Stages (16 page)

“Guys have to prove to the world that they’re worthy of having sex,” Brett said. “But they know that in the eyes of some women—in the eyes of the world as far as that goes, ’specially if they’re cops or hardhats or garbage men—that their lives don’t prove a thing. That’s rough on them. It makes them want to kick ass. Most of the time they can’t, so they enjoy it when they can.”

“I see,” said Melanie. “I guess.” She drank some more beer.

“Want another one?” Brett asked.

“No thanks, I’m fine,” Melanie said. She wrote on her list, “Two. The ocean.”

“You get seasick?” Brett asked, looking.

“No,” Melanie replied, “that’s just my personal shorthand.
The ocean
is what I call this feeling I get sometimes. It’s a variation on the theme of our insignificant place in the universe.”

“Oh that,” said Brett. “The moment in the shower when you wonder who and what you are. It helps if you sing in the shower. Then you don’t worry about…what is it, going down the drain along with…uh, the endless stream of time?”

“That’s pretty close to what I’m talking about,” Melanie said. “Only with me it’s not going down the tubes I think about, it’s being adrift…. See, when I was a kid I used to go swimming with my friends in this saltwater marsh. It had channels in it that were pretty deep. Mostly we just swam from one side to the other. But I used to think, what if I just kept swimming, out into the harbor, and then out of the harbor into the ocean, until I lost sight of land? It would get dark, and the moon would come out, and shine on the surface, and there I’d be, just floating, in the middle of infinity. I don’t have to be by the ocean to get this ocean feeling. Sometimes it comes over me in Times Square.”

“Was this marsh you used to swim in muddy?” Brett asked.

“As a matter of fact it was,” Melanie said. “It could get really smelly at low tide too.”

“That’s why you remember it when you’re in Times Square,” Brett told her. “Muck is muck. What else you going to put on this list?”

“Usually when I make a list like this I put my father right near the top of it,” Melanie said. “But this year I’m thinking of just having him on my Christmas card list.”

“You and him didn’t get along, huh?”

“He wasn’t affectionate,” Melanie said. “I think he thought it wasn’t businesslike.” She got up and looked out the window.

“They’re starting to come home from work,” she said. “Thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner… Oops. A puppy just squatted right in front of a bus. It had to stop. Oh, look, the driver just gave the owner the high sign.” Brett joined Melanie at the window.

“When a dog makes a commitment, that’s it,” Melanie said. “Boom! We worry about what we’re deposited on this earth for, and they just make their deposits. I think too much evolution is constipating.”

They went back to the sofa and talked some more, and Brett got some more beers out of the refrigerator.

After about an hour, Melanie experienced a sensation in her throat that was a little like the feeling of a nervous puppy licking. Then there was a ripple across her field of vision, as if someone were pulling a translucent shower curtain across the room. She found herself growing more and more fascinated with Brett’s guitar, with the rattan chair, with the rawhide fringe on his boots. Things in the room began to pulsate; they seemed almost to be breathing, in the same rapid breaths that Melanie was. She was infusing inanimate objects with her own heartbeat.

Melanie knew that she was getting high, very high. She was climbing stairs of sensation. She’d think that she must have reached the top, but then she’d start climbing all over again. Closing her eyes, she saw a glass meadow, every blade of grass a colored prism; it was as if she could see rather than hear the tinkling of wind chimes.

A little unsteadily, Melanie got up and walked over to the window again.

“What’re you doin’?” Brett asked.

“Just looking,” Melanie said, sounding and feeling as though she had accomplished something of a feat.

Outside, the pedestrians and the automobiles seemed to hesitate in their movements around the shallow pool of existence.

“I wonder what they imagine they’re doing,” Melanie said.

Profoundly tickled, she laughed. “Reality is something we shouldn’t get overconfident about,” she said.

Brett’s body seemed to have elongated as he slouched on the sofa.
His legs aren’t
that
long,
Melanie thought.

Suddenly she felt self-conscious. Aware that something in the room with them was about to pounce. She wondered what he was thinking. She felt like she’d been running, but she wasn’t tired.

She looked at him, and Brett grinned at her.

Melanie saw his erection swelling his jeans along the inside of his leg. She sighed and smiled, and slid across the room. Instantly they were entwined, and inside Melanie exquisite flowers burst into bloom, and tendrils of feeling reached everywhere.

Her body was elastic. She was on a swing, pumping herself dizzily higher and higher, every string in her hanging from his limbs.

In a flutter of fingers her blouse opened up. Then her breasts, all pins and needles at their tips, were pressed against the damp velvet of his chest. She couldn’t absorb enough of him.

“I think we should open up the bed,” Brett murmured after a while.

“Mmmm,” said Melanie.
Bed.
The word was the soft center of a chocolate world.

Sitting up, Brett kicked off his boots. They got on their feet, and he tossed the cushions off the sofa, reached underneath it, and pulled. The mattress unfolded right before Melanie’s eyes, the magic within the miracle.

Together on the bed, naked, they blended their bodies so completely that Melanie no longer knew where she ended and he began.

It seemed to go on for endless hours.

But it did end at last, and as he lay on her, still inside her, where she wanted him to stay and stay, Melanie saw through her half-closed eyes the face of the little alarm clock on the windowsill.

It was only six-thirty.

“Gee,” she said. “We still have the whole evening ahead of us.”

“What’ll we do?” he said.

Much, much later, they finally went out for a pizza.

It was after midnight, and Melanie was still very high. There were puddles in her perceptions that she had to step over gingerly. The other people in the streets appeared to be on fantastic journeys, spies with deep dark secrets emerging from mirages.

But they made it to the restaurant though the blocks were all light years.

