Contemporary Gay Romances (22 page)

I’d decided on what had once lived over what was now alive. This, despite all indications that it was the wrong direction, that living nature, studying tadpoles and crickets and birds whose names you weren’t sure of—soon to become known as Ecology—that was the real future! I chose the past, although my favorite children’s books were
Min of the Mississippi
and
Nature for Everyone
. Dragged by something inevitable that told me some things were so old, immeasurably old, I chose, and instead of a botanist or ornithologist, I became a paleobiologist, a student of that paradox dead life, of life encased in stone and slate and if I’m very lucky, suspended in millions-of-years-old amber. In choosing, I found I’d also chosen to study the rock and shale and petrified tree resin wherein dead life might be located. Old rock. Dead wood.

I took it as a challenge, and on those few occasions when I felt compelled to explain my choice, I always said it meant that from now on I’d continually sharpen my senses, go through life opening my eyes ever wider, forced to see in the least hints of fossilized ferncombs and feathertracks the possibility of something greater. And by extension, that in life in general I’d always have the details. Never miss what was right in front of me. I’d prided myself on that.

But in the past few months, I’d missed something crucial. The man who above all I loved in this life, whose love I’d come to take for granted, even while I never once took him for granted, had become symptomatic, had sero-converted, and I had not seen it happen. Sue had seen it, although she’d told us last night she’d never met a person infected with HIV. Craig had seen it immediately though he was the most egocentric of human beings. And I’d
not
seen it.

I did now, walking away from Mark, ostensibly to look for fossils I didn’t expect to find, and for the first time totally feeling Mark there behind me, knowing this consciousness of Mark would never go away again—until he himself did.

Stumbling forward, I thought I would cry. No, I’ll wait until I get out of his line of sight, I told myself, there, behind that escarpment, where he can’t see me.

I’d just reached it and looked back to check that I wasn’t seen, when something huge and catlike leapt down at me.

“Gotcha!” Craig yelled as he dragged me down into the sand. He roared and pawed at me and in general acted like an animal. I don’t know what got into me, since we always fought as equals, but this time I cringed away from him, and when he half came at me, I cringed again, cowered, shaking.

Craig could see how upset I was as I stumbled trying to get away from him, but he caught me and slid me against the cliff and held me there, held me tight, his front to my back, his larger, stronger arms over mine, his beard burning against my neck, letting me shake myself out, silently sob myself out. It was the longest that we’d been this close since we’d awakened that morning in the hotel bed together. After a while, he let go.

Mark was coming past us, on the way to our towels.

“I think it’s time to go,” Mark said. “What do you think?”

Even with all the rest, the walk back was still too much for Mark and we waited with him on the same bench as before while he caught his breath. A few hours later, we drove him in the rented T-Bird to the airport to get his jet home. Much later, after dinner and more of our usual arguments at a diner in Hillcrest designed as though it were right out of the fifties, Craig and I went to bed together in my hotel room.

At first he was aloof. So I was too.

“He doesn’t have long, you know,” Craig said. He moved closer until he covered my body with his.

“I know.”

Craig pinned me against the sheets.

“He’s going to die soon.”

He began to kiss me hard.

“Your beautiful lover is going to die.”

He made love to me with complete wildness and total abandon and with the same unchecked ferality he’d displayed on the beach. And I responded in kind, both of us acting unforgivably, saying unforgivable things to each other as we did, as though knowing it would be the last time ever.

He came in late, maybe twenty minutes after the reading had begun, certainly way past Roger’s usual seventeen minutes of intro-with-vamping for the usual contingent of latecomers having trouble parking. He slid in the door, and so was easily visible from where Roger stood, addressing the two dozen or so people. He found a seat, nodded at Roger, some kind of apologetic smile on his face, and settled in to listen.

