Gay Place (30 page)

After a moment Stanley realized she really was serious, and he tried not to smile … not just yet. Like an interview with a college journalist, he thought. And now Neil had heard the question too; Neil was turned round in his seat, staring, smiling faintly, waiting to hear his reply. “They don’t mix,” Stanley finally said.

“What?”

“They don’t mix — art and politics — like Scotch whiskey and Pepsi-Cola they don’t mix … I mean how can you keep the
issues
in perspective? You imagine writing an epic poem and expecting to
Say Something Important,
like in Lippman’s column? If I let an issue creep into one of the speeches I’m composing for Neil, it just sort of erupts and runs bloody all over the prose.”

“He’s right,” Neil said, smiling at the girl. “The speeches he writes for me are rarely ever flawed by even the suggestion of issues …”

“Can you imagine,” Stanley said, “can you imagine
real people
going around agonizing about fluoridation and dental caries or recognition of Red China or the goddam hydrogen bomb?”

The old plane lurched downward and sideways; blankets and pillows and small bags descended on the passengers from overhead racks. There was an extended sensation of free fall, and then they were pulled up brutally against their seats. They lay fast against the cushions until, as suddenly as it had come, the pressure eased. A flash of pure sunlight could be seen through the windows, and one of the pilots appeared up front, smiling, as if it had all been happening right on schedule.

“You survive that last bump?” he said cheerfully. “We’re about out of it now. There’s perfect weather from here on in …” He moved down the aisle and began clearing the litter. The steward rose and joined him, setting kitchen stocks back in cupboards. The pretty little girl finally got her martini. Neil and Stanley had whiskey. It was half past noon, and the steward had begun to prepare frozen TV dinners in the oven.

Stanley raised his glass in a toast. He wished them a happy Good Friday.

The hours of His deepest passion, Neil thought … They just didn’t make passion like that any more. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen real passion, but nothing came to him. It was all a cheap imitation, a fraudulent compound of polemic, spleen, and seasons of rut.
Whare’s all mah passion?
Earlier that morning, dressing for the flight home, he had stood staring at himself in the bathroom mirror … “I grow old …” he had said aloud, and Stanley’s voice came to him from the next room: “You’re the Very Junior Senator — that ought to help some.” It wasn’t really much help, though, and least of all on this Good Friday with the two younger passengers there beside him. He felt nearly feeble next to them, with none of the compensations of age. He was the Very Junior Senator and there were nice gray patches in his dark hair and some interesting lines appearing at the corners of his eyes and round his vaguely dissipated-looking mouth. But all that was irrelevant … frivolous … He welcomed the one thing but could not avoid the queasy notion that he was losing all of the other. A most difficult year: like a young girl approaching her menses. Was there some precarious balance one struck between wisdom and resignation, passion and repose?

He sighed, settling in his seat as the steward placed the steaming precooked dinner in front of him. The thawed vegetables were of incredible shades of green and orange; they simply weren’t convincing. He picked at the tray of food … Ersatz stuff? … In the space of a few seconds he was visited by a great weariness. He pushed the food away and settled in the chair, lowering the backrest. He felt certain that he would be able to fall to sleep. God! How monumentally bored he was with all tired young men — and by the melancholy notion that he might qualify as one of them. He closed his eyes.

“Do you really manage to make a living out of all those part-time jobs?” the girl was saying to Stanley. “Fourteen dollars for an article isn’t going to take you very far.”

“No … No …” Stanley said. “Neil’s really the source of most of my income. We were roommates at college. We’re old friends … This is a real boondoggle, honey …”

A
FTER TWO MARTINIS AND
an owly-eyed sip at a third, the girl had passed abruptly into semi-coma. Her disablement came without warning; there was no intervening period of distress or giddiness or quietude. One moment she’d been sitting there, chattering as before, pausing only to poke food into her mouth or taste the gin, and the next she had simply ceased to function. She still sat there nearly upright, plump hands resting on the edge of the dinner tray, green-painted eyelids in a three-quarters droop, her mouth slightly parted. It was as if a beautifully turned out machine had developed a sudden, chronic imperfection. Like the pressurizing system on the attack bomber, Stanley thought. He moved his hand in front of the girl’s face; he touched her cool forehead; he leaned close and spoke into her ear — “Hey, honey, how’s it feel?” — but there was no response. He sat back for a moment and cleaned his plate of food. He leaned forward again and speared the remaining bits of roast beef and potato from the girl’s plate. He smoked a cigarette. Then he signaled to the steward to retrieve the trays and he began the laborious business of lifting and pulling on the girl until she was stretched out the length of the reclining chair. He slipped off her new pumps and propped her feet on an overnight case. Then he took another seat across the aisle.

