Sincerity as a Method of Concealment

Oscar arrived exactly on time, which I was learning to understand as a form of aggression. Casey was twelve minutes late and carrying two coffees, neither of which was for anyone but herself. “One’s for now,” she said, setting the second cup down with the authority of someone staking a claim. “One’s for when this gets difficult.”

We were in a borrowed office at the Algonquin — a bad literary joke that Oscar had insisted on with exactly the kind of delight you’d expect. The room was small, papered in a green that had probably been tasteful in 1987, and the radiator was producing a low, industrial hum that made it feel like we were inside something alive.

“So,” I said, pulling out my notes, “a queer romance between a young diplomat and a society columnist. The columnist writes blind items — ”

“I know what blind items are,” Oscar said. He was standing at the window, which overlooked an alley. He seemed to find the alley more interesting than either of us. “Gossip dressed in the costume of discretion. One reveals by pretending not to reveal. It is the most honest form of dishonesty. Or the most dishonest form of honesty. The distinction hardly matters.”

“It does matter, though.” Casey dropped into the chair across from me and pulled one knee up. “Because the columnist knows who he’s writing about. He’s choosing to protect someone by half-exposing them. That’s not dishonesty — it’s care wearing a disguise.”

Oscar turned from the window. “My dear, care that requires a disguise is either cowardice or flirtation. I am hopeful it’s flirtation.”

I watched them settle into the thing that would define the rest of the afternoon — not quite an argument, but two fundamentally different theories of what performance means in a love story. Casey kept coming back to the word “earnest,” which was doing a lot of work. Oscar kept deflecting with epigrams, which was also doing a lot of work. I was trying to find the place where those two kinds of labor met.

“Here’s what I want the story to do,” I said. “The diplomat — he’s junior, posted somewhere glamorous, let’s say a consulate in a European capital — ”

“Vienna,” Oscar said immediately.

“Why Vienna?”

“Because it is the city where everyone spies on everyone and calls it culture. Also, the pastries are exceptional, and I have always believed that a love story should have exceptional pastries.”

Casey laughed. It was a real laugh, not a polite one. “I was going to say London, but fine, Vienna. I like that it’s not D.C. or New York. It gets us away from the American-politics version of this story. The diplomat can be American abroad, which is already a performance — you’re always representing something bigger than yourself, and you never get to just be a person.”

“Precisely,” Oscar said, and you could see it cost him something to agree with her so quickly. He covered it by continuing. “The diplomat performs his country. The columnist performs his taste. Neither is performing himself, and yet — here is what interests me — neither is lying, precisely. The performance IS the self. That is what people refuse to understand about masks. You do not put on a mask to hide. You put one on to show the face you cannot otherwise wear.”

I wrote that down. Then I said, “But Casey, your instinct is the opposite, isn’t it? That the mask eventually has to come off. That the real person underneath is the one who matters.”

Casey was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that Oscar looked at her with something approaching curiosity. “No,” she said. “That’s not what I think. Or — it’s what people think I think, because my books are warm and optimistic and people confuse warmth with simplicity. What I actually think is that the moment you take off the mask and the person underneath looks exactly like the mask — that’s the real revelation. Not that you were hiding. That you were showing the truth the whole time and calling it a performance because that was the only way you could be brave enough to show it.”

The radiator clanked. Oscar sat down.

“That,” he said, “is essentially the plot of my best play.”

“I know,” Casey said. She took a sip of her first coffee. “Jack invents a brother named Ernest so he can be irresponsible. But ‘Ernest’ turns out to be his real name. The lie was the truth. The fabrication was the fact. I think about that all the time.”

“Most people take it as a joke.”

“It is a joke. That’s what makes it devastating.”

I felt something shift between them — not agreement exactly, but recognition. The particular electricity of two people realizing they’ve been working on the same problem from different directions. I wanted to push into it before it settled.

“So the columnist,” I said. “He writes blind items about the diplomat. Little hints in his column — ‘a certain junior attaché was seen leaving the opera with a companion who was decidedly not on the guest list.’ That kind of thing. And the diplomat reads them and knows he’s being watched, and instead of being afraid, he’s — what?”

“Thrilled,” Casey said.

“Intrigued,” Oscar said, at the same moment.

They looked at each other.

“Thrilled is better,” Oscar conceded. “Intrigued is what a person says when they mean thrilled but are too sophisticated to admit it.”

“See, that’s what I want in this story,” Casey said, pointing at him with the hand that was holding her coffee, which sloshed slightly. “I want a character who admits it. Not at the end, not after eighty pages of agonizing. I want a character who reads a blind item about himself and thinks, ‘Someone is paying this much attention to me,’ and feels joy. Reckless, stupid, completely justified joy.”

“Joy is never justified,” Oscar said. “That is what makes it interesting.”

I asked about the columnist’s angle. What did he want? Why was he writing these items?

“Because he’s in love,” Casey said, “and this is the only register he has for it. He can’t say it directly because he’s built his entire career on indirection. He’s a man who tells other people’s secrets for a living and has never told his own.”

