Gossip (8 page)

There was no trace of his affectionate body in an oddly nasty play by Shakespeare, a cynical riff on characters from the
Iliad.
Thersites turned out to be an ugly clown kicked around by Ajax, Ulysses and Achilles; the last was clearly homosexual, but all were shits. Thersites was a truth teller of a sort, but a very narrow sort, pathologically obsessed with other people’s lechery. I couldn’t tell if Bill was simply a bad reader or more self-mocking than he seemed in person. I needed his function keys to tell me “(joke)” and “(gentle laughter).”

“Hey, Sergeant Rock.”

“How was DC?”

“Do anything or one special?”

The Monday night gang in Gayworld wanted the dirt. I remained coy and Shanghai Lily did not give me away. Nobody had much news, but I stayed on the chatline for two hours on the chance that Thersites might drop in and I could cross-examine him on Shakespeare. He didn’t, which was just as well. There was no word from him in my E-mail either.

We had a staff meeting Tuesday to discuss the Christmas schedule. Thanksgiving was two days off, marking the start of six-day workweeks, overtime and an escalating madness that left no room for thought. I took perverse pleasure in this time of year, all conscious life suspended for five weeks in a kind of blue-collar Zen.

I did not think about Bill all day until I stopped by my local newsstand after work and saw
American Truths
in the rack. With a glossy black cover and fastidious columns of print broken by collages of diced photos, it looked respectable enough. Bill had nothing in this issue, but was listed in the staff box: William O’Connor, Jr. The newsstand had only three copies—this
was
the East Village. I bought one, just to have something to read while I ate my Chinese takeout, with a blush similar to what I’d felt when I purchased my first skin magazine.

Initially, it seemed only slightly worse than
The Village Voice,
as glib and self-congratulatory, frequently damning the same people the
Voice
damned, yet for entirely different reasons and with fewer facts. But while it was difficult to tell what the
Truths
writers were for, it quickly became clear what they were against: Clinton, liberals, the media, feminists, black guiltmongers, environmentalists and gay activists—which suggested inactivists might be tolerated, which perhaps left room for Bill.

The magazine was not excitingly evil, merely slippery and tedious. Nevertheless, I left it on the floor by my futon while I masturbated, needing to test its effect on the sensory snapshots in my head: plush skin, a double-barreled cock, an open smile. Bill was good porn, nothing else. Feeling more foolish than usual after a wank, I pulled up my gym shorts, threw his magazine in the trash and went back to Trollope.

There were two huge shipments from wholesalers on Wednesday. Alec and I spent the morning playing stevedore, loading and unloading solid boxes of books in the wheelos that we sent up and down on the freight elevator in the sidewalk. Alec, usually so resentful and listless, enjoyed the butch game of heavy manual labor as much as I did. We heaved and yoed, swaggered and scratched. The last wheelo sank below the pavement, the iron doors closed shut. I went back inside, high on muscular exertion and covered with sweat. Peter called me over to the phone desk.

“We need your signature, dear,” he said with a leer.

A delivery man in a bow tie thrust a clipboard at me. I saw a large foil-wrapped bundle on the counter.

“I didn’t order anything,” I said.

Peter laughed. “You don’t order flowers, dummy. You’re sent them.”

I wiped a hand on my sweatshirt and nervously signed my name. I timidly peeled the foil back an inch. Yes, flowers. Garish red roses.

“They won’t bite,” said Peter. “Here.” He lifted the glass vase they were in so I could pull the foil off. “Who’re they from? There’s a card. Read the card. Hasn’t anyone ever sent you flowers?”

“Never.” I opened a small white square of cardboard. “Shit. They’re from Thersites.”

“Ah.
Him.”

The card said simply: “I won’t be in New York until after New Year. I sent these so you might remember me. Warmly, Bill.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with flowers?” I grumbled.

“Take them home. Take them down to your desk. They’re roses. You don’t have to do a thing with them.”

“Do you want them?”

“No. They were sent to you.”

“Would you like a couple?” I needed to share my complicity.

“They’re yours, Ralph. Enjoy them. Or throw them out. They’re meaningless to anyone else. They’re a show of his affection for you.”

“I guess. How much do you think this cost?”

