Like People in History (22 page)

I could see Julian, who'd cornered two people between the dining room and kitchen, talking to them with that rapid, staccato movement of lips and head which I'd by now come to recognize as Stage Two: "I've got them hooked; now what exactly do I
want
with them?"

"So does this mean...?" Alistair didn't know how to ask it. "I must sound like Suzy or Cholly Knickerbocker. But are you two splitting up?"

"I'm awfully fond of Julian," I began. "Grateful too. For everything!" I tried to encompass in a single word how much of my life had altered since meeting the rock star.

How explain how
much
it had changed? Outwardly, the only real changes were in my hours and in my associates. I still officially resided in four tiny rooms on the first floor of a West Village tenement. I still officially worked for the same textbook publisher as before. True, I was seldom home anymore except to change clothing or to pick up my mail. My real residence seemed to be one hotel suite or another: the Sherry in New York, the Biltmore in L.A. since we'd been eighty-sixed from the cottage at the Beverly Hills. Sometimes I thought I really spent the greatest amount of my time in an airplane seat flying between places. As for work, when I did arrive at the twenty-sixth-floor office—which was no more than one or at most two days per week, between Julian and the band's gigs—I seldom remained more than a few hours. What was odder was that that was okay too. I still hadn't gotten over how Frank Kovacs—that jerk among jerks—had taken me aside one afternoon and asked, "Is it true about Julian Gwynne?"

He had this stricken look on his face: I was about to reveal his hero as a major queer.

"Is what true?" What had Maria and Debbie told everyone?

"You know, that you're with him whenever you're not here?"

I thought, okay, here goes, I'm about to be fired for being a fag. But the up side was that I didn't need money, and I'd probably be able to collect unemployment insurance.

"It's true. I travel with him and the hand wherever they go," I said.

Kovacs all but gushed. "I think Gwynne's the best ever. Even better than Clapton," he said with the sober tone in which people announce deaths and circumcisions. "Don't worry. I'll cover for you. Just keep Gwynne happy and make sure he keeps playing."

It was those words that best explained the way in which my life had changed. I was surrounded by, covered with, drenched in, unable to free myself from the enormous attentions and totally demanding needs of Julian Gwynne's larger-than-life ego.

"I think I understand your problem," Alistair said. He'd known Julian longer than I: surely, he ought to understand. "But you know," Alistair added darkly, "maybe the problem isn't Julian. Maybe it's..."

"What?"

"You know, being gay."

"Imagine a little thing like that crossing your mind."

"Well, you
have
been sitting on the fence about your sexuality for years."

"Who? Me? Are you kidding? I've done everything I could to get a girl."

"Please! Girls are a dime a dozen. I have to fight them off and I'm as fly as Oscar Wilde."

"Maybe that's because you have something they want? A name. Money. Where I have jack shit."

"I'm sorry. I've seen far sorrier specimens than you, dear Cuz, have babes lined up." He paused. "The thing is, even the dumbest woman has good intuition. And if their radar reads you're not sure what you want, they generally keep away, in droves." He moderated that. "C'mon, it's not
that bad
being a homo. I've not found it's limited me very much.

And since you're so anti-establishment and all, I would think it adds another feather in your cap. Wear your hair long. Smoke dope. Be against the war. Sixty-nine with a guy. Could you possibly be
more
anti-American if you tried?"

"Maybe." I moped. "But this may only be a phase," I argued, and when the look on his face demanded a response, I added, "I mean, I haven't yet
decided
whether this is it or not. I might still want to go out with women. I might! There are plenty of bisexuals, you know. Guys who date women and men."

"Fine!" Alistair said. "Do your own thing, man! But let me just give you a tip. I'd save that kind of bullshit for your mom and dad. What? They know?"

"My sister was talking about Julian and Dad said, 'Sounds like some commie-fag to me.' He was half baiting her, of course, but he wanted to say exactly that. So I said, 'He
is
a commie-fag. And so am I!'"

This event had only gone down a few days before our penthouse terrace conversation, and I vividly related the scene to Alistair, setting him inside that Long Island dining room he recalled from his youth, with the same relatives—older if not wiser—he well remembered.