Sitting opposite him in a booth, Melanie saw Brett toss his long hair back from his eyes. Maybe it was the way he did it, maybe it was the way he looked at that precise moment, but it affected Melanie like a distinct pause in her life.

She reached for a napkin and put it in her lap. She had to get herself focused, or refocused. What was there about the mere thought of love that everything had to be reorganized around it?

30

With a tray balanced on his shoulder, Mike sidled by his boss, who was fulminating at the fish guy for the third time in a month. The fish guy, a small, timid Italian named Mario, whose demeanor was an act of contrition, was cringing by the walk-in refrigerator.

“Jimmy’s in some mood today,” Sally said to Mike when they met at the coffeemaker. “Ever since his wife stopped by with the kids and he had to run around prying their fingers off things.”

Mike had liked Sally from the first. She took the job about as seriously as he did. Working in this restaurant was for the two of them a lot like being in grammar school—it was a boring routine interrupted by little outbreaks of pandemonium, and suppressing your laughter at the ridiculous things that happened somehow generated enough energy in you to keep you going.

Nick and Jimmy Dardanis’s place was inexpensive for a Village restaurant. It served mostly American food, along with a few Greek specialties
(
hummis
was listed on the menu under
continental cuisine
)
.
Nick and Jimmy Dardanis were able to keep their prices down because they had a long lease and a tiny kitchen, the better to fit in tables.

The day after Mike became part of the crew at Dardanis’s, Sally had an accident and reacted to it in a way that made Mike respond to her immediately. They were in the middle of a rush, with a bucket brigade going in and out of the kitchen. Sally was on her way into the dining room with six dinners when she slipped on a raw shrimp and her tray splatted against the wall. She sat there on the floor, her legs spread out in front of her and her eyes wide with amazement, while the
au jus
streamed down. Then Jimmy emerged from the walk-in, saw the spectacle, turned gray, went back into the walk-in, and closed the door behind him.

Sally started to laugh. So did Mike. And neither of them could stop laughing until Paul, the black dishwasher who had a tragic view of life, came over with his mop. Nick pounded on the door of the walk-in and wept until Jimmy came out again. By that time the mess had been cleaned up and Mike had decided that he’d found a friend in Sally; at work a comrade-in-arms was someone who laughed at the same things you did.

So it hadn’t turned out to be so bad, this waiting on tables. Mike was making enough to rent a small one-bedroom apartment on Christopher Street, and since he usually worked nights, he had his days to look through
Back Stage
and occasionally go to an audition. His first year in New York he landed one role. His second year, two. But everything he did was on the fringe of Off-Broadway, in theaters so small that their aisles reminded him of the silverware drawers in the restaurant. Looking out the windows of the dressing rooms in these theaters, Mike would invariably see a wash on a line strung between tenement windows. And the shows did not run for much longer than it takes a pair of socks to dry.

Any acting job was better than none, though, even if it went unnoticed. Working in the restaurant was a constant reminder to Mike that most people toiled without recognition for their efforts. What was the line from
Death of a Salesman
?
“Attention must finally be paid to such a man.” It wasn’t necessarily so, Mike had decided. In New York, as in the rest of the country, all the attention people didn’t give to one another or to the arts, they paid to celebrities. How anyone became a celebrity was decided somewhere in the clouds, or maybe in New Jersey.

Even when you were noticed, you might not get anywhere. The gay bars that Mike went to sometimes had their own stars, guys who turned heads when they walked into a place, but though they attracted attention, they were approached so seldom it might as well have been never. What homosexuals had in common with almost everyone else was the certainty that none of God’s gifts could possibly have been meant for them, and that conviction was a complement to their uncertainty about themselves.

The week that Judy Garland died, Mike asked Sally if she wanted to go out with him and shed a few show business tears—which he said were the drops of condensation running down the side of a cocktail glass. She really would have loved to, she said, but she was baby-sitting for two Scotties, a mother and daughter, who would spite you by sitting glued to the sidewalk if you’d left them alone too long. Mike said he understood. And he did. It seemed to him that most of the single people living in New York would be forever indecisive if it weren’t for what their animals decided for them.

The alternative for Mike, then, was to go out after work alone, which was not a very promising proposition, since it was June and everybody in the gay world who was anybody would be going to Fire Island or the Hamptons for the weekend. There wouldn’t be anyone on Christopher Street except the usual street trash and a bunch of out-of-work actors like himself.

But what have I got to lose?
Mike thought.

After he’d finished clearing his last table, Mike folded his apron for the evening, rolled down his sleeves, and walked out into the mild, moist night, expecting the usual nothing. Living in New York was a kind of expectation in itself, though, and as Mike walked he searched the sky—which in the Village was only partly bricked up—for a star. Rounding the corner, he lowered his eyes to the sidewalk. By the back door of Dardanis’s, the sidewalk was gleaming with Paul’s soapy dishwater, a river that flowed summer and winter.

The restaurant wasn’t much, and neither was this part of the Village, with its store windows full of secondhand lamp bases and beckoning fortune-tellers with kids hanging on to them. Still, Mike felt he belonged here. There was a dirty romance to these streets, a rainbow underfoot like the patches of oil from cars that shimmered when it was wet out. He might have made as much money or more working in some other city, but here Mike had something more than money that he lived on. He knew he wouldn’t have had it anywhere else.

Mike was a couple of blocks from Sheridan Square when he heard sirens.

Must be a fire,
he thought.

Then he saw two figures running toward him. When they ran under a streetlight, he saw that they were drag queens. Mike knew one of them; he was a fiftyish stock boy who worked for Lord & Taylor during the day. As a sideline he painted
Mother
on wide ribbons meant for funeral wreaths. His name was Arthur, but his street name was Annette Funicello. Arthur and his friend were in such a hurry that their feet were slopping out of their high heels.