“Forty, fifty dollars.” Peter grinned and shook his head. “Second time must have been a lulu.”

I gingerly carried the cylinder of trembling stalks downstairs, annoyed with Bill, strangely humiliated by his gift. I set the gratuitous flowers on my desk. The thorny, lobster green stems were magnified by glass and water; the unfurled knots of red velvet nodded overhead. They looked surreal beside the yellowed UPS rate chart Scotch-taped to the wall. I imagined keeping them there for their absurdity.

“Somebody sent
you
flowers?” said Alec.

“What of it?”

“No, it’s kind of, uh, sweet.”

“But corny,” I said. “Very corny.”

“Hey. Kitsch can be fun. So long as you know it’s kitsch.”

“This is definitely kitsch,” I agreed.

And the worst kitsch was me. Because I had to admit that I was touched someone liked me so much that he’d sent roses. I never dreamed I could be so cheap. Love’s most banal signifier, yet I was as giddily unnerved as a boy in junior high receiving a valentine from another boy. It wasn’t as if I’d never been loved. I had, for weeks and months at a time. Just not so conventionally, or from such an inappropriate source. All right, I thought. Let’s see where this goes. January was a long way off. There was no telling where our heads or pricks would be by then. I sent a card that afternoon—“Thanks for the flowers. I’ll certainly remember you”—tucked inside a copy of
Cures
by Martin Duberman. I wanted Bill to know who and what I was, daring him to remain interested. I almost sent him
The Epistemology of the Closet,
yet that seemed much too blunt, and I’d been unable to read more than fifty pages of it myself.

T
EMPERATURES PLUNGED AFTER THANKSGIVING
; the world froze. Newspapers, radio and television agreed that the winter was the coldest since the Great Depression. There was snow in December. Peter came to work every day by cab. The locusts of Christmas swarmed, then vanished with the New Year; the store became a cold tomb of books. I spent my evenings at home, drinking hot tea and burrowing through Palliser novels. The streets of the East Village, a moonscape of white and black glass, were deserted by nine each night. The homeless disappeared into shelters and the forgotten corners of train stations. The fluorescent lights of the subway platforms froze gray in their tubes.

At a time when the sun seemed to have died, the thought of a warm body in a warm bed became a beautiful necessity.

“So how have you been?”

“Good. Excellent, in fact. And yourself?”

“I can’t complain.”

I’d arrived at his room at noon. It was now three and our nudities were still tangled under the blankets. Even his expensive hotel could not produce enough heat in this ice age for guests to remain uncovered after afternoon trysts. We had said little more than hello when Bill opened the door and our grins merged. His body was as excited and grabby as mine, although I was also driven by a fear that talk might dilute biology.

“And you’re free all night?” he asked again.

“I left tonight wide open.”

“I have this brief meeting in the lobby at five. But afterward I’m all yours.”

“Great,” I said, and meant it. I needed to see who Bill was, out of bed and outside my head. We’d spoken only a few times by E-mail in December, cramped postcard notes, and once by phone. He called to thank me for my gift, unthreatened by it, but conversation was awkward without our bodies to explain what we wanted from each other. His telephone voice was clipped and formal, as if he’d learned it off FM radio. He grew more distracted the longer we spoke. When I asked if someone else was in the apartment, he apologized for being preoccupied with his galley proofs. “I can give myself to only one occupation at a time,” he explained. That was fine with me. He was not the most important fact in my life either.

“So what did you think of the Duberman?” I now asked.

“I’ve been too busy to read it. But I will.”

“Your own book?”

“Done. My editor is very excited. He took me around the offices yesterday and introduced me as someone special.”

“Is that why you’re so happy today?”

“One reason.” A soft sole caressed my calf.

We spoke comfortably now about the most trivial things, an amiable noise accompanying the real dialogue of shared skin.

“Did you have a good Christmas?” he asked.

“Working retail burns the romance out of the holidays. But the store had a good Christmas.”

“Should that matter to you?”

“It’s my job. I don’t want them to go out of business.”

“Someone with your brains could do better than retail.”

I enjoyed hearing him say that, though he knew little of my brains or much else about me.

