In Memory of Angel Clare (21 page)

“It is, isn’t it?” But Jack himself had kept no photographs of Clarence, quite deliberately. He believed photographs get in the way of how you remember something or somebody; after a time all you can remember is the photograph. He was amazed to think Michael might feel the same way.

“That solves that,” said Laurie. “It’s just as well. There’s no way you would’ve been able to find him, Jack. Really.”

“Did he ever mention going to a particular bar?”

“He never mentioned going to bars, period. Let’s just forget it. If he doesn’t show up tonight, then maybe we can—” She shrugged, not knowing what they could do.

Wherever Michael was, Jack imagined the words “Then go out and kill yourself if you feel so bad” burned into his thoughts.

“No. I can’t do nothing,” he said. “I’m going to check out the bars on Columbus, then swing by Uncle Charlie’s when I get downtown. I just might run into somebody who knows him or remembers someone like him acting funny.”

Laurie rolled her eyes and bobbed her head about in acceptance of Jack’s foolishness. But she was gritting her teeth. “Dammit, Jack!”

“I’ll leave you alone and you can get back to your work. This is just something I have to do for my own peace of mind.”

“You get me all worked up over Michael and expect me to go back to my arithmetic? Thanks but no thanks. Let me get my shoes.”

“I don’t expect you to go with me,” Jack called apologetically after her. “Maybe you should stay here in case Michael comes back.”

“It’ll serve us right if he comes back while we’re out looking for him!” she shouted from the other end of the apartment. She loudly returned wearing work boots. “I think we’re just jacking-off,
Jack.
But anything’s better than sitting around here fretting over that stupid twerp. Don’t look at me like that. Let’s just go.”

He felt bad about dragging Laurie into this but was glad to have her with him. She made him feel less crazy. Now that he was doing this he felt like a fool again, but he preferred being a fool to being indifferent.

“Anyway,” said Laurie when they were out on the street, “it’s a lovely day for a wild twinkie chase.”

Which it was, the air warm in the sun but cool in the shadows, the September light as clear and restful as water in a glass. Outdoors and moving, Jack could stop worrying so much about Michael. He was startled by the presence of another world in the streets, something he forgot when he’d been writing or thinking for too long, and he was stunned by the sheer number of people, most of whom must have inner lives almost as complicated as his own. He and Laurie passed through the scattered afternoon crowds along Broadway, then walked east, Jack lugging along, Laurie bobbing beside him. He imagined they looked like Mutt and Jeff in public. When they talked, they didn’t talk about Michael but about an airhead illustrator whose taxes Laurie was doing.

The green trees in the park behind the Natural History Museum were speckled with yellow leaves, like eyes. Jack led Laurie to where he thought Cahoots would be, but the neon sign in the window said The Works, a bar Jack remembered being in a different block. He wasn’t sure if it was his memory or the city that played tricks on him. Jack hated bars and never went to them alone; it had been years since he visited the bars on Columbus with Clare, before Clarence met Michael in fact.

They went inside and the young bartender and two solitary drinkers at the bar turned and stared. Jack thought they must look like a straight couple, despite Laurie’s shirt and hair, which she’d pushed to one side in its boyish mode. Jack didn’t think he looked gay, which was sometimes cause for relief but more often an annoyance—you had to be svelte and young to be gay. Jack was calm enough over Michael to feel self-conscious again.

“Looking for someone?” the bartender asked without being prompted. He was svelte and young, with cheeks like a chipmunk.

With Laurie standing back and looking around the bar, Jack stepped forward, explained they were hunting for a friend, and tried to describe Michael.

“Sorry, sir.” His respect made Jack feel old. “I wasn’t on last night and know only a couple of regulars by name. And this Michael person sounds like half of the boys who come in here.”

“No, I understand that,” said Jack. “But there’s no harm in trying, is there?” He wrote out Michael’s name and his own telephone number on a notepad the bartender handed him, although he suspected the piece of paper would be peeled off and dropped into a wastebasket as soon as he left. He asked about other bars on the street and was told Cahoots and The Wildwood no longer existed, but he might try an adult bookstore with a French name the bartender said he couldn’t pronounce.

