Like People in History (30 page)

Out of which I was elected to help him rise.

Was I being naive in considering him for the job? Foolishly indulgent? Sure, a little of both. Magnanimous too. But I thought practical too. I'd begun studying Taoist philosophy and using
I Ching
by then, and all the signs seemed to point clearly toward Alistair joining me. Besides which, I needed an ally at the shop, someone to watch my back should things get hairy.

So I hired him to run the art gallery.

And this was where we were six months later: Alistair in league with the Genoan Goose and Fatuous Faunce. Not against me, but not quite with me.

The three had stopped to confab on the step leading down from the gallery to the balcony opposite. The Asian women turned and looked at them, then quickly away, probably because of how good-looking two of the men were—not Faunce, he's a dog! Monika, meanwhile, had moved to the little table and begun wrapping the bibelots. I could see she'd phoned some credit card operator—doubtless American Express—for approval on the sale. She saw the three men and began to blush even more. I'd heard gossip around the shop to the effect that she'd at one time conceived the hots for our boss. In response to her blushing and sudden awkwardness, the two Japanese women snuck looks behind her, whispered behind big sleeves, and giggled, causing poor Monika even more consternation. On the other side of where the three men stood, Justin in the record department balcony changed the music from Rimsky to a guitar quintet by Boccherini—the Goose's theory was that the seriousness of the music was inversely proportionate to sales—and was writing up sales for the Scandinavian discophiles.

I gathered together the art book catalogs and paper-clipped a note to them reading, "Holly! Help!" She'd know what I meant.

I pulled on my jacket, straightened my tie, checked my shoes to make sure they looked vaguely polished, checked my face in the compact mirror the women kept in my desk drawer to check makeup, and strode off, headed toward the three conspirators by way of Monika and the Edo darlings.

Halfway across the walkway, I stopped to look down and inspect the first floor of the shop, most of it visible from here. I checked the front cashier and saw that no obvious disaster had befallen while I'd been at my balcony desk. I contented myself that no browsers looked like thieves, and that Thea and Katja had seen me and broken up their gossip fest. I didn't see Andre, but I intuited that he was among his beloved French books. I moved on.

And stopped again. There, below me, not twenty feet away, in the poetry section, holding a book in one large outstretched hand, while he turned a page with the other was—I would have sworn it—the Archangel Ariel himself, his wings folded up, hidden away somehow in a U.S. sailor's eyebright middy and thirteen-button "broad-fall" flap-front trousers.

In an unexpected dimensional shift, his eyes moved to the other page, tilting his head suddenly in another direction, and now I could see the single huge black curl falling across his Alcibiadean brow, the total roundness of those large dark eyes, every tanned plane of that amazing head.

I felt a sudden burning in my breast and recalled that St. Theresa of Avila had written of being struck in the heart by the blazing dart of Divine Love, and the paradox of enduring such Sweet Agony. So shocked, I had to lean against the walkway railing.

The sailor must have caught my sudden motion in his peripheral vision: he looked up suddenly, and dimensions shifted again. His direct gaze was so intense it was as though someone had suddenly pulled the blazing dart down through my torso and out of me again via my urethra.

My head spun, but I managed to get to the far wall, where I found a seat and dropped my head between my knees, glimpsing Daliesque visions of his individual facial features as they fled and cavorted and chased one another through a Palladian cathedral of pastel-hued clouds.

"You okay?" It was Monika.,

I was able to look up without feeling total nausea, so I sent her back to her customers.

"They're gone. We were done," she protested.

I still shooed her away. Alistair took her place.

"That time of month?"

"Go away. Fuck off. Die," I said with no emotion.

"You'd recover in a second if you knew what Fate just dropped onto the floor of the shop. Down in poetry. The. Most. Beautiful. Young. Man. A sailor... You've seen him!" Alistair suddenly said, intuiting something. "In fact, if I'm not completely gaga..."

"You are! Completely gaga!"

"...said lovely is the cause of this sudden attack." •

"Lunch," I corrected. "A touch of food poisoning."

