Like People in History (59 page)

"I hate these. My profile's so vulpine," I said.

"Nonsense! We all need a touch-up," Alistair said. Then, "Well?"

"Actually Horace is a bit more demonstrative than—" A thought suddenly struck me. "Is he
on
something?"

Alistair shrugged. "How should I know?"

"Has he used MDA before?"

"Why? He's not being difficult, is he?"

I stared at our images in the mirror. Whoever had thought up this party would have been completely fulfilled at this moment—we might have come straight out of the movie.

"Because," Alistair went on primly, "if he is being difficult, you tell me!"

His tone suggested that Alistair had planned for Horace to be stoned on MDA and out of control. With me forced to handle him. Why? I decided to take the long way 'round that question. "Honey," I cooed, "has Horace slept with a guy?"

"One would think not. I honestly don't know." Alistair carefully picked at his mascara, convincing me that he did know, and the answer was definitely no. "Still, given how he leaped at this party, and his excitement seeing us dressed, how he cajoled you into being his date tonight... Let me do that, dear." Alistair took away my lipstick. "You'll never learn to put on lipstick if you live to be eighty.... It all does rather add up, doesn't it?"

"Surely, you don't expect me to deflower him just so you have future blackmail material."

"Stop fidgeting, will you! As you very well know, Cuz, I never blackmail. I do however believe that a well-placed 'anecdote' can be as effective as a sword thrust. And neater. However, you seem, to have a far bigger problem tonight than dear Horace. Stay still, will you? I'm referring, of course, to the contretemps he and I happened to walk in on tonight. Not that I'm in the least surprised. See, Cuz, you literally paint the outline of the lip then fill it in. Just like with crayons and coloring books... You remember a short while ago, when I said what a wonderful job I thought you'd done with Matthew? Of course you do, and I'll not take back a jot: I still think so. Only... I didn't know then what

I know now. Now the upper lip! We both know I'm speaking of Matthew's marvelous gift. He knows and I know and we all know how ghastly; you feel about not being able to help him as much as you'd like to. But it's not only his talent I'm talking about, it's this whole American gay image business you've trapped him into—"

"I trapped him into?"

"Close your mouth or I'll get it on your teeth. Not you directly, of course. But you helped certainly. Being so successful! What choice did poor Matt have but to try to emulate you in the only way he knew how?"

"That's not the way it happened!"

"Of course,
you
don't see it. You're so tied up with your magazine and all. And it
is
important. I'm not putting it down, Cuz. It's just that what's good for you, growth potential for you, is where Matthew can't expand, can't grow. Face it, Rog, you've done all you can for Matthew. You're holding him back. It's not anyone's fault that he has more potential than any of us dreamed. It simply is. You know it. I know it. He knows it!"

I did know it, of course. I had known it increasingly of late, known it earlier this evening as one of the unspoken truths that lay behind our confrontation. Now, speeding and blinking on MDA, I knew it again, this time with an emotional certainty, a finality that... Now Alistair was confirming it.

"Let's see." Alistair held my face, then turned it to the mirror. "So natural! So! What do you think?"

"About what?"

"You see how well he fits in with even the most scattered remnants of my little entourage, peripheral as they are. I think, well, to be brutally frank, dear, I think Matthew's reached the stage where all he needs is a final polish."

For a second our eyes found each other in those three mirrors, mine dark, nearly black with fear and drugs, his lighter, clearer, so much more lucid, and I wondered if our gaze seemed so ambiguous, so incomplete, because the mirrors were so new, so unused to reflecting back.

"...the final polish that living abroad almost naturally gives one," Alistair completed his thought.

So that was why he'd saddled me with Horace tonight. To keep me occupied while he put the final make on Matt. "It's not my decision. Talk to—"

"I have. Not in so many words. I merely suggested abroad. Doriot's abandoning our place in France. A month or two in Paris. A few side trips to meet editors, to slip Matthew into the right salons..."

