How Long Has This Been Going On (49 page)

"That
is
irritating."

"They have these mannerisms, and we have each other."

"What a... lovely way to put it. I'd hug you if it weren't three-thirty in the afternoon in the East Fifties."

Jim lived four and a half blocks from Andy's new apartment, so our boys were back in no time—but when Andy unlocked his front door, they found Andy's mother cooking in the kitchen. The
Fiddler on the Roof
poster had been taken down, and plastic covers had been stretched over Andy's new leather couch.

"At last you come back, eh?" said Andy's mother, one eye on them and one on her work. "No invitation to visit from you, no phone call of, Mama, I'm in my fancy new place that I had to move to because where I'm from isn't good enough for me.
Ma che?
We forgive you. I got the keyfrom your fancy doorman in the uniform. Your father's out getting copies made, and then we'll see, the fancy young apartment boy who thinks he knows more than his mama, eh? Who's this?"

Andy stood there, stricken.

"You were supposed to keep this address secret from them," said Henry, quietly. "This is the reason why."

"I never thought they would—"

"Of course you did. You hoped it."

"I said, Who
is
this, Adreiano?" Andy's mother repeated.

"Look at her giving me the Old Country evil eye," said Henry. "Look at you quaking. You're not man enough to be gay, Andy. You're not even man enough to leave home."

"Adreiano!" Andy's mother put down her spatula, left the stove.
"What does this mean, eh?"

"Mama, what are you
doing
here?" said Andy, really upset. "I was going to ask you over when—"

"Tell your mother who I am, Adreiano."

Andy's mother took a step forward, eager for battle; then she halted, unsure of the stakes. It had just—this second—dawned on her that her son might be
anormale,
and she was willing to do almost anything to hear the idea exploded. Hastily, she regrouped. She wiped her hands on her apron, took another step forward, and smiled.

"I brought up a little pasta," she said, looking more at Henry than at Andy, "and the sauce is thickening in the pot. It's going right for the dinner, a boy and his mama and papa and his friend, to start up his new house." More smile, and a slight shrug. "Now, Adreiano."

Meaning, introduce us. Andy said nothing, though.

So Henry said, "I'm Andy's lover. I kiss him, fuck him, blow him, rim him, shrimp him, and am just beginning to hate him."

"Henry—"

"You may not be familiar with all my terms," Henry went on, addressing Andy's mother. "Fucking. Now, that's basic. All sex tends to fucking, because one demands to be top and one needs to be bottom, and gay men long to discover who of them was meant to play which—"

"I can soothe this out," Andy was saying, trying to take hold of Henry. Henry wouldn't look at him.

"You couldn't soothe a deck of Old Maid, Andy boy," said Henry. "Where was I? Blowing? Yes. Now, blowing is very different from fucking, because few agree as to which is the top and which the bottom in blowing. Is the top the icon who poses to be worshiped, or is
he
taken, his insides thwunked out into the—"

"Adreiano," in this dead voice, the sound of fat lies pierced by the arrows of what is true whether you like it or not.

"Mama, please leave.
Please.
You don't want to—"

"Rimming," said Henry, clearing his throat, "is the gay man's choice act because it is the most intimate, and most terrifying to straights." He spoke dreamily, a disembodied Henry, in tune with a philosophy but not with the scene at hand. He's even thinking, How much longer were Andy and I going to continue, anyway? Love is nice, but is it effective? "Now, as time blows on, you come to notice that each boy has his own unique taste, and Andy here... With Andy it's like dipping your tongue into a honey pot."

"You
dirty!"
Andy's mother screamed at Henry. "
Sporcizia!
You make delinquent my son!"

"Is that what I do, Andy?"

"Mama," Andy begged, "you don't know what this is about."

"I don't
know
? I don't hear what he says, the filth? The selfish?
God
doesn't hear?
Onta su noi!
To offend the way of God!"

"There is no God," Henry replied. "There is only rich white heterosexuals passing laws to consolidate their power."

"Adreiano!
To even
know
him!" Andy's mother began to weep, quite genuinely. "To know such a person!"