"...said Heloise to Abelard. If I were you—and to quote Tom Eyen: 'Who of us is not each other?'—I'd go after that sailor. Or I
will go
after that sailor."

"At your own risk," I threatened.

"All I know is that life would be too unfair if he managed to escape two perfectly good queers without being in some way molested," Alistair said.

"I have a meeting with Pierluigi."

"I'll stall him. C'mon!" Alistair urged. "Up and at the lad."

"What if he's not..."

"I'll tell Pierluigi you went to the boys' room." Alistair was pushing me toward the stairway. "Go! Will you!"

I managed to stumble down the stairs to the main floor, hid myself under the edge of the balcony, where Alistair had returned to Faunce and the Goose, fooled around straightening out a volume or two here and there among the gardening books and something new on bargello, and sort of wandered nearer the sailor, half circling him all the while, ready to flee at the slightest sign of disinterest.

From this close, he was taller than I'd expected. Six feet, almost six one. Big shoulders. Incredible deltoids, biceps, buttocks, and thighs outlined and simultaneously gripped by the tight cut of his sailor suit. I found myself thinking that the term "animal grace" had been coined just for him. He was still holding the book in his hands, reading it. I tried to make out the cover and thought it might be a recent anthology of poetry. He shifted his pose in place, and it was like continents gliding across the surface of the planet—and that Michelangelesque face!

Just as I was thinking I can't possibly do this, he peeked over the top of the book at me. Almost inhumanly silver-hued eyes set in a bed of black lashes.

"Hi," I said, held my breath, and moved to one side of him, adjusting various books on display that didn't at all need adjusting.

He half smiled. Surprisingly small teeth. Was about to say something.

"You're fine where you are," I said, about to pass by. Understatement of the century.

He put down the book. It
was
the anthology.

"I should probably buy this," he said in an even-toned baritone. "And not just stand here reading it all." No accent at all. Certainly not from the West or South. Yet not from the Bay Area.

"No problem," I said, trying to move away, yet magnetically held by his field of attraction. At that moment, I realized I would have said 'no problem' if he'd demanded to remain where he was and behead passing customers. Then, in a flash of unexpected poise, I added, regarding the book he'd been perusing, "It's supposed to be a good sampling."

"Is it?" he asked, so intensely naive and questioning I stopped about a tenth of my fidgeting.

"It's supposed to be better than the
Oxford Book of American Poetry.
Of course this one has English poets too."

"What about this Auden? He considered English or American?"

He held out the book, and I saw the lines "Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm."

I must have blushed, because he said, "What?" and pulled back the book and read the page. And half snorted a laugh. "That one's pretty good. But I like this one better." He showed me "Fish in the unruffled lakes." "You?"

"'Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle...'" I quoted the title from memory.

"'Upon what man it fall/In spring,'" he continued. "Yeah, I like that one too. You don't think it's strange?

"I always thought that particular poem very strange. For example, here," nervously pointing, and now so close I felt sea-deep within his ambience, his smell like toasted wheat bread that's not yet cooled, "in the second stanza, where he writes about dreaming of going home and kissing his wife under a sheet, then instead he wakes and sees 'Bird-flock nameless to him; through doorway voices/Of new men making another love'..."

"Oh!" I suddenly said aloud. I'd for the first time realized what Auden must have meant with those phrases. "Oh, he must mean..." I stopped myself and began to blush. Gays, Auden must have meant, I thought but didn't say. "New men making another love." Opposed to a wife. What else could it mean?

"Mean what?" the sailor asked and read aloud. "'...new men making another love.'"

He looked up, those remarkable huge, pale, silver-gray eyes so extravagantly set in dark, long, curled lashes, and seeing me red-faced, he too must have suddenly realized the words' import, since he too began to color.

Which meant that against all expectations, all possibilities, all percentages, all fears of it not being so, the sailor
must
be gay too!

I couldn't believe it. I almost levitated off the imported Albanian rose-red marble floor.

In that moment I felt us connect. It was as if a double-sided grappling hook had suddenly been flung and caught under each of our sternums, grasping tight into bone, biting deep into vital organs.

