The Fisher Boy (3 page)

Chapter Three

No one knew the meaning of what had happened at Arthur’s. Was it a hate crime directed at a specific individual, or against the entire gay community, using one man as a kind of totem? Like hundreds of other sweaty, sunburned people, Roberto and I crowded into the meeting about this outrage.

The room in the town hall was one of those echoing Victorian spaces that called to mind assembly at St. Harold’s. The seats were hard, made of varnished slats the color of peanut brittle. They kept up a running battle with your spine. Despite this and humidity that settled on your skin like a rash, the place was packed with a populace diverse as Arthur’s party: gays and straights, shop-owners and houseboys, summer residents and year-rounders, even families of tourists fanning themselves with the lavender flyers obediently accepted from gay rights activists.

A famous lesbian author nursed her baby with one dove-white breast. A prominent bar-owner, in a Santa Claus beard and leather lederhosen, had brought along his Congo parrot, which danced on his shoulder. “Why, why, I want to know why,” a woman in painters’ overalls was saying. The tension in the hall was as palpable as the heat, which was Bangladeshi in its intensity.

The first speaker was the Provincetown chief of police. He was a sleek man with a profile sharp as the edges of his badge. “First, let me say that everyone in Provincetown is shocked at this incident of…vandalism. And let me stress that every possible lead—”

“You told the media you don’t have any leads!” one activist with flyers yelled.

“The chief has the floor!” shouted the captain of a whale watch boat.

“We have leads but no suspects,” the chief of police answered. “The animal found on Mr. Hilliard’s doorstep was wearing a collar but no license or any sort of identifying tag.”

“It was wearing an AIDS ribbon, though! That’s evidence of a hate crime!” one of the twins from Arthur’s party argued.

“The animal in question was indeed wearing a ribbon tied to its collar,” the chief admitted. “The ribbon was saturated with blood and may, at one time, have been red or another dark color. What this signifies—”

“It signifies hatred! It’s a hate crime!” Roberto yelled. Outspoken as always, he was now all but trembling with anger.

The chief reported that the dog was “a well-nourished female, a mixed breed, German shepherd and Labrador retriever.”

“Like we need its ancestry,” Roberto said.

The famous lesbian author demanded, “This happens in broad daylight, yet nobody saw a thing?”

“Which seems to suggest that the people who did this had a car—to be able to dump this dog off quickly, then retreat,” the chief said. “But no, there was very little street traffic at the time, and nobody saw a thing. No neighbors, for instance. They were all at Arthur’s party, in the dining room, at the back of the house, or in the backyard, out on the terrace. The dining room windows open onto Arthur’s driveway, so there is no direct view of the street. On the terrace, the view of the street is blocked by the foliage in the garden. The dog was bloody, but there was no blood spilt on the front path leading to the stoop, suggesting the animal was carried in some sort of container. So, please, if anyone has
any
information, contact us.”

Just then, the lesbian author’s baby began screeching until she pointed it back to her nipple. Some tourists’ children in Notre Dame T-shirts giggled when they saw the bare breast, then their father turned their heads around like spigots on a sink.

Rumor had it Arthur had been scheduled to speak but had cancelled at the last minute. He was absent, and so were Edward and the woman from the café who’d alerted me to this meeting.

Ian was recognized and stood. “I have been a summer resident and tax-payer for more than seven years. I had had a pleasant experience here in Provincetown until government meddling interfered with my wishes regarding my private property—”

“Mr. Drummond,” the moderator asked, “what relevance does this have to tonight’s—”

“This is a clear-cut case of mindless vandalism,” Ian said. “It isn’t political and it isn’t a hate crime. How many crimes are committed out of love? Just enforce the laws that are on the books and put these punks to work making license plates.”

“Say no to hatred!” a gay rights activist called out. “The climate of this town must change!”

“I agree!” said a man about forty in a navy blue suit which must have felt like goose down in the heat. Upon reaching the microphone, he beamed and said, “I feel so fortunate to be a new resident of this glorious corner of creation…”

“Get to the point,” somebody yelled.

Politely, too politely, he said, “I will.” He fumbled with the flap to the pocket of his jacket, and, from inside, drew a slender glass jar, the sort that holds maraschino cherries or marinated mushrooms in supermarkets.

Unscrewing the lid of the jar, he poured its contents into his hand—a glittery white substance he displayed with triumph. “This,” he told us, “is all that’s left of Sodom and Gomorrah…A salty waste on the shores of the Dead Sea.”

At this point, something jolted my memory, like your body jolts when first surrendering to sleep. I had seen this man before, televised, amid colored fountains and the statue of an angel ten stories tall. Others recognized him too, and moaned, “Oh God!”

“I’m so glad somebody finally brought Him up!”

People whispered and then shouted his name: “Hollings Fair, Hollings Fair from the Christian Soldiers!”

At this point, all decorum collapsed. The lesbian author shouted, her earrings flashing like swords. I saw Miriam for the first time, standing toward the rear and hissing.

Fair continued, “Three-hundred-eighty-five years ago, the Pilgrim fathers dropped anchor in the New World, at Provincetown. Now, we too come here, in the same spirit of hope and opportunity.”

“You’re not a resident!” Roger Morton shouted. “You don’t belong at this meeting!”

“Opportunism is more like it,” the lesbian author said. “We know what your people did out west!”

“Shame, shame!” some activists shouted.

Hollings Fair folded his hands on the podium and tried to appear serene, but he was squeezing his knuckles white with tension.

“I’d like the floor,” said a blue-haired lady I knew worked at the local bakery. The chief tapped Hollings Fair, but he refused to move. Instead, he bowed his head in silence, apparently in prayer.

“Sir,” said the chief of police, “please make your point in a timely manner.”

“I will,” said Hollings Fair. “I just wanted to tell God about it first.” His voice became strident. It might have been the voice of his ten-story angel, with her sword and concrete wings: “We do have a stake in what happens in Provincetown, we
do
have a right to voice our opinion. Because we
are
property-owners as of this week!” He pulled papers from his jacket and waved them aloft. “Here’s our deed, here’s our deed!” He quoted an address on Commercial Street.

Many in the audience groaned or swore. “Focus, focus!” somebody called.

“We are going to change this town!” Hollings Fair announced. “We are going to take back this town in the name of the American family!”

Roberto stood and yelled, “Are you behind what happened at Arthur’s party?”

“Of course not!” Fair yelled back.

“We’re here to discuss the incident about the dog,” the moderator pleaded. “Please yield the floor.”

At last Fair obeyed, taking his deed and Dead Sea salt to a far rear corner of the room where his followers had been collecting, not anemic ladies in straw hats with veils, but crewcut men who were Parris Island-lean, some in camouflage and boots black as iron.

Then the blue-haired woman from the bakery took the microphone amid scattered but intense applause. I had often seen her, among the turnovers and Portuguese pastries. Introducing herself as Mary Almeida, she said, “I’m a lifelong, year-round resident of Provincetown,” a dig at summer people like Ian and the famous author. “My son is on the police force,” she said, and some people in the audience began clapping.

Mrs. Almeida made a speech about unity in the face of hatred and was the first person to praise Arthur’s long list of contributions to Provincetown. Coming from someone local with a son on the police force, her words carried an added authority, especially when she ended her speech with, “And who could do such a thing to Arthur, of all people?”

There was sustained applause.

But where
was
Arthur? Frightened into seclusion in his house? If he’d been alone, I might’ve been less uneasy, but he was with that dubious little Edward Babineaux.

As we filed out into the humid night, Ian accosted me. “Did you believe that holy roller?” He was violating my space, as some people might say, standing inches in front of me, his breath reeking of beer, like a frat-house the morning after a kegger. “Did you see those stormtroopers he brought with him? Where did they go? I guess they cut out early.” Ian’s tone conveyed both indignation and delight. The delight might have been due to the Christian Soldiers’ battle gear; Ian loved military history and could name divisions and commanding officers from wars most people had never heard of.