“I would like him to be aware of the irony,” Oscar said. “Not tortured by it. Aware of it the way one is aware that one is wearing a particularly good suit. The irony is part of the pleasure. He writes about the diplomat because writing is the closest thing he has to touching.”

That was the sentence that unlocked something for me. Writing as proximity. The blind item as a love letter with the name removed. I said as much and Oscar waved his hand, which I was learning meant either “yes, obviously” or “I’m not sure I agree but I don’t want to argue about it right now.”

“What I’m worried about,” I said, “is the public/private split. In Red, White & Royal Blue, the leaked emails are the crisis — the private becoming involuntarily public. I want something like that, but not exactly that. Not a leak. Something more Wildean.”

“What is more Wildean,” Oscar said, with the careful patience of a man explaining something he has explained many times, “is that the private never needed to become public because it was public all along. The blind items are already public. Everyone reads them. Everyone suspects. The ‘secret’ is an open secret. What would be truly devastating — truly dramatic — is the moment when the diplomat and the columnist realize that everyone already knows, has always known, and the only people who thought it was a secret were the two of them.”

Casey sat forward. “Oh. Oh, that’s good. Because that means the entire romance was happening in public and they were the only ones who didn’t see it. They were performing secrecy and the performance was transparent. The blind items weren’t blind at all. Everyone could see.”

“Everyone could see because everyone had eyes,” Oscar said. “The items were blind. The readers were not.”

I asked whether that undercut the stakes. If everyone already knew, what was left to risk?

“Each other,” Casey said, and there was something almost fierce about it. “The public knowing is nothing. It’s background noise. The terrifying thing is looking at the person you’ve been writing about, who’s been reading what you write about them, and saying: I meant all of it. Every word. Not as gossip. Not as copy. As the truest thing I’ve ever written. That’s the risk. That’s always the risk. Not what the world thinks — what the one person thinks.”

Oscar was quiet for what felt like a long time. “I am going to say something that you will find sentimental,” he said, “and I would appreciate it if you did not look so surprised.”

Casey made a visible effort to control her expression and did not entirely succeed.

“The reason earnestness is frightening,” Oscar said, “is not that it is uncool. It is that it is irrevocable. You can retract a witticism. You can claim a paradox was a joke. You cannot unsay ‘I meant all of it.’ Sincerity, once deployed, cannot be retrieved. This is why I have spent most of my career avoiding it. This is also why,” he added, looking at Casey with what I can only describe as rueful admiration, “your books work. You make your characters say the irrevocable thing. And then you refuse to punish them for it.”

“That’s the whole project,” Casey said quietly. “That’s the whole thing.”

We sat with that for a while. The radiator kept humming. Someone in the hallway dropped what sounded like a very heavy suitcase.

I tried to move us toward the shape of the story. “So structurally — the blind items are threaded through. The columnist writes them, the diplomat reads them. The reader sees both sides. And the items escalate — first they’re coy, then they’re specific, then they become something that isn’t gossip anymore. They become declarations.”

“The form of gossip becoming the form of love,” Oscar said. “I approve.”

“And the diplomat responds,” Casey said. “Not in print. In person. He starts showing up where the columnist can see him. Starts wearing the tie that was mentioned in a column. Starts leaving breadcrumbs. The courtship happens in public, in full view, and everyone except the two of them realizes it’s a courtship.”

“What about the ending?” I asked.

“There should be a party,” Oscar said. “All comedies end at parties. Or begin at parties. Or both.”

“I don’t want it to be too neat,” Casey said. “I want them to get together — this is a romance, so yes, they get together, I’m not negotiating on that — but I want there to be something still unresolved. Some asymmetry. Maybe the columnist doesn’t stop writing blind items. Maybe the last one is about the diplomat and it’s still blind, even though they’re together now, because that’s the language. That’s how he loves.”

“A man who can only say ‘I love you’ by pretending not to,” Oscar said. “I have met several.”

“You were several,” Casey said.

Oscar tilted his head. “Well. Not several. But certainly one or two.”

I wanted to ask about the Vienna setting — whether the consulate life gave us enough texture, what the social world looked like around these two men. But Casey had opened her second coffee, and Oscar was looking at the green wallpaper with the expression of a man who has just had a thought he is not ready to share, and I had the sense that the most productive thing I could do was stop steering and let the silence grow into whatever it wanted to be.

“The thing about blind items,” Casey said, after a while, “is that they’re a collaboration. The writer and the subject. The writer chooses what to reveal. The subject chooses whether to confirm or deny. And the reader gets to play detective. So the whole form is — it’s a three-way performance. Everyone’s participating in the fiction.”

“Including,” Oscar said, “the fiction that any of it was ever fiction at all.”

That felt like the right place for something to end and something else to begin. I had what I needed: two men performing a courtship in the grammar of gossip, a city that was all surfaces, an audience that saw everything, and a final act that required someone to stop writing and start speaking. Whether the speaking would happen, and what it would cost, and whether the costliest thing of all was that it would cost nothing — those were questions the story would have to answer.

Casey finished her second coffee. Oscar continued studying the wallpaper. I turned to a blank page.