Stages (9 page)

“What’s awkward is a fraternity party,” Melanie said. “Where they all
are
after you. Like a bunch of German shepherds standing on their hind legs and pawing, with beer on their breath.”

Leering, Melanie started panting and did a dog paddle up the front of Mike’s shirt.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I get the idea.”

“How come you didn’t give it a shot with Eric yourself?” Melanie said as she settled back onto her stool.

“I don’t know,” Mike replied.

“Were you afraid to?”

“I suppose.”

Melanie sighed.

“Stand By Your Man” was playing on the jukebox.

“At least there’s one thing I’m not alone in,” Mike said. “Being scared of rejection. You read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ for English, didn’t you? ‘I am not Prince Hamlet.’ It’s a neat trick, Mel, if you can play the lead role in the drama of your own life. Most of us watch ourselves, from the wings.”

He drank some more Scotch.

“I think David’s girlfriend watches the soaps and takes notes,” Melanie said. “Well, anyway, you win some, you lose some. The thing is to keep playing the game.”

“I haven’t got forever to do that,” Mike replied. “Look around this place. I’d really rather not turn into one of these old queers who wear their overcoats over their shoulders like capes. And red socks. And handkerchiefs that…
bloom
out of their jacket pockets.”

“There are worse things than wearing your overcoat over your shoulders,” Melanie said. “If there wasn’t a little glamour in the nighttime nobody would come out after dark at all.”

“We probably would,” Mike said. “Ah, the lure of the bright lights. Tell me, Mel, do you really want to be famous? Wait, don’t answer that question until I get another drink.”

Mike caught the bartender’s eye and got his drink. “Well?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied primly.

Mike blinked at her.

“I was just picturing myself arriving at the Academy Awards,” Melanie said. “In a limousine, with Warren Beatty.”

“Fat chance,” Mike said.

“Fat chance, skinny chance. Who knows?” Melanie replied. “If I have some luck, I won’t worry about whether or not it has a weight problem. The way I see it is, the world is made up of the haves and the have-nots, and what the have-nots most often haven’t got is imagination. You’re never going to get where you can’t see yourself being.”

Noticing Melanie, a nearby customer said to his friend, “Is that a drag queen?”

“Of course,” said the friend. “An actual woman could never look that
real.
”

14

Paula was behind in her work, so three weeks before finals she decided to go home to Queens for a long weekend in order to get caught up. The big advantage of going home to study rather than for a vacation was that when she was there to work, her mother scrupulously refrained from
hocking
her about things, lest her grades should suffer. As it happened, Jonathan Bernstein, the little male ingenue who hadn’t wanted to play the Fool in
Lear,
was going home for the weekend too, and his family’s house was only a few miles from where Paula’s parents lived. So she was able to get a ride with him.

Jonathan’s car was a brand-new Chevrolet Corvette. It was like his roommate’s car, only it was a different color. Jonathan’s roommate was a rich southerner, cultivated in his decadence, and living according to his whims. His name was Hooker Hamilton. Since he was given to velvet sports jackets and pomaded hair reminiscent of a Beardsley print, Hooker’s sudden appearance in September in a sports car associated with American machismo—“Route 66” and all—created a stir. The stir almost became a row when, in October, Jonathan’s parents, not about to be outdone, presented their son with a Corvette of his own. Jonathan was a JAP as well as an ingenue.

David had to explain to Melanie and Paula why the fraternity crowd was so outraged by two faggots tooling around the campus in Corvettes. He said that they thought of it as a terrible social injustice, mitigated only by the fact that both cars had automatic transmissions instead of four speeds, which rendered them, as true performance machines, almost—but not quite—impotent.

Melanie and Paula had laughed until their sides ached.

Now Paula was going to get to ride in Jonathan’s Corvette all the way to New York, and the prospect amused her. She liked Jonathan and his roommate. They were not lovers, and they lived together rather like two ladies in an English seaside resort. They were dilettantes and aesthetes, making spur-of-the-moment transatlantic telephone calls to friends spending their junior year abroad, and quibbling with salesmen at Brooks Brothers over whether or not their trousers should have cuffs.

While Jonathan’s parents were well enough off, Hooker’s parents were startlingly rich. They had an estate in Albemarle County, Virginia, that had its own air strip, and Hooker had simply flown his whole life-style up to Boston with him, right down to his embroidered opera slippers.

It was partly this, their cavalier way of dismissing out of hand all of life’s burdens and inconveniences, that made the two roommates charming. Though jaded, they were genuinely free spirits, and Paula liked to associate with them, because the idea of being absolutely free to do whatever you wanted with your life fascinated her. She wasn’t quite sure yet whether that freedom was something that only money could buy.

The first leg of their trip Paula and Jonathan spent discussing their respective mothers’ taste in interior decorating. Both the Rubins and the Bernsteins lived in large, Tudor-style houses with little more than bibs of lawn, so everything had gone into the interiors.

“Is your mother still on that monochromatic kick?” Jonathan asked.

“Are you kidding?” Paula replied. “At this point everything is white, except for my grandmother’s hair. That’s orange. When she sits down on one of my mother’s sofas she looks like a pumpkin on a glacier.”

“My mother is still fond of Louis XV,” Jonathan said. “Ormolu and brocade. I’m not sure if there are sofas and chairs anymore. Everything looks like a ballgown or a chandelier.”

A few drops of rain spattered the windshield of the Corvette.

“Oh, dear,” Paula said. “I thought those clouds looked mean.”

They were on the Connecticut Turnpike, just past New Haven.

“So, I’ll spritz it off,” Jonathan said. He pushed a button, and windshield washing fluid spurted out. The wipers began to arc back and forth.