I’d come uptown eager to see Bill again, first to learn if the sex was as good as I remembered, then to discover what, if anything, existed on the other side of sex. I’d been right about his smooth skin and avid kissing, but wrong about other things. His face looked neither round nor cherubic but indescribably Billish, open and affectionate, with chestnut brown eyes I didn’t remember from our first meeting. His cock no longer felt shotgunlike in my hand; the familiarity of touch had rubbed away its edges; There was a disquieting moment when he broke off to whisper, “You’re negative, aren’t you? I want you to come in my mouth,” and I was thrown that he hadn’t already figured that out, that we didn’t play by the same rules.

“Did you see your family?” he asked.

“No. I only get two days off and they’re down in Raleigh.”

“Your mother wasn’t hurt that you weren’t there?”

“She understands. And both my brothers and their families were down, so it’s not like Uncle Ralph was missed. I’m a fly in Dad’s eggnog anyway. He enjoys the holidays more when I’m not there to suggest father
doesn’t
know best.” I rolled my eyes and sighed. I actually found my father’s nervous silences comic and forgivable. I’d outgrown any need for his approval.

“Well, I spent Christmas with my family,” said Bill. “They’re in Baltimore and I see them every other weekend. But my mother makes Christmas a special treat. She’s an angel. I’m all my parents have, you see. My mother’s always been wise and supportive, but recently I’ve made my father respect me too. He disliked journalism before I went into it.”

I nodded indifferently. We were engaged in the gentle blasphemy of using family for postcoital conversation, a way of taming them, only family clearly meant more to Bill. I’ve never understood gay men who need to define themselves as sons after they’ve left home. Nancy thought I was “amiably alienated” from my own family, and maybe I was, but there is no dignity in grown-ups loving, or hating, their parents too much.

“But you poor guy,” he said. “You spent Christmas alone.”

“No. With friends. We went to a movie and had our Christmas orphans dinner afterward.”

“Your Senate friend didn’t visit while Congress was out?”

“No. She had to go to the Virgin Islands on business.”

“One of those federal junkets disguised as work?”

“No, this was work. A so-called health conference held by the insurance industry.”

“She went with Senator Freeman?”

“No. All by her lonesome. And she hates hotels, so it wasn’t her idea of a vacation.”

No longer listening, he laid his head on my chest and wrapped his arms snugly around my waist.

Having pulled a doubleheader our first time, we patiently waited for our bodies to recharge so we could do it again. This was about sex, I told myself, just sex. I felt pleasantly stupid with sex. Yet there was affection too, a fondness that began as lust but lingered afterward.

“‘He eats nothing but doves,’” I said, “‘and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.’”

“Huh?”

“Troilus and Cressida.
”

He looked suspicious. “You read it?”

“Right after we met,” I admitted. “You put yourself down by calling yourself Thersites, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“He’s kind of a clown. Isn’t he?”

“Not at all. He’s the one honest man in the entire play.”

The telephone rang before I could explain. On the second ring Bill pulled free to crawl across the bed, as wide as his bed in Washington. It was as though we’d never left that first bed.

“Hello? Jeb, hello! Quite well, thank you. I very much look forward to seeing you at five.”

His FM voice with its absurdly precise enunciation was back. Up on all threes and out of the blankets, he contradicted the voice with his ass, a flattened white peach with a pink pawprint of toothmarks lingering on its left cheek.

“Now? Of course, yes. I understand. Only—um. Could you give me ten minutes? I just returned from the hotel gym and haven’t changed. Very good then. The Oak Bar. Ten minutes.”

He hung up and swung out of bed.

“Drat. My five o’clock is downstairs and can only fit me in now. Drat drat drat.” He stumbled around the room, picking up my underpants, then his own before saying, “I better wash off. Sorry.” He hurried into the bathroom. “Open my Powerbook and turn it on,” he called out. “There’s a date I need.”

His bossy command took me by surprise, but I spotted his laptop on the Empire-style desk by the window and automatically threw back the covers. The cold air slapped me awake. We were at the Plaza Hotel, something else I kept forgetting. I walked barefoot through a lush carpet and saw the trees and snow of Central Park in a fog of silk curtains. “Who did you say is paying for this room?”