In Memory of Angel Clare (8 page)

“Yeah. I know I shouldn’t, but—” The man shrugged guiltily, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it.

Someone who was trying to pick you up would respect your wishes, wouldn’t he? Michael decided the man wasn’t interested in him. He was annoyed by the thick smoke.

The man sat and said nothing while he smoked, apparently thinking about someone or something else. But his headset remained around his neck like a collar. He didn’t go back to his music, which would’ve declared their encounter over.

“You visiting New York?” Michael asked. He assumed the man lived elsewhere. He had a faint Southern slur, and no New Yorker would be as openly enthusiastic about anything as this man was about music.

“I live in New York. Just going home after a weekend in D.C. And you?”

Michael explained he was a student at Columbia and the man asked what that was like. They talked about living in New York. The man was from Danville, Virginia, had lived in New York twelve years, worked in a midtown film lab, and lived on the Upper West Side. He never mentioned being gay, but he never mentioned a wife or girlfriend either.

The man seemed to grow bored with their talk, because he suddenly asked, “Seen any good movies lately?” always a sure sign conversation was running down. Michael mentioned a couple of recent titles—bored and lonely, he had seen more movies his first months in New York than he’d seen all year at Haverford. So they talked about movies. Actually, the man did most of the talking, having seen more movies than Michael knew existed, becoming as bashfully animated over movies as he’d been with music. He went on at length about one in particular, a foreign film he said Michael must see the next time it played at a revival house. It was called
The Conformist,
and although the man never made clear what its story was, he went into great detail about its use of camera movement and music. He did not talk about movies like a normal person; Michael was never conscious of anything but the story and how he felt afterward.

They talked movies until the illuminated tip of the Empire State Building slid along the dark house-covered ridge in New Jersey and the train plunged into a tunnel. Beneath the Hudson River, people began to collect their things. Michael collected his thoughts, wondering why he was so nervous that this meeting was ending when he should be pleased to be back in New York, where he could be miserable without being confused. He stood up to get his bag and let the man get out.

“You know,” said the man, remaining in his seat, “I just remembered. They’re showing that movie I was telling you about. Next week at the Thalia. I see it every time it’s shown. If you like, we could see it together.”

“Yes!” said Michael. “I mean, it depends. When is it?”

The man didn’t know, but offered to give Michael his telephone number so they could arrange something. Michael passed the man his notebook, then a pen, then took them back when the man finished. Michael couldn’t remember the number of the pay phone in his dorm, but the man didn’t ask for it. The train had come to a stop, and people swept Michael down the aisle before he could say more to the man than goodbye. Not until he was upstairs in the concourse did Michael have a chance to look at his notebook before slipping it into his bag. Neatly written across the top of a page covered with chemical equations was a number that looked like just another equation, except there was a name beside it: Clarence Laird.

(The next day, talking to a friend on the telephone, Clarence moaned, “I’m getting old, Ben. I tried to set up a date with a kid I met on the way back from meeting that would-be producer in Washington. I’m turning into a god-damn chickenhawk, Ben! Thank God, I’ll never hear from this kid. I don’t even know if he’s gay, and I’ll bet he doesn’t know either.” Ben assured him the younger generation were quicker about these things than they had been.)

Michael sometimes thought about naked men, but he didn’t think that made him gay. Such homosexual fantasies were a symptom of loneliness, he believed. He’d been having these thoughts since high school, but he’d been lonely since high school. And he had these thoughts only when he was alone. Sometimes particular guys, sometimes just any guy, but he never thought of anyone that way when he was with him, only when he was by himself. There had been a senior dorm counselor at Haverford whom Michael needed to see at least once each day, so he wouldn’t think about him naked. In the beginning there’d been naked women too, but it had been nothing but men since he was sixteen. What proved to Michael he wasn’t gay was his discomfort with gay men. There were openly gay students at Columbia, unlike Haverford, and Michael never thought about them the way he thought about other guys. In fact, the mere presence of an obvious homosexual made Michael forget he ever had such thoughts or, if he remembered, assured him his thoughts had nothing to do with their behavior. It was as though he could have his fantasies only when they were private, completely original, and incapable of being shared. Michael used the word
gay
not for liberal reasons but because
queer
and even
homo
might apply to his fantasies.
Gay
suggested an identity as solid and apart from him as
black,
an identity now shored up by rumors of a disease that struck only gays. Michael never worried about the disease because he wasn’t gay.

The night he returned from Philadelphia and all the next day, Michael thought about the man on the train. Not naked, however. He was too nervous for that. He thought about not calling the man, but things left unfinished were harder to forget. He considered throwing away the man’s telephone number, but it was written on an important page of notes and Michael hated to mar his notebook by tearing off a corner of paper. And he actually wanted to see this Clarence Laird again. The man was a nice guy, could talk to someone younger without condescension, knew things Michael felt he should learn—cultural things. So what if the man were gay? So what if he made a pass? If he made a pass, if he actually made Michael do things with him, it might cure Michael for good of his morbid thoughts. There had been black moods when Michael worried himself with the idea he had come to New York mainly to find someone to do that to him. Michael was only nineteen. The discovery that his imagination and emotions seemed to have a life of their own sometimes struck him as evidence of insanity.

He telephoned Clarence on Monday night, gave his name—he had never mentioned it on the train—and said he wanted to see that movie, whose title he had forgotten. It was being shown the following Sunday, and Michael spent the rest of the week changing his mind and making it up again until the overcast afternoon when he walked twenty blocks down Broadway to the Thalia.

(“Much to my surprise,” Clarence told Ben over the phone, “Amtrak Junior called. I think he’s the type who expects to be seduced, so he won’t feel responsible. But I don’t have the energy to play that game these days, not with so much else on my mind. Or the interest. He’s way too young. Well, I’m not counting on anything. I was going to the movie anyway.”)

The man was waiting for Michael beneath a shabby, small-town movie marquee. Michael was surprised the man was the same height as he was. He’d imagined him to be taller, just because he was older, but they’d been sitting the whole time they met. The man looked disappointingly normal and unphysical, like a college teacher, nothing like the dangerously physical presence Michael had been imagining all week. He had not dressed up for their meeting but must have shaved, because there was still a dab of shaving cream on his left earlobe, like a pearl earring. Exchanging hellos and pleasantries outside the theater, Michael had to fight an impulse to reach out and wipe the man’s ear.

“Seeing this with someone who’s seeing it for the first time is almost as good as seeing it for the first time yourself,” said the man as they stepped inside and sat in the smoking section. He talked about nothing but the movie, telling Michael about the director, how young the director had been when he made it, warning Michael that the movie had an extremely tricky flashback structure.

“I’m sure I’ll be able to handle it,” Michael said.

The movie began, and Michael was surprised the man had not warned him it had subtitles. He tried to get used to that, tried to concentrate on the movie, but although it seemed as beautiful as the man said it was—the camera moving in weird, noticeable ways—things flashbacked all over the place and Michael became lost, uninvolved enough to be conscious of the man’s knee beside his. Their knees brushed, once. Nevertheless, the man looked as utterly absorbed in the movie as he’d been in
Hansel and Gretel
on the train. It was as though they were still on the train, only now the scenery was in front of them.

Ladies with parasols looked on while a gang of boys humiliated a pale boy in a sailor outfit, jeering at him and pulling his pants down. Michael responded to that. Then the boy went off with a uniformed chauffeur, who showed sympathy for the boy, took him to an enormous deserted mansion, lured him to his quarters, and threw him on the bed.
This
was why the man had lured him here, Michael decided. He watched excitedly. The boy seemed to want something to happen. He ran his hands through the man’s shoulder-length hair. The movie flashbacked somewhere else, and when it got back to the boy and chauffeur, something must have already happened, because the boy grabbed the pistol the chauffeur had shown him and started firing wildly around the room, killing the chauffeur, then fleeing.

The movie settled down and became easier to follow—a secret agent and his wife in Paris—but Michael watched it in a daze, still haunted by the boy and the chauffeur, until the final scene, when a dark curly-haired young man lay bare-bottomed on a bed in an alley, watched by the secret agent through iron bars.

When the lights came up, the man was sunk back in his chair and grinning at the ceiling. “It never ceases to amaze me,” the man murmured. “And I’ve seen it at least twenty times. You want to come back to earth with a drink somewhere?”

Michael nodded and followed the man out to the street, wondering if they’d seen the same movie. It had affected Michael, but more like a bad dream than a movie, a disturbing dream that might have seemed sexual except that nothing like intercourse had been involved. He pushed aside his confused excitement by dwelling on questions of fact: had the man behind bars already had sex with the naked guy or was he only considering it?

“Anywhere you’d like to go?” the man asked outside. “There’s a bar nearby, or, if you’d just like beer, my apartment’s only a few blocks from here.”

“Beer’d be fine,” said Michael, telling himself he accepted the man’s invitation only because he couldn’t afford to go to a bar.

But the man—Clarence—did not seem especially excited Michael was coming home with him. He resumed talking about the movie, asking Michael what he thought of this or that, genuinely curious about what Michael understood and what had escaped him. He brought up the ambiguous ending himself, but the mystery for him was what it meant, not what had happened. “I’ve got this friend who’s a film critic who thinks it’s an anti-gay script that accidentally became homoerotic when they were filming it, that Marcello is supposed to be another evil homosexual. He thinks the director was concentrating so hard on making each shot beautiful he didn’t realize what he was doing. My friend thinks it’s all gorgeously photographed claptrap, but that’s just Jack. Who doesn’t trust anything that can’t be put into words.”

It was the man’s first mention of homosexuality, safely buried inside the mention of a friend who was a film critic. Michael pictured someone like Siskel and Ebert and was impressed. He expected the man to use the movie to talk about homosexuality, to make a pass at Michael, but the man began to talk about the poetics of editing against camera movement, whatever that meant, and sex became just a vague threat again.

The man took him to an enormous, old apartment building over toward the river. There was no doorman. Riding up in the elevator, Michael needed to make conversation.

“You know so much about movies,” he told the man, “you should be a director.”

The man smiled. “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

Even as a joke, it was odd to hear an adult say that.

The man unlocked a door at the end of a hall and led Michael into a darker hallway. He turned on lights. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“My family wants me to be a doctor.”

The apartment was so big Michael wondered if the man were rich or maybe famous. But nobody famous would ride Amtrak, and the ill-assorted pieces of old and new furniture did not suggest money. Michael wandered deeper into the apartment while the man went into the kitchen to get beers. In an alcove at the far end of the living room was a wall covered with squares of paper. They were sketches laid out like the panels of a comic book, just the outlines of figures but very clean and precise. The first panels bore words: “Last Week at the A&P” and “A Film by Clarence Laird.”

“Just something silly I’m working on,” said a voice over Michael’s shoulder. “Uh, I was wrong about the beer. There isn’t any.”

He felt the man standing very close behind him. Michael did not step away or turn around. Without thinking, he relaxed his body when the man embraced him from behind, as if his body were relieved to have something to lean against.

A friendly pair of hands touched Michael’s front. Michael put his own hands over them, intending to stop the man before he went too far. But he liked the feel of other knuckles and fingers in his hands.

“Well, enough about movies,” whispered Clarence.

It was not yet nine o’clock when Michael left. Unlike the movie, he did not shoot Clarence afterward. He did not really feel like shooting Clarence. It had not been as awful or obscene or even as strange as Michael had imagined. He never wanted to do it again, but it had been interesting to be touched, different to be in bed with another body, exciting to have someone do to him what Michael always had to do for himself, until it was over. Michael walked back uptown to his dorm, immediately took a shower, and sat at his desk to study his chemistry. The phone number in the notebook no longer bothered him now that the business was finished.