Because Roger didn’t need glasses to read, he wasn’t wearing his distance lenses at the time, and so when he first came in and for the first half hour or so, Roger thought he was that film producer Roger had known way back when, he hadn’t seen in maybe fifteen years and who used to be a window designer working with Bob Curry and his partner, Candy what was her last name? How this producer had made it to Hollywood, Roger had never figured out, but he had, big-time, and if Roger remembered correctly the last time they’d had any kind of interaction it hadn’t been in a chic Vermont Village bookstore and it hadn’t been exactly pleasant either. In fact, Roger had called the guy a “consummate asshole” and had done so twice, first in front of about seventy people at Sunday brunch at the Fire Island Pines Botel’s Blue Whale restaurant.

The noisy table-full evidently being treated to lunch by the decorator-turned-producer had been annoying enough arriving loudly, confusedly seating themselves, boisterously ordering and reordering drinks, driving the waiter nuts with their lunch orders changes. The window designer/mogul was even more irritating, coming onto the nice, extremely humpy, waiter (Belmain a Swiss guy: he and Roger had done it once at the Burma Road) who made it clear he was not interested and definitely not amused. So when the waiter returned with their seven meals on a big tray, before he could even put it down on the table, the Hollywoodized window dresser had stood up, reached for the tray, and snatching it away from him, had hurled it over the metal railing, over the narrow strip of boardwalk and right into the Pines Harbor. He’d then said, “And that’s what we think of your lousy service here.”

To which the unconsternated Belmain had replied, “We’ve got your credit card number and I’m charging it all,” while the producer’s unfed guests bounced off the deck
en suite
,
and down thirty feet away to where a water taxi had just sent spumes to wash the two-story stern of the yacht named
Barbara
, arriving in front of the Pines Pantry. The window dresser’s party then boarded, headed, everyone assumed, to the Grove for lunch. “He’s still paying for it,” Belmain said aloud, then gussied up the table, turned to the next group waiting at the stairs near the Pines Bus Service window, and said, “It’s all yours.” Roger’s comment had been repeated a month later at Nick and Enno’s dinner party on Ocean Walk, when someone who knew the window dresser told the story, expecting us all to support him. No one did, as they all knew and liked Belmain, and that was when Roger spoke out a second time. “I was there, Bernardo, and you can tell Michael that everyone at the Botel that afternoon considered him a consummate asshole”: words Roger was sure had been repeated back.

And here he was, doing what? Waiting two decades to get revenge? Who cared? Roger had a half-drunk, iced latte and he was fully prepared to throw it into the guy’s face at the first hint of trouble.

He waited till last, until Roger was done talking with the last reader/buyer person, then came up, and Roger was amazed to see it wasn’t the asshole producer, but instead someone he’d not seen for even longer, Cap Hartmann, his closest friend in college.

“So,” Cap said, holding a copy of the new book open to the title page, “sign it to the head of the L.A. chapter of the Colgate Alumni Association.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ll hit you up for a donation later.”

“Colgate doesn’t know I exist,” Roger said. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”

“How? They’re better at locating people than the C.I.A.,” Cap said.

“After I made a big protest by not attending the graduation ceremony, they totally lost track of me. I was in Europe right after for close to a year, and when I returned to the States I moved to Alphabet City, where no one from Colgate would ever willingly step foot. Far as they know, I’m dead.”

“Lucky you. I was sure no one ever eluded them.”

The two men looked at each other and were once more delighted in each other’s words and company. How nice.

Two clerks had come up to the makeshift table, each holding a stack of his hardcovers, and they were very definitely standing there waiting for him. Roger said, “I’ve got to John Hancock these or this event isn’t kosher. Can you wait? Are you free at all?”

“Christ, yes,” Cap said. “You think after this long I’m going to let you go? You know, when I saw you’d be here in the newspaper, I tried all the hotels I could think of. No go.”

“I stay with friends in the hills,” Roger explained. “Off Lookout Mountain.”

“That’s what Karina thought. I wanted to have dinner and catch up.”

Karina: Cap’s wife, woman, girlfriend, whatever. When you were Cap Hartmann, there would always be a Karina.

“Cool with me. Can Karina join us?”

“She’s got business. A meeting with a client. She’s an attorney. You want to do this, yes?”

