When the stories I supervised put me in Graydon’s good graces, I was jubilant, but after failure, when it was possible to wait endlessly outside his office for a brief and chilly audience, I could do nothing but worry and obsess over the rejection.
I lived with a succession of bizarre stomach ailments, always in terror of failing. For weeks I disappeared from polite civilization for trips to East Hampton to wage war during at-home editing sessions with a political reporter whose name drew readers despite her indifference to deadlines.
It was Condé Nast. It was big-time, an environment hermetically sealed to block out signs of aging; the poor, charmless, and unslender; and any vestige of reality. I bought new clothes, edited pieces on presidents, movie stars, murderous heiresses, and warring Hollywood executives. I worshipped Graydon for his creativity and eye for the subtle treacheries of Manhattan’s stylish power brokers. He saw the hidden strings that held his world together, but he was boyish and mischievous, delighted by glamour and fun, the first to pummel the pretentious. An effortless raconteur, amusingly ironic, he was also surprisingly vulnerable, judgmental in the extreme as he tallied up style offenses, lapses in etiquette, imagined slights from employees, sushi deliverers, or celebrity handlers. He was, I still believe—outside of Betty Hodgman—more attentive to hair-related error than any human I have ever known on Planet Earth. “After thirty,” he told me, “a man should never change his hairstyle.” I took it in.
I craved his regard. I wanted more. A little bit was not enough. I wanted what those hands could deliver, what my father’s shaky fingers could no longer give me: a place that felt certain. I hated it when they were occupied with pursuits beyond my sphere.
. . .
On the island one summer, I kept running into a nice-looking man—a cheerful-looking guy of the type I thought I should find. We smiled at each other when we were out with people, or buying groceries, or lying on the beach. His appearance was reassuring; he didn’t wear Lycra or spandex and looked like someone who had grown up in a leafy suburb and had his insurance policies in order. He seemed comfortable in his skin. I needed a rock. There was something; I sensed it. It was one of those times when something sparks without a second of conversation, though—because I was high every time I saw him—I thought it was probably something going on in just my head, the kind of private show that occurred there, confusing me and making me reluctant to believe that any attraction could ever be mutual.
One night, at an AIDS benefit, I felt a hand on my shoulder at the bar, a hand attached to a classic monogrammed cuff, and there he was, the man from the island—maybe a lawyer, or someone who worked on Wall Street, or a businessman, the old-fashioned type who never got flummoxed. As it happened, he was in advertising, his wardrobe a way to offset his industry’s flash. I discovered all this during the course of the evening when I received every second of his attention, though the room was crowded with others easier to engage than me, someone too uncomfortable to converse while standing and hyperconscious of my inability to meet his eye.
Flattered, I felt drawn to him, and was happy to return to his apartment where, after discovering my unwillingness to engage in unprotected sex, he threw me out. It was fast and unexpected, but these things happened in these times. My friends spoke of the same experience. I wasn’t the only one and they let me know I didn’t really have the right to feel so badly treated. I had no right to linger on this. People were dying. They were right.
After I left the apartment, I went back to my place on East Tenth Street and, though it was very late, got high, wishing I had checked in with Missouri earlier that Sunday because I felt that there was something my mother was not telling me. This made me need to get even higher. They never told me if anything was wrong, but there was nothing I could do at that hour, with the sun rising, so I did more drugs because there wasn’t time to sleep and I needed to be alert in a few hours.
. . .
“I don’t like the way you sound,” Betty said on the phone. “I don’t like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”
“I am fine. I am fine. What about Daddy?” I answered.
“He’s okay,” she said. But I didn’t think he was and felt terrible receiving attention that should—with his increasing weakness and difficulties getting around—be aimed in his direction. My problems were easier to focus on; she could always tell herself she was only imagining them. He was right there, failing indisputably in front of her eyes. She hated to see him weak and pushed him to get up out of his chair and do more, get out of the house.
“Get up and let’s do something. Get out of that chair.”
She wouldn’t see what was happening.
“But what about Daddy? I don’t think he looks too good.”
“You don’t sound right,” she said.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”