I calmed down a bit. The rest of the conversation was carried on in bits and pieces, as I continued to more slowly orbit him, still straightening out displays and "point of purchase" areas.

He remained where he was, slowly revolving to face me, a rotating star to my ellipsis of erratic wandering. He closed the book and held it close to his side as he answered my questions, telling me he was on a sort of leave, staying in the Presidio while he visited San Francisco. He'd spent most of the past year in the South China Sea and around the Mekong Delta as a gunner's mate on board a destroyer, "assisting friendly fire further inland," he said enigmatically. He'd also seen some "land-based action," he said. (I trembled to think he might have been killed.) He'd had two "tours" of active duty, he said, but had only another few weeks left, and he wasn't sure whether he'd "re-up" or not. He'd sort of liked being in the Navy, as it gave him plenty of time to be alone and to think and to read and write poetry. He wrote poetry, he repeated twice, though he'd never revealed that to anyone else on board ship. He'd asked to come to the Bay Area to be demobilized, because he'd never been here before and thought maybe he might want to live here once he got out of the Navy—that is if he didn't re-up. He originally came from the East, he said. His folks lived in Westchester County, though he didn't say where exactly. He was an only child. His name was Matthew Loguidice, which he pronounced "Load-your-dice," which he said was a Sicilian name. He was half-Italian, half-Finnish.

Meanwhile I told him a few things about myself, including that I read—but didn't write—poetry and had studied it in college and wouldlike to see his poems (he demurred) and that I got off work in about an hour and would be pleased to talk to him more if he'd join me for dinner; he could stay here or return, I said, nervously doing all kinds of semi-janitorial things within a six-foot radius of his gravitational pull, unwilling to move any farther away lest he vanish into thin air, unwilling to leave the spot until he'd agreed to everything I'd suggested, well, everything I'd suggested aloud at least. Then I suggested one more thing: he could take the poetry book and wait upstairs in the art gallery, where there were chairs, till I got off work—in a half hour.

Matthew said that sounded like a good idea, as he'd been on his feet all day and was a little worn out from sight-seeing in the city, which, required a good deal of shoe leather. He thanked me, and our eyes connected very hard and my chest tightened suddenly. I had to force myself to look away.

As he went up one way, my boss, Faunce, and Alistair came down another.

"Don't you look like you were struck by a semi," Alistair commented.

"Do I? We have a dinner date. After my meeting with Pierluigi."

Alistair followed my eyes, following Matthew going upstairs.

"With Apollo himself? How could you?"

"But Alistair! You insisted."

"I never dreamed you'd actually do it."

"Well, I did."

"Or that he'd agree." Alistair bit his lip, looking up at the record department, where Matthew had stopped. "For a supposedly shy little thing, you certainly... I can't believe your nerve! How could you bring yourself to speak to him?"

"Sheer fucking terror!" And explained, "Terror he'd get away. Terror I'd never see him again."

"It seems to have paid off," Alistair admitted sourly. "Dinner?"

"Dinner," I replied.

"Who's paying?"

"We didn't discuss that. I assume it's Dutch treat."

"Don't assume too much with types like that." Alistair tapped the sentence out on my jacket lapel. "They're used to being treated."

"You'd know from your tons of experience with Trade," I sneered.

Alistair was about to say something else, then stopped himself just in time to half smile at our boss, who'd reached the main floor of the shop and was busily brushing off Faunce about something.

Pierluigi gazed around the store, giving it the once-over, then addressed me. "Mees-ter Sannns-arcc! We have a meeting."

"I'm ready when you are,"

"My office!" he decreed and headed for the elevator. Alistair and Faunce said good-bye and left the store the other way, doubtless headed out to dinner with Mrs. Faunce, to hatch who knew what new conspiracies.

As Pierluigi and I ascended past the mezzanine art gallery, I briefly saw, through the little octagonal window, Matthew's head—as though in a cinquecento tondo—turned in profile as he stared at an Erté print.

I thought, God, if he's still here when I return, I'll never say a bad word again in my life. Never! I promise!