Like People in History (39 page)

Where was Matt?

The children's section had a little leather sofa built into one corner, with a curved indirect lamp mounted above it. That's where Matt sat, reading
Babar & Celeste.

I checked his leg. Nothing special—no cast, no apparent bandages— showed through his trousers. He was wearing Navy dress blues. He looked very big filling up that little sofa.

I wondered how long I might watch him before he noticed me, and in those minutes, I tried to gauge if I really loved him. I would have to love him a great deal, I guessed, enough to put up with a great deal from him, with him, because of him. It wasn't just that I thought him handsome as a god. It wasn't just that he was the best sex I'd ever had. Nor was it that he'd been wounded physically and psychically by the war and so was utterly vulnerable. Not even that he might need substantial help from me in the future. It wasn't that he'd opened up so completely about his Vietnam experiences to me. Or that he was a poet who'd decided not yet to open up his poetry to me.

Yes, it was. It was all that.

It was also that he could sit here quietly, while near chaos whirled above his head, sit here and unself-consciously read a children's book with total concentration, utter absorption in the present.

He looked up. Saw me, began to put the book aside and stand up.

I went to him and kept him from rising. I knelt at his feet and looked up at him. His face was a little drawn. He'd lost some weight. His eyes glowed like polished agates, like those marbles I'd owned and valued so much as a kid and which I'd lost without a jot of regret in a game where honor had been at stake.

"Tell me a story," I begged.

"This story?" He held the book.

"No... this story." I touched his right leg.

He wasn't lame. He was all right. And he was back. I was expecting him to be able to talk about it now. To tell me something good about it.

"It began about six, seven months ago," he began.

I let a beat go by, then asked, "Was that when you were wounded?"

He looked at me suddenly with a momentary flare composed equally of fear and exposure. I thought for a second he would stand up, push past me, and walk out of my life.

He remained where he was and took a deep breath.

"I was bored. I volunteered. It's my own fault. I was tired of being so protected, in the middle of a tin can, firing missiles at people so far away only electronics could see them. I heard of this mission from a few Seals on board I used to smoke weed with. Just a search and recon on shore. It was supposed to be a really minor mission. I pushed for it. They let me go. But it was fucked from the second we pulled out of the water. Frag got me," he said. "Frag from a whirly mine. I was the lucky one. The two guys ahead of me blocked the blast. They ate it whole. There wasn't enough left of them to scoop back into the raft.... We all got decorated!

"It wasn't too bad," Matt said in a curiously even tone. "You know, for me. The pain and all. Except for this one." He guided my hand back to the lightly bandaged deep scar. "The frag there cut my sciatic nerve. That's the nerve that goes up to the spine. They've tried reconnecting it two times now. That's why I was down in the VA in San Diego this time. But it didn't take. I don't have a whole lot of feeling in this foot. I've got to be careful, banging it around and all. No trouble walking because my muscles and bones aren't affected. Yet. But it can get infected easily and I might not know it. Get gangrene. Have to come off. That's what will probably happen to it. Sooner or later.

"Don't do that," Matt said, his arms reaching down to surround me.

"I don't mind it too much! Really I don't! I'm sort of happy not to be so... you know, perfect, anymore. Really I am. It's better this way if I'm going to be a poet. Come on, Rog, you shouldn't... Think of how it coulda been worse.... How it coulda been so much worse! Hey! I've got an idea. I wrote this poem at the hospital while I was on morphine. I'll show it to you. Right now. Okay?"

"Guilty?"
I couldn't believe my ears.

"Bu'chy'are, Blanche! Y'are guilty!" Anatole said in the worst Bette Davis imitation I'd ever heard.

"I know that. But it's the principle of the thing!"

"Give the rhetoric a rest, if you don't mind," Therry Villagro, the ACT UP attorney, said.

"We're on your side," Anatole agreed.

Perhaps I was jumpy because we were sitting in one of the sleaziest offices I'd ever seen. It appeared to belong to some minor functionary connected to the public defender's office, and was reachable only by long, dim, badly painted corridors. Anatole assured me that it was attached to one of the numerous small night courts connected to the Tombs. Although, after the night's activities, I wasn't the cleanest person myself—I'd climbed the side of a building, slid across its filthy roof, been thrown to the ground and frisked—this place disgusted me with its years-old layer of untouched grime, its odor like that of old hamburgers and uncleaned cat boxes, its audible rustle in the wainscoting of what had to be hummingbird-sized roaches—or worse! Anatole sat on newspaper he'd carefully spread on the slatted wooden chair he'd selected. Therry had turned her chair and sat astride it, leaning over the back.

She didn't seem to notice the sanitation problem at all. I wondered, not for the first time tonight, exactly how nearsighted she was.

"Here's the deal," Therry spelled out. "You plead guilty to trespassing, which is a misdemeanor, and you pay the hundred-dollar bond as a fine. The judge drops criminal mischief and endangerment charges and lets you off with time served. Case closed. No one in the city can ever go after you again on this."

"This judge a close personal friend of a sister's ex-boyfriend's mother?" I asked Anatole.

"Better. He's queer."

"And closeted!" Therry said.

"So far!" Anatole said in the man's defense.

"What about the kids?" I nodded toward somewhere within the building. "Junior and James?"

"Same deal for all of you," Therry said.

And when I still demurred, Anatole said, "You can't get better!"

He suddenly sounded as his father must have sounded fifty years ago, selling bolts of material on Orchard Street. I loved him for that.

"What's the problem?" Therry asked.

"Wally! My lover." I explained further: "Lenin in denims."

"It's okay with Wally. We discussed it with him."

"It is?" I was surprised. "Where is he anyway?"

