Like People in History (56 page)

Alistair laughed. "What did you say?"

"I told him this was the Isle of Lost Boys."

"From
Pinocchio!"

"Peter Pan..
. Give me the poems, Alistair. I'll publish them."

"You're a doll! Now, don't forget! Friday afternoon at three on the dot, we meet at Klinger's!"

"I know I'm going to regret it," I moaned.

"I don't believe this is happening!" I turned to the Grunt in panic. "Say it's not! Say something!"

Bernard looked me as straight in the eye as he could, given his squint. "It's happening. I could have predicted it. It's your own fault."

"My
fault?"

"Your fault!" he insisted.

"Because I tried to cooperate with Harte? Because I tried to accept and accommodate her?"

"Because you didn't kill her and scatter her body in ash cans around the city when you had the chance," the Grunt said.

I stared at Jersey Joe, spread-eagled by thongs and pushpins on the wall above our publisher's desk. Joe wore a silver bathing cap. A black racing suit wrapped his lower torso. Six fake Olympic medals were splayed upon his considerable, stuffed chest. His button eyes were inscrutable behind solarized water goggles.

Mad and amusing as this was iconographically, it could in no way compensate for the past ten minutes of my life. I'd sailed into our monthly update meeting, at which editorial staff and publisher laid out and discussed a rough "book" of the next issue. This meeting had been attended by myself and the Grunt as well as by Sydelle Auslander and our art director, whose increasing interest in Eastern mysticism had led us to refer to him as "Swami Powell" or, more simply, the Swami.

For a while, the meeting had gone well. Harte found Sydelle's feature on "Biker Dykes" a strong follow-up to my lead story on the fire at the baths. Those were followed by my interview with Isherwood—third of my "Homo Authors of the Past." The two commissioned pieces—the one a report on gay resorts in the Pacific, the other a humorous essay on how to be openly gay on your college campus and still have fun—for this, our "Back to School" issue, were deemed okay. The centerfold was a recent also-ran for
Playgirl
and of high quality, though his rep in Waikiki was pure diva. Our news items—what was "hot and breaking" concerned the Greenwich Village protests over the filming of the movie
Cruising
with its sure-to-be-negative gay images, the recent success of the movie
Alien,
which forever changed how one thought of tummy aches, and Tennessee Williams's revision of his
Summer and Smoke,
called
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,
starring Blythe Danner and Frank Langella, just aired on public television. Then we'd come to the four-page layout the Swami, the Grunt, and I had put together last night using some Mapplethorpe photos in our files and six of Matt's poems.

I thought the Grunt's choice of typefaces excellent. I thought the Swami's layout equally classy. Alistair was right: the poems and photos looked so good the entire issue now edged a bit toward the higher-browed.

"Gee," Stephen Forrest Harte, our publisher, said, looking at the layout, the most childish of looks upon his already childlike face. "What's this?"

"Surprise!" I said.

"Poetry?"

"Good poetry," the Grunt—Matt's biggest fan—said.

"Gay poetry," I added.
"Mandate'
s already run poetry by—"

"Saw it! Nice photos! Do we own them?" Harte asked Swami.

"Pub rights only. He keeps all originals."

Harte had gone back and forth, back and forth, page after page, reading the poems. He'd finally looked up and had been about to say, "Fine, next!" when Sydelle Auslander spoke up.

"I realize it isn't my place to be concerned with the image of the magazine," she began,

"Of course it is," Harte responded, falling into the trap. "It's all of our place. That's why we all attend these meetings."

"Well, then... I personally think that publishing those poems will open up the magazine to attack. Especially our editorial policy."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"Why is that, Ms. Auslander?" Harte asked.

"It would be different if we published poetry on a regular basis. But we don't. To have these suddenly appear, so lavishly produced, with everyone knowing the nepotism involved..."

I'd nurtured this viper at my breast, encouraged her....

"We've got to start publishing poetry with someone's work, no?" Harte took the role of devil's advocate. "Loguidice's seem as good as any."

"They're fine. But everyone will know they've been published because his lover's the editor," she said.