She held out her arms to Andy, and he walked right in. "Adreiano," she warned, "to have a family is the most sacred thing to do on earth. To be raised in love and honor, so we go on to raise our own
bambini
in the same way."

"Don't ennoble it," said Henry. "You didn't raise a family out of choice. You raised a family because some guy with total power over you fucked your insides and made you bear children."

Andy's mother was stunned for about three seconds. Then she charged. Thrusting Andy aside, she stepped up to Henry and slapped him a good one just behind the right ear.

Henry looked at Andy.

Miserable Andy backed away. "Henry," he pleaded.

Henry smiled tensely at Andy's mother, then slowly walked over to the
Fiddler on the Roof
poster, leaning against the desk. "I was ten or eleven," said Henry, grasping the poster, raising it, showing it off. "And my father decided to punish me because I hadn't made shortstop on my Little League team. Both he and my older brother had been outstanding shortstops in their day, and I tried my best to make it, believe me. I just didn't have it. So my father revoked my television privileges, indefinitely, except for the pro baseball games, which I would in fact be forced to watch, for my edification and the greater glory of fathers."

Henry hefted the poster as if testing its weight, trying a grip or two.

"All this," he continued, "because I simply wasn't able to hold my own with the other, uh, chaps. So I piped up and said, I don't want to play Softball from
any
position. I don't like softball. My father announced that he would
teach
me to like it by beating me. Not a strapping, you understand. My father liked to rock in there with fists flying and knocking you against the wall. A real hero, I'm sure you'll agree. Where was my mother during all this? She went upstairs to catch up on her sewing. Father knows best."

"Adreiano," said Andy's mother. "It's time for your friend to go."

"No, it was my brother who stood up for me. Something like, 'Dad, you can't punish him just because he didn't make—' And
crack!
across my brother's face, for daring to interfere. Now, I'm proud to say that
that
was what inspired me. Because suddenly there's this moment when you realize that everything your parents have taught you is garbage. They say, For Your Own Good, but they mean, For Our Endlessly Devouring Obsession with Convention."

"Vergogna,"
said Andy's mother, dangerous but wary.

"As it happened, my brother had just come home from softball practice, bat and all. So I grabbed the bat and went for the windows. They were my father, and I was killing them. Now, he told my
brother
to stop me—and if my brother didn't, my father would go back on all his guarantees on his college scholarship. My brother then told my father what a fucking bastard he is. But me, I was jamming away at those glass windows. Like this."

Raising the
Fiddler on the Roof
poster, Henry aimed it at a corner of Andy's new desk—Andy cried
No!
as his mother gloated—and slammed it down with such force that the cardboard itself crumpled behind the shower of glass.

"This
is your friend!" Andy's mother remarked.

Henry strode to the door, turned, and said, "Maybe it's too bad, Andy. But you love what they do to you and I cannot bear it."

"Henry," said Andy, low, beaten, a whimper floating past prison locks, "I don't love it."

"If you didn't love it, you wouldn't let them do it."

Henry left the apartment, and Henry and Andy did not speak again.

* * *

Dear Elaine,

What exactly do you say to the police—"A lunatic is following me and what if she's dangerous?" And how do you put it to Lois—"That woman I keep seeing is real, please save me"? Doesn't Alfred Hitchcock teach us that No One Believes You?

I was in the produce section of the Red Apple, and I heard "Hello, Elaine." So I turned and there she was: the woman who's always there. She was smiling and I was startled. I said something mild like "We've been seeing each other around the town, haven't we?," and her "Oh, yes;
yes"
was so fervent, so concentrated, that she might have been a fairy-tale stepmother responding to the question, Was it you who dipped the apple in the poison?

I was flustered, but I tried to move on in my assertively uninvolved New York style. I said, thumbing through the apples, "My roommate has a thing for Granny Smiths, but only the hard ones covered with freckles. They taste the best." I shrugged and walked. She followed. So I turned and asked, not pleasantly but inquiringly, "Is there something you want?"

"Yes," she replied. "I want what you have."

