Like People in History (42 page)

"You see, Wally, it's not a matter of competing. You
couldn't
compete with Matt. No one could. He was of another ilk. Of another era. Some people claimed even back then that he
was
that era. I wouldn't
want
you to compete. You're too ... too much Wally for that. Whereas Matt... I sometimes "wonder what Matt was. And I'm the one who knew him best, who was with him at his most human, at his weakest, his most vulnerable!"

You could have driven a truck through the silence that ensued. Hell, you could have driven the entire Indy 500 through it!

I wondered whether I'd made a Major Error. I'd known since earlier in the evening that Wally and I would have to have it out sometime. Had I been wise in laying out my entire hand now? Too late for second-guessing.

I waited for Wally. Behind him I heard a soft hooting sound: an owl. I'd read that the Parks Department had been stocking owls to keep down the wild mice and rat population attracted by human debris. It sounded again, distant and cold and very wild: untamed, untamable. The wind rose and riffled the lake in shirred patterns. Matt would have turned it into a poem. But Matt was dead.

"Well... I asked." Wally's voice sounded hurt.

"Don't take it like that." I was trying to pull him down next to me. "It's ancient history. It's over a decade since Matt and I broke up. What were you doing in 1979? Studying social studies in the fifth grade? Playing with the Donkey Kong computer games? Think, Wals. Think how far away it is. How much has happened since then."

"And you did break up."

Better. Sometimes the tooth had to be pulled lest it forever rot.

"A complete divorce."

"Incompatibility?" Wally asked.

"It's a long story."

"Involving Alistair?"

"Involving a lot of people," I said, too glibly. "Involving Alistair," I admitted.

"Dorky said you two didn't talk to each other for years after." -

"Six!" I admitted. Reminded of Alistair, I stood up and pulled Wally with me. "It's getting late. We'd better go."

As we were climbing the steps out of the fountain plaza, Wally said, "If you're willing to let Alistair die, it's because of what happened then, isn't it? With Matt? In 1979?"

"I don't know. I think I forgave Alistair. I told him I did."

"Because he stole Matt from you?"

"Oh, Wally! It should only be that simple!"

"Well! Tell me!"

We were walking in the middle of the road that led off Seventy-second Street on the East Side, headed west.

"You'd have to know the entire situation! All the shit going on between me and Sydelle and Harte at
Manifest.
What was going on between Patrick and Luis, our housemates at Withering Heights that summer. The way all of us—"

"Withering Heights?"

"That's what our house was called. Partly because while it wasn't much to look at, it was high on a hill. Partly because of us in the house. Matt, of course, was Heathcliff. I was usually Cathy Earnshaw. Marcy and Luis took turns being Nelly, the maid."

I explained further:

"All the houses at the Pines had names in those days. Sometimes the name referred to the building's style—the Kodak Pavilion, because it was shaped like the one at the '64 World's Fair. Or the Ramada Inn, which looked like a motel. Or Lincoln Center. Or the A-House. Sometimes they were named after their owners or whoever lived in them: the

House Bananas Built, owned by a Central American fruit millionaire, Camp Tommy, Wrangler Ranch, Bus-house. Sometimes people put up their own names—the Ogre, Seven Beauties, Tea and Bigamy, Fire Island School of Design, Surfside Six. Sometimes the house was named despite what the owners wanted. It was a small, homogeneous community. Everyone knew or knew about one another. People received nicknames. Mrs. B. was Trude Heller's girlfriend, sometimes called Isadora for how she'd run naked along the surf trailing a gauze scarf. Or Spare Parts. Or Eisenhower or—"

"Manifest
was the magazine you worked for?" Wally asked.

"Actually it was MAN-i-fest, until Sydelle arrived. With an accent on 'Man.' You've seen copies. Remember? I took them out when Martin Landesberger was here from upper Michigan."

Wally recalled. "Did I see
him?"

Meaning Matt.

