Free White Girls by Hilton Als Page B

loving the smell of their adhesion. How did people talk the way that Jean-Michel was talking to Mrs. Vreeland now, in the utter privacy of their souls, and yet in public, for all the world to see? To talk to myself, even, I had to turn off the lights, as in a cinema.
    I met her through some queens I didn’t like but thought I should like, because they were queens. It was also the summer I met—through the same queens—a Dutchman who was spending time in New York; he had swapped his apartment in Amsterdam for a small place on East Fourteenth Street. (That’s the same Dutch guy I visited early on in my friendship with SL, when SL offered to come along to Amsterdam with me and I freaked out, early love will freak you out.) Eventually Mrs. Vreeland took the flat above him, he found her the place, and that was one of the things I never noticed about her until sort of late in our friendship: part of what her love demanded was to live in or near your actual home, I never understood what that meant otherthan the obvious. She was her very own crew on her very own Flying Dutchman. I fell in love with the Dutchman who ended up suffering a variation on a garbage-bag death, but in those years I was really much more in love with K, my college friend, the guy I would mourn in my stage-set apartment, sometimes with boys I paid to look like him. K was my heart’s desire, I took him to the bar where Mrs. Vreeland worked maybe a week or two after I met her because I loved her and I loved him, and the world was amazing! Amazing! Amazing! including Mrs. Vreeland’s willingness to be a Projection C as Wallace Stevens defined it. “She is half who made her. / This is the final Projection, C. / The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist.” Mrs. Vreeland not only affected this writer’s vision but the visual artist’s vision, too, Jean-Michel aside, there was SL remarking, soon after he met her, in 1988, referring to her carefully applied makeup: I’ve never known a white girl to use such colors, plus she doesn’t even like the Beatles! Later, looking at family photographs, SL pointed to a Modigliani reproduction that hung in his family dining room and said: I knew you before I knew you. SL also discussed, with a Japanese friend of Mrs. Vreeland’s, how her facial proportions resembled those in eighteenth-century ukiyo-e, or Japanese woodcuts. Also, curators who worked in the art field got her, too. One such curator said about Mrs. Vreeland once: I get it. She’s an old black man. Yes, I can see a little old Bojangles in her, why not, I saw everything else in her, she was one of life’s last great journeymen not to turn that experience into a career, she traveled from house to house learning from what was in her way but even though she longed for someone to make her a home I can’t ever remember her bringing a suitcase to that wish, she was always moving on, looking for a friendor a family, sometimes leaving whatever she’d acquired on her travels but more likely just throwing it away to stay light and keep everything moving, and it’s okay, Mrs. Vreeland, I’ll keep it with mine, like old Bob Dylan said, I’ll keep it with mine. But would she let anyone keep her but herself? She used to joke with SL and say that he was married to himself but Mrs. Vreeland you were like every human being on the planet in that what you saw in the person you loved most was the person you were frightened of most, which is to say yourself, and so I guess the world is full of twins, beings who are attracted to themselves even as they’re repelled by and drawn to that same-only-different equation. You spoke our language even before SL and I became a we. In the bar where we met I heard your tone before I heard what you were saying; each was interesting but let me just say I find nothing more charming than a white girl who speaks with a slightly black syntax. Then I heard you say: I looked up at the sky and booga oog fletmarx Karen Horney