Glass Houses (42 page)

He saw a cab coming down the street and stepped off the curb to hail it. Just as he did so, a woman stepped off the curb just a few feet behind him. He looked at her briefly and nodded, determined to do the right thing and let her have the cab ahead of him. Then he realized he knew her, or at least knew who she was. He saw in her face that she recognized him, too.

“It's,” he said, coming up to her as the cab pulled over, “it's Miss Lydgate, isn't it? I'm sorry. I'm not good with names. I'm—”

“You're Gregor Demarkian,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “If you're going back to Cavanaugh Street, we can go together. I was just headed home.”

“That would be fine.”

Gregor held the door while Phillipa Lydgate climbed into the back of the cab, then got in himself. She had already given the driver their destination, so he sat back and unbuttoned his coat.

“Have you been touring the city?” he asked. “That's what you're doing in America, isn't that right? You're writing articles about Philadelphia.”

“I'm writing about American identity,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “I'm trying to get some insight into the way Americans think. Real Americans. Red State Americans.”

“Pennsylvania is a Blue State,” Gregor said, thinking that he remembered having this conversation with her before. Or maybe not. Maybe he'd had a conversation about a conversation like this with somebody.

Phillipa Lydgate was rearranging things in her handbag. “I was going to go to Ohio, but I couldn't find a contact there. Americans are so woefully igno-rant of other countries, it's nearly impossible to explain to them that the rest of the world just doesn't see them the way they see themselves. They don't see the value in work like mine. I don't think even Bennis Hannaford does, and she's a very well-traveled woman.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “she is that.”

“It's the myopia that comes from being the world's only remaining super-power,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “It's another form of arrogance. We all have to pay attention to what other people think about us. It's part of the process of being human. Americans think they're immune.”

“Do they?” Gregor said.

“I went to a store today,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “In the very poorest part of town. It was run by a black man—not a South Asian, an African, a
really
black man. And here he was, in the middle of a neighborhood of his own people, and what was he doing? Selling cigarettes. Selling the worst kinds of junk. Potato crisps. Twinkies. I bought a packet of Twinkies. It made me sick.”

“Did you eat two of them?”

Phillipa Lydgate ignored him. “I went to that place because it was owned by a man who was suspected in those murders you have. I've never seen such a country for violence. Of course, he was only suspected because of his race. Americans can't seem to get over their racism. They can't even seem to confront it. Do you know what this man told me? His store, the physical store, the property itself, is owned by an absentee landlord of a
Mayflower
family, and as far as I can tell, they treat him no better than those
Mayflower
families have ever treated their slaves.”

“I don't think any slaves came over on the
Mayflower,
” Gregor said.

“It was all about slavery, the founding of this country,” Phillipa said dismissively. “And this landlord this man had got, this woman apparently—although you'd think women would have more sensitivity to social inequality—this woman came down to the store and screamed at him the one time he was even a week late on the rent. A week. Can you imagine that?”

“It does sound a bit excessive,” Gregor said.

“I pressed him, but he refused to see the incident for what it was, completely unacceptable and a gross violation of his human rights. He's grateful to
her, if you can believe it, because she agreed to rent him the property even though he'd been in prison. Think about it. What's a man supposed to do when he gets out of prison if people can refuse to rent to him because of it? The people of this country think nothing of rehabilitation. They're only interested in vengeance. That's why you still have the death penalty. Every civilized country has abolished it.”

Gregor was opposed to the death penalty, but he couldn't help himself. “Japan isn't civilized?” he asked.

Phillipa Lydgate acted as if she hadn't heard him. “And then there are the guns,” she said. “The guns are everywhere. There are shops selling them right in the middle of the city. I don't know how any intelligent person can live in this country. I don't know if any intelligent person does. Lord only knows, if I was an American, I'd have emigrated to someplace civilized long ago.”

“THIS IS Cavanaugh Street,” Gregor said, and it was, which was a good thing because the cab driver's neck kept getting redder by the minute.

The car pulled up at the curb, and Phillipa hopped out without bothering to look back. Gregor pulled out his wallet and paid up.

D
ennis Ledeski was not
behaving like a sane man. He knew that. He knew that he should never have disappeared from his office to begin with, and if he had he shouldn't have taken so much with him. He didn't trust Alexander Mark, that was the thing. Alexander Mark was “gay,” and gay was the absolute opposite of what he was. Gay was a grown man who wouldn't step up to the plate and shoulder his responsibilities. It wasn't true that the Greeks had honored homosexuality. They tolerated a few flings between warriors in wartime, but that was only sensible. You took a bunch of men and put them out on the march away from home for months at a time, and it wasn't surprising that they took to screwing anything that moved, including trees, which didn't move. The Greeks despised homosexuality, that was the truth. What they favored were mentor relationships between older men and younger boys. The idea was that sex would bring the two together, and the bond that would be created would make it possible for the boy to learn, not only from his mentor's teaching, but his mentor's soul.

Of course, the younger boys in those relationships had been fifteen, not six, but Dennis couldn't see where that made the difference. The principle was the same. Once, spending the afternoon in an Internet cafe in a little town outside Orlando, Dennis had looked up NAMBLA's Web site, and he had seen at an instant that they understood what he himself did. It was the relationship that was important. Sex was the trivial thing. It was the relationship that he craved so much that he sometimes came awake at night in pain, the images streaming through his head as if somebody had held an image hose to one ear and turned the water on full. That made no sense. He never made any sense when he thought about this.