It occurred to Paula that Jonathan drove pretty much the way her mother did, oblivious to everything between the starting and the stopping.

The rain was coming down harder.

“Looks like we’re in for a real downpour,” Paula said. Shrugging, Jonathan turned up the volume of
Sergeant Pepper
,
which was playing on the eight track tape deck.

Suddenly the windshield looked as though a tide were coming in over it.

Cars were slowing down. Then, just ahead, Paula saw a car sliding with almost balletic grace right across the road; it climbed halfway up an embankment.

“Oh, my God,” she said, her heart pounding. “Did you see that?”

Jonathan, who had slowed the car a little, was trying to concentrate on the traffic ahead of him.

“Maybe you better fasten your seatbelt, Paula,” he said.

She did as he suggested. The click of the belt latching reassured her a little.

Two miles down the highway a Volkswagen microbus veered into the guard rail. The doors on the driver’s side were peeled open, and right before Paula’s horrified eyes three small children fell out, one by one, like luggage spilling onto a carousel.

A moment later someone had stopped his car and was desperately trying to gather up the kids.

All Paula could do was gasp.

Jonathan slowed even more.

“What is
wrong
with this
road
?”
Paula finally managed to say.

“It’s gotten slick,” Jonathan replied. “And there are all these curves.”

Paula saw that he had a death grip on the steering wheel. As calmly as she could, she said, “Do you think we should stop for a while? Pull over and wait it out?”

“I guess maybe we should,” Jonathan said. He drove another mile or so, and then, seeing, a sign for a rest area, he braked.

The car slid like a dish on a lopsided tray.

In a sort of suspended animation, Paula saw the guard rail looming in front of the car. She heard the grind of the impact in the same instant that her head flew forward and thwacked the dashboard.

She felt a shock go through her head, and a warm sap all over her face and in her mouth, before she blacked out.

15

After their fourth visit to the motel on Route 1, Lauren and James came to be known there. When it was available, they were given room 20, a room to which Lauren had developed something of a sentimental attachment. The headboard of room 20’s king-size bed was a long, narrow mirror. By the window were two Danish modern armchairs and a round coffee table with a maple-colored finish that was blotched with water marks and black cigarette bums. On one wall there was a framed photograph of a tigress with a cub in its mouth. The room smelled of tobacco, and virtually every surface was tacky from softdrinks.

Yet in room 20 Lauren was contentedly at home. The room was the setting of her only intimacy outside of her family, and though it was as cheap, dirty, and impersonal as a seat on a bus, the feeling it gave Lauren was luxurious.

After they made love, James would smoke a cigarette, and he and Lauren would map out plans on the room’s ceiling. He wanted her to try to get into a graduate program in London; he was almost sure of getting his Fulbright. They could go to Paris together, and Venice, maybe even to the ancient amphitheaters of Greece. As James talked, his head resting on a pillow propped against the mirrored headboard, Lauren would listen, her fingers gathering his T-shirt.

Lauren loved James’ white oxford shirts, his rep ties, and his herringbone sports jackets. She loved looking at his wing-tip shoes on the floor, their laces untied. Sometimes she would hang his things on the chrome bar by the door, arranging his wardrobe for him, like a wife.

Once, in his haste, James tore a button off his shirt.

Later Lauren wondered if Ellen would sew it back on.

Usually she didn’t think about James’s wife and kids; they were part of a world outside room 20. Lauren knew that he had two teenagers, but she imagined them as older, people James had lived with for a time but had now gotten beyond, like their mother.

As much as Lauren loved James, she loved the way he was working to control events so he could be with her. He was power itself, the way he had towered over the theater history class, the way he’d run the department, the way he’d played Lear. And he was hers, directing their life together.

They had been looking forward to spending hours together in room 20 during exam week, but then they found that they couldn’t. The entire motel had been booked for a pipefitters’ convention, and there was nothing James could do about that.

16

Melanie was ashen.

Kathy’s hand darted to her breast.

“Mel, what is it?” she said.

“It’s Paula,” Melanie said. “She’s been in a car accident. With Jonathan.”

Kathy was the second person Melanie told. She’d run into David first, on her way to see Kathy, minutes after she’d received the news herself. David had scribbled down the number of the hospital in Connecticut where Paula was, and he’d tried calling—three times, but he’d gotten a busy signal each time. The third time his patience had run out, and he’d wanted to rip out the receiver.

Lately David was running out of patience every other day. Frustration would boil over in him, and he’d stalk out of his room, out of a restaurant, out of a phone booth. Once he ran to a bus stop, took the bus to Cambridge, got on a subway in Harvard Square, and rode that into Boston. Then he walked from Beacon Hill across the Common to the Back Bay.

He felt as if he could have walked across the country.

When he was unable to reach Paula, he walked blindly across the campus and right through a touch football game, never even glancing at the players when they shouted, “Hey, watch out!”

While David was trying in vain to reach Paula, she was lying in her hospital bed in New Haven listening to her mother telling her, “You’re a very lucky young lady.”

Paula’s mother was wearing her caramel-colored hair in a French twist, and she had on a beige suit of a nubbly material that Paula, enough out of her daze to be sure of a few things, identified as a wool blend. She also recognized, on her mother’s face, the expression she wore when preparing for diplomatic negotiations—settling an issue that had arisen in her mahjong circle, or asking for Broadway house seats for a group of five rather than the standard four.

Paula’s nose felt as if a champagne cork had been stuffed up each nostril.

“Lucky?” she said weakly.

“Of course. It could have been a lot worse. Of course that friend of yours was even luckier, walking away from a wreck like that without even a scratch. I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned him to me before. Is he anyone…
special
?”

“He’s gay, Mother,” Paula said.