The Fall of Princes Read online

No. I married Carmela Mickelson Chase because she had come up from Philadelphia for a dinner party I was holding in the loft, served by white-coated waiters from Glorious Foods, each a beauty, passing the canapé that turned New York on its ear that year, a tiny new potato hollowed out to hold a dab of crème fraîche and a dot of caviar. Carmela dressed that night in real Paris couture, ruby and diamond earrings, dark Irish hair and eyes, and she showed up at the party with her present, two Russian saber dancers she had met on the street, old men in Hussar dress who danced for us and bowed and left.

  Carmela, which was not by any stretch of the imagination her real name, her real name having died in the chill night air of the sleeping porches at Miss Porter’s, had come to New York to go to the Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and been brought to my ruin by a friend, an astonishingly luminous girl, Berry Berenson, sister of the actress Marisa, and who was later to die in the first plane to hit the World Trade Tower. There are only six people, and sooner or later we are all yesterday’s newspaper.

  Carmela had beautiful hands, and the most beautiful skin you can imagine, and there was almost nothing that came out of her mouth that was not filled with a charm I thought had died for me forever. In the middle of dinner, discussing photography, which is what she spent her days doing, she held her hand up in a certain gesture, her small hand raised above the pink rack of lamb as though she were a child candling an egg, and I knew that I loved her, and she looked at me and we both knew that she would be spending the night with me in the loft.

  I said to Anne Kennedy, who sat on my right, smoking, so beautifully photographed with her exquisite sister Mame by Robert Mapplethorpe, he soon to die of the thinning disease, famously photographed, two brilliant beauties staring wide-eyed at the camera, two sisters who had come from Connersville, Indiana, to be the kind of girls they had read about in Vogue and The New Yorker—I told this beautiful, thoughtful girl that I admired a mint-green silk blouse she was wearing.

  She held her hands aloft, as though framing a window: “It’s my favorite thing.” She gently waved her arms. “I love the cut. I love the color.” And that was the thing about Carmela. I loved the cut. I loved the color.

  And I have never, since that moment, despite what happened, have never not loved her, not for one second. I have never said one unkind word about her. Not a single day passes that I don’t think of Carmela, with the most abiding love I have ever had the joy to know. My one true love, my rock of affection that will remind me on the coldest night that love is a real, true thing, that it has a shape and a boundary, that it has a gesture that can win you over and hold you forever in its gentle grasp.

  After every other guest had gone, Carmela and I were lying in bed, having made love for the first time as fondly and efficiently as a couple married for half a century, and she raised herself up on her elbow as my hand slid down the slope of her hip, and she said, “Look. I have something to say. Either this ends in two years with me having a baby or I walk out of the door right now.”

  I kissed her, tears springing to my eyes, hearing the last of the waiters still clearing the tables, and I promised her. I promised her she would have a baby, ten babies, that she would be mother of the year. And she would have been, would have mothered a child as she held the imagined egg, if I had kept that promise, which I did not, to my eternal shame.

  Which I did not.

  A week later, she had left her lover and her loft in Philadelphia, and was hanging her clothes in my closets.

  Three days after this, she stood in the bathroom, my bathroom, brushing her teeth as I left for work, and said, “Honey, we’re out of toothpaste, would you get some on the way home?” We. In a week we were “we.”

  That night, she threw my Knicks tickets into a handy dumpster and took me to Lincoln Center to see Balanchine’s Serenade, her favorite of her many favorite ballets, all by Balanchine.

  At the theater, the house hushed, the gorgeous Sputnik lights rose into the heavens, and that red curtain opened with the sibillance I was to come to know as the breath of my life, and there, on a twilight stage, in costumes by Jean Lurçat of such a color and cut, pale gray sapphire, ethereal, so beautiful they caused a crater to be named after Balanchine on Mercury, there stood ten women, reaching for the heights, in identical positions, and, at the end of each slender left arm, there was Carmela’s delicate tiny hand candling her egg.

