In Memory of Angel Clare (13 page)

Laurie set teapot and cups on the table and began to pour. “Not to pry, Michael, but what’s your money situation like? After your trip?”

“Fine, thank you.” Then, thinking it over, he asked, “Would you like me to pay rent for the months I’ve been living here?”

“Not at all!” Laurie said defensively, although Michael had been perfectly matter-of-fact, not guilty or accusing.

“What Laurie is asking is if you have enough money to get your own apartment. We don’t feel you owe us anything, Michael. Not a thing.”

“I still have his money. Most of it.”

“I imagine you’ve spent only the interest and haven’t touched the principal,” said Laurie. “The way you live. The rent and all could run as high as fifteen thousand for the first year. If you decide to stay in New York.”

“I’m staying. This is where my friends are,” he said calmly.

“Of course,” said Laurie. “But you do have enough to cover that and still have money left for personal expenses? Until you start working, that is.”

Michael nodded and sat there, contentedly looking at something before him, presumably his future. “No. You’re right. I understand perfectly. We’ve been letting this go on too long. I hadn’t stopped to think. I want my own space. It’s not like we’re family and
have
to live together.”

“Families,” Carla groaned in agreement. “Most of us came to New York in the first place to get away from family.” The majority of Carla’s cases were family related and her feelings were less ambiguous than Laurie’s.

“But we still expect to see lots of you once you’ve moved,” Laurie told Michael. “We don’t want you to think we’re rejecting you in any way.”

“I couldn’t think that,” said Michael. “No. No, my only regret is that we didn’t talk about this sooner. My living here had gotten to be a bad habit and it’s time I broke it. No, this has been a very productive talk.” He nodded and smiled at them both, a cordial smile with a bit of pride in it, as though he were pleased with himself for sounding so adult. He picked up his cup of tea and drank half of it. “Was there anything else?”

“No. I think that was it,” said Carla.

The three of them sat there and looked at each other, not thinking of anything else to say.

Michael quickly drank the rest of his tea. “Good then. It’s settled. I’ll try to be out by the end of October.” He eased his chair back and stood up. “Thank you both for being so honest with me.”

“And thank you for understanding our point of view,” said Carla.

“Not at all.” He stood there touching the table with the tips of his fingers. “Now, since it’s all settled, I think I’ll go out for a little walk. Maybe think about what kind of place I want for myself.”

“You do that, Michael. Give it some thought. It should be fun to think and scheme over,” Laurie lied. “Looking for your own apartment.” Some people actually enjoyed apartment hunting in New York, but not Laurie and Carla.

He gave them a slight bow and a smile. “See you in an hour or so,” he said as he backed toward the door to the hall, then turned.

A second later, the front door slammed loudly, but they were always forgetting how heavy the door was and letting it slam hard behind them.

Laurie turned back to Carla. “So what do you think?”

“I think it went very well. I think we’ve underestimated Michael.”

“You don’t think it went
too
well?”

“I asked myself that,” Carla admitted. “I wondered what he might be repressing. But have we ever known Michael to repress anything? He might say it insincerely, but he always said it. Besides, it’s not an unreasonable request.”

“True. Maybe it’s just because I expected him to be all pathetic and theatrical about it that I can’t help worrying it’s too good to be true.” She got up and looked down the hall to assure herself Michael was gone. “He barely mentioned Clarence and never once called this Clarence’s apartment. Let me call Jack and find out what
he
told Michael.”

Jack answered the phone with the gruff, barely tolerant hello he used when he was writing.

“We did it, Jack. We actually talked to Michael.”

He listened to her story, worried at first, then astonished it had gone so well. He sounded as skeptical as Laurie had been, but, arguing with his skepticism, Laurie found herself believing Michael’s response had been genuine and sincere. Jack began to give in, expressed admiration for Carla’s abilities in such matters, and became sheepish over his failure to do his share of the work. “I was my usual bumbling self with Michael.”

“What exactly did you say to him?”

Jack described their conversation, emphasizing Michael’s fear they thought he was faking his grief, Jack’s brief mention of the apartment and the women’s privacy, then how the conversation ended in lost tempers before Jack could pursue anything to its end.

“Hmmm. He never talked about grief with us. What did you say to each other when you blew up?”

“Oh, I told him he exaggerated his grief and he called me a book queen.”