“Hell, yes! I can’t believe how great you look. How trim. How…young,” Roger said. It was true. But of course Roger could say it because he knew he looked trim and young too.

“I lived with a dancer for five years. Eugenia,” Cap explained, stepping away from the table so Roger could see how trim, how muscular his legs and torso were, how slender his hips. He looks like a ’mo, Roger thought. Full head of butterscotch hair with only a slight singeing of gray on the sides, only a few very shallow lines on his face, great skin, good tan: Cap was in as good shape as any homosexual of forty-five, Roger knew…And thank Christ for that!

“Give me ten minutes,” Roger said.

*

The large white elephant in the room during their hour-and-a-half long catch-up on the years over
steak frittes
at the glorified 1950s diner on Sunset was, of course, Trish Tanager. Cap and Trish had spent most of the three and a half years of college that Roger had known them in a famously passionate, famously difficult, and eventually famously broken relationship. Cap had ended it. Cap had graduated half a year early—or half a year late—Roger never knew which really, and before Cap had graduated, he’d joined the Peace Corps and broken up with Trish.

Leaving her utterly brokenhearted.

Roger knew to an iota exactly how brokenhearted, since Trish told him repeatedly for the next six or seven years. That’s how long they’d hung out together in Manhattan before she’d taken off for San Francisco and a totally new life. Even after she was gone, he and Trish remained in contact: postcards, letters, phone calls, gifts, her visits to her folks in uptown Manhattan, Roger’s less frequent visits out West, until he’d moved there, south not north. She told him about the breakup when she was drunk and when she was sober, occasionally when she was somber and almost in tears, and more often laughing over a joint of stuff they’d nicknamed Arthur it was so good, which they’d bought together, several kilos-full, and sold off slowly, cheaply, for good Karma’s sake, earning just enough money to be able to always smoke it free.

Cap had vanished, first into Peace Corps training at Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and then down to Namibia. There had been maybe four letters over two years to Roger, and then nothing, ever again. So Roger had inherited Trish Tanager. They’d gotten high together, gone to parties and Be-Ins and dance clubs and concerts together. They’d slept together once, not quite disastrously because it was so funny. But to the day they remained in contact. Roger had spoken to her by phone two nights before, as he was headed to the Bay Area and Sacramento next on his little book tour, and he planned on renting a car and driving upstate to see her and her third, or was it fourth, husband? Roger knew he couldn’t say a thing about Trish Tanager to Cap Hartmann, couldn’t reveal any of their decades-long life together without Cap—unless Cap asked.

Cap didn’t ask. Cap did, however, definitely want to hear about the others: the rest of their tight-knit, superior, overly literate “Hell Fire Club” in the English Department at Colgate. Roger had actually stumbled upon the three in a Russian Lit course, second term of his freshman year, when he arrived too late to sit anywhere but the back row of the room. It had taken him only that first class to realize that the three of them, Cap, Elliot, and Larry, already knew each other, and were already a group. He’d returned next class and sat in the back row with them, admiring Beatle-Paul-cute Larry Isaacson with his perfect complexion and almost blue-black helmet of hair. He’d slowly come to even more admire the masculinely handsome Cap Hartmann, And even, if non-sexually—he was definitely overweight, red-bearded, and dressed like a hippie—admire their leader, Elliot Dolgard, “the brains of the operation,” as he’d once joked to Roger.

It was Elliot who’d told him that Roger had made an instant life-impression on all three of them when, in class number three of that course, he’d corrected the professor just loud enough that the last two rows in class could hear it, by naming Pushkin’s true dueling assassin.

Leaving class that day, Elliot had turned to him and said in his flat Midwestern voice and with its insistent and always slightly offended edge, “How did you know who killed Pushkin?” as though this was utterly privileged information. To which Roger had admitted that he possessed an enormous fund of utterly useless, trivial knowledge: all the Indian tribes of North America, every eighteenth-century carriage built; insects of several classes and genera; all the constellations plus fixed stars of the first to third magnitude; and of course how every writer alive had ever died.