"Sitting in the last row of night court soaking up atmosphere," Anatole said.

"Soaking up years of future indignation is more like it," I said. Indignation that I knew would be expressed at me in weeks to come.

But Wally wasn't in the courtroom when we entered fifteen minutes later. And the judge turned out to be not only queer and closeted but also someone I knew. In fact, over the past twenty years, I'd come across him sooner or later in most if not all the less savory gay male haunts the city had to offer. Not a bad-looking guy, though a little careless of his appearance, he had a face composed of two similar if slightly ill-fitted halves; I'd more than once speculated that his face had been frozen, cracked, and too hastily put back together when he was a boy. One late summer night in 1981, out of a combo of ennui and let's-get-it-over-with-itis, I'd let him suck me off. This had taken place alfresco, between two pizza delivery vans in that little V-shaped parking lot across Hudson Street from a trashy bar named J's, when it was closed and still known by its former appellation: Hell. Ever since that blow job, in those increasingly few times whenever our paths crossed, he and I would silently acknowledge each other, and since it had been a pretty good blow job, I would always wonder whether or not to approach him. Now, on the bench, he looked at me without any sign of recognition. I noted that with age and a general softening of his features, one side of his face had sagged a bit and at last looked even with the other. His fine, longish brown hair was photogenically tinged with gray. His blue eyes—his strongest feature—gazed impassively, judicially, at me. I wondered how much he remembered of me—and how fondly.

Over the next few minutes, while I was before him, we continued to glance at each other in rapid sideways flashes, reminding me of nineteenth-century Spanish women flirting behind black lace fans. Since attorneys between us were doing all the talking, the judge had no reason to address me directly.

Therry had warned that due to the publicity of the case—i.e., my being on TV and what I'd said—the judge might feel the need to make a more public statement than usual about the arrest. I thought not, if he were as closeted as she said he was. And it turned out that if he did have anything to say, he kept it to himself. At the end of arguments, he provided exactly the terms of the deal I'd earlier reluctantly agreed to. Therry said what had to be said, and it was over—I was being moved to another area of the court, a desk where a paper was handed to Therry, then outside to a smaller office, where Anatole stepped forward to present a bail-bond check and clap me on the shoulder.

"Unless you decide to get into the slate business, try to stay off politicians' roofs, okay? Say something for me to Alistair!"

Anatole left before I could ask what exactly I was supposed to say to Alistair. I had to stick around longer to initial papers reassigning the already posted bond, and to hear the D.A.'s assistant whining at Therry Villagro, who seemed to enjoy thoroughly how upset the other woman was.

I was watching the two snipe at each other, when I felt Wally behind me: I knew he was standing there without having to look.

I suspected that a great deal lay in exactly how I acted and reacted during the next minute or so, but knowing that Wally was angry with me—if not exactly why—I wasn't sure exactly how to act or react. If I were too contrite, he'd guess I was faking it and probably blow up. On the other hand, if I were completely uncontrite, he'd have no trouble finding that reason enough to do anything—from making my life miserable in little ways for months to come, to denying me sex, to breaking off our relationship: none of which I particularly wanted. What I needed was to find the perfect balance: an impossible, a Grail-like, search at the best of times in our relationship.

So, without turning around, I reached back a hand and groped his crotch. Not hard—in a friendly, in an almost exploratory, manner.

He didn't jump, he didn't take my hand away, until it became clear even to me that several people in the room had both noticed and were shocked. A clerical person handed me my finished papers, and I grabbed Wally's belt and used my grip on it to pivot myself around and face him.

Looking him in the eyes, I declared, "Free. Free at last! Free at last!" sassily quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., in hopes of amusing Wally. , At the same time, I became aware that every single person in the little side chamber had stopped talking and was now looking at the two of us.

Wally couldn't help but become aware too. He did what he does best: he made a scene. He kissed me squarely on the mouth; he hugged me close.

I tried to respond with passion. But he was having none of that. This wasn't romance, this was a needed public spectacle, to be ended the moment it had achieved its intended effect.

"We'd better go now," Wally said in what Victorian novelists used to call "measured tones." Holding me by the shoulder, he guided me out of the room, past Therry, the openmouthed assistant D.A., past the desk, past everyone.

Out in the corridor, I began to say something, but luckily for me, since it was something stupid anyway, Wally put his hand over my mouth.

We remained silent as we threaded our way through various hallways to an elevator, silent as we waited there, as we descended, as we walked out of a side lobby of the building, silent as we walked out onto the street.

It was quite cool. Behind us, Foley Square with its attendant court buildings was desolate. Only the most perfunctory of night lighting still gilded the lower floors and huge porte cochere of the enormous Municipal Building and the more stately Georgian lines of the Surrogate Courthouse. Peeking out between them, chunks of the Brooklyn Bridge glistened icily in the night. I checked my watch against a building clock hung over the sidewalk: both read 3:37
A.M.

"Now!" Wally suddenly let me go. "We find a taxi to Alistair's."

I wanted exactly that, but first there was Wally and me to deal with.

"Are you sure you don't have something to say first?" I asked.

Meaning, why he was so angry. Now that we were alone, it was even clearer from his regal indifference that Wally was stupendously pissed off.

"Whatever I may or may not have to say, first we do what we agreed to earlier," Wally insisted, with a tight little smile.

This was getting us nowhere fast.

"Wally, do you remember how we met?"

He turned and began to stride into the middle of Lafayette Street: empty, cabless. For that matter, earless.

"It was in the Pines Pantry," I said, following him. "As I was checking out my groceries, I happened to look up and I noticed the two dimples on your naked lower back."