Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch Page B

Métro stops. I swayed on skis on fake tissue-paper snow, mostly pretending to laugh at all the cutting up by the photographer, who resembled Fearless Fly with his frizzy blond hair and silver jumpsuit, playing air guitar with a broken-off broomstick, or ogling the girls when they appeared in their bras and panties. Surrealism in Paris was by now a chapter in art history, but a kind of surrealism verité thrived each day in its fashion studios.
    About a week later the phone rang and reality came crashing back into all this surreality. I knew something was terribly wrong from Howard’s voice, suspected the cause, but filmmaker—or sadist—that he was, he drew out and framed the anguish, telling how tired, bedraggled, and dizzy he had been since I left, unable to fall asleep until dawn, thinking about going to the baths, but then not going. He said he remembered telling me he thought we should be faithful to each other while we were apart, and that I, of course, had said “No,” but he decided that he would anyway, and then pretended I was doing the same. The night before, he’d gone to see a late screening of Pasolini’s Arabian Nights , with its implicit moral for our situation left unsaid: Aziz, unfaithful to Aziza, realizes his horrible mistake only after she is gone. Coming home from the film, he crawled into bed and, said he, found my diary. Some excuse papered over the indiscretion, such as his thinking I’d asked him to read it or some such. Either way, deciding to be current, he turned to the last page, where his eyes fell on my confession (to myself) of having justreturned from an afternoon of sex, of my being afraid he would find out, but writing that perhaps his anger would relieve my guilt—a neat insinuation that I really wanted this discovery.
    He began rattling off incidents, having read not just a page, but backwards through many pages, starting with my saying I had “jungle fever.” (Hence the outings Mapplethorpe and I sometimes made, he more regularly, to Keller’s, a bar for black men and their admirers at Christopher and West.) Then there was some Milanese, Sandro, and a model from Nebraska named Scott. Or the Brazilian from the Paris Club Sept I somehow snuck in while we were in Paris at the end of August. After reading my journal entries back to me, Howard revealed that he had actually called at four in the morning his time, earlier in the day. Someone visiting Melinda informed him that I had not come home the night before, had stayed out all night, but I was never told. “With your record, I know what you were doing,” Howard, in effect, said. “You knew when you left you were risking our relationship. Now it’s done. We’ll make some equitable living arrangements if you return to New York. I know now I’ll never be able to trust you. I wish I had drugs, anything to numb me. I love you so much. But I want a lover who is faithful. I may never find one, but I’ll start looking.” Click.
    Thus began a horrible emotional log-flume ride that went on night after night, at odd hours to adjust for our work schedules and the time difference. We would talk and give up and hang up and talk again. I felt terminally punched in the gut. I had never entirely bought the argument that I was doing something so horrible. Yet after all those hundreds of sessions with Sister Mary Michael, and the softening of all those nights when Howard and I were trustingly wrapped in each other’s arms, even with my history as a classic WestVillage seventies guy, I had allowed a more ordinary definition of intimacy into my emotional dictionary. In a brilliant debating-team tactic, Howard argued as someone more Brad than Brad by spinning on the word “faith.” He even sent me a sixteen-page neatly handwritten letter, in that familiar blue-ink script of his that somehow got to me more than any of the words expressed, including an appendix of familiar quotations about faith, ending with Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews: