I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (12 page)

“It goes back tomorrow,” said Dennis Savage.

“No!”

“It’s too big for you!”

“It makes me look tough!”

It made him look, actually, like a lollipop wearing a teepee. Sensing sympathy for lost causes in Daniel, Little Kiwi turned to him and said, “What do you think?”

Daniel regarded him for a moment, took him by the waist, and said, “I think you’re a very sexy boy.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Little Kiwi, breaking loose. Erotic directness still panics him and even jumbles his syntax. He has a way to go yet. But he is picking up defenses here and there: grabbing his detecting glass, he held it up to Daniel’s nose and faced him down till he laughed.

“A likely story,” Little Kiwi repeated triumphantly.

“How does it feel having your own detective on the premises?” Carlo asked Dennis Savage.

“Not to mention the writer downstairs?” Dennis Savage replied.

“Or the schoolteacher up,” I added. “Though he mentions it seldom.”

“And me,” said Little Kiwi, “Inspector Wilberforce. Plus the canine wonder with a mystic alias never yet revealed.”

“The canine wonder?” said Daniel.

“He’s hiding under the couch because he ate too many Oysterettes. Daniel, what do you do?”

Daniel smiled, friendly but firm. “That’s a secret.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“From Carlo, too?”

Carlo looked baffled. Of course he hadn’t yet thought to ask what Daniel did for toil. A job is an obstacle, something that precludes pleasure, like a dentist appointment or going home at Thanksgiving. You wouldn’t ask about it. But who would bother to keep it a secret?

“Why can’t you tell me?” Carlo asked Daniel.

“Because I can’t.”

Carlo said, “All right,” but he looked as if he wasn’t sure it was.

*   *   *

“What do you think of Daniel now?” was the question of the month, as more and more of him showed. I thought he was generous, because he took us all out to dinner; and appreciative, as long as no one attacked the United States or the flag; and hard-headed, when he ran into anything that unreasonably barred his path. Little Kiwi adored him; Dennis Savage regarded him wryly. “He’s too wonderful,” he said. “There’s got to be a flaw, some terrible hidden thing. No one’s that…”

“Yes?”

He shrugged.

“No, go on,” I urged. “Finish the thought and reveal one of your own bitter doubts. Criticism of wonderful men usually does.”

“That strong, I was going to say. Is that so revealing, you human bedpan? And while we’re at it, what did you mean when you said I seldom mention teaching?”

“Have you been stewing about that all this time? In fact, you never mention teaching at all.”

“No one wants to hear about it.”

“Most people talk about their work.”

“Fascinating. Shall we call Little Kiwi in to tell us about life in the mail room at BBDO?”

In the succeeding silence, I was thinking that I for one talk ceaselessly about writing, my own and others’; it had never occurred to me that anyone worth talking to wouldn’t find it enticing. Writing is the world entire: morals, politics, death, and feelings.

Dennis Savage looked away. Was he thinking that a man of education ought to do better in a lover than a mail room assistant? I was. But then I have seen him, over the years, crying, sick, nude, drunk, and raging in despair, so he has long since given up worrying about what I think. I suppose I resent that; but someone who worries about how you feel can be forgiven a lot.

“You know,” I said, as carelessly as I dared, “I wouldn’t mind hearing about teaching every now and then.”

He took a while to respond. “Everyone has flaws. So no one is perfectly suited to anyone else.”

“Is that Chatty Cock’s wisdom or yours?”

“My wisdom for today is: Not being able to tell your lover what you do in the daytime is
molto
strange.”

Carlo thought so, too, which was even stranger. “What could be so terrible,” he worried, “that he can’t let me in on it?” As so often, Carlo was living on unemployment insurance and had plenty of time for visiting. Most days, by my six o’clock break, if Carlo wasn’t at my place I could go upstairs and find him at Dennis Savage’s playing Guess Daniel Johnson’s Profession.

“Maybe he’s rich,” said Little Kiwi, taking out his wallet and admiring, as he continually did that month, his first bank plastic, with a credit limit of something like eight dollars. “He’s rich, see, but he wants you to like him for himself. That’s what his secret is.”

“He can’t be rich,” said Carlo. “He lives in Brooklyn.”

“Maybe he owns a house there.”

“Rich people don’t own houses in Brooklyn,” said Dennis Savage. “Rich people own Brooklyn.”

“Have you ever seen where he lives?” Little Kiwi asked Carlo.

“No…”

Little Kiwi beamed. “Inspector Wilberforce rides again.”

“Maybe he’s a hit man,” I suggested.

“Never,” said Little Kiwi. “He’s too nice.”

“Hit men can be nice.”

“Not,” said Carlo, pensively, “to the people they hit.”

Dennis Savage looked at him.

I looked at him.

Little Kiwi saw something going on and he looked, too.

“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” said Carlo. He said it too fervently, so we all leaned in for more.

“It’s … no. Believe me. I was just thinking aloud. I didn’t mean anything.”

“You never truly know a man till you know what he does in bed,” said Dennis Savage. “You know, Carlo. So tell us and we’ll decide.”

“It’s not what you think,” Carlo insisted.

“What do we think?”

“This is too deep. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What do we think?” said Little Kiwi, baffled. He turned to Carlo. “Does he hit you? In
bed?
”

“You know him, Carlo,” I said. “For good or ill, you know him. And it’s for good, right? What difference does it make what he does for a living?”

“I should have known you’d take the fascist’s side,” said Dennis Savage.

“I’m taking Chatty Cock’s side, in fact.”

“Does Daniel hit Carlo?” Little Kiwi repeated. “Because he was naughty, or what?”

Carlo, who spent his twenties in San Francisco exploring some of the culture’s heaviest scenes, said, “Little Kiwi, someday I will sit you down and tell you about dangerous men.”

“Daniel is dangerous?” Little Kiwi asked. “He gave me a piggyback ride on Hudson Street!”

“Inspector,” I said, “I think this particular topic is over your head.”

“The Case of the Dangerous Man,” Little Kiwi murmured, amazed.

“I just want to know what he does,” said Carlo. “I just want to know.”

“‘I must see the Things,’” I quoted. “‘I must see the Men.’”

“Who said that?” asked Dennis Savage.

“The crazy part,” Carlo went on, “is I left San Francisco to get away from it. Do you know what I like? After all this? Do you know? I like playful men. Playful and affectionate. The trouble with S and M is that it … it does something. It’s more than sex. It’s like an act you would be hired to do in an after-hours club.”

“It makes a case out of love,” I observed.

Carlo nodded.

“But Daniel
is
playful,” said Little Kiwi.

“You know what?” said Carlo. “Daniel is a lot of things.”

*   *   *

I feel like something of an inspector myself, as I unravel my tales, making cases of everyone I know. As I write, my neighbor across the way is standing in her window with a male friend, pointing at me. “See?” she says, I guess. “There he is again, watching.” Yes, I watch; but not her.

Or yes, sometimes I do, fleetingly. She is very attractive, dresses for power, and constantly changes her clothes: for the office, for dinner, for rendezvous. The man is older than she. When he comes in at night, he wears a lawyer’s suit, but peels down to Oz-green jockey shorts. Once I saw him push her onto the bed, and without anything else to go on—the lights immediately went out—I could not tell whether he was being playful or dangerous.

“We are not alone,” my friend Eric told me once, as we walked up Third Avenue after dinner. “
Everyone
is mad.” Only the truly bizarre is normal in New York, where spiffy men in Lord & Taylor trench coats and bearing haughty attaché cases walk past you carrying on irate conversations with invisible associates. Then I encounter Little Kiwi at the treats section in Sloan’s, looking as wan as Tiny Tim because his favorite flavor of Pop-Tarts—brown sugar–cinnamon—is out of stock. And I think, thank heaven,
someone
is still sane.

We trudge home together past the little kids solemnly pushing their own strollers, and the people with the latest Bloomingdale’s bag, and the dreary hustlers attempting industrial-strength come-hither smiles, and Little Kiwi asks me, “Does Daniel really hit Carlo?”

How do you explain S and M to someone who thinks belts grow on pants? “He doesn’t hit him, exactly. He…” What? “He romanticizes him. He takes him out of the world and engulfs him.”

“With what?”

“Concentration.”

The doorman hands me a messengered package as we turn into our lobby—page proofs of my latest book.

“What’s this one about?” Little Kiwi asks.

“Same as the others. Morals, politics, death, and feelings.”

“No wonder you’re always grouchy.”

Carlo met us at Dennis Savage’s door, in the heat of debate. “Isn’t it a lover’s job,” he asked, “to be honest and true?”

“Now what?” I asked Dennis Savage.