“Oh, you mean Les Hommes.” It was one place in the neighborhood Jack did know. “Yes, that’s a good idea. Thanks again for your time. Goodbye.” He nodded to Laurie and they went back out to the street.

“I thought gay bars were more butch than that,” she told him. “It was almost elegant in there, despite the hurricane fence in the ceiling. Where to now?”

“I don’t know. This really is rather pointless, isn’t it?”

“We knew that when we started, Jack. I’ve decided to treat this as my little tour of how the other half lives.”

Her blitheness annoyed him, and there was her old condescension toward gay male sexuality and its rituals. Jack could be pretty catty about it himself, but it was different coming from an outsider, even someone as close to him as Laurie.

Les Hommes was on a cross street several blocks down. It looked both seedy and silly in the light of day, just a door with a sign in a blank wall. Jack was embarrassed to stand outside it with Laurie.

“Maybe you should call the apartment while I go in here,” he told her. “See if Michael’s come back.”

“Michael wouldn’t answer the phone if he were back. He never does. What’s the matter, Jack-o?” she said teasingly. “You don’t want to be seen in here with me?”

“No, I—you won’t be comfortable in here, Laurie.”

“Aw, Jack. Come on. You got me curious. I’m a big girl. I know all about gay men and their dumb little sex fetishes.”

Jack snapped. “This is serious, Laurie! I’m worried about Michael and you treat this like it’s all a joke!”

Laurie looked startled, as if she’d been slapped. She grimaced, kept her temper, and said stiffly, “We’re doing this to keep our nerves intact. Remember? I’m worried. You got me worried. But I’m not going to get pious and frantic while we go through the motions of hunting for the little jerk.” She drew a deep breath. “If you need to enter this holy inner sanctum without me, go ahead. I’ll wait here.”

Jack lowered his head—she understood him before he understood himself. “It’s just that I feel odd having you in there,” he admitted. “I used to come here. Now and then. That’s why I lost my temper. I apologize.”

“I figured as much.” She sounded more tolerant than forgiving. “No, go on in. I’ll wait out here. Or no, I’ll wait over there at the corner, where I won’t look so inappropriate.”

He thanked her, apologized again, and told her he’d be right out. He waited until her back was turned before he opened the door and went inside.

There were no windows in the front room, the store portion of the place, and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead turned the afternoon into two o’clock in the morning. The right half of the room was sealed off behind a scratched and smudged wall of plexiglass, like a derelict bank, a man at the window beside the turnstile reading
Soldier of Fortune
magazine. There was nobody else in the room. On the wall opposite the plexiglass stood a display case full of apparatus, the most prominent being a row of dildos arranged by size from the vaguely human to what looked like a stuffed moray eel. All attempts at verisimilitude—flesh-colored rubber, wet glaze, and swollen veins—only made them look more grotesque, so the handcuffs, leather masks, and cockrings seemed homey in comparison. Jack had wanted to cite the dildos as an example of the limitations of realism in fiction or film, but no review had come up where dildos would have been suitable.

He went up to the window. “Excuse me. I’m looking for—” He gave his description of Michael and asked if the man had seen anyone like that last night or today. “It’s important. He’s a friend of a friend and he’s disappeared.”

The man looked up from his magazine with a weary smirk.

“It’s a family emergency. Really.” Without Laurie beside him, he must look and sound like a lovelorn chicken-hawk chasing down a recent trick. It was a repellent thought.

“Young preppy type?” said the man. “Sure. I think we got one of those today.” He nodded at the curtained door on the other side of the turnstile. “Five dollars.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not looking for a
type.
This guy has curly hair and is very long and skinny.”

“That might be the one. Maybe.”

Jack knew the man was hustling him, but there was a chance Michael might be back there; he wanted to see to make sure. “Can you let me run in, have a quick look around, and come right out again?”

“Sure, pal. Five dollars.”

It was the answer Jack expected and he knew it was pointless to argue. He paid the five dollars just so he could get this over with, and the bastard let him through.

Jack read the new sign posted by the curtain—it forbid sex
between
persons on the premises—and pushed through the curtain toward the sounds of moaning and heavy breathing. The sounds were the porn movie playing in the video room, a dark room with a dozen theater seats facing a video projector and screen where the granulated image of genitals squished and heaved. Jack hated the close-ups anyway, but he found the image sexless and absurd because he was here for something else. The video was the ultimate today in impersonal sex: it played to an empty room.

