In Memory of Angel Clare (22 page)

“Pardon,” said Jack and he jerked the curtain shut.

Jack hurried to the end of the aisle, becoming more flustered. Seeing what he’d seen blew away what little reality the place had, although what had he expected to see at Les Hommes? It was finding nobody here but a street tough—maybe nobody else went to backrooms anymore—that made the sight so shattering. He remembered Laurie outside, and that grounded him back in reality. He gave his head an agitated shake, and left.

The fluorescent light of the front room was a sickly blue-gray after the red light inside—Jack didn’t even look at the man in the window. The daylight outside was blinding, and Jack stood there blinking until he saw Laurie down at the corner. She leaned against a telephone booth with her arms folded, looking thoughtful and human. He walked toward her, shaking his head and holding out empty hands.

“No, huh?” she said, without surprise.

He expected her to make a crack about what took him so long, but she wouldn’t, of course, not after what they’d said to each other earlier.

“You okay, Jack? You look a little funny.”

“No, I’m fine. It’s a strange place back there, that’s all.” Actually, he found Laurie strange after what he’d seen inside. Her boyish hair was confusingly sexual. If he didn’t know her so well, he might even find her body sexual. Sex and Laurie were two halves of his life that had nothing to do with each other, happily.

“I made a couple of calls while I was waiting” she said unimportantly. “Livy, who said she hasn’t seen Michael since they ran into him in Paris. I didn’t say anything to get her worried. And I called Ben and Danny.”

“They’re not back from Connecticut, are they?”

“I guess not. But I left a message on their machine. So. Where to next?”

Jack shrugged. “No place, really. Maybe we should go back to your place, see if Michael’s returned, then I’ll just go home. I might go by Uncle Charlie’s when I get down there.”

“Let’s go downtown now. I’ll go with you. We can swing by the Center and talk to Carla about this.”

“Oh?” Jack liked and respected Carla, but was intimidated by her rocklike sanity. He suspected she thought he was a fool, or worse, without any of the self-recognition and sympathy that enabled Laurie to find him occasionally foolish yet still worthy.

“I’ve been thinking while you were in there, Jack. We’re making each other positively nutty over Michael. We should hear what Carla makes of all this. She
is
more experienced with potential suicides than we are.”

“Maybe.” Jack was still anxious about Michael, but eating away at his belief was his ability to feel so many other things at the same time. Yes, Carla might be the person to shame him out of his worry. “All right. Sure. Let’s go talk to Carla.”

They walked west toward the 72nd Street subway station, Jack reviewing his thoughts to himself while Laurie remained oddly silent. She retained the air of seriousness that had come over her while Jack was in the bookstore, as if she had been thinking about something else besides talking to Carla. Laurie’s silence was so rare it was suspenseful. Not until they were beneath the street and standing on the long, narrow subway platform did she share what was on her mind.

“Jack? Being brutally honest about this—” She sounded gentle and tentative. “If you were Michael, would your life be so empty without Clarence that you’d seriously consider ending your life?”

He bent his eyes at her, wondering what she meant.

“I just can’t imagine him being such great company when he was alive,” she explained. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I always assumed it was nothing but sex between them. I mean, what did they have to say to each other?” She hesitated. “You don’t have to look at me like that. I bring this up as just another argument for why we shouldn’t be worried about Michael.”

Jack limited his anger to an exasperated sigh. “Just because a couple aren’t like you and Carla doesn’t mean they’re not a real couple.”

“It’s
not
because they’re not like us.” She folded her arms and settled her back against the girder beside them. “You knew Clarence better than anyone else, Jack. Right? You know what I’m saying. Do you feel your life is over because he isn’t around anymore?”

“An important part of it is, yes.” He said it firmly, proudly.

Laurie pinched her mouth at him. “Jeez, Jack. I feel I’ve spent half of my life hearing you complain about Clarence. How self-absorbed and irresponsible and forgetful of his friends he was. You’re as bad as Michael playing the widow. You are.”

“Laurie, he was my best friend. You wouldn’t understand. I don’t have a Carla in my life. I miss him. I even miss complaining about him.”

She was silent again, and he wondered if it was because he called Clarence his best friend instead of her. But then she said, “I think you love him more now that he’s dead than you ever did when he was alive. It’s easier now.”