“Spare change?” a girl with a foreign-sounding accent asked on Commercial Street, then Ian laughed and edged away. The girl had crinkly golden hair and sprays of coins dangling from her pierced ears. At first, I thought she was a foreign college student, hitchhiking around the States, then I saw that she was young, fifteen at most, barefoot and dirty, in a long dress of violet batik. She and her companion, her sister, I guessed, were smoking fat, hand-rolled cigarettes that generated a great many sparks.

My pocket yielded two quarters, some pennies, and some lint. Roberto was about to give them a dollar bill when Miriam called out, “Stop! Don’t do that! Don’t give those girls a thing, they stole from me earlier this week!” Miriam’s nerves were obviously jangling—she’d been sick on Edward’s bouillabaisse, then, with me, discovered the bloated mutt on Arthur’s doorstep. “I recognize you both,” Miriam said, but the girls smiled as though she were telling them a riddle instead of accusing them of theft. “You,” she said to the older girl, “you tried to take an amber bracelet.” She pointed to the smaller girl. “And you tried to put a kaleidoscope into your handbag.”

“We’re from Scandinavia,” the older girl said, in a singsong accent reminiscent of Abba.

“Since the
Vasa
has come here, all young shoplifters are suddenly Scandinavians who speak English when it serves their interest,” Miriam told us. “But everyone knows that the crew of the
Vasa
hasn’t come ashore and you didn’t even know what amber was even though most of the world’s amber comes from the Baltic,” Miriam scolded the older girl.

Both girls, smoking their fat, sparky cigarettes, laughed. The older girl took Roberto’s dollar, then they vanished.

Miriam turned her irritation on me. “Why didn’t you say something at the meeting?” she said, the heiress pushing through her earth mother facade. “You’re an actor, you’re used to speaking in public.”

“I’m not a resident. And I spoke on TV. Why didn’t you speak?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer, but said seeing that obnoxious Hollings Fair had nauseated her as much as Edward’s bouillabaisse. And she was worried sick about Arthur. Like me, she’d called him dozens of times, only to get the “treasure” on the answering machine, repeating that they were “fine” but not up to receiving phone calls or visitors. “He’s not reaching out,” Miriam said. “Arthur isn’t asking for support. He might need his meds again.”

We walked Miriam to her shop. Her daughter, Chloe, was behind the counter, not waiting on customers, of course, but leafing through a storybook,
The Magical Radish.
The little girl had Miriam’s auburn hair, but a smile that was more transforming. It lit up her being as she abandoned her book, calling, “Mum, mum, mum!”

“Thank God you’re here!” the cashier said to Miriam.

“Has Chloe been acting up?”

The little girl came scampering out from behind the display case, from behind the shelves of amethysts and arrowheads, garnets and quartz and freshwater pearls, all sparkling among river stones dark like sea beans. She buried her head in Miriam’s skirt.

“Chloe’s been fine, but we’ve had shoplifters.”

“Two dirty-looking girls?”

“A dirty boy. He almost made off with one of the paperweights.” The cashier, a high school girl, gestured at the shelf of blown glass paperweights, each with what looked like a sea anemone imprisoned inside. Expensive, imported from Scotland, the smallest cost fifty dollars.

The cashier said a boy “who looked like he was allergic to soap and water” slipped a paperweight into the front pocket of his jeans. When she told him to put it back, he said the bulge was “an all-natural compliment.” So she called down the street, pretending to see Sergeant Almeida, and the boy tossed the paperweight onto the floor, then ran out.

“Was he ‘Swedish’?” Miriam asked sarcastically.

“He was just an idiot,” the cashier said.