He looked around now, trying to gauge just how far he had walked and just how deep into the district he was, but he couldn't. New York was not his city. For most of his life, he hadn't even liked coming here. The place was too big,
and every bit of it was rude. Getting out of Philadelphia, though, he hadn't been able to think of any place to go. There were all those crime shows on now:
Unsolved Mysteries,
and
Americas Most Wanted.
They put your picture up and everybody saw it. Waiters and cab drivers were looking out for you. Fat house-wives with part-time jobs in the local 7-eleven prided themselves on being able to spot the best disguised fugitive. He had to be someplace where nobody paid attention, and the only place he knew like that was New York.

He was pretty sure that if anybody was paying attention to him now, they wouldn't be in this place, where people did not pay attention even to themselves. He looked from store front to store front, and his stomach clenched. It wasn't his fault that the world was the way it was, that the prisses and the fags and feminists had taken over everything. They were the ones who were to blame. They had taken a beautiful thing, the love of a man for a boy, the love that meant not just sex and emotion but the promise of a brighter future for the boy and a legacy for the man, they had taken that thing and made it foul. No, Dennis thought, that wasn't quite it. The thing itself, the man-boy relationship, that was shining and pure and good and noble. Nobody and nothing could destroy its nobility. What the fags had done was to align themselves with it, to take it on as cover, and as a result people spit on it these days. They hated it. They did everything they could to paint it as foul and perverse and abnormal. It wasn't abnormal. He'd been on the Internet, and he knew. There were millions of men out there who felt just as he did.
Dateline
could run as many sting operations as it wanted it, it wouldn't change the fact that “pedophilia” was as normal as apple pie.

Pedophilia. The love of a child. The love of a
boy.
They had made that into a disease. They had made it into something worse. That was why Dennis Ledeski hated fags. He really did.

Just at the moment, he was surrounded by fags, and he knew he had to be careful. He'd been approached three or four times by prostitutes. The first two had been women, the kind of women who made you know that every movie depiction of a hooker was
so
airbrushed as to make it a fantasy. They were very young, but they were already filthy all the way through. You could see the tracks on their arms and the dirt in the folds of their skin. The next three had been men, but transvestite men. It was a kind of continuum, as if the professionals on the street knew that it was a bad idea to approach a man first off with the real deal. The transvestites had been in better shape than the girls. They were clean, and if they were junkies they weren't injecting it any place visible from the street. Dennis had to be careful. The unmasked gay male prostitutes would come next, and they would be much more aggressive than the others had been. He knew. He had been followed through train stations by them, followed down streets by them. They came at you like vengeance, and once they started they never let go. They all had AIDS.

Dennis was just thinking that Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell, or whoever it had been, had been right for once, AIDS was God's way of punishing homosexuals, when he realized that somebody was staring at him. The stare was calm and straight and unwavering, and Dennis was suddenly sure that this was going to be somebody who understood him. He could always tell the ones who understood him. They could always tell him, too. It was a secret bond, more secret even than the one between men and boys.

The store fronts were full of pornography. In smaller towns stores didn't put their stuff right in their display windows for anybody to see from the street. A lot of them didn't have display windows. They blocked their windows up with plain brown cardboard, lettered all over to let you know what they had inside.
ADULT BOOKS! MOVIES! MAGAZINES!
With all the windows open like this, Dennis didn't know where to look. The store he was standing next to had a display of equipment that made Dennis feel a little sick, even though he had used some of it some of the time. When you dealt with boys you had to use some of it. Boys were wild. They were born untamed and undisciplined, like young horses. And like young horses, you had to train them to control themselves. It was a fern-bitch lie that you could do that by talking to them or making them sit in a corner. Boys were men. They didn't respond to that kind of soft, suffocating ooze, except by dying inside and becoming fags. That was why there was so many fags. There were more and more each year. The prisses had gotten hold of the schools and the social service agencies. They had banned and outlawed all the natural, normal ways to bring up boys. They had made pariahs not only of men like him but even of ordinary fathers who only wanted to use the strap a little to bring their boys into line. What they got were fags, or boys who wouldn't deal with them at all, criminals, violent and bloody for all the world to see.

The man really was watching him. He really was. Dennis looked carefully behind him to see who it was. He was not a stupid man. He knew how to take precautions. One of those precautions was never to go anywhere, in a district like this one, with a black person. Dennis would have avoided going anywhere with a black person under any circumstances, if only because so many of them were either drug criminals or related to drug criminals, but very few black men were gay, and even fewer were mentors. That, Dennis decided, was what he should call himself. He was a mentor. Men like him were mentors. When he put the palm of his hand on the inside of a boy's thigh, he was . . . he was . . .

Something in his head had fuzzed out. His balls hurt. Every part of his body hurt. He turned around to look at the man who was looking at him. He was glad at what he saw. This was not a middle-aged troll. This was not the kind of man you saw on
American justice,
beard grown out for a day and a half, Polo shirt stained down the front by beer. Dennis looked quickly at his reflection in the window with the leather equipment in it and felt immediately
better. He didn't have a half-grown-out beard. It was too difficult to tell if he had stains on his clothes. He had to be careful. Being on the run did things to you. You began to fall apart.

The man was young and tall and muscular, and unlike everybody else on this street he was dressed like a preppie on his way to a fraternity meeting. Dennis liked his clothes. There was a certain kind of man who looked especially good in an expensive Polo shirt, and this man was wearing a very expensive polo shirt. The Polo shirt was white, and dazzlingly clean. The trousers under it were stone chinos and also dazzlingly clean. If the Angel Gabriel could have appeared in New York on an ordinary day, Dennis thought he would look like this.

There was no way anymore to ignore the fact that the man was looking at him. Dennis wandered over, doing his best to make it look causal. “I don't like this street,” he said, when he got close enough for the man to hear. “I'm not from New York. I don't know how I ended up here.”