtook me. I remember thinking, Is this what besotted means?
Manny had survived his long, puzzling melancholy by imagining himself perpetually poised for a future that had thus far eluded him. This meant making just enough money to survive and remaining marginal in all his habits. Still waiting for his life to begin, he did everything on the cheap. He drank coffee at a stand-up counter, walked everywhere he had to go, wore his clothes to shreds. The Staten Island ferry was our pleasure boat, student concerts at Juilliard our Carnegie Hall. Twofers at the theater, dinner at the diner, and excursion walks all over the city completed our social agenda.
My own insecurity about money was ever-present, but I lived in a fine apartment, ate in restaurants many times a week, and spent a small but considerable sum on music, theater, and the movies. Yet Manny’s predilections invaded me easily. I fell in with them as though between this moment and the time we’d both been living in the Bronx nothing had intervened; as if I’d only learned to ape the manners of the middle class and were now reverting to type.
It was then that I began to think about the lack of acquisitiveness in myself that I have earlier written of. When I saw Manny’s apartment, I at once understood its meaning for both of us. He lived in one large room in a loft building in Brooklyn. The room was bright and clean and neat. In it he had one bed, one table, two chairs, and a lamp; in the kitchen, two pots and a frying pan, two dinner plates, two cups, two sets of flatware, three or four drinking glasses. Minimal, I thought dryly, very minimal … and in that instant saw myself plain.
It was as though suddenly I had come to realize that things lend warmth and color to one’s surround, give it weight, context, dimension. A world stripped of things leaves the atmosphere stark: black, white, and unpopulated. If you didn’t want things the way Manny and I didn’t want things, it could only mean you were willing to live with the confirmation of a sense of marginality strong enough to cause the brooding self to stand stock-still, for years on end.
There in that neat, empty room I saw this long moodiness of life in Manny, and its ineluctable consequence in me. Remarkably, I felt affection for the me I saw reflected in Manny’s stripped-down space. Standing there in its doorway, I felt my heart go out to him. I embraced him, I closed with him.
But mutual disability is an unreliable magnet. The moment always comes when it repels rather than attracts.
Within the year it became clear that love would bring us neither peace nor stability. Nostalgia and chemistry had brought us together and were keeping us together, but the incursions on pleasure being made by needs that originate in places other than the senses began rapidly to multiply. The most vital form of connection other than sex is conversation. It was important to both Manny and me to speak, and to be heard, but within months we seemed to disagree on almost everything — and disagreement was invariably perceived as repudiation. The simplest difference in opinion became a matter for dispute; and a conversation of any substance established a failure of connection that all too often proved near fatal. Repeatedly, we startled ourselves with the quickly flaring temper that began to characterize almost every exchange. The volatility was astonishing: it leaped ahead like brushfire, and within seconds we were going down in flames.
For my part, I passed many an hour trying to retrace the course of these conversational disasters, wondering which was the sentence offered as a stimulation that had been received as a challenge, the response that had scattered my insights, the nuance that had flattened his. Why, I wondered as I sat alone late at night, did we come so close, yet remain apart? We were both decent, intelligent, literate. We both pulled the same lever in the voting booth, read the same book reviews in the Times. Neither of us was in real estate or city government. What was going wrong here? The answer to these questions was always the same.
Good conversation is not a matter of mutuality of interests or class concerns or commonly held ideals, it’s a matter of temperament: the thing that makes someone respond instinctively with an appreciative “I know just what you mean,” rather than the argumentative “Whaddaya mean by that?” In the presence of shared temperament, conversation almost never loses its free, unguarded flow; in its absence, one is always walking on eggshells.
In the heat of our quarrels, I inevitably tried to calm myself by observing, “Look, we’re just not on each other’s wavelength, that’s all, different wavelengths.” I spoke these words as though I thought them a neutral evaluation of our problem, but Manny always heard them as a put-down, even though they were as true for him as they were for me. Yet it was also true, what those words meant, when I spoke them, was that in his presence my own mind became a burden to me. I grew defensive when made to explain what I should have been allowed to explore, felt closed off and then shut down.
The irony was that the worse the quarrels became between me and Manny, the more I dreaded losing him. Within six months of our having been together, I had become terminally thin-skinned, making one scene after another because I could not control the feeling that I no longer had all of his sexual attention. In bed I knew he adored me, yet it seemed to me that he was eyeing every pretty woman in the street, that I no longer looked as sufficiently good to him as I once had. Now, his every word, every gesture, every flick of the eyes, was continually being measured against an invisible ruler marked “He loves me more today than he did yesterday, less than he did an hour ago, not as much as two weeks ago.”
The thing was, we weren’t friends. Without friendship, we were each alone in the wilderness.
I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one’s actual self but for one’s ability to arouse desire in the other. It was a given that the powers assigned the me that Manny desired would be short-lived. Only the thoughts in one’s mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently, and those in mine Manny did not love. He did not hate them, but neither did he love them. They were not necessary to him. Ultimately, this connection of the senses meant that I would be thrown back on myself to an intolerable degree, made to feel so vulnerable that I was soon drowning in self-doubt.
I once asked Manny if he was surprised at how his life had turned out. He said to me, “I’ve always felt pulled around by forces beyond my control. I’d do what people expected of me, and then I’d get anxious. For years I knew no condition but anxiety. One day I realized the anxiety had formed me. After that there were no surprises.”