  How do we bear it, the beauty that memory holds for us? How does it not just carry us away into oblivion? How can we hold such beauty in our hearts, knowing all we ourselves have done to lessen that beauty, our sins of omission and commission, our inexactitudes, our false starts and false intentions, the promises made in cocaine and the dark, never to be fulfilled?

  We go on, frenching the beans, letting one dog out the door as the other wants to come in, trying, trying so hard to find in our abject lives the sanctity of memory, that place where we live always in beauty and terror until we think our hearts can’t stand it but they do. They do. They can. They can forever.

  Carmela didn’t really have to work at anything, what with the moneybags ma whose generous checks came every two weeks, but she did, and she was genuinely brilliant at it. She took pictures. She dressed her girlfriends in dresses from her mother’s vast collection of couture, sparkly, ethereal constructions of cloth that would float rather than fall to the floor, a history of the brilliance of fashion in the decades after the war, and she photographed them, and then she locked herself in her darkroom with a pack of cigarettes, a darkroom Alan had squeezed in where one of our imaginary children was eventually to sleep, and she made pictures that were lustrously graceful and elegant. She did this all day every day, with the most ordinary girls, girls she met at lunch counters, waitresses and secretaries, aspiring rock singers, not a beauty among them. Then I would come home from work around nine, the girls gone, the darkroom locked for the night with her secret key, and sit down with friends to an exquisite dinner, made by Carmela, served on Tiffany china with Chrysanthemum knives and forks, on permanent loan from Carmela’s mother, part of Carmela’s allowance.

  We didn’t break things. We didn’t look on our lives as frangible. We had energy and youth and money. We ingested our lives as smoothly as a line of cocaine.

  Work on the loft continued, and Alan slowed and weakened. He sat next to me in the fading sun in the English bankers’ chairs that were one of his hallmarks, watching as a $63,000 Lalique crystal chandelier we had dipped into bloodred automobile paint was wired and hung over the granite table.

  “Can I hold your hand?” he asked.

  I gave it to him, and he held it softly in his, his hand so thin, so light.

  “I’m cold all the time,” he said. “All the time.”

  This was the last conversation we ever had.

  “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “I know, Alan. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “I didn’t catch it from who everybody thinks it is. It wasn’t him. Tell everybody that.”

  “I promise.”

  “And don’t sing anything from A Chorus Line at my memorial.”

  “Promise.”

  The next time I saw Alan, he was in a glass room at New York Hospital and I was wearing a surgical mask and a hazmat suit. That’s how scared everybody was back then. Nobody knew anything.

  He was gaunt, unrecognizable. He was so intubated, his only means of communication was to write on a pad of paper by his bed. In a shaky hand, he wrote a note and handed it to me. “It wasn’t him.”

  I folded the note and put it in my pocket.

  I wasn’t there when he died. He had built for me a space that was the envy of everyone I knew, and then he died and stayed dead. The loft was a gleaming engine for entertaining and it was only as I got used to it, came to be at home in it, that I realized, with the bankers’ chairs and the banquettes and the grand piano, there was no private space in the whole of the entire loft. There was no place to sit and read a magazine. It was designed to hol
d large numbers of people, bright, happy people who were not wearing hazmat suits.

  The only private space was Carmela’s darkroom, from which she would emerge at the end of every day with ten or twelve prints. She knew the work was good. It was she herself who was inadequate.

  “You don’t love me,” she would say in the darkness.

  “Of course I love you.”

  “Well then, you don’t love me enough.”

  “And just how much would be enough? How would you know?”

  “When you get there, I’ll tell you,” and she would turn away from me in the dark, and we would sleep without touching.

  In the morning, she would bring me coffee in bed, and we would drink coffee and smoke, and look at the wall opposite the bed, where she had pinned dozens of photographs.

