The Music of Your Life (24 page)

He is unsatisfied.

He looks at the clock; he doesn't want to belabor this. He'll probably go out for a drink, or two, after leaving the office; there's a bar in his neighborhood he frequents. He's sure to see someone there that he knows, if only casually; someone to shoot the breeze with, anyway.

He turns to his telephone and again notices the blinking light. He listens to his messages. The first is from a man he has had a few dates with who seems, well, nice.
When can we get together again
, blah blah blah.
Beep
. His father, whom he has called Ed since he was in college, wanting to say hello and report on his latest visit to the doctor; also something about confusion over an insurance claim. Give a call.
Beep
. His brother Henry, thanking him for the silver piggy bank he sent the new baby, saying how much he was sure little Eddie would love it when he was old enough to know it came from his Uncle Hunter in New York. From Tiffany's!
Beep. No more new messages
. After a moment or two of staring out the window, he turns back to his computer and types:

“Dalton Foster, as Stone Michaels, commands the screen with his enormous physical presence and intense, still-vital good looks. After years of supporting the stars, he has finally been given the chance to become one himself. Unfortunately, he is simply not up to the task, and remains unconvincing in the key love scenes with his two leading ladies, who seem to be acting overtime in an attempt to get him to register some emotion,
any
emotion in response to them. (Romantic interest would seem to be what is called for here.) For an actor of his considerable charm and leading-man appearance, this seems an especially damaging thing not to possess in his performer's bag of tricks.”

His phone rings. He hesitates for a moment, then decides to pick up.

“Hunter? It's Billy. I thought I'd find you there.”

“Billy. Hey. Where are—aren't you performing tonight?”

“Yeah, but I've got a couple minutes. I'm in the chorus, you know. Right now, it's Star Time out there.”

“Oh. It's always Star Time.”

“Tell me about it. So, did you see the film?”

“Yeah. We'll talk about it later, OK?”

“Sure, fine. I gotta go on soon anyway. Listen, I just wanted to let you know I got Julie to sign the record album for you.”

“Wow. Thanks, Billy, I really … thank you …”

“You'll love this: she said she's
always
glad to do whatever she can to make a critic happy.”

“Ah. Imagine that. I should be so lucky.”

“She also said you must have played the record a helluva lot to have warped it like that.”

“That's a long story.”

“I'm sure. Actually, she said heckuva.”

“Of course. What did she write?”

“Hang on, I've got it. ‘For Hunter … So glad to know your mum took you to Mary Poppins all those years ago. I'm honored … Love, Julie Andrews.'”

For a quick second, Hunter can't really respond to that; he freezes. He feels the sudden catch in his throat—
God, what a cliché I am
, he thinks—but he steadies himself with a hand on the desk. He has learned how to suppress these moments, so he does. Quickly.

“Hunter? You there?”

“Yeah. That's great, Billy. Thanks. Hold on to it and I'll get it from you when I see you.”

“Sure. Hey, listen, I'm on in a second here. I gotta go.”

“OK. Thanks, Billy. I'll see you.”

He hangs up and turns back to his computer screen. He is composed, once again. He finishes the review and files it. With a click, he sends it via e-mail to the entertainment editor. Done.

He turns off the desk lamp, and gathers up his coat and briefcase. He pauses at the window, illuminated by the silvery lights of the city shining into his darkened office. For a few moments, he stares out over them, as he has done so many times before, as he once stared out at the tops of dogwood trees in his front yard from the window of his boyhood room, as he once looked out onto the campus bell tower from a window in the industrial-green hallway of his dorm, so long ago. He's always looking over things, he thinks. Or … overlooking things? He laughs out loud to himself: it's a word problem!

The rainy city streams and twinkles and honks below him. He has always loved this view of New York, even before he saw it for himself, even from when he gazed at photographs of Times Square on album covers and in old magazines, imagining it for hours at a time, imagining it in three dimensions—the sounds, the smells—
what does it really look like?
Now he knows.