The paperweight, full of tender-looking orange tentacles that looked like they might sting small fish, had chipped, the cashier confessed, but Miriam said not to worry about it. Then, to Roberto and me, she said, “I wonder if the Christian Soldiers steal?”

Chapter Four

Up, up, up we climbed on the following Friday. Roberto and I were climbing endless redwood steps up the sandy hillside to what Ian Drummond was calling the First Annual St. Harold’s Memoriam. Ian’s party list was culled from a far smaller circle than Arthur’s; it was crankier, more conservative, and exclusively gay male. His guests were graduates of select New England prep schools like St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, and Exeter, among which St. Harold’s would be considered what Ian called “weak tea” even before it began hemorrhaging red ink.

But the fate of St. Harold’s failed to tarnish Ian’s social stature in gay circles. Among angry entrepreneurs who called talk radio on their cell phones, among MBAs who quoted Ayn Rand, among South End couples with hot tubs on their roof decks, Ian was recognized, and, to a large degree, respected. People might challenge his opinions or find him scrappy and smug, but few denied him the compliment of being one of Boston’s “movers and shakers.”

“Take everything he says with a grain of salt,” I advised Roberto, as a survival strategy for this party.

Our host, obviously sloshed, greeted us with, “Welcome, Mark, what would you like to drink? I’m serving grilled swordfish, which doesn’t go well with dead dog, so I want no discussion whatsoever about Arthur’s little canine dilemma. Agreed?” This remark sabotaged my plan. I’d left a message on Arthur’s answering machine warning that if I didn’t receive some sort of reply—from him—that I’d assume he was in danger. And I’d planned on asking Ian to phone him too.

Belatedly, Ian acknowledged Roberto, or rather acknowledged his thighs and biceps with a once-over, then, to me: “And you brought your fellow thespian. How bohemian, I hope we won’t bore you.”

Roberto simmered, but didn’t speak. Ian’s house was like a flying saucer from some especially shabby planet. Built on several levels, it seemed decorated with suggestions from old
Playboy
“Advisor” columns or plagiarized from sets of an early James Bond film. It was filled with Sixties-era sculptures—a neon eye, female nudes in runny epoxy—and with kidney-shaped tables and Martian-looking lamps and acres of nubbly carpeting the beige of dirty cocker spaniels. But you had to forgive Ian for most of these lapses of taste because, strictly speaking, they were not his. He had inherited the furniture and art from his oldest brother, Fulton. Married but childless like Ian’s other brother, George, Fulton had given Ian the entire contents of his Sutton Place townhouse when he’d left bachelorhood and Manhattan for marriage and Westport. When I whispered this information to Roberto, he countered, “He’s still under indictment for the carpeting.”

The men present, busy laughing, talking about taxes and property values, were the sort that sent us scurrying to that sanctuary of the shy, the hors d’oeuvres table. Ian’s offerings were not terribly imaginative, celery and carrot sticks and broccoli florets, with onion dip conjured from some mix. And even the celery was bad, thick and spongy and riddled with those strings that wedge between your teeth for days at a time. “He can’t even do vegetables,” Roberto said.

“So we’ve got to socialize,” I muttered. “We can’t use having a full mouth as an excuse not to talk.”

I had hoped to buttonhole a club owner or two about booking our troupe, but this wasn’t a comedy club crowd. The guests might have been hired to offset the ugliness of the decor, chosen for their bone structure, which was as serene as the geometry of the Taj Mahal, and just as marble-cool. Of course the view from this hideous house was spectacular. Its site atop one of the higher hills of Provincetown, an ambitious dune, really, gave it a view of the “old” harbor and the breakwater connecting the “mainland” to the gay nude beach at Herring Cove.

Our host approached us. “Don’t wolf down all my vegetables. Leave some for the masses.”

Roberto swiped a spear of zucchini through the onion dip, swiftly, like someone swiping a credit card through a machine. “So you couldn’t care less about what happened to Arthur,” Roberto challenged Ian.

