Contemporary Gay Romances (15 page)

When he opened his eyes, the room was empty.

*

He was visited every night for several weeks. Every night, Ben awakened, sought out the outline of the figure against the lighter darkness of the room, and succumbed to fantasies and sex.

During the day he often told himself he ought to be sure it was Victor and not someone else. But who else could it be? He searched the eyes of the other colony members he came across, looking for any signs of guiltily secretive interest. He found nothing even close. Then he would come upon Victor Giove, racing around the lawns with the big Irish hound or sitting reading in a hammock strung outside Joan’s studio, and though they seldom exchanged more than a few words, every word, every phrase seemed so couched with meanings relevant to their shared nights, Ben was convinced it must be Giove.

Didn’t everything point to it? Victor’s insistence that Ben remain at the colony that first night? His unceasing friendliness? His increased reticence with Ben since the night visits had begun? He seldom spoke to Ben of Joan, or of her work, as though it were only an excuse. Ben came to believe their new silence—when they met at the local grocery store or out on walks, they now barely spoke—was more eloquent than words. It spelled content.

Ben would have to be a fool to spoil it. The impossible had become the possible. Not in the open way he’d at first, naïvely, imagined it would be, but tacit, secretive, and for that reason somehow more passionate than he’d ever fantasized. Victor must still have hurdles of attitudes, ingrained prejudices to jump, before he could admit what he was wanting, feeling. Ben would give him time. Who knew what the next step would be in their growing closeness—so long as Ben didn’t force it.

*

Ben had been visited that night, as usual, all his lust and wakefulness drawn from him, as it always was, replaced by deep, calm, dreamy sleep.

People were marching down a small-town street. Batons twirled, trumpets blared, signs and crepe-covered floats sailed past. Children bounced eagerly behind. The drums passed by very close, going bam bam BAM! Bam bam BAM! again and again, sounding lovely and rich and mellow at first, then ominous, then emergent.

Ben awakened to someone hammering on his front door. He thrust open the bedroom window to the cool mountain summer morning. It wasn’t quite dawn.

“Ben! What do you know about drugs?” It was Eugene Ormond, evidently recently awakened himself. If he hadn’t looked so panic-stricken, Ben would have laughed.

“Joan Sampson’s taken a pile of them. We’re sure they’re some kind of sleeping pills.”

“What did they look like?” Ben asked.

“We found one that fell on the floor.” Dr. Ormond showed Ben the shiny red and blue capsule: a Tuinal.

“She’s got to vomit them up,” Ben said, and jumped into the car with Dr. Ormond and drove to her studio. “Then black coffee to keep her stimulated.”

“Frances thought the same. I hope she’s all right.”

“Where’s Victor?” Ben asked. “He would know, too.”

They pulled up alongside the studio. Ormond looked at Ben oddly, then said:

“Didn’t you know? He’s back in New York, has been for the past three days. That’s what all this nonsense is about.”

Before Ben could register the news, Dr. Ormond was pulling him out of the passenger’s side of the stopped pickup and into the studio.

Joan was audibly vomiting, Frances as audibly cursing about the stupidity of trying to kill yourself over a man, for Chrissakes, even one like Victor. There was a final spasm of nausea, quiet, then Frances Ormond half dragged the smaller woman out of the bathroom and, spotting Ben, asked him to grab the other side and help her walk Miss Sampson around a bit while Eugene made coffee, “doubly strong, Eugene!”

Their charge was light but weak, her arms useless, her head kept lolling against Ben’s shoulder. Words and saliva dribbled out of her mouth. He found himself totally repulsed.

They wheeled her around like that another five minutes. Another fifteen were spent feeding her coffee and ensuring she didn’t vomit that up too. Then more walking around.

Joan was visibly recovered by the time the phone rang. She still looked awful and had allowed Ben to bring her into the bedroom, where she was noisily sobbing, but at least she seemed awake, safe.