That stung and infuriated him. He kept control and firmly said, “No. It’s clearer now, that’s all.”

“And it’s why you’re jealous of Michael’s grief.”

“I’m not jealous of Michael!” He was taken by surprise and his anger jumped out. “You don’t feel jealous of grief!”

“Jack! You don’t see that? You’re jealous of Michael. Why else would you hate someone so much who isn’t worth hating?”

“I don’t hate Michael! Would I be running all over the city after the little asshole if I hated him?” He looked around and saw the other people on the platform glancing toward him and Laurie. He lowered his voice and said, “Michael’s just a nuisance to me. But I know something of what he’s feeling and I’m worried for him.”

Laurie lowered her voice, too. “Maybe. Although I’ve been wondering if you’re all upset and anxious about him today just to prove to yourself you don’t hate him.”

Jack bit the corner of his mouth and chewed his mustache. It was the kind of psychoanalytic nonsense he had expected from Carla, although Carla was too professional to say it outright. “Everything doesn’t
have to be
a symptom of something else, you know.”

“I know,” Laurie admitted timidly. “It was just a suggestion. Just a possibility. And it made more sense than you being paranoid for Michael out of guilt over losing your temper with him yesterday.”

“Maybe it’s not just paranoia,” he claimed. Their train was grinding, then roaring into the station, and he did not have time to toss off any valid reasons for his worry. “Maybe I have ESP!” he said sarcastically, raising his voice. “Maybe it’s my woman’s intuition!”

Laurie smiled, as if his joke were a return to the old Jack, and they stepped into the crowded subway car.

But Jack found he was still angry with her on the ride downtown. The train was too loud for them to talk without shouting, and Jack was afraid shouting would put him in closer touch with his anger. What gave her the right to say he loved Clare better dead than he had loved him alive? He stood shoved against her among the slack bodies coming home from work, able to see her only as a reflection in the darkened window. Jack never knew what to do with his anger. It debilitated him, left him feeling empty, helpless, and stupid. He was far more comfortable with guilt.

The Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center stood on West 13th Street, an enormous abandoned school the city sold to the jumble of gay and lesbian organizations that had sprung up like a bureaucratic boomtown over the past ten years. The building’s tall brick front looked as plain and quaint as an old warehouse on the street of brownstones, and the inside still looked like an abandoned school. Beneath the intimidatingly high ceilings—the school had been built in an age when there was the desire and money to awe occupants with the power of an institution—everything looked secondhand and temporary. The maintenance fees alone were exorbitant, and there was never enough money left over to make the place more than habitable. The public spaces were bare of anything new except the crowded bulletin boards and numerous posters and the occasional coat of fresh paint. It was Danny’s contention the Center had been carefully redecorated in High Lesbian.

Jack remembered the joke without smiling as he followed Laurie through the reception area, where a bearded volunteer with an ear punched full of studs and doodads sat at a chipped wooden desk and answered the telephone. Jack came here only when he was meeting Ben and Danny or Laurie and Carla for dinner, although he lived just a few blocks downtown from the Center. The social activities never appealed to him, and they attracted a class of gay men that made Jack uncomfortable. All manner of women came here, but Jack thought the men were almost always the ones you never saw in bars—the shy or middle-aged or homely or fat, all of which Jack knew himself to be, but he didn’t like having his nose rubbed in it.

He followed Laurie up the long stairs in the cavernous stairwell, telling himself he had nothing to fear from Carla, that there was nothing she could say worse than what Laurie had told him. He remained angry with Laurie, but it was a quiet, tolerant anger. He knew he was worried for Michael in spite of his dislike for the boy, not because of it, and that he had loved Clarence alive; he had.

The offices for LGMH were on the second floor and looked more permanent than the space downstairs. The four desks in the main room matched at least, and the walls were a single shade of pale lavender. A potted plant slouched in the corner.

“Hi. Is Carla Peterson free at the moment?” Laurie asked an elderly gentleman in a necktie and cardigan sweater who sat at the first desk.

“Carla? Oh, Carla. The woman.” The first desk was often occupied by volunteers who weren’t familiar with the rest of the staff. “I don’t rightly know, my dear.”

“Laurie. Hey.” A handsome black woman looked up from her desk in the corner. “Carla’s still out. Some kind of meeting with a shrink down at Bellevue. She should’ve been back half an hour ago. You want to wait for her, her office is empty.”