  One day, after I had gone off to work, she took down all the pictures, put them in a brown paper shopping bag and walked with them down West Broadway and into Sonnabend, the best gallery on the street. She talked her way into seeing Ileana, Castelli’s former wife, who presided in a wig and her regal obesity over some of the most exciting art being made in the city.

  Carmela dumped the contents of her paper bag on the gallery’s desk, and twenty minutes later Ileana had scheduled a show. September. The sweet spot. It wasn’t luck. It was tenacity and brilliance. The tenacity of a deeply insecure person, like the mother who is, miraculously, able to lift the car off the baby.

  The opening was a triumph, and she had nothing but future. There was a party afterward at our loft. Five hundred people came, including the homely waitresses and saxophonists who had posed for the pictures.

  And, sometime during the party, Alan said good-bye to the world. We played the Albinoni adagio at the New York State Theater and sat silently through a slide show of Alan’s best work. Keaton spoke. Bette Midler sang “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Eros and thanatos. Glamour and death. Sooner or later, some side would win, one side would prove stronger than the other, and Alan would be largely forgotten, in the way that the five hundred guests, so used to going to openings and book parties at the houses of people they didn’t really know, would wake up the following morning and wonder, while the coffee dripped, exactly how they had spent the last evening.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Packing Up the Circus

  Carmela divorced me by six o’clock on the day I got fired. Semper paratus. We had been together almost exactly two years. There was no issue, as I had always known there wouldn’t be.

  The following morning, I walked into a Ferrari dealership and bought a $300,000 car, whose seats hurt my back. I bought it in a rage and drove it in pain until it went for pennies on the dollar in the great fire sale that my life was to become.

  Carmela got everything. I gave with an open hand until there was nothing left but bare skin. I moved back into Hovel Hall, painted it battleship gray, and roamed the nights with the rats.

  There was an unmistakable sense, no matter how perfectly the suits were pressed, that the tide was somehow turning, and I was helpless in the tidal pull.

  Carmela had loved Solitaire, a game I had almost never played. Back at Hovel Hall, I sat on the floor every night, after coming back drunk and stoned from the clubs, and played game after game of Solitaire, an open bottle of gin by my side. I played until I passed out or the gin was all gone or it was time to go to work.

  Slap. Slap. Slap. The cards endlessly went into their piles.

  I was in mourning.

  Three months later, at five in the morning, I played a perfect hand of Solitaire, sitting on the grimy floor of the apartment where I had acted with such sexual profligacy, even as I lived with Carmela in one of the most beautiful lofts in the most exciting city in the world.

  I played the hand out, all the cards falling into four neat and undeniable ranks, and then I put the cards away, and I never played again, and mourning was over.

  But Carmela never ended, and Alan never ended; the red chandelier still hung in the darkened dining room, and nothing from those days was ever over.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  In the Grip

  Of such terrors and demons, we are. The bodies litter the streets on which we walk. They ride with you in taxis. They sing hymns with you in church. They are everywhere, the dying, and their names are the names that fill your Filofax, which you grip to your chest with the passion you used to feel in a lover’s embrace. Every day, you cross off another name, and write in your calendar another memorial, another black suit, another eulogy, a reading from Millay, a song from Chorus Line, a pair of tap shoes and a red rose on some buffet table upstairs at the Russian Tea Room, still decorated for a Christmas long past.

  It was 1984, the year the plague came out of hiding and showed its fangs on every street corner, and fear ran not just in the veins of our infected friends, but in the streets, like blood beneath the guillotine. Don’t share a dessert, don’t sit next to a man who has cut himself shaving, the year, in fact, that razors were no longer to be found in gyms, the virus can live in a teardrop, so don’t tell me you can’t get it from a toilet seat, and there was only one thing it meant in that sentence, and that was death. God forbid you nicked your neck shaving. You would count the days until the wound had healed completely, taking that as a sign you were safe.

  My first thought, every morning—God help and forgive me—when I thought of my fallen colleagues, was that there were fewer dogs to bite me in the ass on the way up the ladder. I remember that thought with shame almost every day, and there is no undoing it, and there is no one to forgive me. Certainly I can’t forgive myself.

