Stages (43 page)

Two weeks later, Eric did come out of the hospital. They put him on a train, along with an attendant. Mike stood there on the platform in Penn Station, watching Eric leave New York for the last time, his head, resting against the murky, spattered window. They were sending him home to die, in diapers.

Mike walked all the way back to the Village. It was one of those fall days when the sky is a spotless blue and a cool breeze keeps you to the sunny side of the street. Mike wondered as he strode along if he too might be living on borrowed time.
In the end,
he thought,
I
really haven’t done very much with my life.
What, Mike asked himself, had he been but a sometime actor in nondescript, barely noticed plays. He’d been a pretty good waiter. He was afraid that he hadn’t been much of a friend, though, to anyone. Too often he’d played at being someone’s lover instead, for a night, for a month, for however long it had felt good. Now it was all over, that part of it, anyway. What was left?

Stopping before one of the windows in Barney’s men’s store, Mike looked at the male mannequin, with its turned-up collar and its country-weekend scarf. The plaster face, with its square, cleft chin, could have been any one of the Sunday comics’ characters who looked like Clint Eastwood. Mike looked at his own reflection in the plate glass. If he lowered his chin, scrunched it down into his neck, lines drove upward into his cheeks, lines that would be there all the time in a year or two. Still, he sensed, he
knew
that there was going to be more to his life, that something, maybe someone, awaited him, in the wings. A kind of calm descended on Mike. Once he had feared growing older. He didn’t now. He might not have done much with his life, but at least he had come far enough to reach maturity. He had had wisdom thrust upon him. He had known and would know much sadness, but better that than the crying of an hysterical child, which was where most adults were with their emotions.

Mike walked away from his reflection in Barney’s window knowing that something like hope was being held out before him. In a way he felt that he had everything, because he was among the lucky ones who had received what now seemed the surpassing gift: years yet left in their allotment of time.

72

“Roomy, isn’t it?” Melanie said.

“It’s about as big as the bus garage I go by on Ninth when I eat at Ralph’s,” Mike replied. “What are you going to do with all this?”

“Live in it,” Melanie said. “And work in it.”

Mike walked over to one of the windows. It was nearly as tall as he was.

“Nice view of the river,” he said. “But you’re gonna need about a case of Windex.” He pulled a piece of Kleenex out of his pocket, wadded it up, and rubbed the grime until he had made himself a little circle to look out.

“I figure about six months,” Melanie said. “And it’ll be looking the way I want it to.”

“Why didn’t you just get an apartment on Fifth Avenue? Why bother with a loft at all?”

“I told you, I’m planning to
work
here.”

“At what? You planning to turn this place back into a sweatshop?”

“In a manner of speaking. What I want to do is open an actors’ workshop. Something along the lines of the Actors’ Studio. Oh, I know I’m not Uta Hagen, or Lee Strasberg. All I’ve ever been is an actress who’s hung in there, and made her mistakes, and had her little triumphs, even, but I’ve always found work, and at this point I think I know a thing or two about the profession—so I’d like to share what I’ve learned, maybe make it a little easier for some of the kids coming along. I can pick and choose the roles I want to take now, thanks to my father, so I got to thinking, what would I do in between roles, shop in Bloomingdale’s?”

“I would.”

“I can always count on you to play devil’s advocate, can’t
I?”

“Of course. I’m here to supply a healthy dose of cynicism, and I can help with the decor too. If you need any more gay input than that, you should be opening a beauty salon.”

“I was thinking of you for more than that, Mike. How’d you like to help out here?”

“You mean teach?”

“If we can just get them over high school, then we might even be able to make up for some of the damage that was done to them in college. I think it’s worth a try, anyhow. I see all these kids, over where you live now, in Hell’s Kitchen. They come here so hopeful, and I feel like I want to try to help them—not to get all their hope kicked out of them. I’d like to try to show them how to survive.”

“That’s a neat trick sometimes,” Mike said. “Surviving.”

“How is Eric?” Melanie asked.

“They sent him home two days ago,” Mike said. “To die.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Melanie.

“Eight of my friends so far,” said Mike. “If I counted acquaintances, it would be more like thirty.”

“I’ve lost friends too,” Melanie said. “Peter, Harry, Mark, Jeff, Larry.”

“Maybe it’ll end,” Mike said. “When nobody from my generation is left. It was a short party, but it was fun while it lasted. I guess. I wonder if it hadn’t been going on, if I’d have made it as an actor. Maybe I was too afraid I was going to miss something, so I just waited on my tables, and then got back to the Pines, or Studio, or Flamingo, or the Saint…. Maybe I would have been better off doing summer stock in Somesville, Maine.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to Somesville. Maybe I should have tried out for that part that Veronica Simmons got.”

“Yeah.
Paula.
I wonder what she had that we didn’t.”

“A nose job. Also an ability to work with fate, I suppose. But anybody can learn to do that. Do the unexpected thing with what life has handed you and then you can look back and think that what’s happened was meant to be. But whether it’s God’s decisions or your own, I think there has to be some purpose behind it all, something more important than eating and sex and football.”

“I think you should go shopping and you think I should teach. Can we do any better than that?”

“There’s love, but I’ve had love once and I don’t know if I’ll ever have it again.”

“Love. Yeah, I’ve been in love too, for moments at a time. If I decide to work here, I won’t be the tech director, no way.”

“Whatever happened to Mr. Cherry?”

“Eric told me that a pair of hustlers left him in pieces in a couple of garbage bags outside his house.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, Eric was. The last anybody heard of him Mr. Cherry was running a restaurant that’s also a gallery. He gets people drunk with the cocktails he makes and they go home with paintings. He’s brought the concept of fast food to interior decorating, plus he functions as a b-girl. People find fulfillment in funny ways, don’t they?”

