Like People in History (72 page)

"Really?"

"Cross what's left of my heart. Do you know I'm still wet," he added. "That child's hair does absorb sweat!"

"Aren't junk bonds terrible risks?" I asked.

"The worst. They're virtually nonexistent. Paper written against paper. Which is why the take is so high. Until someone pops the balloon, but Guy—that's the name of my darling little shoe-licking fiend of a broker—insists we've got maybe a year or two before the shit hits the fan. So say yes, Roger, let me buy the theater company."

"On one condition."

"A condition! I don't believe this! Here I am, saving your ass, not to mention your entire theatrical career and..."

"That you don't fire the male ingénue and take his role until two weeks into the play's run."

"When all the reviews are in." Alistair picked it up instantly. "Max, you sly puss! Okay. Deal! I'll have them come re-review it for me."

"One other thing... not a condition! There's this supposedly straight man in the cast...."

"You're not going to make me promise to keep my hands off?"

"Would I subject you to such temptation? Not at all. I just want you to make a videotape when you get him."

"Well... videotapes are awkward. Would audio do?"

Another silence developed. And again, although sitting right next to each other, we fell instantly into our own worlds of thought—his, I thought, probably, like mine, about Matt Loguidice. When we did speak again, several times Alistair seemed to begin a sentence, or he'd lead up to a place where the inevitable next topic would have to be the past that still stood between us: a past in which, for all intents and purposes, Alistair had stolen Matt away from me. Stolen him away, and then not even been able to keep him—which made it seem all the more a gratuitous act, an act of perfidy, of pure destruction. The six years since that had occurred, although a long time, still wasn't enough to have healed it, or for scar tissue to have formed. So each time it seemed that Alistair might broach the topic and even hint at asking forgiveness, I was prepared simply to get up and walk away. Because I knew I couldn't forgive him. Not with Matt the way he was. Even though I could forgive whatever poor schmuck it was who'd infected Matt. He'd probably suffered, or would suffer, enough himself, might even be dead already by now.

At nearly three in the morning, Matt was deemed awake enough to say hello to us, and although it was supposed to be only one of us at a time, of course we went in together.

Matt looked completely exhausted. "I was hallucinating like crazy," he managed to speak hoarsely through the chipped ice in his mouth. "It was stronger than acid!" He tried a thick, chapped-lip smile. "Look at you two!"

"Garbo's back!" Alistair threw his upper torso at me so suddenly I was forced to catch him. "And Redford's got her!" he finished the line, pursing his lips at me.

"Together again," I mocked. "Through thick and mostly thin." I pushed him aside and went closer to the bed. "You feeling any better? I'm sorry you had to suffer like that."

"Depends on what you call suffering," Matt replied. Despite his voice, his eyes were clear, bright, almost mischievous. He was himself for the first time all day. But he began to blink again, as though sleep were overtaking him.

That was when Matt repeated that I'd promised to go get his parents and bring them to him. And with Alistair standing right there, what else could I possibly say but of course I would?

Not long after that, Matt stretched, yawned, and was asleep in an instant.

"Larchmont, next stop," the conductor called out.

Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Rye, Port Chester, then into Connecticut— I knew the stops from the years I'd taught part-time in a New Haven prep school. On occasion and without any explanation at all, the late morning train I regularly took four days a week would transform itself from express into local until it reached the state line. This afternoon, I wouldn't get that far, I wouldn't even reach Rye. I'd be getting off at Mamaroneck and from there finding a taxi or wandering around until I found 172 Foothill Drive, home of Mr. and Mrs. Loguidice. I would be returning with them, helping them onto the 4:24 to Manhattan, taking them directly from Grand Central Station to the hospital, to Matt.

Would they agree to come with me? Would they grasp how this could happen to their son? How it was happening all over the city? the country? the world?

Matt said they would. "They've heard me speak of you so often, for so long.... They trust you," he'd argued this morning when the resident returned him to his room and bed without all the monitoring devices attached (though there they were, lurking under the plants, replacing one chair, still in the room). "You've got to tell them what's happening," Matt said.

"You tell them!" I flared up. "I'm not telling them anything."

