Gossip (7 page)

“You should. It has a wide range of opinion. Some good people write for it.”

I slipped a hand between his legs. “Do the editors know about you?”

“Two or three. The ones I respect.”

“And they’re not nervous? Knowing what readers would think if they knew who they were reading?”

“My private life is my own affair.” He glanced down at our tangled legs and my very intimate hand.

“Do you write about gay issues?”

“No. Not my domain.”

“So you’ve never said anything against gay rights or gays in the military or any of that?”

“Never. And I wouldn’t.”

I knew how ludicrous I sounded, talking politics while I cupped his balls and petted his penis with my thumb. But I needed to address my unease, even if it meant talking myself off this fence, out of this bed, although my body wanted to stay.

“What does your family think?” I asked.

He clung to me more tightly, as if my questions might shake him off. “They’re proud of my success.”

“What do they think about the rest of you?”

“Hmm,” he irritably murmured, and stretched up to silence me with his mouth.

I thought it was only a tactical kiss, but gave in to it, rejoining him in our slippery room of tongue and teeth. When he softly ballooned and snapped to attention in my hand, I went with that too. I hadn’t come twice in the same go since I was his age, and with a man I’d been pursuing for weeks. I assumed it would be only Bill this round, but I was never going to see him again; I wanted to watch him pop one last time.

He was grinning again, forgetting our words, grateful for this bonus. And he was so appreciative of me, so delighted with my shoulders, ass and mouth, that I became hard too. Even then it was a willed lust, all nerves and friction, but I began to excite myself with the idea that anyone who enjoyed sex so much was not beyond hope, that I could bring this Republican to his senses. One more orgasm just might save him. It was pure fantasy, yet I wanted to believe it long enough to wring out my own farewell burst of joy.

“I
DON’T GET IT. I
just don’t get it,” Nick declared, but he was being rhetorical. Nick Rosi always got it. “How can the
Times
call itself liberal and use this lead for a news story?” He read a damning sentence about Clinton and an old real estate deal.

“We are most critical of those most like us?” I offered over my section of the paper.

“No,” he said. “It goes back to the fact that their liberalism is all for show. An illusion of choice. They’re as reactionary as the other fucks.”

Peter sat with us, a tall, long-faced Picasso of the Blue Period quietly chewing toast while he skimmed Arts and Leisure.

“So why not read the
Post
or
News
instead?” I said. “At least we know where they’re coming from.”

“Because we need to know the current language of hypocrisy.”

“And the
Times
has full-page underwear ads,” Peter added.

It was Sunday and I was back in New York, eating breakfast with Nick and Peter in the glassed-in porch of a coffee shop on Cooper Square before Peter and I walked to work. Sheets of yesterday’s paper tumbled and scraped in the concrete desert outside, as grim in winter as a square in East Berlin. At the entrance to St. Mark’s Place across the way, the old four-story cartoon of a boho face with an eye patch and cigarette pouted on the blackboard-like side of a building.

Nick was in his mood, his all-knowing petulance. Short and dark, with a clone mustache of another era, he had a groomed, corporate look even on weekends in sweatshirt and jeans. Nick was a stockbroker who’d stepped down to be the office manager of a small accounting firm in order to have more time for activist work. His cool, professional certainty had once seemed magnetic to me when he stood to speak at ACT UP meetings, his anger full of purpose and hope. Now that ACT UP was dead—although he was furious if anyone said so except himself—his anger came out in machine-gun bursts that were not intended to persuade, only give him a righteous place to stand. I was no longer afraid to disagree with Nick.

“It’s a game to all of them,” he declared. “The
Times
is worse because they make it respectable. Entertain the populace with fake conflicts. Bread and circuses, without the bread. Every group gets its shot of fame, and you damn well better make yours count, because people get bored. They tricked us into wasting our shot with that gays-in-the-military shit. God knows what we have to do to get another chance.”

“But the
Times
has changed,” I insisted. “And for the better. This, for example.” I read aloud from the obituary of a dancer. “‘He died of AIDS-related pneumonia, said his mother.’
His mother.
Remember when we had to decode it, when nobody called it what it was?”

“So what?” said Nick. “The silence is over and hasn’t changed a damn thing except to make death respectable.”

“I think it has,” I claimed. “Just not as much as we hoped.”

Peter wearily folded up the arts pages. “All I know is that death is boring. It’s no fun anymore.”

