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By Root 1249 0

because it was just beginning, we could still imagine might truly blossom someday). It was easier, however, for him to say he was sexually and romantically jealous and possessive. I would leave his apartment and then walk into mine to hear the phone ringing. “Why did it take you twenty minutes to get home instead of fifteen? What were you doing? Did you duck into a doorway with some tall, dark, and handsome stranger? Come on, you can tell me. That’s what happened, right?” I could hear him inhaling on his cigarette and blowing the smoke out of his nose like some condensed form of rage. “Huh? Is that what happened? Don’t think I’m naïve. I know what a little slut you are. Just can’t pass up a chance of getting fucked, can you?”

When I’d arrive at his loft, he’d embrace me tightly and I’d be flattered and moved until I realized he was sticking a hand down the back of my pants to see if my asshole was wet from just getting fucked. He’d push me away and say, “How many times you been fucked today, huh?” He’d be genuinely angry.

If it had been a sex game once a fortnight, I would have thought it was a turn-on, but as a constant presence in our lives, as if we were in a three-way marriage with his jealousy, it was an intolerable invasion of my sense of freedom. I’d been hopelessly in love with three men and I’d spent all my time suppressing my feelings of jealousy as uncivilized and in any event a fruitless expense of spirit. Now Chris was letting jealousy consume him completely, nor did he question his right to be jealous.

At first, after my years of being rejected by Keith McDermott, I was starved for even this pathological form of devotion. My shrink said that I had such low self-esteem that only a nutcase could send a strong enough signal to get through to me. But soon I resented Chris’s jealous interrogations and shakedowns, especially since I’d always been an apostle of promiscuity.

My new editor was Bill Whitehead at Dutton, a funny, handsome man who would die of AIDS at age forty-four in 1987. He developed a new paperback line and brought Chris to work for him as his assistant. Chris was perfect for the job—his meticulousness, his charm, his energy and devotion to Bill and his authors, his savviness about all the names in New York (that’s what New Yorkiness is, primarily: the recognition of a thousand names and faces).

I had a difficult acquaintance, the Southern Gothic writer Coleman Dowell, whom Chris befriended. When gay men say in their personals, “No drama queens, please,” they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman. He was from a poor family in Kentucky but lied and said he was rich and that his family owned Heaven Hill bourbon. What he didn’t want to admit was that his psychiatrist lover, Bert, was supporting him. Cole wrote elaborately postmodernist novels with Chinese-box narrators, but they were all about spiteful people in positions of power double-dealing one another—or they were rural-Kentucky stories about a farmer cursed with a huge penis, a dick too big for any woman to handle (finally a teenage boy was able to take it all). Ludicrous as these stories were, no one quite saw them in all their pornographic absurdity since they were rendered with such dodgy modernist devices and in an opaque Faulknerian style.

I had first met Cole because the New York Times Book Review had asked me to review his Island People, probably his best book although it is so consumed with paranoia and spleen about real people (notably Carl Van Vechten, who’d had the ill luck to be Cole’s mentor) that it is hard to read to the end. It lacks that key, embarrassing literary quality no one knows how to discuss: charm. I was baffled by such a complicated book, so uneven that it could be called a corduroy road to perdition, but even so I gave it a positive review, while expressing reservations about such highfalutin expressions as “she was an ennuyante of stature.”

No matter. My qualified praise got me invited to dinner at Cole and Bert’s Fifth Avenue apartment on the fifteenth floor looking down on Central Park and across to the