Hearing that made me suddenly cold.

So even before tonight, it had all been decided between them, and my part, my decision, was merely ornamental—or to make them feel they'd done the right thing.

But wait! What if Alistair were wrong? What if I'd not harmed Matt but helped him? What if he'd not been trapped because of me and my career, but because of his own needs and desires, his own decisions?

Despite being so high, I was cogitating, formulating some way to offer all these arguments, when a quartet of Scarletts and Jezebels entered the room, giggling and chatting. I began to rise from the vanity stool, but as though intuiting my change of mind, Alistair held me down.

"You mustn't fail Matthew now, Rog. He needs you more than ever now to do what you know in your heart is right for him."

Staring at my own suddenly estranged and conflicted face in those three mirrors, I barely heard his whispered words through the chatter and the loud rustling of silk and taffeta around me.

"I know he can
count on you,"
Alistair sighed. He stood up to leave.

I
had
to stop him. Stop him and stop Matt from leaving!

"Wait just one minute!" I said.

"You girls done in here?" one queen in pink crinoline asked petulantly.

"We're not done," I said, irked by his tone of voice. "And if you want to go back to the party with any hair left on your skull, you'd better get out right now. Alistair, stay right where you are!"

"But, Cuz..."

"All of you!" I shouted, knocking aside the leg of one queen who'd dropped into full lolling upon the bed. "That means you too, Melanie."

"Pushy bitch!" he said, getting up.

"Overweight! Overdressed!" I retorted, shoving her out the door. And turned to Alistair.

"I might be having trouble with my lover, and I might be stoned on MDA, but believe me, I see exactly what you're up to."

His lipsticked mouth puckered in surprise.

"...And what you've been up to since the minute you arrived at the Island with Hugger and Mugger in that beat-up old tug."

"Exactly what do you me—"

"What I mean is that for all the money from your settlement and all the fancy and titled friends you've collected and all your many many experiences in world travel, the minute you got here, you saw what your poor little cousin had and you turned fucking forest-green with envy.
You're
the one who insisted on marrying a woman even though you knew it was going to be nearly impossible to pull off. And now that it's failed, as it had to, you have the nerve to come here and try to break up
my
marriage."

"If it's solid," Alistair sneered, "I couldn't even try to break—"

"Who in hell gave you the right to make that decision? I never did. I never heard Matt do it. From the moment you got here and saw us together, you were bent on breaking us up."

"You can't bear that Matt would come with me, can you?" Alistair asked. And just then, someone stepped into the doorway dressed as Judy Garland from
Meet Me in St. Louis.
Without a glance, Alistair shoved him out the door.

"I've got to pee," the lad protested.

"Use the sink!" Alistair yelled and slammed the door shut.

"I can bear it!" I said. "Let Matt go to Europe with you. I'm not afraid. Let him go to Patagonia with you! To the planet Saturn, for that matter! It doesn't
mean
anything! It doesn't mean he'll ever
sleep
with you."

"Oh, please!" Alistair scoffed. "You're becoming infantile."

"And even if he
should
happen to sleep with you, it still won't
mean
anything. And even if, after years and years, it happens to come to mean something, it will still never mean what Matt and I mean to each other, even when we haven't seen each other for days, even when we're fighting each other tooth and nail."

"You admit your relationship is crumbling?"

"I admit nothing. The truth, Alistair, is that no matter what you do, you'll still never know the intimacy we've had, even in our worst moments."

"It's crumbling! This is your final pathetic attempt to hold onto shreds of dignity!"

"The truly surprising thing, Alistair, is that with your IQ and after all these years, you don't have a clue to what really counts in life, do you?"

"Pathetic and not even worth comment if it weren't for— I
said
stay out!" Alistair slammed the door shut again.

"But that's not what bothers you, Alistair. What bothers you is that you realize that it's all over for you. You already attained what puny little peak was destined to be your acme
years
ago! At twenty-four? At sixteen? And it's all been downhill since, hasn't it?"

