Like People in History (48 page)

"Oh, honey," Luis sighed. "The day I've had you wouldn't believe!"

"Have a joint!" I said. "Have a Valium! Have three!"

"You're not even surprised to see me here?" Luis asked, as I disinfected and lightly wrapped his bruised toe. "Let me tell you why I'm not in the city. This guy, Sternmetz or whatever his name is, we're doing the humungous party for tonight? He comes by the place this morning and he asks to see everything. Then he says, 'You're not going to be there overseeing, are you?' And I said, 'Sure, why not?' Then he says he don't want no spies around. He calls me a spic!
Me!
I tell him I'm no spic, I'm a Cubano! My grandfather born in Spain, a
hidalgo
from Extremadura! You think he cares? If Tommy and Eloise hadn't been there, he would have walked out with a carving knife in his chest! Then... Thanks, hon, you're an— Wait a minute! Don't I get a lime wedge? That's better."

When I could get a word in edgewise, I told Luis about my day. We all commiserated, and they went in to change for Tea Dance, leaving me on the side deck in a deck chair, by now, with grass on top of gin on top of those Valium, feeling little even recognizable as tension, never mind pain.

The sky was doing something wispy and purply—what a display!—when Matt and Alistair arrived home.

They were singing "My Girl," what sounded like the Rolling Stones' rendition, and they were carrying a half dozen shopping bags between them.

"You made it!" Matt Seemed surprised. He slid onto the deck chair and tried to nuzzle up to me. He had tequila on his breath and stared at the marks he'd made on my neck with apparent satisfaction.

"Guess where we were!" Alistair asked, dropping the bags.

"Harry Belafonte's Casa Calypso?" I ventured.

"No, silly!"

"At a fund-raiser for Tom Hayden given by Jane Fonda in complete
Barbarella
drag?" I tried.

"Tea! And before Tea, shopping! Come! I'll show you what we bought."

We trooped into the guest bedroom, where Alistair dumped the bags onto the double bed and began to display, explain, and try on each item. I noticed that they were well chosen, expensive as one could manage, and in the exactly correct colors and shades for his by-now-two-week-old tan.

"You
could wear this!" Alistair put the cotton sweater against my chest. "See, Matt! How good it looks. We have the same coloring. I'll bet you didn't know that when we were children, Rog and I were almost identical. I swear!"

Luis and Patrick joined us long enough to ooh and ah sufficiently, then headed off to Tea, Luis complaining. "Not so fast. My poor toe."

"Of course, I have better bones," Alistair said at the mirror.

"More of them, certainly!" I added. "Especially in your head!"

"Cunt!"

That led to a pillow fight, which Matt was forced to break up by threatening spankings—"Yes! Spank me. Or better yet have the headmaster spank me!" Alistair shouted. I was dragged out of the room and told to change for Tea. Alistair threw a new sweater into my bedroom. "It's yours, Cuz."

Fifteen minutes later, cleaned up, dressed, separated by Matt in the middle with an arm over each of our shoulders, yet not at all sobered up, we ascended the three steps to the Blue Whale, where Gloria Gaynor's cover of "Reach Out, I'll Be There" was tearing the place apart.

Seeing us come up the stairs, Luis turned on his heel and said in an overly loud and desperate tone of voice, "Stop!"

"...in the name of love!" we all three sang back, totally unprompted, complete with the extended halt gesture the Supremes had used.

A round of applause greeted this arrival on the deck. Luis put a hand to his chest and said, "I've haven't been so moved at Tea since I heard that Spanish Anna walked into the surf wearing a nine-hundred-dollar Halston with a drink in each hand and was never seen again."

Patrick guided us to the back bar, where Carlton Fuller, once and eternally the "Marlboro Man," though he never smoked a cigarette in his life, was just putting together one of the blue liquidities which were a specialty of the
maison.
He winked at Matt: we'd arrived!

It had been a while since I'd been at Tea, never mind been there with Matt, who, on the other hand, did go fairly often. So I was somewhat surprised by how he'd managed to work out a way of dancing without moving that one foot at all. Evidently, Alistair was oblivious to the problem. I must have looked puzzled as I moved around my lover, because he suddenly caught me around the waist, lifted and dipped me, leaving me off balance and thus vulnerable.

In those seconds before he hefted me back onto both of my feet,
something
passed between Matt's eyes and mine, although I wasn't certain then or afterward what exactly it signified.