  So many dead. So many funerals. People who had never needed a dark suit before, now finding themselves putting one on two or three times a week. So many mothers and fathers who found out that their sons were homosexuals only when they saw the hideous bruises on their handsome young faces. The gaunt young men, strong and eager just a summer before, shuffling the streets of the Village. A restaurant called Automatic Slim’s, whose name became synonymous with the disease.

  Those nights in the clubs, in the dark bathrooms, the nights of unbridled sex, were now coming back to tear a whole generation into shreds of paper, tiny announcements in the Times. “After a short illness . . .” So many dying with not one solitary soul at their bedsides. The riotous spending by men who knew that their debts would die with them.

  Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot

  Yet he’ll remember with advantages

  What feats he did that day

  . . . the feats of bravery and cowardice, of foolishness and fear, young men whose lives turned into a sea of sorrow in an instant, with the first cough, the first red blotch on their sweet skin, and nobody paid attention, nobody paid attention, and there wasn’t even a test until 1985, so the only way to know you had it was to get it, the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible death, the day the music died, to steal a phrase, and there couldn’t be any sharing of glasses or toothbrushes, no kissing, that greatest of inventions of Western civilization, and still men went to the baths and roamed the halls naked until dawn, fucking anything that passed, often not caring, some actually longing to be stricken so as to join their brothers.

  And I’ll say this once, and not again, and then I’ll lay out the cards and you tell me the answer. People say there’s no such thing as bisexuality, that bisexuals are homosexuals who are too afraid to embrace who they really are, and I say those people are lying to you, because they can’t admit in their drab lives that there are men in whom the sexual urge is so strong it can be triggered by many forms of beauty, I lived with women and I fucked men, always on top, always the aggressor, the dominator, and I have never been happier, and have been less happy since the day the roads diverged in a yellow wood and I chose the one less traveled by, and I was diminished because of that choice and long for the days when I would wake up with her in my arms and meet him for lunch at the Pierre. Lunch for $700, the beauty of touch at noon.

  He
that outlives this day, and comes safe home

  Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named

  . . . and he will say, “I was there. I bear witness and what do you do? You place ads online and meet men for five minutes in a cheap motel and call that love because you cannot, will not grow up, because in all the world you are denied the right to couple, because you would rather spit on yourself than be spat on by strangers in the street, strangers who hate you, who wish you dead.”

  Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

  And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s Day,”

  Except the scars are invisible now, the cry of pain is muted by the noise of the world, the yackety yack of young men who march in parades half-naked to proclaim their solidarity, their mothers and fathers walking beside them, and the whole idea of gay rights has turned into something that says that two men are free to kiss and feel each other up in front of Tiffany’s.

  And being a homosexual has lost its hidden power, its intoxicating allure, because it has lost the vicious prison of its secrecy, and love is no longer made on the gallow’s steps, but en plein air, with all the world to watch, and sensuality has been replaced by mere vulgarity, and we who are old and have lived through it, yes, strip our sleeves and show our scars to a world that does not watch and does not even care.

  And you want to say to all those mincing, self-loathing queers filling the aisles at Barney’s, “You think I’m old and useless and unattractive, and I am, but I’m here to tell you that I invented you, I allowed you to become the kind of man who drinks mojitos at the Standard in Palm Springs, to fill the clubs on Mykonos every night with shabby, sanitized versions of what we knew and made live because there was a burning in the blood, a burning for sex, that act which, regardless of reproductivity, creates life every time it is performed.”

  And, if I could recreate for you the sexuality, the unstoppable force of kissing in 1979, the compelling secrecy that was homosexual life, the cruelty that caused Helter Skelter to jump out the window upon hearing his own death sentence, in the years just before the war, the feeling of lying skin on skin, and tongue to tongue and cock to cock, you would reel from the power of it, as though you had been struck by a Taser. You could not handle it. You couldn’t bear it.