“Thanks, Jocasta. Hmmm. What do you think, Jack? Do we wait?”

Jack looked around the room and shrugged. He was ready to forget the whole business and simply go home.

Just then, the door behind Jocasta opened and out stepped Ben Slover. “Jo! You got a pen? There’s no pen or pencils on my desk! Who’s been snitching my pens while I was gone?” he said in a rush, then saw his friends across the room. “Jack! Laurie! Can’t talk now. Important phone call. Thanks,” he told Jocasta when she wearily thrust a fistful of pens at him. “Come on back. I’ll be finished in a sec,” he called out, and disappeared back through the door.

Jack and Laurie glanced at each other, then went back to Ben’s office. It was a windowless cubbyhole with doors at each end, perhaps a cloakroom when the building was a school. Ben sat wound up at his desk, the telephone receiver pinched between his shoulder and head while he used both hands to pull things out and write things down. On his desk was a photograph of him and Danny in coats and ties, chatting with Ed Koch.

“Uh huh. Uh huh. That’s all perfectly well, Councilman, but there’s going to be five hundred people demonstrating outside Gracie Mansion tonight whether the police approve it or not. Be easier for the cops if they were there just to stand by than it will be if they have to haul five hundred people off to jail. It’s in everyone’s best interest if we get the permit.”

Ben was still dressed for the country, sweatshirt and jeans, but he looked utterly at home on the telephone. His voice turned conciliatory, indignant, or mournful from one moment to the next, but a corner of his mouth remained curled in delight over the game he played. Jack had watched this before and decided it was the political equivalent of phone sex.

“Okay, Jim. You do that. Yes, I’ll be here. Call me back as soon as you finish with him.” Ben hung up, took a deep ecstatic breath and solemnly faced Jack and Laurie. “Another crisis,” he groaned. “What brings you guys down here?”

“We came to see Carla,” said Jack.

“What’s up?” asked Laurie, nodding at the phone. “You and Danny weren’t supposed to be back until Friday.”

“Haven’t you heard? Don’t you people listen to the radio or read the papers? The stupid sonovabitch really stuck his foot in it this time.” And Ben indignantly reported a statement by Mayor Koch about “AIDS chiselers,” people Koch claimed pretended to have the disease in order to take advantage of the city’s resources for people with AIDS.

Jack recognized it as the kind of careless, insensitive remark frequently tossed off by the mayor. After he was criticized for a day or so in newspapers whose animosity toward Koch was stronger than their indifference toward gays, Koch would call a news conference, claim he had been misquoted, and say more carefully what he had really meant. Jack didn’t believe it was a real crisis, at least nothing like the personal crisis he was involved with today. Politics seemed so distant and illusory anyway, Jack often dismissed the whole business as an enormous fiction.

“So I hurried back first thing this morning—Danny’s still in Connecticut—got the phone tree in action, the word out, and we’re going to raise a stink outside Gracie Mansion tonight. Get a little media attention for how
little
the city does for PWAs.” He eyed the telephone, expecting it to ring. “What about you guys? Have a nice September?”

“Fine,” said Laurie. “We better be going. You’ve got your hands full and we only dropped by to see Carla.”

“Oh, no. Please stay,” said Ben. “I can’t do a thing until this person calls me back. And it’s good to see you both. It is.” He reached out and carefully touched Laurie’s hand, then Jack’s arm. “So everything’s fine? Connecticut was nice. A bit boring but restful.”

“Actually,” said Jack. “Everything’s not fine. Michael’s disappeared.” He had intended not to mention it, but Ben’s good spirits and air of self-importance brought it out of Jack.

Laurie frowned at him and told Ben, “Well, not disappeared exactly. But he hasn’t come home since last night.”

“When Laurie and Carla told him it was time he found his own place,” Jack said pointedly.

“After Jack told him he should kill himself if he felt as bad as he said he did,” Laurie added.

Statement by statement, the subtle accusations of each other giving way to a flat description of their doubts and fears, they filled Ben in on what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Laid out for the benefit of a third person, their worry sounded even more unjustified than when they had tried arguing themselves out of it. Ben listened, mechanically lifting and lowering his eyebrows at each of them, continuing to steal glances at the silent telephone. But then he began to rub a finger over his upper lip, as if missing the mustache he once wore.