Story of my life, he thought. The goddam past is prologue, and I continue to comfort my drunks … Should have left them all to soil themselves!

He opened a small notebook and began to mark source material for a speech Neil was scheduled to deliver on the following day. He hadn’t any idea of the subject matter; all he could manage at this point in the writing — in the
composing,
rather — was the assembly of half-thoughts and once-rejected phrases. But he left off the note-taking after a minute or so and again addressed himself on the problem of tending drunks — all his favorite people, fore and aft, front and back, down through the years. Perhaps he could go into the business! He’d had, God knows, enough practice. There ought to be a demand for an attractive young man of good health and pleasant disposition with a lifelong experience at … What? They hadn’t been drunks exactly; not alcoholics in any event. His mother and father hadn’t drunk themselves to death; his uncle at the farm was no lush, and neither for that matter were Neil and his younger brother John Tom Christiansen. It was just that he seemed always to be putting a friend or relative away for the evening. People were always getting snockered in his presence, and he was invariably somehow sober enough to help.

It suddenly came to him that all were dead except Neil. All but Neil: Mother, Father, Uncle, and fat John Tom. Strange … And thoughts of death had never much concerned him. No matter. None of them had choked to death on a whiskey bottle, and there were others still live and kicking who were periodically liquored up in Stanley’s presence to the point of helplessness … He remembered Neil at college, back from the war with his drawerful of medals and the enormous stack of books stolen from Rec Room libraries. Neil had been tight nearly every evening (and many of the days) during that first semester. And John Tom half boozed during most of the next. Still … it had been a marvelously rewarding year. There was a beach they’d driven to on weekends: he remembered it was compared at the time with Cannes and Nice and Marseilles — they were near the same latitudes, weren’t they? There was a corn products factory nearby, constantly belching smoke and disgorging workmen. There was a naval gunnery range a mile away, and clearly in sight from the yacht harbor was a cluster of offshore oil rigs. Even the season had been a little absurd, though it never seemed really to matter. It was a year after the war when the first new cars had two-by-fours for bumpers and the women wore shoulder pads and rather resembled Joan Crawford. He was only seventeen at the time and there was no way of ever remembering all those boozy episodes during which he’d undressed Neil and John Tom and directed them to bed. It was experience that counted in handling drunks, not so much one’s age … He remembered helping his mother and father, first one to the bathroom and then the other, on the evening after Roosevelt’s funeral. How they’d mourned! White horses and helmeted soldiers and blue-uniformed Navy women, the slow procession down Constitution Avenue. God!
I mourn’d and yet shall mourn … I give you my sprig of lilac
… They’d watched the procession earlier and then gone back to the Willard, in a steamy little room, where his mother had read the Whitman to him until evening. Whitman’s funeral song for Lincoln. All the family had been a little batty about politics. He could remember when he was ten falling asleep in Carole Lombard’s lap, but the experience hadn’t meant half so much to him as shaking hands with Jim Farley or Hopkins or Louis Howe or seeing Bilbo in his last days. Or Forrestal or Frank Knox or Wallace or Mister Cordell Hull. His parents had talked of them endlessly, the way some families gossiped about the neighbors. And how his father would have ragged him today! Writing speeches for southern politicians! Well it was the old man’s fault; it had been his decision to send his son down south to the farm after the mother’s death. And down south the son had remained. He really must have been insufferable when he descended on the farm that first year; a preposterously chic and worldly New York City prepschooler. At the farm they’d just called him tacky. The farm was his uncle’s — how many times had he put
him
to bed, half out of his mind on Jack Daniel? — it had been his father’s homeplace. And it was to the farm that he had been exiled soon after his mother died and his father realized the son wasn’t going to be chic and worldly about the new lady friends visiting the apartment.