"You couldn't help but see him then. He was the model for the most popular commercial popper, and Mr. Leather as well as Mr. Gay Northeast and Mr. Gay America several years in a row. His photos were everywhere."

"The clone hunk, right? With the black leather vest and curly black hair and beard!"

"That was Matt."

"I didn't think he was real. I thought he was like a composite or something."

"He was real all right."

Wally was silent for a while. Then he said, "Then you broke up?"

"Finally," I corrected. "We met in July of 1974. There were plenty of trial breakups before that."

"Over other guys?"

"No. Over... I don't know over what. Over Matt being Matt and me being me. I wasn't always like I am now, Wals. I wasn't always cool and laid back and thoughtful and grown-up. I used to be... temperamental... something of a bitch."

"Used to be?" Then before I could punch his arm, he said, "Tell me about it. Tell me all about it."

"You sure?"

"I want to know everything that happened that summer. Everything!"

"In-suf-fic-i-ent Re-sponse from Con-tes-tant Num-berrr Thu-ree!" Patrick said in a most mechanical tone of voice.

"Hold your horses!" I replied. "I'm looking."

"For what?" Luis asked. "The Lindbergh Baby?"

"For something to discard," I said. There wasn't much of anything in my hand. I'd been dealt garbage this time around, which would probably be the final hand in the game. And so far I'd been unable to pick up anything in the least bit interesting. I was so badly off, I was working on a low club run!

"Playing the game of 500 Rummy does
not
require a genius IQ!" Marcy needled me in a put-on snooty tone of voice. "It does, however, require the rudiments of a memory."

"Oh, pul-eeze! I left the rudiments of my memory on the sidewalk in front of Les Mouches in '76, sometime during my four hundredth tab of acid!... I hate my hand," I concluded, throwing down a five of hearts.

Naturally Luis picked up the card, shoving it into his hand and speaking as though continuing a conversation, which he had not in fact been having. "So I says to her, so I says, Ceil, Ceil honey, I know you love your husband. I happen to love a good cigar. But I sometimes take it out!" He laid out a low heart flush, four cards long, in front of himself on the table and discarded a club jack. "Knocking!"

"I'm going
to
knock you," Patrick declared. But I noticed that he quickly enough snapped up the discarded jack.

"So when am I going to see the Incredible Hulk?" Marcy asked. She'd lifted one leg up high and was inspecting her mosquito bites. Her leg was shapely, her skin very pale, but the scratched bites were not a pretty sight.

"You've met him, haven't you?" I asked, using the question to turn the topic back over to Marcy, and thus away from myself temporarily. The last thing I wanted today, the last thing I wanted among these three sharpies, was to give a hint of my currently more than usually addled feelings about my lover.

"Never met him," Marcy said.

"Where
is
that husband of yours, Rog?" Patrick asked. "It's what? Seven-thirty? Tea Dance
must
be over! Especially in this weather!"

"You know how Matt is at Tea," I said, hiding my irritation under an overacted moan. "And afterward!"

"Hanging out at Hard-Wear," Luis said, "unable to tear himself away from his large, admiring public."

"More like upstairs at the Crow's Nest trying to get Ralph to slash prices," I said.

"Up there, trying on body-fitting T's." Patrick shivered at the image. "Allowing himself to be ogled by the hoi polloi."

"Well, he'd better, manage to find his way to the Pantry," Luis said, "and buy some food. You guys promised to make dinner tonight."

"I know. I know."

It had been raining since dawn that Saturday—which was why, instead of getting dressed, getting a little high, and going to Tea Dance along with Matt and four hundred other queers at the Pines, as we usually did, Luis Narvaez, Patrick Norwood, and I decided to remain at Withering Heights for the afternoon and early evening, watching the varieties of rainfall and hoping it would stop.

Once Marcy Lorimer arrived at the house—she'd been staying at Davis Park and had come over by water taxi—it became another thing altogether: an afternoon party! We'd all laughed and kissed and put mint julep facial masks on one another. We'd twisted on various
shmattes
as kerchiefs until—with those pale green faces!—we looked like characters out of a Kabuki play.