Exasperated, Matt sighed. "I've already told them. I'm not sure they believe me. You've got to explain or they won't come! They hate hospitals. They're afraid of doctors. They've had bad experiences. If Grandpa were alive... I'm depending upon you, Rog! Go! Bring them! Once they see..."

At last I agreed. It was too late to argue. Matt was so close now. Why give the Other Side an edge against him? Why not make it as easy as possible for him? Help him however... maybe he'd stay a bit longer.

I couldn't believe I'd agreed to do this.

No, that I could believe. After all, Matt had asked. How could I deny Matt anything? No, what I couldn't believe was that there was a need for it, that even I had to admit there was a
need
for it. Some twenty-six hours ago, I would have scoffed at the necessity. But then that was before yesterday.

"Mamaroneck! Mamaroneck Station! All those departing, please check your seats and the nearby floor for any belongings. Have a good afternooooooon!"

Matt said the house was five minutes away. Once past a few blocks of small shops, it was a delicious, early spring walk—forsythia, magnolia, trees all in bloom, the sky pale blue, with the lightest whisper of clouds. It reminded me of a little town on the south shore of Long Island. I might have been a teenager, walking home from high school again, coming from a pal's house where we'd done homework together. The large houses—Colonial, mock-Tudor, French gray brick, sprinkled with a few huge old Victorians—were just like the ones where I'd grown up. The air fresh with new growth. I might have been sixteen again, visiting my brand-new friend Matthew for the first time. Excited at seeing him at home. Scared at meeting his parents. Afraid they might not like the way I looked or dressed or behaved, and would say no, after all, Matthew couldn't come out with me this afternoon, so sorry. And probably not tomorrow either. Or, yes, he'll be right down. Have some cookies, milk, or soda pop. Sit right here. And then Matt would have bounced in, holding a football, looking amazing at sixteen, not filled out yet. Maybe not as perfect as he'd become, but still a bit awkward, slightly flawed, say his ears sticking out a little, his already tight-fitting chinos... and Matt and I wouldn't have had merely our few short years, but more, twenty-four years together: a whole life.

Here was Foothill Drive. That fourth house, the pale-yellow ranch with white trim and a pale slate-gray roof surrounded by birch trees, the front entry amid rhododendron in bud, was number 172. I stood a minute, suddenly reminded of a movie I'd seen—had it been a Hitchcock movie?—set in a small town somewhere in New England, where a stranger suddenly arrived one bright day, a professor who turned out to be a Gestapo spy or informer or fifth columnist, preparing the area for a future Nazi takeover. That's exactly how I felt carrying my terrible news, bringing the horrors of last night in Matt's hospital room to this quiet, sunny town, the knowledge itself a virus, once contracted never to be gotten rid of again, and I the bearer, the infecting agent.

Before I could change my mind, I ascended the thick slab of field-stone set in concrete and rang.

The tall, dark-haired, heavyset man who opened the front door wore a heavy gray vest over a striped shirt. It only took a second to recognize the thick movement and slow eyes and round face and distinctive mouth of a person with Down's syndrome.

"Hi! I'm looking for Loguidice?"

"You Roger?" the thick-tongued voice asked.

"That's right. Are Mr. and Mrs. Log—"

The screen door was flung open, and I was half lifted in a bear hug over the lintel into the hallway.

A brother, cousin, friend of the family Matt hadn't mentioned?

"Mama!" the voice called out, still not letting go of me. "Mama. It's Roger. Matt's friend." Then more quietly: "You look just like in the pictures." Louder and off to one side: "Mama!"

No brother: Matt was an only child.

Seeing my expression, the man let me go. "I'm bein' a bad host. C'mon in. Sit down. Did you have a good trip on the train?"

He guided me into a bright living room. Everywhere around us, on every table, desk, pyramid of tiny shelves built into wall corners, were photos of Matt. In his Navy uniform. On board a destroyer in his Navy work togs. In a tuxedo, with and without a pretty girl (high school prom?). In a graduation gown. On the lawn of the big Rye house, standing hugely next to his small grandmother. Playing on the lawn outside this house with a big sheepdog. On a bicycle with two other youths on their bikes. With me at Fire Island Pines, wearing nothing but tiny scarlet Speedos and carmine-tinted translucent visors, at the Red Party. With this very man and a similar-looking woman, standing next to a shining-Ford Escort, a ribbon across its hood, evidently Matt's first car. With the same two again, outside an ivied building, Colgate, where Matt had gone to school before he joined the Navy. With them again somewhere out in the country.