Jeffrey Roth, my dance buddy, appeared at that moment, as though out of thin air, and pulled me away from the others with his terpsichorean skill and sheer
joi de danse.
We continued dancing for several more cuts, long and short, even though I noticed the others leave the floor to go out onto the open deck. I had to beg Jeffrey to stop.

As always in the ten minutes before Tea ended on a good-weather weekend eve, the place was completely jammed. Jeffrey pulled me over to the metal steps leading up to the Botel's upper floors, and we leaned and looked.

"Congratulate me! I'm in lust!" he said.

"You're always in lust," I said.

"His name is Lawrence. Not Larry, Lawrence! He's an investment banker from Shaker Heights. He's got a washboard stomach, eyes the color of the Pacific in July, and the Dick of Death!"

"So you're tinting your hair blond, having your tubes tied, and buying a new wardrobe from Bendel's before you move to Ohio."

"You're just jealous! Who's the number dancing with your lover?"

I stood up and peered in.

"That's no number. That's my cousin Alistair."

"That
is a number, no matter who you claim he is. Look at his buns in those white ducks," Jeffrey said. "Like two babies fighting under a blanket. Not to mention the sublimity of his long, sun-streaked ash-blond hair falling over his sun-splashed cheeks and aristocratic nose."

I looked again. All I saw was Alistair. "You're making that up."

"Ex-
cuse
me!" Jeffrey grabbed a lad—Owen, known for giving blow jobs while humming Rossini's "Largo al Factotum"—and said, "Owen, see that one? Tallish, slender, blond with the ass and legs?"

"Dancing with Matthew Loguidice?" Owen asked. (Everybody knew Matt.)

"The same. Would you do it with him?"

Owen pursed his lips and went "Mnmmm."

"Get closer if you need to," Jeffrey suggested.

Owen left the staircase and went inside. When he emerged, he gave a thumbs-up sign, stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth, and rolled his eyes.

"What'd I tell you! Your cousin's a bona fide number!" "Pul-eeze! Owen would go down on a flagpole."

"I'd watch your little country cousin," Jeffrey said. "Those types seem so innocent, until they get their claws into your man. Then..."

I laughed. "You're way off, Alistair Dodge couldn't be more sophisticated. Or uninterested. He's nursing a broken heart from his divorce with one of the Bay Area's wealthiest heiresses."

"In the immortal words of Maria Montez in
Cobra Woman,
'I haff spo-ken!' "Jeffrey declared.'"Are we on for tomorrow at the Ice Palace? Say no and I'll have both your legs broken. Wait up, Owen. I've got to dance to this song or I'll scre-eam!"

No one was answering the phone. So I did.

I dragged my body out of bed and into the living room. Astonishment: it wasn't three in the morning. It was too bright for that, too sunny, too... What did the clock read? Ten? No! Impossible!

"You sound three-quarters asleep," Marcy said on the other end.

"I'm
completely
asleep. Where are you?"

"In town. And I'm Nile green with envy. Is it as beautiful out there as I suspect it is?" she asked.

"Scrumptious," I said, trying to focus on the deck.

"Make that forest green with envy. Russian green. Crocodile gree—"

"Hold on, will you? I'll move to the kitchen. Got to get coffee."

"I'll call back when you're awake," Marcy said and hung up.

I made an enormous Chemex of it, drank an entire mugful, and was carrying a second mug outside along the side deck, trying to shake myself into semiconsciousness, when I heard a voice from out of the guest bedroom.

"That coffee I smell?"

Alistair: awake.

"Tons of it."

"I don't think I can move. I danced so hard last night. You wouldn't bring in your cup so I could have a sip?"

He sounded so pathetic I did as he asked. The bedroom appeared pretty much a-tumble. But while sleepy-looking, and with his hair swept up in six different directions at once, Alistair—nude but for a pair of pale-yellow briefs—certainly didn't look as terrible as he sounded. In fact, I was thinking, this divorce seemed to be doing at least his body some good. The last time I'd seen him this unclothed he'd been a bit zaftig.

I perched on the edge of the mattress.

"Now, don't tell me I should have been a good little boy like you last night," Alistair began.

"Because I plotzed at dinner before even dessert?"

"Because you stayed home and got beauty sleep. I do admire your stamina. Work your butt off all week, then out all weekend boogying. This coffee's good. I promise I'll get my own."