"What did he say to that?" Alistair asked.

"Well, after he was done choking on his lamb, my mom said something like 'Serves you right, Richard, for baiting your son like that.' "

"She didn't believe you!" Alistair said.

"Not then, she didn't. Not till I began complaining about the bed Julian and I shared in the Drake when we were in Frisco. She got sort of white-faced, then pulled herself together and changed the subject. My sister's husband kept his head down and went on eating and eating."

"Imagine if they knew
I'd
engineered the affair," Alistair mused.

"They wouldn't believe it. You're still a good little boy to them," I said. "Anyway, you overestimate your role." As usual, I thought.

"You'll admit I was crucial?"

"Once you saw me, sure! You're hardly why I was at Woodstock."

"I might have assumed you'd be there. Everyone of a certain age between Maine and Virginia was."

"Well, no matter who arranged it, or even what happens to Julian and me, I'll always thank him for bringing you and me together again."

I meant it. Because in fact Alistair Dodge now was the changed person my mother had promised he'd be at sixteen—when he hadn't been. I didn't fool myself into believing that it was Love and Peace and drugs that had done the trick. Maybe what had finally calmed Alistair and allowed him to be himself—charming, bright, and funny—was simply success, and that he needn't ever have to worry about money again. Whatever was responsible, I only discovered it with many hesitations and reluctances during late summer and early autumn, as Julian courted me, and only because Julian's ego required that anyone he love in turn love everything and everyone else Julian loved—which happened to include Alistair.

"He did bring us together," Alistair agreed. "Last time... I didn't think you'd... I sent Julian to do my dirty work. I knew he wouldn't take no for an answer."

The French doors onto the terrace opened, and someone peered at us.

"C'mon out!" Alistair said. "Plenty of room."

Three new guests had arrived. Alistair rose to greet them and show them around. I heard him call the houseboy. "Kenny? Are you alive?" Getting no response, he went indoors with one of the three young men.

As the door opened wider, I heard the Chambers Brothers chanting "Time" again and again over a ragalike bass guitar drone. I smelled a new brand of grass at the same time the two newcomers drifted across the terrace and offered me a hit. I offered them a seat. There followed the usual chat about how spacious the terrace was and how stupendous the view: it encompassed the West Village, the lower Hudson River right to the Statue of Liberty. A graceful arc of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge glittered in the distance.

When we stood up for me to point out more specific views, I confirmed that the young man not doing the talking was by far the more interesting-looking of the two. Unlike most people I now associated with, his hair—so black that like Clark Kent's in the comics it was blue—wasn't halfway down his back, but straight, in a natural-looking Beatles bowl cut. In contrast—and when I saw him by electric light and later in daylight this was even more striking—his skin was quite pale, ivory-white, as though he'd managed to avoid the entire recent summer. His eyes were another contrast: coal-black, lavishly lashed, probing, and restless.

I thought his face almost too perfectly featured—small nose, fine lips, cleft chin, deep little dimples—and from what I could see of his body in his black corduroys and short-sleeved chambray shirt, it also seemed petitely if perfectly proportioned. He looked as though he'd been drawn to model for a children's book, stories by the Brothers Grimm, say—except for those eyes: they smoldered like banked fires.

"Cord Shay," he introduced himself. The other was Christopher something or other. Their friend, Alan, now joined us. He carried the bong, newly filled with strong, sweet Michoacán grass, which Cord lighted.

"Know who's inside!" Alan gushed.

"I saw!" Cord said, a hint of sourness in his voice.

"Julian Gwynne," Alan went on, "from -----," naming the band.

"I saw!" Cord repeated. "And I chose to come out here."

"Don't you like Gwynne?" I asked. If not, it would be a novelty.

"Never met him. Never want to," Cord added.

His sentences were like that: short, declarative, final somehow. When he looked at you, it was off to one side—not far, an inch—a fast glance; instant assessments seemed to be his metier.

"You know Gwynne well?" Christopher asked.