“Get that, will you, Ben?” Mrs. Ormond asked, looking from where she was cleaning the spattered bathroom floor.

Ben lifted the receiver and said hello. There was a confused mumbling from the other side. Then:

“Joan? Is that you?”

Victor Giove, perplexed.

Ben looked away from the phone, unable to say anything for a minute. Holding his hand over the phone, he barely uttered, “It’s Victor.” Saying the name was more difficult than almost anything he could remember doing in his life.

“Of course it’s Victor!” Frances Ormond declared and took the call.

“You see,” Joan sobbed, standing at the threshold of the room. “He’s seeing
her
again. He was with
her
all last night. He couldn’t stay away from
her
. That’s why he went back!”

Frances Ormond hushed her. Ben moved away from them, feeling as though he were on the set of a movie where everyone was playing a role, and only he didn’t know the scenario or have a script. He still couldn’t believe Victor was in New York. Yet there he was, calling long distance, in response to a call Mrs. Ormond had put through.

Ben left the studio and walked slowly back to the little cottage. He felt dazed by the morning’s events, but not so distracted he didn’t notice it had rained the night before: the dust around the cottage was still damp enough although drying fast. Two sets of footprints led to the tire tracks where Dr. Ormond had parked the pickup a few hours ago. Although he walked around the cottage twice, Ben could find no other sets of prints or tracks.

That night he drank some brandy, which kept him awake longer and made his sleep lighter than usual. When he awakened later during the night by the urgent panting breath at the foot of the bed, he immediately turned to the bed table and turned on the lamp.

The room was empty.

Energized by the need to know, Ben leapt out of bed and ran out to the other rooms. He even looked outside. When he returned to the bedroom a few minutes later, he thought he made out a wisp of mist curling into the lower edges of the large storage closet. The closet proved to be empty. But the morning chill caught up with him there. He began to shiver so badly he had to get into bed and pull up the covers, awaiting sunlight.

*

“Stephen Hunter was homosexual, wasn’t he?”

Frances Ormond looked across the distressed oak-parquet of the old table at Ben.

“I guess they still don’t talk much about those matters in college, do they?” she asked, instead of answering him.

“The vagabond who murdered him was a hustler, wasn’t he?”

“You seem to know all the answers. Why ask?”

“In the bedroom?”

“Stephen tried to get away. He hid in the storage closet.”

Ben wasn’t surprised to hear it: only vaguely chilled to know his line of reasoning had been so on-target.

“And Victor and Stephen were friends, weren’t they?”

“Not by then, they weren’t. They had been. Close friends. But that summer they had a falling-out.”

“Because Victor wouldn’t sleep with Stephen.”

“You do have all the answers, don’t you? Yes, Victor looked up to Stephen as though he were a god. But he couldn’t bring himself to love him that way. Generous as Victor is with himself. Sometimes too generous, if you ask me. People want more than Victor can give.”

“And that’s when Stephen began picking up hustlers.”

“No. He’d done that long before he met Victor. You’ve read the sequence he titled ‘Broken Bones,’ haven’t you?”

“Years ago,” Ben admitted. He’d never dreamed it was about hustlers.

Frances got up from the table and went to another room. She returned with a copy of Hunter’s
Collected Poems
. Ben found the page and reread the first few poems in the series. He was shaken by the harsh, beautiful images of lust and fear.

“This is why you said I was heading in the same direction?” Ben asked.

“I don’t care what you do—just be careful.”

“I’ve never brought anyone back to the cottage,” Ben said.

“I never said you did. Borrow the book,” she pleaded. “Read him again, Ben. He has a great deal to tell you. All great poets do. But I think Hunter has a special message for you.”