He watches as lights in other offices—desk lamps, overheads—are turned off and on in windows across the way. He wonders if other people in other tall buildings are also standing alone in their windows, at this very same moment, looking out over the city … he wonders if
they're
wondering if other people like themselves are standing in windows looking out over the city! So many people in such high altitudes, just under the clouds, staring out across the city, their city, the one they know so well, yet filled with people they'll never meet, never even see. So then: a city they live in, but don't know at all.

He stands in his window and counts other windows, as many as he can make out, as many as he can count. He could stand here forever, he thinks, just looking, just looking and counting; looking and counting, but not moving. And that's good enough, he thinks; the city needs people who are merely content just to look at it, to watch it, to regard it from a distance … to gaze upon it without ever touching it, to study it, in admiration, as if it were—all of it—nothing more than a rare and famous painting, stretched across an endless canvas, protected by glass.

Perhaps he has always stood here.

The traffic is thick and stop-start along the Henry Hudson Parkway heading out of the city; it is, after all, Friday afternoon in the middle of the summer. Fortunately, Perry's new Ford Explorer is blissfully air-conditioned, and from my vantage point in the backseat, I feel like I'm at a drive-in theater, since Perry and his new boyfriend, Duffy, are putting on a show up front. This is the scene where they're arguing about what music should be played in the car.

“
I
get to pick the CD this time,” says Duffy.

“No,” says Perry. “You always pick your own music without consulting me.”

He leans on the horn with a violent blast, though I hadn't noticed that the car ahead of us had done anything to warrant the honk.

“Don't be so premenopausal, Perry,” Duffy says. “It's just a CD.” And with that he chooses one from what I note is indeed his own personal CD collection, contained in something like a photo album, with
DUFFY
printed in gold letters on the leather cover.

“Rufus Wainwright!” he announces suddenly, flipping the flat silver disc between his palms like a pancake, and here he turns his pretty, youthful little head back to me.

“Do you know who Rufus Wainwright is?” he asks, his eyes fixed on me. It sounds more like an accusation than a question.

I stare back at him for a moment, then turn my own head around to look over my shoulder. Then I turn back around again. “Are you speaking to me?” I ask.

“Duh!” he says.

“Duffy,” Perry says, suddenly grabbing a chance to navigate the car into the faster-moving lane, “adults address other adults by their first names. I realize you probably haven't gotten to that lesson yet in kindergarten this year, but since you're in the accelerated section, I think you can handle it.”

Duffy glares. If he were a dragon, steam would be coming out of his nostrils. I'm thrilled; it's like being plunked into a virtual reality production of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
with an all-male cast.

“Now try it again,” Perry says.

Duffy snaps his head back to me. “JACKSON,” he says, speaking phonetically. “DO YOU KNOW WHO RUFUS WAINWRIGHT IS?”

“Oh, you
were
talking to me. Yes, I do.”

“You do?” Perry asks, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

“I read
Entertainment Weekly
,” I say. I must choose my words carefully, since it's in my best interests to offend neither Senior nor Junior. It's only Friday, after all, and I am invited up to Connecticut for the entire weekend. Perry has a new country house in Claxton (courtesy of his recently acquired executive status at Salomon Smith Barney) and this is my first visit. And even though their little front-seat drama is fun for the moment, I'd just as soon not have to listen to George and Martha bray at each other for three whole days. Of course, it does occur to me, young Duffy has probably never heard of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, so I must resist future references.

“Rufus Wainwright it is, then,” says Duffy, and he inserts the disc into the dashboard's CD player, which sucks it quietly, but immediately, into its insides. Because of my own current state of Intimacy Deficit Syndrome, I can't help but muse upon this as a visual metaphor for a popular sex act.

“Besides,” Duffy says, “Rufus is gay. And out. Gay boys should support gay musicians!”