“Tell him, Carlo.”

Carlo threw himself onto the couch as Little Kiwi and I sat with our brown paper grocery bags on our laps. We looked like steerage passengers awaiting our examination at Ellis Island.

“I found a gun in his room,” said Carlo.

“You went to Brooklyn?”

“A gun in a leather holster.”

“Instead of in what, a macramé potholder?”

“A gun in a holster in the top drawer of his bureau!”

“What must he have in his closet?”

“I didn’t get a chance to check the closet. He went to the bathroom and I just had a—”

“With gloves?”
cried Little Kiwi. “So you don’t leave fingerprints? Carlo, can I come with you next time you snoop around in Brooklyn?”

“A man with a gun!” Carlo pleaded. “Don’t you understand? Won’t you please listen?”

Bauhaus, feebly barking, pattered in from the bedroom on the way to his water dish as we contemplated Carlo’s predicament.

“Tell me what to do,” said Carlo.

“Carlo,” I explained, “you are one of the most experienced men in American gay. You helped break styles in in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Factions have formed around you. Bars have mooed in wonder upon your entrance. If James Joyce had known you, Molly Bloom would have been a man. How can anyone tell you what to do in romance?”

Carlo heaved a sigh of profound discontent. “If only I knew what that gun does.”

“I’ll find out!” cried Little Kiwi. “This is a job for Inspector Wilberforce! With his intrepid canine wonder, whose mystic name…”

The canine wonder slunk past us with the biggest dog yummy I’ve ever seen between his teeth.

“What are those?” I asked. “Elephant biscuits?”

“Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage, “I don’t want that dog eating in the bedroom.”

Little Kiwi shrugged. “He likes to dine in utter silence. It’s too noisy in here.”

“I’m going to break it off with him,” said Carlo suddenly. “I mean it.”

“Carlo, if you love him—”

“Love is for twinkies.”

“What?”

“I’m not like you.” He looked at us, all of us, and this time we leaned back and away. “We don’t believe the same things.”

Silence.

“Don’t be sore at me,” he went on. “I’m not saying I’m better than you. I just know about other deals. I don’t make cases out of everything.”

“Deals?” said Dennis Savage. “You think love is a deal?”

“You’re making a case out of Daniel Johnson,” I observed.

Carlo nodded. “Good for me. Because he’s not doing what he’s supposed to do. And I
will
drop him, watch.”

More silence, penetrated by the sounds of distant teeth breaking up a biscuit.

“I have to go,” said Carlo; and he went.

“It isn’t the gun,” said Dennis Savage, after a moment. “Or the mystery job. And Oscar Wilde knows it’s not S and M.”

“Then what?” I asked. “Is Daniel too dangerous for Carlo?”

Dennis Savage slowly shook his head. “There’s a missing piece somewhere.”

“Is it possible,” I asked, “that, for the first time, our Chatty Cock has come face to face with Murder Cock?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. Carlo is smarter than he likes to think he is, and he learns by doing. What has he done for fifteen years? He has made love to men. Men is what he knows, all the kinds. Believe me, Murder Cock and Carlo are graduates of the same school. And so is Daniel Johnson.”

“So what’s the missing piece?”

“I think I know,” said Little Kiwi.

Dennis Savage patted the sofa next to him and Little Kiwi dutifully arrived there.

“No,” Dennis Savage told him. “You don’t know. And if I have any contribution to make, you never will. Okay?”

“For the sake of heuristics, Inspector,” I put in, “what do you think the missing piece is?”

“Love.”

“How so?”

“I don’t think Carlo has ever been in love. You know how I know?”

“How?” asked Dennis Savage, putting an arm around him.

“Because he isn’t afraid of anything.”

“That may well be,” I said. “He has never thought about what it’s like. Right? He just does it.”

“What’s ‘it’?” asked Dennis Savage.

“Love … no, I mean, a lover—
No,
I mean, the Imaginary Lover. One’s concept of what love is supposed to feel like. That’s ‘it.’ And Carlo has no concept. He is his own Imaginary Lover. And you know what I think? I think Daniel wants to be Carlo’s Imaginary Lover, and things are getting hot. Very, unbalanced, true-love hot. And Carlo is uncertain. For the first time in his life.”

No one said anything for a bit. Then, “If I were Carlo,” Little Kiwi observed, “I would be uncertain, too. I might even start being afraid.”