Contemporary Gay Romances (2 page)

Both women had stepped away from the table. Lizabeth, his agent, to the restroom, Andrea Kelton, the editor who’d just said the words to make him float on air while seated still on the big
moderne
banquette, had received a phone call from her office and had wandered off somewhere at the far end of the restaurant trying to get better wireless reception. Leaving Niels Llewellyn alone to sit and gloat. Around him: the delicate tinkle of crystal and silver against porcelain in the overpriced eatery, and its otherwise artful sonic decor of swirling waters covering the multimillion-dollar deals being proposed and sealed by the industrial and media movers and shakers about the big, posh, water-hushed room.

It was something to savor, as had been Kelton’s words, “this is unquestionably your breakthrough book. We’re so proud to be involved!” Followed rapidly by further indications of how proud they actually were, including the stunning figures of the enormous first printing the company had settled upon, the pre-publication acceptance as a “main selection” by the book club, with its own concomitant huge printing, and even—he was to expect it as soon as this week—an unprecedented further advance upon his advance of a year past, actual cash more than double what he’d received, as though confirming the success of a novel not yet in print, never mind one liable to ever succumb to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Lizabeth returned first, and confirmed the second advance and pre-sale and huge printing all meant there were to be no vagaries of the marketplace at all now. They—she and he, together for twenty-six long years, through wheat and chaff—had been elevated, as though on an enormous dose of morphine, a good half foot so far above the buy-and-sell mentality that had so enclosed them all of their professional and personal relationship. Niels was now about to become a “personage,” and she too, at least in the “industry” a correlative mini-personage. They toasted each other’s good sense and tenacity and lifted a glass edge toward whatever literary gods there still might be in this ghastly age, to help them ever onward.

Then Kelton was back, closing the phone and saying, “The advertisements are set now for a national vend. Six major newspapers and three magazines,” and Niels sank back into the banquette and listened almost as though he were not the major reason, but instead some hanger-on, or better yet and ironically, given his age, a child, as the glories of his immediate future were trotted out in all the brightest colors with metaphorical pennants excitedly set to fly in front of him.

He was hardly a child. Closer to sixty than fifty. No friend to the reflections of windowpanes and looking glasses that had a startling way of creeping up and suddenly presenting him to his nowadays always unsuspecting and usually horrified self.

“About time,” some would say. His previous agent, gone into real estate in Gulfstream St. Pete; his sister, an aged thing upon a stick who lived in Middleton, New Jersey, on a government pension and who he still held responsible for his mother’s death: responsible by means of her unbending maternal neglect; was it half a lifetime ago? “About time,” a few dusty professors would utter, those not yet retired, who’d gone to college with him, saying it with a bit more fire, a smidgen more respect. “About damned time!” his few pupils over the years would celebrate, wherever they celebrated these days; he expected in their overpriced apartments in the wilds of Queens or Staten Island, after all, who could afford to live in Manhattan except the wealthy and the few like him who actually were more or less rent-controlled unto death?

The celebration soon over, the women once more drawn to the cell phones, someone—he didn’t know, he didn’t care, which—paid for the, of course, overpriced lunch, and they all stood, made kissing-like gestures in each other’s direction and slowly slid out of the water-tumbled dining chamber and into a corridor, into a bar, toward a coat check room, into another corridor, and out onto the front foyer where men with suits even he knew were ridiculously expensive—suits he soon could buy should he care to change his look (“Post-Graduate” one magazine had written of his habitual costume)—were entering.

In the spring afternoon sunshine, Lizabeth spotted a taxi, and Andrea mentioned they were going the same way. Touchy kisses this time from the two of them, as the middle-aged women skipped chattering like preteen girls through the Mid-Fifties street traffic and into the cab door, “No-No”ing another matron foolish enough to try to beat them to it. Then the taxi slid forward, they were gone, and Niels was alone.

“It’s April ninth!” Niels found himself saying to three other women, stepping around him without even a look back headed into the restaurant’s foyer, then he moved out of their way, forward into the 2:06 p.m. noise and grime of a midtown sidewalk.