Elaine abruptly rose from her desk, fidgeting, shaking her head, crossing to open a window. Some writer, she thought: Cinderella and the Ritz I can do, but show me real life and my pencil breaks.
What I have,
she wants!

This weird city, Elaine thought, looking down on the street. Do I even want real life in my books? Because I surely don't want it in my life.

Oh, it's rich, Elaine. Rich it
is,
darling. One look at someone with the messy, terrible power of real human longing and you run like a child.

I have to step in here, because Elaine is wrong: She handled it well, actually. "What I have?" she asked the stranger, sensible, curious, bemused. Elaine in the role of Elaine. "What do I have?"

The woman who's always there brightened suddenly, as if the drugs had just kicked in.

"Love,"
she said. "It's always there for some of us, Elaine, and it can come and take us without warning. Love is anywhere. On a Broadway street, or in a moonlit ballroom, or right here in a store. Elaine, you are love to me."

The woman who's always there: youngish, short, trim, chopped-short hair, a hard mouth in a soft face. Scary, Elaine thinks. She's smiling to hide the anger.

"The creations of Elaine," the woman went on, making them sound like hats. "I have friends who would give anything to be talking to you now, like me. Maybe taking pictures—I brought a camera." This was an eager confidence, almost a plea. "There's always lunch."

Elaine turned and moved through the store, dodging the price checkers and the dodderers who go into a trance at the sight of the paper towels. Leaving her basket on an idle checkout counter—and thinking, Lois is going to have to do without her Granny Smiths—Elaine fled the place, hailed a cab, and rode away. Fifteen blocks south, she had the driver run east to Central Park West and back home again, leaping out and into her building in real jig time.

Music, she thought. I'll listen to something.
Calma, calma.

Like many of her generation, Elaine had never quite adapted to the home stereo system. To plain folks raised in the Depression and the war years, home music meant radio; only aficionados and the pretentious bought records. As youth today automatically switches on MTV when entering a room, Lois and Elaine turned on the radio; you never knew what you'd get, but it was filled with personality. A world bubbled up in it: song, chat, sports, politics. It was like a hobby that cultivated itself as you sat there.

Music and coffee, Elaine thought, reheating and finishing off the pot. The wizards have replaced everything I'm used to with shortcuts—frozen instant coffee flakes and bottles of pre-mixed Mai Tais. Well, it
is
a young culture, eternally self-renewing, wanting new things of its own. Johnna was right about that.

"Far out," Elaine said aloud, as the radio played that
Hair
number about the Age of Aquarius. "Heavy. Groovy. Out of sight."

Someone knocked at the door; this almost never happened. New Yorkers maintain such strict codes of privacy that one shouldn't bang on a door to warn that the building is on fire without having buzzed up from downstairs first. To answer an unexpected knock—even to call out, "Who's there?"—can involve one in lurid, exotic plots.

Lois, of course, would storm right up to the door, pull it open, and grouch at whoever was there. Elaine was more reticent. Anyway, she'd had her fill of strangers today. She sat at the kitchen table, staring at the door, as the knocking grew louder.

"Elaine!" cried the woman who's always there. "I want to be inside with you! Elaine, I hear music! You didn't fool me with that taxicab,

Elaine. I know all about you, see? I was across the street when you came back, Elaine. You better open wide for me, now! I want to see what you're like!"

She wants what I have. What do I have? More curious than annoyed, Elaine switched off the radio, walked to the door, and spoke up: "If what you admire about Elaine Denslow is what you read in her books, then I am glad to inform you that the next one will be even more sharing than the others."

Elaine heard a rustling behind the door, nothing else.

"There will be more of me in this one," Elaine added. "Perhaps too much, even."

"No," came the voice. "There could never be too much of you, Elaine." After a moment she added, so softly she could scarcely have meant to be heard, "Let me see you. Let me feel you, Elaine."

"In my books."

"No, no, Elaine." Now she sounded happy. "Through the open door, a pathway to heaven."

I thought they only did this to movie stars, Elaine was thinking. How do they even find you?