Palimpsest by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal [Vidal, Gore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1996-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

I challenged Jack. “Why did you, the tell-it-all-like-it-is writer, tell everything about that evening with Burroughs and me and then go leave out what happened when we went to bed?”

“I forgot,” he said. The once startlingly clear blue eyes were now bloodshot.

“You remembered what I said to you the next morning.” We had woken up in a low double bed. As I didn’t drink much in those days, I was reasonably brisk. Jack was hungover. After we had dressed, he said he would have to take the subway to wherever it was that he was living with a black girl. “Only I don’t have any money.” I gave him a dollar and said, “Now you owe me a dollar,” which he reports in The Subterraneans. In fact, everything is verbatim from our meeting at the San Remo and our visit to Tony Pastor’s, a dyke hangout, and then, outside, on a streetcorner, as Jack, with one arm, swung his body round and round a lamppost, a Tarzan routine that caused Burroughs to leave us in disgust.

I said I was heading uptown. I was staying at my father’s apartment. But Jack had other ideas. “Let’s get a room around here.” The first law of sex is never go to bed with someone drunk. Corollary to this universal maxim was my own fetish—never to have sex with anyone older. I was twenty-eight. Jack was thirty-one. Five years earlier, when we first met, I would have overruled the difference, but I had also arbitrarily convinced myself that Conrad’s “shadow line” extended to sex: So from the age of thirty on, a man or woman was, for my purposes, already a corpse—not that I ever had much on my mind when it came to sex with men. In my anonymous encounters, I was what used to be called trade. I did nothing—deliberately, at least—to please the other. When I became too old for these attentions from the young, I paid, gladly, thus relieving myself of having to please anyone in any way. But now here I was stuck with Jack, who had certainly once attracted me at the Metropolitan when that drop of clear water slid down his cheek. Now there was real sweat. I stared at him. We were the same height and general build. With some misgiving, I crossed the shadow line.

At the nearby Chelsea Hotel, each signed his real name. Grandly, I told the bemused clerk that this register would become famous. I’ve often wondered what did happen to it. Has anyone torn out our page? Or is it still hidden away in the dusty Chelsea files? Lust to one side, we both thought, even then (this was before On the Road), that we owed it to literary history to couple.

I remember that the bathroom was near the entrance to a large double room. There was no window shade, so a red neon light flickering on and off gave a rosy glow to the room and its contents. Jack was now in a manic mood: We must take a shower together.

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