Beyond the little theater was the real space, a large room full of curtained booths and false walls arranged to form a little maze. It seemed like the sexual labyrinth of your own head when your mood was right and the maze was full of men. This afternoon there was nobody in the first leg of booths. The light was all red, which had caused him to quip, “People developing photos here?” the first time he visited with Clarence. Clare had laughed, drawing indignant stares all around. The men who came here were piously humorless, as if lust were so frail it could be shattered by a giggle.

Slowly, carefully, Jack stepped along the row of empty booths, afraid of making a sound while he wondered if he were the only person back here. The place was as hauntingly silent as it was when full of men looking through each other.

There had been a clump of men groping each other in the dark corner beyond the booths when Jack came here with Clarence. Clare laughed at Jack’s joke, then, without any apparent shift of thought, eased himself into the grope, closing his eyes and smacking his lips when the dozen hands and half-dozen mouths gradually turned to him. They focused on Clarence not because he was attractive but because he was so appreciative. He was the only person Jack ever met who actually smacked his lips-over food or art or sex—with utter conviction. He was
almost
attractive, which made him look available in the eyes of men who’d be intimidated by anyone beautiful. That, anyway, was Jack’s theory about Clarence’s sexual success.

Jack had hung back with the handful of others who coldly watched the little orgy. Clare’s closed eyes and grin weaved in and out of the light, the rest of him a long red shadow between the shirt bunched under his arms and the jeans binding his ankles. Jack considered stepping in to ask Clare if he wanted him to hold his wallet, but resisted the urge and went back out to the little theater—it was movies instead of video then—and waited for Clarence, feeling very unattractive, stupid, and moral. He was twenty-six and righteously clung to his belief sex should be connected with love, or the chance of love. When Clarence came out, his hair was tangled and his face red with whisker burns, but he acted as though he’d done nothing more than had a nice relaxing swim. His capacity for pleasure endowed him with something like a self-healing innocence; Jack couldn’t condemn him. Clare was genuinely sorry to hear Jack hadn’t enjoyed himself and tried to make up for it by talking about books with Jack over cheeseburgers in an all-night diner.

Had they ever talked about anything besides books and movies? Jack suddenly wondered if Clarence had only been humoring him all those years.

No. Jack couldn’t think that. From college days on, Clarence loved to hear Jack describe the novels he couldn’t read himself, either because he was dyslexic or simply lazy—dyslexia was a concept Jack couldn’t understand. Clarence didn’t fully understand the nickname Jack gave him in Charlottesville until years later when Roman Polanski made
Tess.
“Angel Clare is a terrible person,” he indignantly announced after they saw the movie. “Is that how people see me?”

“It was just a bit of sophomore cleverness,” Jack assured him.

Clarence wasn’t stupid. He always asked good questions and had interesting comments about the novels Jack described to him. The night after they went to Les Hommes, Jack talked in great detail about Flaubert’s
Salammbo,
and Clarence said, “Sounds like a Maria Montez movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.” Which was perfect.

That might have been the same night they argued about the phrase “guilty pleasure,” an idea whose point Clarence refused to see. “Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found that phrase a total contradiction.” He laughed and added, “I’ll bet you think it’s a—what’s the word? Redundancy.”

Jack had smiled and nodded at that. He didn’t go back to Les Hommes until a month later, without Clarence.

Jack turned the corner and started down the next leg of the maze. He had not anticipated finding the past here. When his thoughts swung back into the present, he was confused enough to imagine Michael was actually here. He stepped more quickly down the back aisle, hoping to catch Michael off guard even as he convinced himself he was alone in this place. Then he found the boy in a booth.

A hightop sneaker stuck out from under a curtain, pressing and twisting against the floor. Jack grabbed the curtain and yanked it open. A boy sat inside, a boy with bad skin and long hair lit by the video flickering on the little monitor. He bared his teeth and glared at Jack, looking like the kind of boy who’d throw empty beer bottles at you from a car with Jersey license plates. But the fly of his torn jeans was open and he was working an erection in his fist.