Free White Girls by Hilton Als Page A

at her looking down, I remembered that Jean-Michel was indeed a baby when I met him; he was seventeen and I was sixteen. We were introduced by a fat and funny white girl who had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But is it an introduction if one of the two people won’t say hello and just stared? Because that’s what Jean-Michel did when he met me. We stood in that girl’s attic room in Brooklyn Heights; Jean-Michel had a Mohawk—I had never seen a black man with hair like that—and he was wearing a green mechanic’s jumper. He was so vibrant and hungry, predatory might be the word, he wanted to get somewhere, and he kept staring at me and it wasn’t until years later that I heard he liked black boys as much as he liked white girls. So I wonder what it was like for him when I showed up with Mrs. Vreeland—I called her Mrs. Vreeland from the first because she was stylish, and everything she wore was unfussy and the opposite of fashion and what did the first Mrs. Vreeland say about style? “It helps you get down the stairs.” My Mrs. Vreeland got down the stairs all right, but sometimes she tripped or stumbled, which is a form of being graceful, too, since what is grace but the desire to forget one’s body, or share it with others? She did both; I saw it all at one of Jean-Michel’s first big exhibitions. He was part of a group show called New York/New Wave , and oh my God I just looked it up—the show tookplace at PS1 in 1981. Like an Adrienne Kennedy heroine I would give anything just now if I could talk to Jesus that night, and just once. I would tell Jesus what I remember about that night. I would tell him what I remember about that night. Were we even twenty-one? Yes, we were, just, and I don’t think I even put the Jean who wouldn’t take my hand in Mrs. Vreeland’s presence together with the artist whose work I saw in a show I had admired tremendously some time before— The Times Square Show , a show that combined the refined and the dissolute: how perfect was that, since New York was a disaster area then so why couldn’t an exhibition be a disaster area, too? I don’t think I took much notice of Jean-Michel’s paintings at PS1, though, since what was interesting to me that night was watching and not watching as the artist sometimes watched me and looked at Mrs. Vreeland; I’d give anything to talk to Jesus about it just once because it was one of those moments when life was changing me and she was life, a skinny white girl talking to an existentially freaked black man and already I was in love with Mrs. Vreeland’s bravery: how many white girls do you know, Jesus, who didn’t grow up around colored people, and who step outside of what life is supposed to look like for them—which is to say, white—and put on a party dress to look pretty for, and try to please, a black man who almost never has any power at all? Those impulses are rarer than you think. I seem to remember the dress, if not the material, then the shape she wore that evening at PS1. The skirt was reinforced with a little, not much, crinoline. The artist and his muse talked to one another as lovers do; he was living with another woman by then, but I’m not sure if that was a heartbreak for Mrs. Vreeland because other people interested her as well. Besides, she liked her heart’s desiresbeing a secret, a story only she could tell when she wanted to tell it. She was so intelligent about men and had realized at an early age that, despite the bluster, they were essentially passive creatures; you could get one if you wanted one, no problem. She was Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker in that she was aware that it took two to have an accident, but she was herself when she said to me, once, as I tried to learn how to drive a car and was too frightened of other people: They have brakes, too. As Mrs. Vreeland and Jean talked to each other in a conspiratorial way at that opening, I became what I would always be, later, in her and SL’s presence, a kid