no
other way
by Douglas Messerli
Mark Gasper (screenwriter and director) An Empty Bed / 1988
Suddenly, as if from an echo chamber we
hear a voice—who we later in the film come to realize is Pete’s wife, Corinne
(Harriet Bass) saying “I think it’s great that the two of you were
roommates”—followed by heavy laughter in the same in which a much younger
version of himself (Mark Clifford Smith) is sitting with his even younger lover
Peter (Conan McCarthy) who presents him with a housewarming gift, since they
apparently have just moved in, of a lovely green-glass ashtray, Peter saying
“This is our apartment now. We’re going to keep it neat.”
As the camera pans quickly across the room
we recognize that it is now not kept so very neat the elderly Bill picking up
the same ashtray and taking it into the kitchen where it empties it into the
trash. He lifts a bottle of whisky and carefully marks the line of what is left
it the bottle. We can guess that his doctor has ordered that he delimit his
alcoholic intake, and we later discover that he has a couple of years earlier
had a heart attack.
Accordingly, we perceive what will be the
structure of this bittersweet tale that joggles us between the empty present
and a more joyful past, forcing us to adjust to the obvious changes that have
occurred in this old man’s life.
I describe Bill as an old man with some
consternation since, having been forced to retire early only a couple of years
earlier, as we are later told, the character is probably a few years younger
than I am today, watching this film at the age of a few months shy of 74. And I
was struck by this film, for that very reason, in a way I might not have been
just a few years earlier. This is the story of a man who is nearing the end of
his life in total contemplation of how he has ended the lonely cocoon in which
he exists. How did that joyfully shared moment of intimate laughter and the
passionate sexual pleasures of Bill and Peter result in the carcass of a lonely
man crawling each morning out of bed to walk around New York’s Greenwich
Village in search of answers to that very question.
In our COVID-quarantined days of early
2021 I cannot even easily walk the streets, and certainly in the vast stretches
of Los Angeles would find little to remind me of friends and events in my own
and husband’s life. My contemplations of the past are almost all limited now to
what I am just doing, watching films and writing about them. But fortunately,
unlike the figure in Gasper’s An Empty Bed, my lover sits just a few
feet away from me on our somewhat neatly kept couch and shares our bed.
Back in the late 1940s and 1950s in which
Bill and Peter’s early days seem to be located, gay life was far more difficult
not only because of societal strictures and general homophobia, but because of
how young men and women had been conditioned to define and express themselves.
Young college boys like the Bill we encounter in one of the old man’s memories
were not only “expected” to marry and procreate by the parents and societies
with whom and in which they lived but because of their own definitions of
themselves. Bill comes home each summer from Boston University to spend
pleasant picnicking days with his girlfriend Patty (Lenore Andriel), who cannot
understand why he keeps returning to Boston when he might remain home, marry
her, and attend the local State college. Bill assures her of his love but
expresses his enjoyment also of Boston, and we can only suspect that despite
the conservative traditions of that city, he is exploring there something he
might not be able to at home. What we do eventually perceive is that the next
summer, after graduation, he does return to Patty.
But even when he meets Peter in New York,
they date not in a gay bar but in a sort of Beat Club, which has a back open
terrace in which to perform poetry and smoke dope, and several side rooms where
both heterosexual and homosexual couples can explore their love. They shared
their meals in local diners such as the Gus’ local Greek diner, where Bill
still eats, ordering up favorites with far less fat and salt that he and Peter
shared in their hearty celebrations of consumption.
We get only a few glimpses of their life
together, but we surmise that their friendship was not as easy one, attempting
a monogamous relationship at a time when gay couples had few other shared
models. Their age difference, Peter obviously the younger man who is unemployed
and Bill working for a talent agency, creates tensions. On Bank Street,
standing outside the Waverly Inn, he recalls a dinner in which Peter expressed
his feeling of having no connection to his lover’s life. “You lie to your
mother. No one at the agency even knows that I exist.” Feeling trapped in
domesticity, he wonders, with Bill paying all his costs, whether he is simply
someone to keep his companion warm at night, characterizing himself as being
something close to a gigolo.
In the elder Bill’s flashes of memory we
gather, near the end, Peter had gotten deeply involved in drugs, now needing
his partner’s money in order to feed his habit, money that Bill often no longer
had or wanted to give him.
Yet their love, despite its rocky times,
seemed to abide which the old man’s stare through a restaurant
window at a handsome young man, who clearly reminds him of young lover,
reveals. Evidently, however, Peter finally demanded his freedom. And unlike
today in which it might mean him taking up with another gay acquaintance or
pickup, it ends in a heterosexual marriage, a move to Florida, and children,
with whom Bill forlornly is kept abreast, the couple visiting him on a trip to
New York which occasioned the comment by Peter’s wife that we heard in the
first few frame of the film. Obviously, Peter has felt no need to tell her of
the real nature of their “roommate” days.
As the older Bill shuffles slowly through
the Village streets we realize gradually that he has no longer any existence
except in that temporarily glorious past, even if he realizes that it might
have been worse. Running into an old friend Elmer (Thomas Hill) he discovers
that since leaving the agency to represent his own clients Elmer has now
suffered bankruptcy—as Bill perceives when his former friend checks his balance
he has only $13.00 left in his account—and must continue to work in the hopes
of finding enough money just to survive. He has apparently been divorced by his
wife.
Later, coincidentally, he runs into an
elder version of his early girlfriend Patty (Dorothy Stinnette) who long ago
married, has grown children, and is now teaching again. She declares that her
life has been a happy one, that her husband is a fine father and that “she
couldn’t ask for a better man.” Yet we also see in her face that she might have
imagined herself happier if she had married her first love, Bill. “Sometimes I
wonder, what did I do, huh, what didn’t I do? You came back that summer and you
changed so. It was like you were a completely different person.”
“I’m glad you married Al. He’s a good
man,” he hesitatingly responds.
“I got tired of waiting.”
“I know.”
She asks the important question of this
film, “Are you satisfied with the way your life has gone?”
“For the most part.” He continues with
the most profound statement of the movie, “Believe me, there was no other way.”
She gives him a gentle kiss on the cheek
and is off to finish her shopping.
Suddenly, in Bill’s statement of
acceptance and reconciliation with his gay identity we no longer feel sorry for
him. He returns home, hardly able to walk the stairway three floors up to his
apartment. And that night we know he will drink another measured portion of the
scotch he has left. The next morning he will rise up slowly, have a smoke, and
walk the streets where everything reminds him of the choices he has made. But
he is no one to be pitied. He has lived a full life defined by who is knew he
was and is.
Los Angeles, January 13,
2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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