I glanced nervously at Nick. “Was it ever fun?” I asked.

Peter arched his eyebrows, surprised himself by what he’d said. “It didn’t feel like it at the time,” he admitted. “But now, in comparison, it was certainly new and exciting. The emotions it touched were new and exciting. So dramatic.”

“Now it skips over emotion,” I said.

He nodded. “And eats right into your soul.”

“Will you two cut this morbid crap,” snapped Nick.

Peter frowned. “What’s morbid? Just the facts of life.”

“It’s maudlin. It’s defeatist.” Nick shifted in his chair. He swatted the front page with the back of his hand. “What gets me is how the military and now this Whitewater shit have been used to divert interest from issues—”

While Nick went off on a new tirade, Peter gave me a resigned, knowing look. “Right back,” he said, and got up to visit the toilet.

Nick waited until he was around the corner. “It’s not good when he gets like that. You shouldn’t encourage him.”

“When he gets like what? He was just talking about how it feels these days. I feel it too.”

“That kind of talk is maudlin and decadent.”

I attempted a disarming smile—confrontation did not come easily to me. “You remind me of my father, Nick. Whenever my grandmother talked about death, my grandfather’s or her own, he always jumped in and changed the subject. He hated hearing any talk of dying. She had to wait until he was gone and she could talk with my mother or me.”

“Peter’s not an old lady with one foot in the grave.”

“But if he wants to talk about it, why not let him?”

“Because it leads to self-pity.”

“He seemed perfectly cool. And what’s wrong with a little self-pity now and then?”

“You don’t know him the way I do. If Peter begins to feel sorry for himself, it’s the beginning of the end.”

I didn’t believe that. This policy of silence was about Nick, not Peter. His anger had been doubled, even tripled by fears for his lover, yet he’d lost his faith in the political uses of anger. He kept all his other emotions tightly reined in.

But couples are like foreign countries: You behave by their rules whenever you visit. Peter returned and I obeyed Nick, resuming my account of Nancy’s tales of gay Washington, playing up the accomplishments, playing down her frustration. “Looks like D.C. is the new center of gay politics,” I said. “New York is becoming a backwater.”

Nick twisted his mustache at me, taking the observation as a deliberate jab, which was how I intended it.

I did not dislike Nick. I was no longer infatuated, but I was still fond of him. I just needed to rebel against his authority now and then.

When it was time to go, Nick stood up to fuss with the wrap of Peter’s long, tasseled scarf. “You sure you don’t want to take a cab? Awfully windy today.”

“I feel up for a brisk walk.”

Nick kissed Peter on the lips, nodded good-bye to me, and sat down to renew his private war with the
Times.

Broadway was a ghost canyon of empty sidewalks and closed storefronts at this hour. A harsh burn of smoke drifted from a pretzel cart being set up on the corner.

“That must be hard,” I told Peter as we walked. “Nick never wanting you to talk about it. Even indirectly.”

“Not really. Because I usually don’t want to talk about it either.”

I took the hint and didn’t press. Peter marched with his head held high, his mouth pursed over the effort to feel healthy and unconcerned. Illness is like a clock whose ticking you don’t hear until someone mentions it. It ticked very loudly now, but I knew we should enjoy the peace while it lasted. My one consolation was knowing that I would not be primary caregiver this time around.

“Gloomy Sunday,” I said. “Maybe it’ll keep the crowds down.”

“So. You do anything else in D.C. besides jaw with Good Queen Wenceslas?”

“Oh, this and that.”

“Yeeesss?” Peter purred. Here was something he wanted to talk about.

“Okay. I met Thersites.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “Did him.”

“Oooooh.” A lewd smile split his face. “And?”

“Nothing to tell.”

“Like hell. Who is he? What did he look like? Young, old, fat, thin?”

I had wanted to keep Bill a secret, a private mistake, but I needed to tell someone, and Peter was so eager to hear.

“He’s twenty-eight.”

“Nice ripe age. I thought he’d be older.”

“But—” I took a deep breath. “You can’t tell anyone this. Not a soul.”

“That’s no fun.”

“Seriously. You can’t tell Nick. Promise me that.” I’d learned the hard way that couples were not one person except when their separateness was an absolute necessity.

“Why? Is it going to make him envious?” he scoffed.

“It might make him think less of me.”

“Yeah?” He was obscenely interested now. “Okay. I promise. Not a word. To Nick or anyone else.”