"Not well. We fuck," I said in the most casual way I knew how and reached for the bong from Alan, who'd begun choking on what he'd inhaled—I hoped because of what I'd just said. Over the top of the water pipe's mouthpiece, I saw Cord Shay stare at me. Did he believe me?

''How do you know Alistair?" Alan asked. I think he was expecting me to say we fucked too.

He was amazed when I said we were related, had known each other since we were boys.

Alistair chose that moment to come onto the terrace, check the bong, add grass, take a hit, pass it around. Inside, the music was the Turtles.

"Uh-oh!" I said. "Who put
that
on?"

"Take it
off!
"Alistair rushed in as we heard the record loudly scraped off the turntable. It was replaced by Dr. John's
Gris-Gris.

"Julian lets everyone know his taste in music," I explained.

"Another reason to...," Cord mumbled. "All stars... selfish!"

"We are all selfish," I said. "Some of us merely have more reason to be."

Cord shrugged and to my surprise allowed himself to be led inside by his friends. I almost joined them, eager to see whether he would change his tune once he was face-to-face with an actual rock star. My guess was he wouldn't. Even though I hoped he would. I remained outside, alone with the night.

I was wondering how to break off with Julian. He'd begun to intuit that—to see he'd been the way in for me to begin to acknowledge my interest in men as sexual/romantic objects—and also to intuit that he was losing me, and to my annoyed surprise, he'd begun to hold onto me all the tighter. It was all ego, I knew. He'd be just as happy to move on to fresh pastures—if only he could dump me first. But it was his very ego that I wanted to get away from.

I'd hoped Alistair would help with my Julian problem, but his willingness to talk about everything
but
when I'd brought it up was so strong, I suspected he'd be useless. Why? Because he was in the middle, naturally. But was that really the only answer? Might he be romantically interested in Julian? He seemed to me to be quite the most eligible young gay bachelor in town, yet despite all the guys around him, Alistair still remained strangely unattached.

I tried patching together bits and pieces of what my second cousin had told me about his life since we'd last seen each other, hoping to discover some telling pattern in the mosaic. Alistair had graduated private school at seventeen, not brilliantly, but not badly either. He'd attended UCLA at Westwood—more or less in his neighborhood—for two years. When the real estate development sold, he'd moved up to Palo Alto and Stanford. He'd taken a variety of business and prelaw courses, and again he'd done well if not brilliantly. He'd connected up with kids from affluent families and managed to get involved in another real estate project, in Fairfax, a "burgeoning" Bay Area suburb, north of San Francisco.

Alistair made Russian Hill his home when he got out of college. By then Diana and Albert had married and divorced, then gone their own ways: Albert up to Anchorage, Diana with a new man to Hancock Park—old L.A. money! Alistair took up with a well-off gay group on the Hill. He had one boyfriend, Michael Someone or Other from that set, and they went into business together, again in real estate, down the coast at Santa Clara, where the growing university brought a need forprofessional housing. Even though Alistair and Michael broke up; they still spoke often, since the project was incomplete. Figuring backward, I calculated that must have been when Alistair first met Julian Gwynne. From what I knew, they'd had a brief affair and been friends the entire past year. Which of them had done the breaking up?

"He's asking for you." Alistair meant Julian.

"In a sec. Tell me about the dark intense one."

"Cord Shay? Completely edible, isn't he?"

"Just spit out the toes and fingernails! Is he a homo?"

"Who knows?" Alistair shrugged. "I know he and Alan are thick in the draft resistance movement. Not SDS but some initials like that."

"Sounds 'Very Serious Indeed!' They one of your charities?"

"I guess. Alan wanted me to go to a cell meeting. Could you picture me with all those lean, ultra-macho guys who wear
plastique
taped around their nuts?" Alistair asked. "All I could think was, Whatever will I
wear?
And then, What if one of them
calls
on me?"

We laughed.

"Cord is advocating the overthrow of the universe?" I asked.

"Just the Selective Service."

"I hope it happens soon."

Alistair caught something in my tone of voice: "You're not in danger of being drafted?"

"I'm not? Truth is, I've been 2-A forever, but they must have found out I finally graduated, because last week I received 'Greetings' in the mail, along with two tokens to the board downtown."