Gordon had been practising his routines on me for weeks—a terrible thing to do to someone. You sit there alone with him in your apartment, straddling a chair, clutching a drink, while he stands before you as if you were an entire audience and tells you jokes. I didn’t even hear half of them, the pain at the corner of my lips was so great from smiling. What was I supposed to do? Say, “Not funny, Gordon”? I knew what that felt like from my parents and, anyway, the few times I suggested changes, he would say, “That? No, that’s funny, girl,” and then he would drop it from the routine without further discussion.
So, finally, we went to the Komedy Klub, one of those bars on the east side where they let comedians debut. It was summer, and the place was filled with college students, which was good because they’re hip and out for a good time. Gordon was on sometime after eleven, but was held up for about ten minutes when Tom Safire—who was then starring in that TV show about black men dressing up as white women dressing up as black men—breezed in unexpectedly. The audience went wild with applause and laughter and he did some of his manic routines. I fully expect Gordon’s bad end to include the murder of that man. He never forgave him. “It’s whores like that Safire, they keep the people, I mean, the real people, they keep them down, that Safire.” I go to all his films.
No haze of liquor could have dulled the next three minutes of that night. When Gordon took the stage, with all the moves, the gestures, the words he had learned from the comics on TV—“Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen”—I felt my entire body close on my stomach like a mousetrap.
“Thank you. I want to thank that warm-up guy, he could go far,” referring to Safire, and the audience gave him a little ripple of laughter, that ripple that sounds like “Show me,” like the great Not Funny gavel is suspended in the air above the judge’s bench. “Now, Tom is lucky, he’s all black. I’m only half black, see. That’s a problem. If I get too close to a pistol, man, my left arm grabs it, points it at the right side of my head, and shouts, ‘Stick ’em up, honky!’”
Oh, oh, oh, I was so glad I was a poet then. What soaring metaphors you can construct even while puking and shitting off a hangover; what Ariel might spring forth from what crippled Pope; what moments of brilliance even in poverty and rejection. But if you are a performer, God help you, your outer body is the vessel of the gift: you are out there in the flesh. The difference between being panned as a writer and as a performer is the difference between being insulted and being hit in the face with a chair. When they crucify a performer, the nails go into his soul, yes, but they get there by way of his hands; when they drop the plastic bag of silence, they drop it, not on his reputation, his insecurity, his anger—they drop it over his head so he can’t breathe. And there is no silence on earth like the absence of laughter.
I heard Gordon’s breath, a half laugh at his own joke, magnified by the microphone into a black desert wind. Three more minutes. Three more minutes without a sound but the sound of his voice. I laughed, of course, or tried, but now even I could see that the jokes I had giggled at in my apartment were either empty or filled with all the wrong things, either wholly unoriginal (“All comedians borrow material,” he had told me.) or so angry that even the crudest members of the audience looked down into their drinks. No big yuks are going to come out of a joke—it occurred to me too late—that begins, “My fucking parents really screwed me up, man …” By the time it was over—and Gordon persevered nobly to the end, I’ll give him that—Gordon had tears in his eyes, and his voice sounded like a shovel scraping out the grave of every line, and all his ambitions.
I had to go outside afterwards so he wouldn’t see me crying. I slipped away through the polite applause, and by the time he reached me in the back, I was red-eyed but composed: the best I could do.
We rode back to my place in silence, and I made drinks, although I was already nauseous and my head was swimming.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Gordon. He was standing in the center of the room with his head bowed, and his eyes glaring at the worn carpet: he looked like a vulture. “I’ll tell you what it is, it’s that fucking Tom Safire. I mean, that place is for new talent, he had no right coming in there like that. Because, you see, that was not right. I mean, fucking Safire, he just fucked me, that’s all, that’s what he did, right there.”
I couldn’t help it: I did the worst possible thing: I started to cry.
Gordon looked up. “What—what you crying for, girl. Oh, you gonna pity me? You gonna feel good about yourself because you can say ‘Poor Gordon’?”
I shook my head desperately, my hair flying back and forth across my face, but I couldn’t speak.
Gordon grabbed me by the shoulders and began to shake me. “Stop crying,” he shouted.
“Don’t!” I cried, and I got the hiccoughs.
He tossed me aside, and I caught my breath. The crying eased: he had shaken it out of me.
Gordon sat down on the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands. “Fucking Saphire,” he said.
I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. He raised his head and sat with his hands on his knees, glowering at the middle distance. I probably should have left him alone—I admit that much—but I did not want to be excluded from his misery. I knelt on the floor next to him.
“Let me,” I whispered, and reached to unzip his fly.
He grabbed a handful of my hair and I gasped as he yanked my head back.
“What are you, a fucking pro?” he said.
“Gordon, you’re hurting me.” What a stupid thing to say: why else would he pull my hair?
“Don’t come at me with your filth, woman. You’re worse than that fucking Safire.”
Then, very deliberately, with a sort of calm, grim purpose, he put his fist in my eye and began to grind it against my flesh.
“Gordon!” I screamed, and he flung me to the floor, where I lay clutching my streaming eye and moaning.
Gordon got up. “I’m getting out of here,” he said.