Who had helped the old man to bed, breathing hard, complaining of bad whiskey, after Stanley had gone off to the farm? He supposed they all somehow survived without him. And maybe the old man had never really needed help, not until toward the end. He’d been something of a public figure (an anachronism now, if he were alive: the sort glibly dismissed in nostalgic accounts of an era as just another left-wing journalist), but there was still a whiff of excitement and trench coat intrigue surrounding him when he’d sent his son to the farm. He had a syndicated column and a news commentary on the radio — he’d even grown a goddam beard. It was all in that grand manner that passed out of fashion toward the end of the war … Passing out of fashion was what probably killed the old man …

Dazzling sunlight shone through the windows of the plane, and Stanley rubbed his eyes, wishing now that
he
had succeeded in drinking himself to sleep during the flight south. He looked over at the girl across from him; the girl groaned softly as she slept: her pumps pulled off, her forehead gleaming, the hard line of her girdle visible against the skirt she’d bought to wear home Easter. He was reminded of a cousin on the farm, a lovely dark-haired girl with whom he had played endless kissing games during the first year. He remembered her distinctly … up to her beautiful arms in the backend of a troubled cow, praying over a new calf.
O God please God,
she kept saying,
make it live God please.
The sale of that bull calf had financed her first semester at college …

T
HEY LEFT THE BRILLIANCE
of the day behind, coming down through the cover of clouds, the old plane rocking and shuddering in the turbulence of the lower altitudes until, very suddenly, the graveled roofs of new houses and the little wooden figures of people appeared a few hundred feet below. And then they had touched ground and were plunging along the narrow runway.

Neil had slept solidly until that moment. Now he came awake to find Stanley and the girl on their feet, gathering belongings, pulling hats and coats and bags from the overhead rack. Neil moved into the washroom and stood staring at himself in the mirror. He pulled his tie up against the collar and brushed his hair. He rinsed his mouth, using a greenish astringent from a small vial. “Christ!” he said aloud, and then to himself: Is there a politician here with bad breath? Bring him out … Let’s have a look at him!

There was a fine mist falling; the warm air seemed suffused by it, stale, ubiquitous. They climbed down a small ladder to the pavement alongside the refueling apron and made a little clumsy run for the shelter of an attendant’s shed, their light bags knocking against one another. Neil was hatless; he wore a wrinkled brown raincoat over his silk suit. Stanley held an umbrella between them and looked at the girl. The girl looked at Neil. The run had brought some color to his face and there were minute droplets of moisture collecting in his dark hair, barely visible in the poor light. He seemed all at once a remarkably good-looking man. His smile made the two young people feel altogether pleased with themselves.

“They should have our luggage in a minute,” Neil said. “I suppose they’ll send a limousine down here for us.” He looked toward the airport terminal several hundred yards away. Once again he told himself he should have traveled by commercial airline. There would have been no inconveniences of this sort. And it would have looked a good deal better. He felt no obligation to anyone for the plane ride. It had simply been available to them, and he
was
making an address the next day to a group of independent oil men. That was how the plane happened to be made available. Still …

“There’s a station wagon headed this way,” Stanley said.

Neil nodded. “That’s the one. Thanks to the pilots. They must have radioed ahead …”

A young man in blue work clothes loaded the bags and held the car doors for them. Neil noted with pleasure that the young man’s work trousers had a belt in the back; his shirt was a rough Oxford cloth with button-down collar. “Lousy day,” the young man said, steering the car toward the terminal. “But it’s supposed to clear by Sunday …”

There was a crowd inside the terminal: an Easter weekend collection of students and servicemen and plain-faces, subtly agitated. The two men shook hands with the pretty little girl, expressed the hope they would meet again, and waved goodbye. Stanley went to the desk to make return reservations. A brusque young man with gray teeth confronted Neil. He stared at Neil, and Neil stared back, wondering if he ought to speak.