*

Like every literature student of his generation, Ben had read several of Stephen Hunter’s poems in college, and had even memorized one, a sonnet: “August and the scent of tragic leafburn.” Aside from that one, however, Ben had always thought Hunter overrated. He had preferred the more formal poets—Stevens and Auden and Lowell—to what he termed the “wild men”: Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsburg, and especially Stephen Hunter. Not that his opinion made any difference. Hunter was in every anthology; his work was written about, discussed, interpreted and reinterpreted.

Ben rediscovered him, reading through all the poems in a few days, reading them again, then selecting out single poems and analyzing them for himself.

Hunter’s famous
Odes to an Unruined Statue
were suddenly opened to Ben as though they had been written in a language he could never understand until now. Victor Giove was the beautiful man/object—the unattainable; Hunter was the critical observer and adoring fantasist.
The Window Elegies
, those five intensely wrought poems of dense metaphors and precise yet oddly angled images, were illuminated as though a light had been switched on behind them in a basement room. Their visionary style and metaphysical message were all held together by the carefully delineated details of different windows through which the poet had seen a loved one. The description in one of the elegies might well be that of Victor’s A-frame studio, here at the colony; the window Hunter had looked through night after night, spying on Victor.

Ben didn’t go near the large closet, which he never used anyway.

Nor did he sleep in the bedroom any longer.

He felt safe on the living room sofa, even though it was cramped. And, whether it was because of his deep new fear or whether there was a natural boundary to the presence, Ben was not awakened once by his nocturnal visitor while he slept out in the living room.

The locks had to be repaired, of course, if only as a precaution. Who knew how many other hustlers had come back here with Hunter. And he began to haunt his previous places of fast, usually anonymous, sex again, returning home late at night and sleeping deeply. When he didn’t go out, he would stay awake at night, working, and instead sleeping during the day. Everything he now did seemed tinged by an undercurrent of excitement, as though anticipation were slowly building, but toward what he couldn’t even begin to say.

Victor Giove returned to Sagoponauk. Ben sometimes came upon him swimming at the pond. Although Joan was no longer with him and the older man waved Ben over to join him, Ben would invariably plead some lame excuse and quickly leave. The one time Ben and Victor were thrown together, right next to each other, at the Ormonds’ for dinner, they found they no longer had anything to say to each other.

What Ben had thought to be a mutual secret contentment, he now saw otherwise: Victor was perceptive enough, experienced enough too, to understand what Ben wanted from him. He was trying to avoid having the same kind of problem he’d had with Stephen Hunter, even if it meant having no relationship at all.

Ben knew that evening for sure that he’d fallen out of love with Victor. He’d probably done so a week earlier, with Joan snivelling against his body. The golden aura that used to light the other man’s steps through the tall grass, the sparkle that used to dapple his dark curls as he lay in the sun were gone. His eyes seemed tired. His face lined. His laughter constrained.

Ben knew why too. No man he could ever deem desirable would have been fool enough to not give so simple a matter as his body to a once-in-a-lifetime-met genius like Stephen Hunter.

*

It was August when Ben moved back into the bedroom. “August and the scent of tragic leafburn,” he reminded himself, when he awakened once more out of a deep sleep.

He knew instantly that the presence at the foot of his bed was Stephen Hunter.

His body was beginning to tingle warm under the blanket cover he had protectively pulled up in that instant of realization. But Ben still shivered. The air about him stirred in cool eddies unlike any air he’d ever known. He heard what seemed to be fragments of whispered lines from poems, mixed with pleas, demands, obscenities. Stephen knew Ben: knew who he was, what he wanted, what he’d given up. Ben’s teeth began to chatter. All he had to do was reach over to the lamp table and put on the light, and he would be alone again, well out of harm’s reach. But if he did that, Stephen might never come back to him. Ben wasn’t sure he wanted that either.

He suddenly thought of Victor Giove. Large, muscled, beautiful, generous Victor. He thought of Victor’s smile, the bulge of his crotch in those tan worn corduroys, the roundness of his buttocks in those scarlet swim trunks, his rippling chest, his furrowed back, those ringlets of black curls, his Florentine profile.