That didn’t sound so strong, but Laurie suggested Jack may have loosened Michael up, given him something to think about—he had arrived with the flowers—and embarrassed him over his use of mourning. Laurie mentioned all that only so Jack could feel he had played a role in this, but it did seem like a real possibility.

“I guess our next step is to see if Michael actually moves,” said Jack.

Laurie admitted it wasn’t over yet, but insisted they shouldn’t cripple themselves with worry until something went flooey.

“And?” said Carla when Laurie returned to the kitchen.

“He believed it. He sprinkled ashes on his head and said some of his usual your-baby-could-grow-up-to-be-a-heroin-addict things, but he said what he said to Michael and it sounds more plausible than ever.” Laurie quickly repeated what Jack had told her of the conversation, identifying things that had reappeared in Michael’s encounter with them.

“All right then.” Carla clapped her hands together. “Enough about Michael for tonight. Let’s go to our Hunan place for dinner. I feel like celebrating and this way we won’t have to face Michael over our dinner table. I’m afraid he’s going to be all open and intimate after our little talk.”

Laurie changed into jeans and a flannel shirt, and they walked over to Broadway and ate in a neat, unpretentious Chinese restaurant that had good broccoli and no yuppies. Laurie liked to avoid yuppies, especially now that she feared she was one herself. She and Carla were co-op poor after buying the apartment, but, doing everyone’s taxes, she knew she and Peter Griffith were the only ones among her friends with yuppie incomes. She went out of her way not to say the word aloud. Laurie had noticed you heard the word most often, and said with the sharpest contempt, from hypocrites thoroughly dedicated to the pursuit of yup.

Over dinner, Carla discussed a difficult case involving an elderly lesbian and her “super Catholic” daughter. Laurie discussed her old worries about the impossibility of moral investment: a corporation she had trusted because of their position on South Africa was being accused of anti-union policies. After three days of fretting about Michael, Laurie found it strange to fret about their work again.

Michael wasn’t home when they got back from dinner. They assumed he was still out walking, or whatever he did when he disappeared for long stretches of the evening. Not even Michael could stay cooped up in his room twenty-four hours a day. Laurie suspected he might go to bars now and then, not really to meet anyone but just to drink and look and sigh. Jack had told her how easy it was to be perfectly alone for a whole evening in a crowded gay bar. Laurie and Carla curled up on the sofa together and watched their favorite prime-time soap, then Carla read the newspaper and Laurie did some paperwork before they went to bed. Michael still wasn’t back.

Laurie had thought she’d want to make love that night, even though they’d made love both of the previous nights—something to do with the tension of having to deal with Michael. But tonight she and Carla simply cuddled a little in their nightshirts and lay very still and close together, Carla’s arm across Laurie’s breasts, Laurie’s nose in Carla’s clean hair.

“Maybe he met someone tonight and went home with them,” Carla whispered.

“Oh, I’m not worried about Michael. He’s out being importantly Michael somewhere. I doubt he’s gone home with somebody, though. It would be the first.”

“Maybe he did tonight as a way of celebrating the new life ahead of him.”

“Maybe.” Laurie wondered if the men still did that, had sex with someone the first time they met them. Jack joked that it was now up to lesbians to carry on the tradition of promiscuity. It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it. “No, I’m sure Michael’s fine. But I do admit I’m thinking about him.”

“Like what?”

“Not to sound crazy, but I almost regret losing the burden of having him around.”

Carla laughed. “You do sound crazy.”

“He was my one good deed in the world. Without him I’ll be just another greedy corporate woman.”

“You’re hardly a greedy corporate woman. Besides, you’ll still have the burden of me.”

Laurie laughed and kissed the top of Carla’s head. “You’re no burden. But I’m serious about Michael. I know it sounds dumb, but there’s all this stuff going on—politically and health-wise and Reagan. And I’m not doing a thing. I just do people’s taxes and invest their money. I know he didn’t deserve it, but Michael was my ‘cause.’”

Carla sighed. “I think you’re wrong, you know. I think you do plenty. Why shouldn’t good people be able to make money, too? And I know what you mean about Michael. But I’ve been wondering if maybe we’ve been making a big mistake treating him as our burden.”

“In which way?”

Carla rose up on one elbow so they could see each other’s face. “It crossed my mind before, but it really hit home today. When Michael responded so well to our being honest with him. Treating Michael as our burden might be what’s made him into such a walking tombstone.”