"You better. You've almost finished this."

To my surprise, he threw an arm around my shoulder, drew me close, and rubbed his cheek against mine.

I moved away, embarrassed, suspicious, and covered it by saying, "Please! Beard burn! What'll people say?"

"I know what Matthew will say," Alistair said and leaned back on the pillow. "You know, I had no idea. Sim-ply had no i-dea!"

I waited.

"That Matthew was such a wonderful man!" Alistair explained. "I mean, I do have eyes, so I could
see
he was gorgeous. But... so bright and smart and sensitive... as though he reads your mind and then does exactly the right..." Alistair shook a finger at me. "You should have told me when I arrived that what I was wearing was... And Matthew's taste! You must trust him in everything! Simply everything!"

"Almost everything," I demurred. "You stayed here last night? At the Sandpiper?"

"No one goes to the Grove on a Friday night! We didn't get home till I don't know. Sunrise. God, this place is scrumptious! You're so lucky."

"Tell me,"

"I mean really lucky. I envy you."

"If we were in China, now I'd have to disfigure myself so as to ward off evil spirits," I said.

The phone rang again. Marcy: "We've got to talk seriously. Whatever did you do to Sydelle?"

"Do?" I asked.

"She said... It took me a half hour to get it out of her, she was so upset. I couldn't believe... She said... Well, really, Rog, I didn't expect this from you!"

"Expect what?"

"She said you humiliated her."

"I saved her fucking article! Which was about to be thrown out."

"Sydelle said your publisher told her
you
wanted it thrown out."

Little two-timing creep—I'd stuff him inside his panda!

"Marcy, listen..." I then explained the whole business.

"I don't know," Marcy said. "I could understand Sydelle being upset about the way you two treated that hotel maid."

"We were scum!" I admitted. "Journalists can be scum! She'd better get used to that if she's working with us."

"Don't take it out on me," Marcy defended herself.

Just then I heard a noise. Someone at my end picking up or putting back the receiver. Wait a minute! Not here, but there! Sydelle herself. She'd been there all the while. Listening in. Hearing what I had to say. That...!

"You tell Mizz Auslander if she can't dish it out with the big boys, she's got no business in the kitchen," I shouted and hung up.

A few minutes later, the phone began to ring again. I ignored it, still fuming from the last call, and took a fresh mug of coffee out to the front deck. Luis appeared in the doorway, holding the phone. He was wearing only white jockeys and had a piss hard-on. The rest of his body looked extra hard, dehydrated from a night out, his taut skin an edible cinnamon tan. Once again I thought what great-looking guys I had as pals and roommates.

"Well?" he asked about the phone call.

"Under no circumstances." I shook my head, and Luis shrugged, said something into the phone, hung up, and toddled off, no doubt to the john.

Sometime after Luis, Alistair, Patrick, and I had breakfasted, Matt deigned to awaken. I'd just made a fresh round of French toast and eggs for him when Marcy phoned a third time. She sounded upset. She said if I hung up again, our friendship was over. It took almost an hour to calm her down, by which time the others had all eaten, showered, and taken off for the beach.

Even Matt had gone, and he seldom went near the sand. Not that he didn't want to show off his body—he did—but because it was so difficult hiding his foot on the beach, and because of the many possible injuries he might sustain if he went barefoot. At the beginning of each season, he'd go out there with me wearing sneakers and socks. Later on, when those were too hot to wear or seemed too silly or obvious, Matt stayed away. In vain did I attempt to explain that not a single one of the dozen numbers who hung around our beach towels as pesky as blackflies in August gave a thought to his foot, for Chrissake! About the lowest their eyes ever traveled was Matt's crotch. Now, however, it seemed that Alistair and he had worked out a better solution: a tightly wrapped bandage over the top of Matt's foot covered his missing toes and allowed him to be otherwise barefoot while sitting down. He'd use a pair of loose-fitting loafers to walk in. It looked natural and required little explanation.

Neither did the way in which Ivan—the Australian bathing suit model—suddenly got up from our beach blanket when he saw me coming down the stairs onto the beach at Ozone Walk. Alistair had joined Luis and Patrick in the surf. Matt was alone at the towels. I saw Ivan say something final to Matt, then take off. He swerved gracefully around the volleyball players and jogged off down the beach. I dropped my beach bag next to where Matt sat, took out my towel, paperback, and sun block.