“About time!” he repeated to himself with secret joy, wondering with a start how life would be different now. “You’re lucky, N.,” Scott Fortismann had said to him only a few nights ago, “fate is saving you for last, for when you’re ready for it. Unlike poor schmuck me, you’ll be able to handle and thus enjoy your fame when it comes.” To which Niels had answered, “
If
it comes!” and been clapped on the shoulder and assured all across Riverside Drive and into Scott’s hundred-thousand-dollar Merce coupe that it would, it would, Scott Fortismann knew for sure.

Scott of course had become famous early, twenty-eight, world-famous at thirty-four with
Nets
, and so had been famous seemingly forever and it had ruined him. Scott would reiterate that to Niels during their long (and on Scott’s part—increasingly booze-tinged) meals. And Niels could see for himself: the lengthy, expensive, disgraceful, emotional, first divorce. The seemingly abandoned children who’d come to hate Scott. Nicky nearly murdering his father that insane afternoon on the yacht in Antigua. Brenda in and out of jail or Payne Whitney or more lately caught up in the bust of the latest escort service to take her in. Scott himself going from wife to wife, girlfriend to girlfriend, even drifting into Niels’s territory awhile, with that much younger and somewhat questionable African American minimalist, what was his name, Nigeria Sands? More disrepute at their very public breakup at the Venice Biennale. Providing ignominious material for half a week of say-anything-just-so-long-as-you-show-everything (and they did!) European scandal sheets. Their few remaining friends, their colleagues certainly, and much of the reading public had come to expect Scott Fortismann’s very public romances and breakups so they could afterward savor them, endlessly rehashing them, appreciating them, a great deal more than his dwindling output of serious plays.

Scott Fortismann would probably be the only one of what was left of Niels’s so-called “circle” (long
perdu
thanks to car accidents, air accidents, overdoses, suicide, cancer, and AIDS) who’d be truly happy for Niels now. The others, well, what had Samantha W. mouthed off last week? “For every artist who makes it in this damned country, fifty others have to fall down in front of a bus.” No, they wouldn’t so much like it, would they? No matter what they would actually say to his face—and who could blame them?

He’d reached the corner of Fifth Avenue, where a complete tangle of traffic appeared to come from two directions. A crowd of pedestrians was gathered under the construction scaffolding, barring Niels from even seeing what was going on in the middle of the intersection—if not from hearing shouted drivers’ curses and the incessant honking of car horns.

When he’d passed here earlier on his way to lunch, three construction workers had been sitting just over there, somewhat elevated, chowing down on hero sandwiches and messily drinking out of big thermoses as he’d stepped around the corner. One of them, maybe twenty-six, slab-sided big, with a mess of thick, bark-colored hair and post-twilight blue eyes, had suddenly stood up and stretched himself to his full six feet and two inches, and Niels had stopped short on the sidewalk and just gawped at the big child-god as the fellow’s eyes closed and his mouth smiled and his muscles played along his arms and over his chest, obvious through his thin “Metallica Rocks!” T-shirt, in sheer animal pleasure at such a simple activity as yawning and stretching. Cupid’s dart had stung Niels so suddenly then, so utterly, he’d become nauseated. He’d felt such complete astonished unmitigated desire and such an opposing instant equal realization of the impossibility of its ever being fulfilled that he had actually had to turn away and retch.

Andrea and Lizabeth had noticed how pale he was when he’d arrived at their table not long after. They plied him with brandy and fabulous news until he’d forgotten the godling, and his own embarrassment, doubled of course when said deity had noticed Niels about to pitch forward over the two-by-four temporary wooden railing onto the filthy curb. Said deity had rushed forward and grabbed Niels, shouting, “Eeth! Give me a hand! This old guy’s goin’ under.”

He’d been freshly mortified by the shout, and of course, they’d easily grasped him and pulled him over to where they sat, where the third one had plied him with tepid coffee from a thermos, the three of them clucking over him: “Jeez, we thought you was a goner!” “Is it your ticker?” and worst of all, Apollo-in-construction-boots demanding, “Look me in the eye, so I can see you’re all right. C’mon, right in the eye! Udderwize we’re calling E. Em. Ess. C’mon, fella!”