"We'll see what my acme is when Matthew is a world-famous poet at my side!"

"Maybe even earlier. At nine, when you still had a complexion! When exactly did you pitch a perfect no-hitter Softball game? 1954?"

"I'll show you!" Alistair shouted.

"Not the face! Anything but the face!" I shouted back, still in character. But I watched him pick up and throw a heavy bronze box straight at me. Not only that, but the fucker managed to slip out of the room while I was busy cowering from the missile he'd launched. Meanwhile it smashed into the wall with enough force to leave a good-sized dent and to break a hinge. Luckily it missed the triple mirrors, or I might have been picking glass out of my flesh for weeks.

By the time I was congratulating myself on emerging unscathed, more costumed party guests, including the previous Southern belles and some seriously post-teen "fans," had pushed into the bedroom and headed for the mirrors, the vanity, and the loo, all of them commenting on how rudely Alistair had behaved.

"The worst is," one said, "I couldn't tell whether that deranged queen was supposed to be Carole Lombard in
My Man Godfrey
or Veronica Lake in
I Married a Witch.'"

"More like Irene Dunne in
The Awful Truth
! And I
do
mean awful!"

I, however, managed to calm myself down. As I exited the bedroom and sailed into the living room, I heard two acquaintances:

"He looks good, doesn't he?" Scott Jacobsen said behind my back.

"As I've always said, my dear," Bob Brasswell replied, "beauty is all a matter of lighting and distance."

"But he was only inches away! And the lighting here is fatal!"

I was still laughing over that exchange when a few minutes later I emerged from the house and found Horace Brecker III awaiting me.

He seemed breathless, eager: evidently lighting and distance were all in my favor as he looked up and saw me. I knew then that the MDA, "the love drug," he'd taken had achieved its eponymous effect on him: Horace was smitten with me—me and no one else but me.

I now faced a choice: I could ease him off, try to dance him into the ground, leave him exhausted and good for nothing but a full day of sleep—or I could give Horace exactly what he thought he wanted and let him worry about what he'd done.

I was still unsure whether or not Alistair wanted Horace seduced. Would it provide some arcane revenge on Doriot? Or would it thoroughly piss off Alistair that I'd gotten to this "straight" man when he clearly hadn't? Pissing off Alistair was my only aim now.

"I thought you'd left," Horace said, and the way that he said it— half-pathetically, half-challengingly—instantly, irrevocably, decided my course.

"That's what I wanted you to think," I teased.

"Don't be mean," he pleaded, taking me by the arm.

"You're so strong! So determined!"

"I am determined."

As we moved away from the door, Horace suddenly flattened me against the wall of the house. He covered me with his body as he nibbled and kissed my neck and ear and nose and lips, breathing into my ear.

He was so far gone he didn't care about making a public spectacle.

"I paid the boat's captain to ship off soon as we're aboard," he said.

This was getting intriguing. Should I turn him into a public love-slave and throw that into Alistair and Matt's faces?

Without waiting for a response, Horace began tongue-kissing me with such fervor and in such depth, I thought I'd pass out from lack of oxygen. When, after some time, he finally retracted his prehensile tongue from thoroughly exploring and simultaneously ravishing every square inch of my glottal insides, he said, "Promise you won't say no!"

"But, Horace," I managed to moan through the continuing palpable steam of his coruscating passion.

"Oh... Babe," he protested back, as his hands seemed to double then triple in number and at the same time slide in through every possible entry and exit, front and back, of my borrowed blue shot-silk dress, "...you've... got me... so..."

"But, Horace!" I continued in that same tone of voice, which anyone over nine years old and not MDA'ed to the kazoo would instantly have recognized as being as fake as Mother's rhinestones, "are you sure you want to do this?"

Another ten fingers emerged from nowhere to slip into my panties and fondle me.

"Oh... Babe, I have to have you tonight. I won't be stopped by anything. By anybody."