“Uh-uh-ah,” Ian said. “What did I tell you? Dead dog and swordfish don’t go well together. I forbid any discussion of Arthur’s problem—”

“It’s everyone’s problem,” Roberto snapped. “Even yours.”

“Can you really imagine anyone hauling a dead dog up my steps? They’d have to be awfully energetic.” Ian finished his Heineken and put his empty bottle next to the onion dip. “A question for you, Mark,” he said. “You’re a good Gloucester boy. I’m doing a little nautical survey…Define the term ‘neap tide’.”

It was a tide of unusually low range, influenced by the positions of the sun and moon. I said this.

“Can you imagine a marine biologist not knowing that? Wouldn’t that strike you as a bit…fishy?” He didn’t wait for my answer, but instead joined the discussion of the NASDAQ next to us.

Roberto nodded toward the balcony that ran all around the house, where a cook was prodding swordfish sputtering on a grill. “I need some air,” he said. I said I would join him once I used the facilities.

The bathroom, like the rest of the house, was redolent of mildew and none too clean. A layer of dust the color of bone meal coated everything, from the lemon-shaped soaps in a canister on the sink to the Serenity Prayer hung eye-level back of the toilet tank. Was that a joke? I wondered, then wondered again. Ian was not widely thought of as alcoholic, but had certainly been drinking rigorously this year.

Ian’s bathroom reading, in a brass bucket, was not the biographies of Douglas MacArthur and the Duke of Wellington I’d expected, but Boswell’s history of Christianity and homosexuality, with the mosaic of a hare on its cover. After washing my hands, I wandered farther down the quiet corridor to peer into Ian’s bedroom, to see whether he still used Fulton’s circular bed and notorious black satin sheets.

Yes, the bed was still there, unmade, but the sheets were wholesome white cotton. The floor was littered with male detritus: barbells and bodybuilding magazines of men whose chests were so layered with muscle they looked segmented, like the undersides of beetles. On the walls were red abstract canvasses, smears like lab slides.

Then I realized that I was not alone. Something was moving on the balcony outside the bedroom, beyond the gauzy oatmeal-colored curtains, beyond the open sliding door—something small. My first reaction was fear, fear in the wake of Arthur’s incident and the arrival of Hollings Fair’s Christian Soldiers. But then embarrassment superseded this fear, as though I’d been caught foraging through someone’s medicine cabinet.

Then I realized the figure on the balcony was Edward Babineaux
.
He was watching people trekking across the breakwater, crossing the long, twisting expanse of granite, coming from the nude section of Herring Cove.

“Wishing you were at the beach?” I said to him. I felt I had to alert him that I was there, although I sensed he’d seen me all along.

“Oh, no.” Edward was as devoid of humor as before. “I’m here. I live in the here and now.”

Being homeless, I imagine, makes that a sensible strategy.

“I’m representing Arthur,” Edward said, “at Ian’s party.”

“In Ian’s bedroom.”

“With you.” His smile was sweet as a geisha’s.

“I hate to be blunt, but I’m worried sick about Arthur. All of his old friends are worried sick. I’d like to hear from him
in person
to be sure he’s okay.”

“Don’t you trust me?” Edward was obviously enjoying forcing me to be polite and hypocritical.

“Of course I trust you,” I lied.

Edward reported that Arthur wasn’t good. I thought he might cast himself in the role of his keeper’s savior, providing gourmet cooking and comforts of the flesh, but he didn’t. He said Arthur’s psychiatrist had phoned the local pharmacy so Arthur had access to sedatives to dull his nerves. “He has night terrors,” Edward said. “He wakes up screaming. Because of the calls.”

“What calls? From the media?”

He shook his buzz-cut head. “They’ve called, but I took care of them. These other calls come in the early morning. They don’t
say
anything. I pick up the phone and there’s just…silence.”

No wonder Arthur was shunning the telephone. “Have you told the police?”

