Free Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

instances minimal in number ... Alex is not queer. He is indolent, anxious, likes rich people and clever people of all sorts. He is a snob, a dandy, and a Marxist. Why should it be an objection that he is the things he has the talent to do rather than the summation of what he has finished? Remember his suffering, so like the suffering of achievement itself. Remember how terrible it is to be touched in youth by the wing of the Muse, the curse of it, lifelong.
    A few facts. Alex worked at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote book reviews in his twenties, reviews in which many negatives caught the eye. He chose as his lifework a book about democratic architecture. He was from someplace, Akron, and he knew what it was like for Hart Crane to be writing letters back home to Ohio, to Cleveland and Chagrin Falls. For A.—University of Michigan and a bit of time here and there at Harvard and Columbia.
    Absence of links and information. What does he live on? He lives on mimicry, mimicry of the style he would practice if he had more money.
    Talent and style can set the teeth of the ungenerous on edge, and more people are scorned for rising above themselves than for living out their lives on a legacy. Alex seemed ahead of his time in one thing: a complicated and hesitant attitude to marriage. But he was not a pedant and so was able to combine the single state with long, difficult, confining periods of more or less living with one person, one who always assumed the claims of ownership that are the temptation of marriage. What he held in abeyance, what the legal bachelorhood represented, was his grail, his lingering, halfhearted vision of self-realization.
    A good deal of Alexander’s life had been assigned to women. Much of his time had gone into lovemaking. Tonight, October, is our second meeting after a number of years. The last time, a month ago, he had told me that for a long period in his life he made love every night. He sighed, remembering his discipline and fortitude.
    I said: Well, I read in the Times yesterday about an old couple in their seventies who do it every day. They spoke of being ashamed to admit it to the social worker.
    Vehemence from him: I hate old couples.
    I met Alex long ago when I first came to New York. He was very handsome and a little depressed by nature, but anxious to please and in this pleasantness somewhat impersonal. For that reason he was doomed to more fornication than he wished. His handsomeness, of course, played its part in the doom of pleasure. Brown, flattering, disingenuous eyes; dark hair that early flecked with gray; sunken, lucky shallows in a large, bony face; shadows of masochism and indolence. His last name is Anderson—some Norwegian there, perhaps; old square-faced ancestors, slow-tongued, patient, pastoral, nothing like him.
    To get back to “long ago.” To yourself on winter nights freezing in a thin red coat, and then a little lamp and a glass of whiskey at the bedside. And the telephone ringing, always there monitoring, as if it were your mother and father with their outraged, punitive screams. You go like a thief to these assignations with someone who belongs to another, or at least does not belong to you, you go slipping into the dark, groping about, critically sighing. You go in like a thief and always leave or are left as the robbed, thinking to look for your fake diamond pin in its old box, check the liquor cabinet, open the window and demand from the fleeing one the return of your new radio.
    I slept with Alex three times and remember each one perfectly. In all three he was agreeably intimidating, and intimidating in three ways. 1. The murmured bits of dialogue, snatched from the air, grammatical encrustations, drifting clauses, ellipses. Isn’t this kind of evening the best of all ? Or, Usually I . On and on in whispers: better than and women who and one time —small, dark, drifting comparisons. 2. A seizure of spiritual discontent and a grave asceticism, mournfully impugning.