Read Online White Girls by Hilton Als - Free Book Online Page B

to the first reading I ever gave, at my college, and while I read she sat in the front row with her then boyfriend, eating a hoagie. After the reading, she said that I needed more stuff behind me while I read, to lively things up. Lights? A video? But I am getting ahead of my story.She was our first home, no, she was our tree, and we hung in her young branches, our bodies swinging like flags in a permanent sweet chill, then a little sunshine through the branches, some bird sounds and maybe Jesus floating beyond the birds. No, she was our ground, and we would die to be closer to her. No, she was a white girl, whatever that means. No, she was colored because she preferred colored men to most white people. No, she was words, and they always came up short against her presence, and if you were a poet whose vocation it is to take the words out from in between other words, and relish white space, then you would be more suited to the task of relaying who she was, as Wallace Stevens seemed to do when he wrote, in 1947, twelve years before she was born, and sixty years before she died, in his poem “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”: “She floats in air at the level of/ The eye, completely anonymous, / Born, as she was, at twenty-one, / Without lineage or language, only / The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture, / Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.” What can I tell you about her that might not sound trite by comparison, well, there are mundane details that don’t diminish her, she loved proper storytelling, the details and hidden meanings and facts and all, but let me just say that the details—how we met, how she and SL met, how she died, how SL and I died—diminish me, or, rather, the whole storytelling enterprise does, words limit things, that’s what I told her once, we were sitting in her little house near a pond on Long Island, she had said good-bye to Manhattan years before but she was made for New York, she was beautiful and made no sense and made perfect sense, just like Greenwich Village, or the Bronx. We were sitting in her little house, and she was so sick, Jesus help her, and I was saying how muchI loved her without telling her that because that’s how we talked—by not talking. We didn’t want speech to limit us. Instead we did things, like making a chicken, or, the first time we had SL come over to her place in New York, and to accommodate his vegetarianism, a gratin dauphinois. Sitting in her house, I could not say how much I loved her even though time and her body were saying I wouldn’t have many more opportunities to do so but we never talked much and as SL said during that time: Why start now? SL understood, intuitively, which is the best way to understand anything, my thoughts on that particular subject: if I said I loved her, it would limit her to my love just as a tree, once described, becomes just a tree, or your tree. I always wanted others to know her and cherish their perspective of her; that would mean there was more of her in the world, how marvelous, and other men aside from SL and myself who felt as one of my boyfriends felt when he said, after meeting her: Whatever that girl has, someone should bottle it.
    Let me just say one reason I can talk about this at all is because of SL and Mrs. Vreeland—as I called her. They wanted my I, more than most other things, and what is writing but an I insisting on its point of view, fuck them for making me do it, fuck them and love them for making me do it. Let me just say, I never wanted my love or language to limit her and relegate her vibrancy, but that’s what time and illness did anyway, confine her body to a wheelchair, such sadness, I can’t even tell you. Imagine Holly Golightly or Sally Bowles or Maxine Faulk or Vera Cicero in the 1984 film The Cotton Club , infirm, not walking down the street or swimming with their boys in the sea, sick and feeling useless to themselves after all those years ofcreating such lasting, vibrant images in