Edward had come in off the balcony. He was investigating the top of Ian’s bureau, which was as well-stocked as his bar, except that these bottles, of course, contained colognes, in silver flasks and sapphire-blue cubes, all with knobby stoppers you could really grip.

“We’ve told the police and they’ve tried to trace the calls. We’ve had
one
call since they put the tap on the line. It was made from a public telephone in Hyannis. They hung up immediately.”

“I keep thinking about these fundamentalists, these Christian Soldiers.”

Edward nodded.

“I keep wondering—did they do this to Arthur personally, or as a warning to the entire community? Targeting a prominent gay man.”

Dreamily, like a child at play in his mother’s bedroom, Edward kept unscrewing bottles of cologne, sniffing each one.

“You must really love cologne.” I sat down on the circular bed.

“Not really. They’re just chemicals. And I have allergies like you wouldn’t believe.”

“What were you doing,” I said, “before you met Arthur?”

“I was at cooking school.”

That explained the superb bouillabaisse. “Were you expelled for burning a soufflé?”

He didn’t laugh. He advanced toward me with the dancer’s grace he’d demonstrated at Arthur’s party, snuffing the candles and raising the window shades and his host’s spirits. He paused to stroke my earlobe, a quick erotic gesture with the tip of his finger. “Thank you for asking about us.” Then he kissed my cheek and swiftly exited the room, neglecting to screw the stoppers back on Ian’s colognes.

I found Roberto wandering around the living room, holding two plates of grilled swordfish. “It’s getting cold,” he said, referring it seemed to both the meal and his mood. “What took you so long? Don’t tell me there’s a back room.”

“Edward was there.”

“I saw him. He just left.”

“Having a good time?” Ian now asked. Guilty about prowling in his bedroom, I compensated by being overly enthusiastic, saying, “I’ve always loved this house. Everything is just great!”

“Do you love it enough to buy it? It’s costing me a fucking fortune. It’s this damn erosion problem. The hill this house is built on is becoming destabilized. The whole house is threatening to break apart. It’s this damn sand. I mean, I left San Francisco to avoid this situation. I didn’t want to wake up with my house on top of me!”

Barton Daggett, all but bursting from his seersucker suit, could not resist joining us to bemoan his own real estate woes, so Ian was off to check on dessert. “First my woods become infested with ticks, those Lyme disease ticks, from the gee-dee deer. Deer, I call them rats with antlers. Then these people move in that make the deer seem terrific—these imbeciles who shoot things in the woods, at all hours.”

“Perhaps they’re shooting the deer that carry the ticks,” Roberto said.

This logic seemed to irritate Barton, who changed the subject, asking Roberto, “Are you a St. Harold’s graduate?”

Ian saved Roberto from responding by bellowing, “Attention, attention, gentlemen! May I have a moment of silence, please?”

The laughter and conversation subsided, then Ian vanished into the kitchen to return with our dessert on a silver tray: an ice cream cake in the shape of the St. Harold’s crest. It was a warm evening and the air-conditioning was off—what with the doors flung open to the balcony—so the cake was sweating like a finalist finishing the Boston Marathon. Already, pieces of the insignia, the icing lions and some ivy, were threatening to drop away. Alone, in a boozy tenor, Ian sang the school hymn, laughing on the verse, “And eternal, like the hills, St. Harold’s…lives.”

Everyone cheered.

“Where on earth did you procure this cake?” Barton Daggett asked Ian.

“‘Procure’ is certainly the right word,” Ian said. The cake had come from an adults-only bakery in Hyannis, one that specialized in edible smut, in rendering breasts and genitalia in frosting. “I’m told the baker is a failed gynecologist.”

Someone had the bad taste to ask, “Who was St. Harold? He wasn’t the author of any gospels.”

“He’s the patron saint of the bankrupt,” Ian said. Then, he called out, “Let us raise our glasses…We toast the men of classes past. For at St. Harold’s, there is no future.”

Then we drank and Ian cut the cake with a dull-bladed sword from Barton’s collection.