And I heard myself shriek, “No! Wait!” even as a low hum started to repeat over and over in the back of my mind, “I’m drunk, I’m just very, very drunk, I’m really, really, I’m just really drunk,” and I started to pull myself to him across the floor on my knees, saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. Don’t go. I’m sorry,” and thinking, “I’m drunk, I’m very drunk, that’s all. I’m just really, really drunk.”
I didn’t even pretend that night that the diaphragm was forgotten. Its absence was some compensation for the way he ploughed into me, for the pain. It was as if the possibility of getting pregnant somehow balanced the humiliation of being treated like that—and of begging to be treated like that. It was a night, that is to say, of pure Komedy all around.
Gordon went home in the dark, as usual, and the next morning, I went out and took a walk around Washington Square. It was a fairly balmy summer’s day and all the street painters were out displaying their aqua seascapes, and their detailed skylines, and their bright circus scenes and it was very colorful and European and melancholy and nice. As I was walking past one of them—a portrait painter in a blue smock with a black beret on her long brown hair—she called from her stool, “Portrait painted?” I stopped and turned to her and she saw my black eye. “Oops,” she said. I just stood there, kind of contemplating her. She had a kind face.
At first, she turned away but when I didn’t move—I was kind of at gaze, I guess—she looked up again, squinting against the sun, and said, “A boy do that?”
I nodded.
“I could leave it out of the picture.”
“How much?”
“Five bucks,” she said.
“Leave it in,” I told her, and sat down on the subject’s stool.
So Elizabeth painted a portrait of me with a black eye—I’ve lost it since: I could never hang it up with Gordon around, and by the time he left, I couldn’t remember where I put it—and we talked. We didn’t talk abo
ut Gordon. Mostly, Elizabeth talked about Kansas, and her parents—whom she always referred to as Buck and Allie—and how she was about to graduate from Cooper Union, and had landed a job designing sets for a little theater off-off-Broadway, but would probably have to teach also, and she had a friend at the School of Visual Arts and so on. What she did, I guess, was just give me a break from it, let me sit and dream my way into her serene life, the quiet waters of her soul. Elizabeth has that effect on people. Her portrait showed me gazing off wistfully through the purple bruise.
Afterward, we went to the Black Coffee and had coffee together—which seems, now I think of it, to be the constant of our friendship. And then, we picked up a loaf of french bread at Hitler’s, and a bottle of white wine and went back to Elizabeth’s where she made us fondue.
By then, we were talking nonstop, laughing nonstop. I had told her about my parents, and Jerry, and she had listened in that quiet, intense way she has. We were—I was thinking even then—like Jack Kerouac and Dean Moriarty in the back of the car, discovering the IT in conversation. We had connected, and the stories of our lives flowed from our mouths into each other and twined together seamlessly.
Gordon never liked Elizabeth. He always got very superior and domineering when she was around. He would pontificate on the effect of the media on such-and-such or, worse, the state of comedy in America today. He used the word—the three words—“Re-al-ity” a lot, and sometimes he stood next to me with his hand on the top of my head like the statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park with his hand on the book on the lectern. But he never attacked Elizabeth directly. He was snide behind her back enough, but I think, frankly, he was afraid of her. And as for Elizabeth, she avoided him as much as she could and we mostly met at her place, where I would sometimes lie on the couch and read my movie scripts while she worked on her set designs, and sometimes vomit into her toilet and pass out on her bathroom floor while she stroked my hair silently and my heart bled and thrilled at the aloofness, the sternness in her eyes.
But if Gordon didn’t like Elizabeth, he hated Lansky, whom Elizabeth met at the theater. I think he hated Lansky as much as he hated Tom Safire, and I even seem to remember him mentioning them both in one sentence. I was sitting in the chair by the window reading Lansky’s latest and chuckling, and he said something like, “Don’t laugh at that garbage, baby. That’s not funny. Lansky? That’s like, I mean, it’s like Safire.”
Lansky, to be fair, treated Gordon like he wasn’t there, and I remember once, when Gordon met me at a rehearsal of “Dying Embers,” Gordon said, “Wouldn’t it be funnier if Angela threw the drink in his face?” and Lansky thought about it and just said, “No,” and walked away, which just about turned the sod over the mound with the headstone marked Lansky-Safire.
But, in truth, I think the thing that bothered Gordon most was Lansky’s jokes about my drinking. Lansky is almost a spartan about things like this. He gets drunk, I’d say, just about once every time there’s a serious threat of nuclear holocaust. Lansky also differs from Elizabeth in that, while he, too, conceives deep, lasting and loyal affections for people, for some reason, no doubt involving his personal history, he has no vocabulary for them, so that, in Lansky’s mouth, an expression of concern over my drinking habits would come out, “Good, Sam, have another one, there’s still a healthy spot in your liver.” This would absolutely infuriate Gordon who would say something sweet like, “Hey, just lay off, man, okay?” thus bringing whatever gathering was in progress to an abrupt and embarrassed conclusion. At the time, this sort of turned me on—I clung to these moments as expressions of Gordon’s protectiveness of me, his caring. But, of course, they weren’t that. They weren’t that, at all.
Anyway, I think it was all these new friends I was making—that and the slow dawning of the realization that he would never have the courage to go on stage again—that finally made Gordon do what he did. Which was cheat on me, which, in my guise as tough-hard-drinking-gal, I was not supposed to mind that much—Hey, no strings, right?—and which he therefore rubbed in my face like so much ground glass.
Gordon came by less often, and a couple of times, he let me get the whiff of her perfume; let me see her lipstick on his handkerchief, or he’d tell me some long story about “a friend” and “she was saying to me …” These were always the days when we would have sex, as if my knowledge of the infidelity coursed through his cock like blood, and he would say, “How do you like it, baby?” in the few seconds before he would come into my open womb, and I would say, “Oh, oh, oh,” as if I were coming, too.
One day, he had coffee with her in the Black Coffee—a tall, cool, beautiful, very-black woman with a lean, pointed face, like a cat’s (well, it was). He knew—and I knew he knew—I was coming in there with Elizabeth that day and I saw him spot me from the corner of his eye before he delved back, ever-so-deeply, into their no doubt scintillating conversation. They weren’t holding hands or necking or anything. I couldn’t have confronted them, accused them. I couldn’t have, anyway; there were no strings, no strings, and the voice in my head, almost ceaseless now—“I am so drunk, I am really drunk”—had developed a sort of silent counterpoint that it at once harmonized with and obscured: “If I lose him, I will become horrible; nothing; I will die.” Elizabeth took me by the elbow and guided me out the door. We went to another restaurant, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it—she had only told me once to leave him and I had slugged back a scotch and told her she was such a prig. Now, when I began drinking heavily, she paid her tab and left me alone.
That was the month, finally. It was in the bleak December, it was, it was, when I finally missed my period. I have never had heavy periods, and they’ve always been fairly regular, and so I’ve never really been one of these Oh-God-I’m-on-the-rag girls—although, come to think of it, I can see why I would have liked then to ignore the whole thing. But with Gordon, every month had become a little abortion, a castration even, a little death, a never-to-be-a-baby dribbling down my thighs; a loss of the only power I felt I had over him, to keep him—and I had to keep him because, oh God, I was just so drunk.
Well, I was due around December first, and by December ninth, I was sure. It was a crisp, clear night and I was thinking of the country, where we would live and there would be sparkling stars.
I sat and drank, slowly but steadily, and listened to him on the radio. I remember he played Hubert Laws’ “Afro Classic”—“Fire and Rain”—and how I thought it was the best piece of jazz music I had ever heard, and how, near the end of it, I suddenly realized somehow that he was playing it for her, and I closed my legs together tightly and shivered—I was so drunk——as I sipped my scotch. At least, I thought, at least, she isn’t from Vermont, either.
And I heard him say, as from a distance—as across a distance of rippling amber silence—“And so, this is Gordon Waters, wishing you a very pleasant—” Pause—I knew that pause to the second and he and I spoke together: “Goodnight.”
Then maybe I dozed a little, because I remember him coming in, suddenly, as if there had been a bad cut in a piece of film, and he was saying, “Good show tonight. Good show. Make me a drink, will you, baby.”
So I did, and I sat down again heavily with the scotch bottle, and I was thinking, “God, I’m drunk,” and I said, “Gordon, I think I’m pregnant.”
He looked at me a moment with what I believe is called a frozen smile, and then he just started to shake his head, great big shakes, and wave his hand before me as if to ward me off and he said, “Oh no. Oh no. Absolutely not, baby. That is too heavy for me, girl. That is just too heavy. No. Huh uh.”
I have often wished that I had asked him what exactly he meant by that. Was that “No, you’re not pregnant,” or “No, you may not say you are pregnant,” or “No, you have not said it, are not here at all”? But I did not ask him that. Instead, I said in a small voice: “Should I have an abortion?”
But this received another negative as Gordon said: “I don’t … You just
deal with it. You just deal with it, baby, cause this is way too heavy for me. Huh uh.”
Would he have made the same answer (I think he would) if I had said, “But, Gordon, I’m dying,” or “But, Gordon, I’m dead,” in the same way I now whined, “But, Gordon, I’m pregnant.”
“No way, baby. No way,” said Gordon.
My lip began to tremble. “I am so drunk,” I thought. I said: “Well, okay, if you want me to, I’ll get it fixed.”
And he exploded. His face contorted, pressed close to mine, his arms surrounding me as his hands grabbed the arms of my chair so fiercely I thought he would fling both me and it out the window, he screamed: “What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do with this bullshit? You trying to fix me?” I turned from him, afraid he would punch me and he grabbed my face in one hand, squeezing it in his hand and screaming, “You want to fix it good, don’tcha, so I can’t be what I wanna be. You wanna make me nothing. That’s all: nothing. That’s all you ever want!” He flung my head back against the chair. “Well, how would you like it—how would you like some of this?”
He dashed across the room to my writing desk by the window. He yanked open the drawer so hard that the flower vase on the desk fell over, the water coughing out, the daisies drooping. Screaming, “How about some of this?” he ripped my notebook out of the drawer.