And so he’d been forced to actually look close-up at those eyes and so be able to determine their exact shade of semiconductor cobalt, which he now knew so very well he could mix it at any paint store, not to mention the naturally frosted three different tones of browns of his leonine mane, or his complexion like that satin found on century-old Valentines, or the exact cut of his Medici upper lip, the slightly fuzzed depth of his matching dimples. Niels had almost lost it again. He’d gaped again, until they declared, “Yawl right, now!” and “Want help inna taxi?” all of which he fended off, with many mumbled thanks and gratefully downcast eyes, getting as far away as fast as he could and then once past the construction site looking back once, only to be startled by his Adonis’s head thrust out over the sidewalk and his somewhat worried face, his big right hand stuck out in a peace sign vee, to which Niels at last responded with one of his own, before somehow managing to actually stumble the twenty yards or so to the nearby restaurant.

Niels didn’t see any of the three now. Could they have already left for the day? Then he heard one: Apollo himself shouting and then there he was, in a sort of setback where the boarding had been nicked three feet into the building dig to allow for a temporary enclosed chute, probably for rubble to be dropped from the top of the construction to its collection site far down below. Hidden within the crowd, Niels felt safe in turning and gawking at the perfection of the creature as he waved his hands and shouted up some obscure lingo, possibly to one of his colleagues from before. It was almost amazing watching him.

Niels became aware of the crowd thinning, his cover lessening, and was about to persuade himself that he’d soon be spotted again—but would that be so very bad? he might even go over and thank him for his trouble earlier?—when his peripheral vision caught something else.

The enclosed chute next to the construction worker had been shaking from side to side, perhaps as a result of larger pieces tumbling down through it, and at an upper section he could see a piece of something seemingly caught fast. It bulged suddenly, maybe two feet above the construction god’s head, then more rubble came down into it, finer stuff, then it moved horizontally maybe four inches on either side. Suddenly it half detached from its lower portion, which swung around a hundred and eighty degrees, revealing, as he’d feared, a good-sized chunk of concrete wedged in tight.

It was the workman’s absolute total failure to see any of it taking place at all that impelled Niels forward, through thinning pedestrians, shouting and knowing he couldn’t possibly be heard over the noise of the chute, over the traffic, but that he had to do something, or it would disgorge directly over, on top of, right
onto
the fellow’s head.

Not even realizing what he was doing, keeping his eyes all the time on the broken shaft, Niels dove across the sidewalk. Panicked even further as the construction worker headed directly under its opening, directly under where more rubble had been dropped down and where the structure now swung side to side. Niels was yelling, “Get away! Get away!” Yelling loud enough it turned out for the worker to turn to the sound of his voice, a split second of surprised but pleased recognition on his handsome lips, his mouth opening to say something back, as the concrete wedge began to give way, and Niels threw himself directly at the worker’s midsection the way he’d seen defensive lineman tackle a quarterback on televised football games, with utter disregard for gravity, himself, where he might land even, and he felt the young fellow’s complete astonishment as he caught the blow and tumbled sideways virtually head over heels, Niels all the while thinking, “God! Have I done enough!” just as the noise above him reached a thunderous boom and Niels looked up and his vision seemed closed down to an overhead tunnel of unstoppably charging black rubble, and he understood that he’d succeeded in saving Apollo but that now the ton of concrete was for him alone, and there wasn’t even time for the next thought, before it all went quite dark.

*

“…so I told him, Tyrone, ‘No! I am not going to that restaurant with you! I don’t care how many of your friends are waiting there!’ Can you believe that? Him telling me that—just to get me to go? What an idiot…Hold on! I think this patient is conscious. Hello, sir?
Sir
? Better get that intern at the desk.
Sir? Hello
.
Can you hear me?
Can you recognize. I’m Tyesha Melton, your nurse? How many fingers am I hold…? There you are, Doctor, I was just…Yes, sir, we were about to turn him over like we usually do at this time and he just now opened…”