Tableau Vivant
Tableaux vivants, living paintings, were planned for a winter gala at the Fogg Museum. I was part of a Monet painting and had to wear a pink gown with a plunging neckline. The tube showed. I pulled the bodice up. The top of the bandage still showed. A square of gauze and a frightening bump. I let it show. One girl saw it backstage and turned white and said my name as if she felt she had to.
The way someone says your name when you’re making love and you know it’s the only time you’ll ever make love, and you aren’t thinking about your partner’s name, and you wish he hadn’t said yours.
The Admiral’s Nephew
Except for the very richest and a few others, Harvard upperclassmen live in one of twelve residential houses.
When a large group of homosexuals from my class were assigned to live in a historically preppy house, it was decided that the group would attend the notoriously conservative Eliot House Spring Fête in drag. A friend to the downtrodden, I had to find a tuxedo to wear.
Through a network of teenaged idealists, a tuxedo appeared. It belonged to a classmate whose family’s roots predated the American Revolution and who had attended an excellent private school in New York.
The jacket was navy blue and double-breasted and had gold buttons, and it had belonged to my classmate’s uncle, an admiral.
Though a few times that year I smoked marijuana with a clique of elite private school alums, in their dorm rooms that were nothing like mine — I remember a freestanding antique silver ashtray, and I remember some of the richest students had had their suite condemned for its filth — I knew our lives were already irreconcilable and that I would only ever be a tourist in theirs. And because I knew I was a tourist, I quietly gathered my small knowledge of the natives’ ways and left scant trace of myself.
The lending of the tuxedo was a gesture of superb faith that we — the awake and living of the class of 1996, whether we had come from privilege or not — were, at least for a moment, of one voice. The lending of the tuxedo was a favor by a stranger, an intimate gesture made to benefit the general welfare of homosexuals.
Three years later, my suitemate, who had both kinds of friends, from both private and public schools, asked me whether I would be willing to help the admiral’s nephew.
The nephew had enrolled in a video-making course, and his assignment was to make an edited movie of a process that involved the body. My suitemate had already watched me flush and dress my line by then, and she knew a picture of that would make a better movie than a picture of someone shaving his head, or putting on or removing clothing.
I don’t like it when we refer to anything other than a corpse as the body.
But when my suitemate asked me if I would permit the admiral’s nephew to videotape me flushing and dressing my line, I said yes.
While I had my central line I wore athletic bras because they were the only ones that didn’t squeeze the wound site, and it was easy just to shrug out of one side of the bra before making the sterile field and changing the dressing.
I was less concerned that a handsome rich boy was going to see part of my right breast than I was ashamed he would see the hump of fat on my pimply shoulders and think I was a girl who not only had gone to public school but who had acne and was fat.
I wanted to tell him that the steroids had given me the acne. The steroids had made me fat. And the steroids had made me go to public school.
But in the end I just told him I had a rash on my shoulders and that it was from the medicine I had to take. He asked me if I’d like my face omitted from the final edit, and I said yes.
He gave me a copy of the tape but I’ve never watched it.
The Signet
After I began to understand the difference between public and private schools, and after I knew about the social register, and after I determined that class is determined not by schools or money but by family, and in spite of understanding that nothing I could do would ever deliver me from the middle class, I wanted to join the Signet Society, a social club for Harvard students that wasn’t officially affiliated with Harvard and had a separate endowment and a private clubhouse.
It was a practice club for the exclusive Boston and New York social clubs the men and some of the women would join after graduation.
I came from a public school with GED tutors and auto shop, but I was elected to the Signet Society, and for my initiation, instead of shimmying up the pillar drunk while the officers held it at its wooden base, they laid the pillar on the ground and I stepped over it with my cane.
I wore a lavender gown and a twenty-inch tube that never clogged as long as blood thinner was shot into it every two days. From one direction it went into my right breast, under the collarbone and straight up, just under the skin, then into my jugular, so that halfway up my neck you couldn’t see the shape of it anymore, and then it went into my subclavian vein and reached toward my heart. On the outside it hung like two white drinking straws, six inches long, with one red clamp and one blue one, like a piece of jewelry, and it was nothing like the expensive pendants the other Signet girls wore.
All spring I sat in my wooden chair like the others, and when it was my turn to ladle the soup at lunch I stood up proudly on my legs and did it. One girl wore a gold pendant shaped like a whale’s tail. Her parents kept a summer house on Nantucket. I was proud to be as good as she was.
I already knew I could syringe the blood out of the tube in my chest and pick off the scabs where the tube went into me, and lie still while the doctors took fluid from my spine, or pierced my muscles with electrodes and turned on the juice, and for a long time I would not admit those things had been anything but an interruption in what seemed my life’s larger project, which was to infiltrate the upper class and to be as good as those rich girls, and not once in the next ten years did I consider that the project of my life was not to wonder that I could pick up a ladle at that exclusive table, but that I could pick up a ladle at all.
More Medicine
Before the diagnosis I had had intercourse with only one person, the man I call my college boyfriend. Which sounds as if we loved each other all through college, but we didn’t. We slept together for eleven weeks, and then he broke up with me.
I was very sad, but I enrolled in five classes the next semester and made a list of goals including run at least twice a week and avoid all time-wasting social engagements.
Two months into the semester, I got sick. And for a long time, I regretted I might die having had intercourse with only one person.
Like many freethinking college students, I thought intercourse was the greatest thing in life. And it just about killed me to hear of everyone’s rambunctious affairs while I was in the hospital.
So when a medical student came into my room alone, after his rounds were over, with a book to lend or a mix tape he’d recorded, I thought about which medical students I’d invite to have intercourse with me if I got to the end of the road there, in the hospital.