“I guess that’s what I’m offering you, Mike, and me—a chance at a funny kind of fulfillment.”

“I may take you up on it. I have to do something besides answer the phone at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.”

“You know, Mike, it’s not over.”

“What isn’t?”

“Gay life. Your world hasn’t ended. Any more than Broadway is dead. You can’t wipe out gay people, ever. And you can’t kill the theater. Because new generations keep coming along, people who are gay and people who want to act. They’re anybody’s children, but they’re the heirs of a history that goes on and on, a history that you and I are part of. Don’t you see, Mike, just by surviving we’ve become the parents of the kids who are like ourselves. We have a heritage that has to get passed along. We have something to do, something that’s important and meaningful and…
”

“Good,” Mike said. He looked through the little clearing he had made in the glass. “Sometimes I forget. How even in a bad show there’s
good.
Too bad the world doesn’t think like they did in those old Mickey Rooney movies—‘Hey, let’s put on a
play
!’
There’d be theaters in every backyard, every barn. And no missile silos.”

“All I want is an actors’ studio in my nice big loft,” Melanie said.

73

Lauren had never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when Jason came home with a gift of a Thai stick from—of all people—a woman oil buyer who represented some public utility in New Jersey, she said to him, “Okay, after Nathaniel’s in bed, we’ll try it. With a glass of brandy, maybe.” And so they did. After her third toke, while Lauren was evaluating the dope (it was smooth, not at all irritating to her throat or her eyes), she suddenly realized that she had been sitting here pondering for quite a few minutes on end. Between her thoughts, there was about enough room to move in a sofa the size of the one she was sitting on.

“This… she said to Jason after making an effort to collect herself, “this stuff is really
good.
”
Jason, who was sitting opposite her in a gilded Louis XVI chair, replied, “It is, isn’t it?”

“I feel like I’ve been transported back to the sixties,” Lauren said. “This is almost like that mescaline we tried once.”

“I remember,” said Jason. “We talked a lot. Everything sparkled, even though it was a cloudy day. I remember all these silvery impressions, wind chimes, cymbals. I think we played the Sergeant Pepper album.”

“That’s right,” Lauren said. “We did.” She handed the joint to her husband.

“And then we did it,” he recalled.

“We sure did,” Lauren said, smiling. “Hardly anyone seems to refer to it that way anymore.
Doing it,
I mean. I bet there are some women who keep all the articles about it on file, like recipes…. My brothers were always talking about whether or not some girl would
do it;
I’d block my ears, unless it was somebody I knew they were talking about. To think that I wound up doing it with one of my professors… They should print warnings in
Seventeen.
”

Jason was watching her through the curls of smoke.

“When I think of myself with him,” Lauren said. “Smoking cigarettes afterward. I remember that I imagined I was living a French movie. God, I didn’t know
anything.
And I pretended to know so much. It’s terrible that it takes so long even to find out what you should know about yourself….
”

“I’ve figured out a lot of stuff as I’ve gotten older,” Jason said. “But I also figure that there isn’t that much I would have done differently, even if I’d known better at the time. You want to watch the ten o’clock news—or do you just want to go to bed?”

“Go to bed?” said Lauren. “It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?” She looked at her husband. He was smirking at her salaciously.

“Oh, I get it,” Lauren said.

“It took you awhile.”

“That’s because this stuff is so powerful, it slows down your…responses.”

“To slow it down is to prolong it,” said Jason. Gallantly, he stood up and offered his wife his hand.

There were occasions when Lauren still delighted in her husband’s body. If anything, he was harder and more tightly knit than he’d been when she’d first known him. He worked out three times a week, and in the summer he played tennis and golf. He fooled around a little too. With whom, Lauren had never known. Secretaries, she supposed, maybe this oil buyer with her Thai sticks. It really didn’t matter to Lauren with whom Jason was
doing it.
She had come to think of his fooling around as something not all that different from what he did at the New York Athletic Club.

Lauren had never forgotten the time when she’d been changing her baby brother’s diaper for her mother and had been squirted in the face. Her mother had said, “That’s the worst thing about boys.” You always had to remember that, Lauren had decided, and make allowances.

Then, even now, there would be moments like this one, moments when Lauren wanted to be possessed by her husband wholly, to have him all to herself, as if there were no world outside this bedroom, no Junior League with a Deco theater to rescue, no New York City with its women in satin jogging shorts flapping around their hips like flags.

God, how she loved him like this, half crazy, his hands clutching at her compliant flesh, his mouth wet against her neck, his breath coming in gasps. How wonderful, how exquisite it was to make love this way, out of desire pure and simple, without any of that old nighttime routine, that wearying step-by-step ascent to orgasm and sleep.

Tonight, she wanted him to fuck her forever.

Lauren could tell that he was torturing himself trying to keep from coming. He would pull out, and shiver, and he’d moan, and then he’d be in again, hard as porcelain, touching that nerve in her that was sensitive only to this, that was the pulse of euphoria, the connector of pleasure and pain, of laughter and tears.

There was an animal part of her that still didn’t know anything, that was incapable of learning. It was young, dumb, and in love. And it made her feel so supremely good.

All the exotic dope had done was let it loose again.

He yelled when he came, and collapsed on her, soaked with sweat, utterly spent. Such a bad boy, but not uncontrollable. He might stray, but he was still hers. So long as they could do it like this, he couldn’t possibly belong to anyone else, not really. She patted his muscular little butt with her fingers. After a while he slid off her, smacking his lips, to go to sleep.