It was at that moment that our harassed advertising director barged into the meeting with a major crisis he had concerning a large client of the magazine, who hated the latest placement of an ad by our art director. Swami and Harte rushed out to confront the advertiser; and, sensibly, Sydelle excused herself before I could leap up from my chair and tear out her throat.

"What do you suggest we do?" I finally asked the Grunt.

"I could have forgiven her anything else," he said darkly.

"Bernard?" I asked. His voice sounded so odd.

The Grunt looked up. "For all my talk, I could have, would have, really forgiven her anything else. But to do this... to Matt!"

His tone of voice reminded me of those women in British telly movies, at the moment they slip a fatal convulsant into the kiddies' marzipan.

"We'll get over it, Bernard! Matt doesn't know I wanted to use the poems. He needn't
ever
know."

"It's actually better this way," the Grunt went on in that same I'm-fine-it's-all-of-you-who're-bonkers tone of voice, "because now I see it all writ large and what I merely suspected about her is all too clear. She is Evil incarnate and must be destroyed."

"Now, Bernard, slow down. I'll handle this. You must do nothing."

"I must!" he insisted.

Before either of us could do anything, however, Harte and the Swami returned to the office. The disaster of losing a major advertiser had been narrowly averted, and the triumph in this achievement made it all the sweeter, even for someone as allegedly "egoless" as our art director prided himself on being of late. To my surprise, Sydelle did not slip back in their wake. But then, why expose herself so needlessly? She'd done the damage already. That was soon evident.

"Okay, so we're close to a frozen September issue," Harte said.

Neither the Grunt nor I wanted to ask what that meant in terms of Matt's work. Which left the Swami to ask, "And these pages of poetry and poems?"

Harte looked up. "Sorry." To Powell: "What else do you have for here?"

Naturally Powell had what I'd shoved aside, which Harte eagerly approved. And our meeting was over.

Two hours later, Harte called me into his office.

"Roger! I'm worried about you. About us?"

"It's Friday," I said. "I didn't lunch. I leave in five minutes."

"You didn't scream. You didn't throw a fit. You didn't remind me of all you've done beyond the call of duty for the magazine. You didn't even threaten to quit, which you do whenever your wishes are thwarted," Harte said. Then corrected that to "Hell! Which you do monthly, whether your wishes are thwarted or not! I'm worried, Roger. Should I be worried?"

"In fifteen minutes," I said, "I shall be meeting my cousin at Georgette Klinger's, where we'll begin preparations for
the
society event of the summer,
the
most lavish and most publicized party in the history of Fire Island Pines. Compared to which, Forrest, your magazine, your decisions, your staff, and yourself are as though grains of sand in a sunless sea." I mimed the casting of sand upon the office floor and washing the grit off my hands.

"It's a matter of professional ethics, Roger. You know that?"

I pivoted a perfect one hundred and eighty degrees on a single heel— having practiced in four-inch wedgies all week—and threw open the door to exit.

"I had no choice!" he wailed.

"However," I spoke over my shoulder, à la Betty Grable in the famous World War II pinup, "should you wish to have
any
editorial staff come next week, I strongly suggest you obtain the services of two very large and experienced bodyguards. One to lock in the Grant. The other to watch over Mizz Auslander."

"What do you mean
any
staff?" I heard his voice rise. "Roger! Roger! Don't do this to me! Ro-ger!"

"Five minutes, Miss Stanwyck!"

Alistair was knocking on the door of my "dressing room," the larger guest bedroom in his house on Tarpon.

"Can I look?'' I asked Bebe, who was still fooling with my hair.

"Momentino!
" He held my head in place. "I still think you should have the fall wig. But...!" He pulled back to look at me, even—I swear— put his thumb up as Lautrec might have done, and sighed. "Okay!"

He spun me to face the vanity's mirror.

I don't know what I expected to see: some ghastly, some-wonderful transformation; a revelation, I suppose. That's what Luis and Alistair had insisted I'd see. Instead, I saw myself. Cosmetized to the nines and dressed expensively, and more feminine than I could ever have imagined looking. Still it was me, Roger Sansarc, no matter how cleverly Bebe had frosted and combed my hair for a swept-up-off-the-neck effect: me!

"You did wonders with my hair."

"Up!" he commanded.