“But we’ve never come right out and told him he should keep mourning Clarence. We’ve cold-shouldered his mourning. Even Jack.”

“I know. But there’s no telling how someone as self-absorbed as Michael will interpret things. If I’d given him the same kind of attention I give to the people who come to me for help I might have picked up on it sooner.”

“You have nothing to blame yourself for. Anyway, you were able to fix all that today. I thought you did beautifully.”

“You do?” Carla laughed and lay back down beside her. “I felt as bumbling as Jack out there with Michael. It was only because Michael was ready that I stumbled—we stumbled—into what he needed to hear.”

Laurie stroked her silky, bumpy head and listened to the silence outside their closed door. “If you were to die, I wonder how I’d be.”

“Oh Pooty!” Carla tenderly groaned. “Don’t be silly.”

But she could be silly with Carla, could drop her strength and indulge her fears, real or hypothetical. “I’m sure I’d be fine. That’s what worries me. I’d probably go on with my life without any qualms at all,” she said guiltily. “Which would mean I loved you for purely selfish reasons.”

“You imagining
my
death and not yours proves that’s not true. Truly selfish people always picture their own deaths and how people’ll respond.”

“Maybe I love life more than I love you.”

“I should hope so.”

“Then you think I don’t love you enough?”

“Oh stop splitting hairs,” Carla laughed and snuggled into the pit of Laurie’s arm. “We love each other really and truly and you know it as well as I do.”

Laurie did, but she conscientiously needed to question it every now and then, assuring herself she didn’t take it for granted, she wasn’t asleep at the wheel.

Carla readjusted her arm across Laurie and prepared to go to sleep. “Anyway, that’s not something we have to worry about, is it?” she murmured.

It wasn’t, which was something else to feel strange about—Laurie seemed to want to worry about something tonight, anything—that she and Carla were spared what so many others were experiencing right now. Even Jack, who had not lived the utterly celibate life he suggested with his endless groans about age and fat and solitude, had cause to be fearful. Gay men had become vulnerable and human. Five years ago Laurie found many of them insufferable, repelled by their smug sexuality, second-hand macho, and attitudes toward women, which ranged from benign indifference to a contemptuous air that seemed to say, “Just because I’m queer doesn’t mean I’m not a man and superior to any woman.” Then she remembered the way Clarence had behaved toward her.

“Relax,” Carla sleepily whispered when Laurie’s body tensed beside her.

When Laurie met Clarence in college, he was a sweet, innocent goof. Always excited over some painter, composer, or film director he had just discovered, he laughed at his own joy and expected you to laugh with him. His joy in discovering things was infectious, even if it was something you already knew. It was wonderful running into him outside the library or coming up the hill to the dorms, a stack of art books usually under one arm, shuffling along in a sweet, private dream, a newborn aesthete from Danville, Virginia, rawboned and ponytailed—the red-neck crewcut had grown out as quickly as his mind, and the big-jawed face was always framed by shaggy sideburns and an unraveling kerchief of tied-back hair. He broke into a grin the instant he saw you, popped out of his dream and shared the dream with you, like a piece of good news: Vermeer, Cocteau, Vivaldi,
Midnight Cowboy
, his first hit of acid, his first taste of hollandaise. He told Laurie everything, even how as a child he drew plans for elaborate mansions and palaces and then, because he didn’t know anything else, mentally furnished them from a Sears catalog. With her other friends so intellectually insecure and serious those years, it was a relief knowing someone like “Angel Clare.” Laurie had still assumed she was supposed to be attracted to men, but she never mistook her appreciation of Clarence for anything like attraction. She was much too serious a person for him.

She saw him only now and then in the years after college, when she tried political work in Boston and teaching fifth-graders in Cleveland, and trusted he was still the same lovable anomaly. Then she moved to New York with Carla ten years ago, saw more of Clarence, and realized he had changed. They had all come out to each other on visits or in letters, and her disappointment that Clarence’s uniqueness might be explained by his repressed sexuality was balanced out by the pleasure of learning they had something in common. But it felt different in person. Clarence now looked at women, even Laurie, with polite bewilderment. He smiled down at Laurie with a blank gaze of “Why’re we even talking since we can’t go to bed together?” It was puzzling at first, then infuriating.