“All right.” I had to build up to it. “I met him at the zoo. We went back to his place. We boffed. And then he told me he was a journalist. Who writes for
American Truths.”

“The right-wing rag that called Anita Hill a nympho?”

“Yup. We have met the enemy,” I said. “And sucked his dick.”

Peter laughed. “I hope he sucked yours.”

“Oh yeah. Royally. A liberal-hating Republican who works with the homophobes. And it hurts to admit, but he was the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. Selfishness can be a virtue in bed. Some of the best sex I ever had was with greedy pigs: executives and army officers and happily married men.”

Knowing what Nick was like in bed, I was not surprised to hear Peter say that.

“He was greedy, but so was I,” I admitted. “Only our greeds clicked.”

“And he was a gorgeous blond preppy?”

“No. Irish-looking. Fleshy. Not conventionally attractive. But cute. I found him cute.”

“Quick and dirty in the sack, I bet. But when it was over, he turned Catholic on you.”

“No. He was hot but leisurely. Good kisser. And very affectionate afterward.”

“Doesn’t sound like the Irish closet cases I’ve known.”

“No. He’s a puzzle. He claimed he wasn’t in the closet, but he must be to write for those people. He doesn’t hang together.”

“But he was hung?”

I frowned. “I don’t care about that.”

“Uh-huh. So when you seeing him again?”

“I’m not. We swapped phone numbers and addresses, but I trashed his. Just a one-afternoon stand.”

“Why, if he was such hot sex?”

“Once you’re a philosopher, twice you’re a Republican. Or thrice maybe. We did it a couple of times.”

“Ah youth,” he said, without envy or resentment.

When Peter and I first bonded, after his suspicion and my guilt had been replaced by the discovery that we had more in common than Nick and I ever did—a love of good novels, bad movies and playing the fool now and then, things Nick never stooped to—I was shy over sharing my sex life with Peter, afraid to rub his face in what he no longer got. It turned out, however, that vicarious lust was what he wanted now, either from my present or his past. Any other kind was too complicated.

He shook his head at me. “Why be so damn scrupulous? It’s not like you sucked off Rush Limbaugh. Just a little reporter, for God’s sake. If it was me, I’d be back on that train next weekend. Political integrity be damned.”

“You just think you would. And I’m hardly Mr. Integrity. But I can’t go to bed with someone a second time without going to bed with the whole person. Their job and family and politics and favorite books.”

“Jesus, Ralph. No wonder you’re single.”

We arrived at the bookstore and I had to shift into a more responsible, adult persona. I was the acting manager on Sundays. While I turned on lights, turned up the thermostat and opened the safe, the staff trooped in, a pack of sulky twenty-somethings, including Alec, my basement assistant, a pasty straight boy with pierced nose and eyebrows and a failed beard that suggested a toddler who’d crawled under a bed with jam on his chin.

“This is a first, Alec. Never known you to be on time.”

“Was already in the neighborhood,” he said sheepishly.

Then I noticed that he was with Erica, a new employee, and they had the self-conscious cool of two people who
may
have spent the night together—I seemed keenly alert to everyone else’s love life this morning.

Peter took his post at the telephone desk in the back. It was a slow morning, but we didn’t talk again until my lunch break, when he found me reading at my desk in the basement.

“Giving up the Victorians for the Elizabethans?” he asked.

“Never read this one.” I showed him the paperback of
Troilus and Cressida
that I’d found upstairs. “You know me,” I said. “A promiscuous range of intellectual interests.”

I hadn’t really lied to Peter. I still intended to toss Bill’s number. When I returned to Nancy’s apartment Thursday night, all lust and curiosity about Bill had been safely flushed from my system. The next afternoon I sat in on a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, where Nancy played shadow to Senator Freeman in a sluggish theater piece performed to a nearly empty house. That night I ate pizza with Nancy and an aide—although not the boy in the pink shirt—while she fiddled with the final wording of the Pittsburgh speech, reading and rereading it aloud to me. We spent Saturday wandering from café to café, continuing our examination of love and work. She was certain now that her crush had been only a case of spilt job anxiety, that the talking cure had ended it. Nancy asked about my adventure, but she assumed such encounters were a simple matter of penises. She shook her head over how little I’d learned about a guy I said I’d met at Lambda Rising Bookstore. Not until I was riding the train home that night did I think about Bill again, amusing myself with a regret that I hadn’t swung by his apartment for one last throw after saying good-bye to Nancy.