I stood. I was wearing a slinky pale-blue silk evening gown with Japanese lotus flowers on it, the bodice recut by Enrico so it exposed the natural cleavage between my own pushed together, worked-up pecs. My biggish shoulders were artfully downplayed by the bias on the sleeve. They'd aimed for a Classical Late Thirties look: long lines, flat sides. All the past week, I'd practiced walking in those damn wedgies at night, nearly spraining my metatarsi whenever I'd gone over in them, but these pumps were softer and lower and fit better. I swiveled my hips, and the gown below my knees swung in place!

"Perfection! I'd say Kate Hepburn rather than Babs S.," Bebe concluded.

"I can check Alistair now?"

"Go ahead."

When Bebe left, I reached for the little sequined purse, took out a silver cigarette box, slipped out a cigarette, checked my manicured, painted nails, put the Benson & Hedges Filter between my Cold Carmine-painted lips, and lit it—all the while carefully observing myself in the mirrors.

I didn't look unnatural or forced. But it was me—not a woman. I saw a
little bit
of my sister Jenny when she'd been a teenager, eternally stopping at one mirror or another in the house to check her lipstick, and maybe too a bit of my mother getting ready for church. I copied her tone of voice whenever she'd say warningly, "Rog-gerrr!"

I could admit now that I'd been afraid it would
not
be me; afraid that, like Frank Cioffi the year before at Flamingo's Halloween party, I'd turn out to look, sound, and behave totally different. Frank, a sweet, handsome, timid male, had in drag become a pushy, oversexed harridan.

But I'd always been me, no matter the circumstances: totally stoned out of my mind on acid, checking in the mirror to see who or what was really behind those eyes, or pulling myself out of my sickbed during the least restful week of sleep in my life, when I had hepatitis, to stare at my eyes, through taxicab-yellow whites.

Now I went out of my way trying to act girly; I openly posed at myself. Oddly, the only attitudes that seemed natural, despite yards of silk and the softly glowing pearls at my ears, wrist, and throat, were the ambivalent ones—the "gun moll," the "wisecracking girlfriend," the "career-woman," the "tomboy."

Another theory thoroughly shot to hell: queers weren't women in men's bodies. I'd always known that, of course. Now it was proven.

Another test passed. That's what it was for me: another ritual, another competition. Like my first orgasm. And my first major broken bone. My first orgasm with penetration. My first fistfight. My first orgasm on an LSD trip. The first time I'd realized I might die. My first orgasm with a man. My first bout with V.D. My first orgasm in public (where I might be caught and arrested). My first case of crabs. Each a step, a test, a ritual of manhood, sometimes long approached and worried about, often achieved unexpectedly or without much effort, Yes, even contrarily, this one of dressing as, being for a night, a woman. Because I'd done it on a dare, determined to fulfill that dare. And now I was content I need have no fear of ever losing my essential self or of questioning its gender, no matter what I did, how I dressed.

A knock on the door. "Showtime!" It was Alistair.

"C'mon in." I'd decided on my usual voice, moderately pitched: I'd softened pronunciation.

Alistair looked terrific. With his high cheekbones, his longer, blonder hair, his more strongly colored and eye-poppingly cut gown, he looked a great deal more female.

We did a Fellini "big-hats kiss" at each other's vicinity. Then stood and looked each other over. Bebe and Enrico pushed into the room, looking us over, primping us.

"You look so natural," Alistair said.

"You're a knockout!"

"Let's see," he insisted. "Turn around." When we faced each other again: "Amazing!"

"You picked it! It feels okay. But with all this silk sliding around, my nipples are always erect." Pecker too, I might have added, only it was held down, not very comfortably. "Turn around."

Bebe and Enrico hugged each other with pleasure. When they left, Alistair sat down on the vanity seat and pulled me near.

"I've only done this once before. Always wanted to. Ever since I was seven or so."

"Not me," I said. "Give me sneakers and jeans and I'm happy. Good thing this outfit's simple."

"Had to be. By the thirties, girls wanted to get out of them fast." Alistair laughed. "Real stockings in this era were silk, you know, not nylon, and held up by garter belts."

He'd brought in a drink. He was posing in the mirror. "We
do
have fun together, Cuz, don't we?"