"You see?" The man pushed another framed photo toward me. It was of me and Matt hugging, outside my apartment in the Haight. "That's when you first met. That's how I recognized you." Then louder, "Mama!"

She stepped into the room, recognizable from the photos, her hair Europeanly braided in an oval flat behind her head, lustrously blond. Her pale-gray eyes were Matt's eyes, even though most of her facial features were more similar to those of her husband, the unmistakable features of a woman with Down's syndrome. Shyly she smiled at me, then allowed her delighted big puppy of a husband to pull her into the room, where I stood up to shake her hand and was surprised to have her place a breath of a kiss on one cheek.

"Are you thirsty?" she asked. "There's coffee."

"It's good coffee," her husband assured me. "Matt got us that professional machine that measures it out and everything."

"It's easy to use," she agreed.

"Sure, fine," I said. In the few years Matt and I had lived together, I'd never met and seldom spoken to Matt's parents. A phone call: "Hello, I'll get Matt." Or a word about the weather. It had always been Grandpa Loguidice, the still-active-at-eighty-eight-years-old patriarch of the family, who'd visited, who'd taken Matt and me for dinner at some crony's place on Mott Street or to a Yankee game when he was in town. I was still absorbing what Matt had and had not told me about his parents.... What had he always said? They were special.... Theirs was a love match no one had expected to succeed.... They'd flown in the face of all convention.... Yes, but the one thing Matt had never said was what that convention was.

"This was outside the VA hospital." Matt's father was pointing out more photos. The room was lovely, beautifully furnished and upholstered. Light poured in through many windows. The coffee must have already been made, because Matt's mother was carrying out a lacquered black tray containing a celadon tea service and silver flatware, with a larger celadon plate holding various cookies—all of it probably a gift from Matt's tour in the Pacific. "And this"—another snapshot, of a smiling strawberry-blond retriever—"is Lucky, Matt's dog. Matt never got another dog after Lucky."

The tray was set upon the coffee table, and they sat and drank coffee, and I was asked to try various cookies. "Those reddish ones are made with wine." Matt's father pointed to the biscuits. "Don't take one if you're on the wagon. They're from upstate..."

"Syracuse," his wife said.

"Syracuse! My cousin sends them. Can't get them around here anymore."

"Still some Italian neighborhoods in Syracuse," she agreed.

"Matt used to buy them in San Francisco. Ghirardelli Square. That how you say it?"

As they sipped and chewed and talked, my despair deepened. How was I going to
do
this? How could I possibly tell these people what Matt wanted me to tell them? It was clear the two of them lived and breathed for their son—his accomplishments, his beauty, how smart he was, how talented he'd been in school, his successful military career, even with that terrible wound, how he'd become a poet ("Imagine! My boy!" Mr. Loguidice beamed with pride) and been published. They had the two stylish European magazines and a copy of the limited edition Alistair had arranged. ("Course, we're not good at understanding what he wrote. Are we, Mama?") How could I even hint at what Matt had sent me to do?

For the briefest of seconds I thought, This is punishment. Matt is getting back at me. That's why he sent me here. Then I reconsidered. No, Matt sent me because it was so hard, too hard for anyone else to do, and because that's what you did for someone you loved.

"No, thank you. I'm fine," I replied to another offer of coffee. Then feeling very awkward, "Do you think... I mean... will you?... Matt said... The next train's in fifteen minutes and if...?"

I was rewarded with a complete lack of comprehension.

I tried again. "Matt thought the four-twenty-four train to Manhattan..."

"Mama?" Matt's father now looked nervous. "If I helped you clear up?"

"Yes, of course," she said blandly, rising.

It was agreed upon then. I almost sighed with relief. They'd discussed all this, and all I had to do was bring them and not—

"But, Roger," she stood there, "why do we have to go to the city to see Matt? Why can't you bring him here?"

They didn't know! Didn't understand.