We'd sat around the dining room catching up and listening to tapes Ray Yeates had put together for Halston's most recent fashion show. We drank beer and old-fashioneds (Patrick made them). We went through our own and each other's wardrobes, picking out ensembles to wear that night: one for the Ice Palace if the rain ever let up, a completely other outfit for the Sandpiper if it didn't let up and we remained here in the Pines instead of trekking over to Cherry Grove for the night. We snacked on Nacho Chips and Entenmann's coffee rings. And we played cards.

"Patricia, are you ever going to discard?" I asked. "We all know you have those jacks lined up ready to march."

"I do not!" Patrick protested. "And as you well know, my drag name is Isadora. Not Patricia." He then laid out three jacks on the table and dropped an ace on the discard deck.

"I'll take that, thank you!" Marcy said, sitting up very straight. She proceeded to lay out three aces and a club flush, queen to ace, very businesslike indeed. "Eat that!" she said to me with mock sweetness.

"Fla-ming twat!" I mock-cursed her in return. But in fact I liked the queen she'd discarded and picked it up, dropping the now useless four of hearts.

"God, this looks awful!" After that flurry of card-playing activity, Marcy had gone back to inspecting her calves.

"You said it. Not me."

"And I spent hours yesterday on my legs," she moaned, "foolishly thinking there might be a hint of sun to tan them this weekend."

"Did you hear about that Bowery bum they found?" Luis asked. "He said he'd drunk everything with any alcoholic content at all. Including Nair."

"Ooooooh! Disgusting!" Marcy squirmed.

"Reminds me of that Gene Wilder sketch in Woody Allen's
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex"
Patrick said. "You know, the one—'What is Bestiality?'—where Gene falls for this sheep who throws him over for some other guy. Gene ends up on skid row. But when the camera does a close-up on him, we see the bottle is marked 'Woolite'!"

"I loved that movie. Remember the gay commercial? The guys in the locker room making out like crazy while the voice-over tells you to buy the hair product?"

"So, you were out west," Marcy said to me. "For the magazine?"

"An article on homosexual writers. Most of them in their senility."

"I thought all the gay writers are young?" Marcy asked.

"You're talking about Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, and that gang? Well, yes, they're all in their thirties. But everyone's writing about them. I thought I'd write about some of their forebears," I said. "You know, the less famous gay writers."

"Forebears
is such a strange word," Marcy mused. "The bears that came before us?"

"Patrick love, go. already!" Luis urged. Patrick took his sweet time.

"Like who?" Marcy asked.

"John Rechy was the youngest. Although it's obviously all relative. He was sweet really. He's got these wall-sized photos of James-Dean and Marilyn Monroe in his dining room. Very, very H-Wood, if you ask me. He was so nervous at first he was stammering. I thought, you know, maybe he wanted..."

"A piece of your prize ass!" Luis said.

"In short!" I admitted. "I mean, after all, the man does teach at the university there. It may be L.A., but that does presuppose
some
basic poise in front of strangers."

"He was probably putting you on!" Patrick said. "Didn't you say he still hustles Santa Monica Boulevard?"

"Marce, you wouldn't believe it! Ten at night, I'm driving around West Hollywood looking for this place where the local queens do country-western dancing, you know do-si-do and all that shit, and I almost dropped my teeth. There was Rechy on a street corner near this porno theater, wearing boots, tight jeans, no shirt, dark glasses. Upper torso naked, but all oiled up. He was standing indirectly under this streetlight so you couldn't see his face."

"But he was sweet," Marcy said.

"They were
all
sweet. You know, big gay New York mag sends its editor out there to interview them in depth. What's not to be sweet about?"

Finally Patrick discarded. We applauded.

"That's not the card I wanted, darlinggggg!" Luis trilled, pretending to backhand Patrick. He picked up a card and discarded. "Still knocking."