“Liberace was gay,” I say, “but we're not playing him.”

“Touché!” says Perry. Traffic is moving along better now; his shoulders aren't arching up to his ears with tension the way they were a minute ago.

Duffy turns around sharply in his seat, glaring at me with a deliberately overdone “scorned diva” face.

“Whose side are you on,
Bernadette Arnold?
” he hisses.

“Just call me Switzerland.”

“Duff, please be nice,” says Perry. “Don't alienate the guest before we even get to the house.”

Duffy puckers up his lips and kisses the air in my direction.

“Oh, Jackson loves me,” he says. “Don't you, Jackson?”

“Isn't that Perry's job?” I offer.

Perry snorts, and Duffy just stares at me, uncomprehending.

“What-
ever!
” he says, running his elegant fingers through his perfectly tousled, drenched-in-highlights blond hair. His tanning-bed tan and his Chelsea-boy hothouse muscles, all courtesy of the same magic emporium on Eighth Avenue, gleam in the late afternoon summer sun; exactly, I'm sure, in the way he knows they do. I look down at my own biceps, the equivalent of deflated tires, not straining in the least the armband fabric of my polo shirt. Just the sight of Duffy, even from the backseat, causes me instinctively to suck in my stomach; though it's not
un
flat, it is far from meeting the standards of the nightly Abs Parade down Chelsea's Homo Highway. In my own defense, I never aspired to those standards, though that doesn't necessarily prevent one from being intimidated by them. I also try running my fingers through my own hair, but I touch more forehead than boyish locks.

Perry continues to drive in broody silence while Duffy sings along to the Rufus Wainwright. He stops singing for a moment only to ask this question to the car at large: “Hey, who the fuck is Liberace?”

Closer to cocktail time—Perry says the sun goes over the yardarm a lot earlier in Connecticut than it does in New York—he and I are standing side by side at the faux-marble island in his spacious kitchen, arranging cheese and crackers onto serving trays and slicing up limes for drinks, while Duffy is upstairs “beautifying” and “maintaining.”

“He's driving me crazy, Jackson,” says Perry, unwrapping a gourmet Gouda. “And yet I don't know what I'd do without him.”

“But you've only been dating him for five months.”

“Four and a
half
months. It just seems longer.”

“Oh. Well, in hetero terms, that's the equivalent of three years. Besides, after four and a half months, shouldn't you be more like, ‘It's as if we only met an hour ago,' followed by copious blushing?”

“No, it's like I've known him all of my life! Jesus, listen to me. I sound like a Harlequin romance.”

“Or a penny dreadful. Oh God, there we go again, speaking in antiquities.”

Duffy calls from somewhere upstairs. “I feel that I'm being talked about!” he sings out.

Perry and I freeze a glance at each other.

“Gee,” I whisper. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

Perry rolls his eyes. “That's not the only big thing little pitchers have.”

“Too much information,” I say. “And yet not enough. Continue.”

“You're a writer. Use your imagination. And make yourself a drink.”

We move out onto his terrace, cheese trays and drinks in hand. We're waiting for my old friend Thomas to arrive; he has his own weekend house in Briar Hill, one town over from Claxton. This summer, he's working in a local stock theater, playing one of the leads in a production of
1776
, for which Perry, Duffy, and I have tickets tonight. Thomas called to say he'd swing by Perry's house on his way to the theater.

“Have more, darling,” Perry says, tipping the Absolut bottle into my glass. “You must be exhausted from your long journey from town.”

“Yes. How divine to
finally
be in the country with the landed gentry.”

Perry looks around at his terrace and garden, which overflows with brightly colored summer flowers: petunias, geraniums, salvia, marigolds, impatiens … the colors blow together in the afternoon breeze; if you squint, it's like looking in a kaleidoscope. Beyond the grounds, at the far end of the yard, is a calm, silvery lake; an old brown canoe, tied with a rope to a tree stump, bobs gently at the water's edge.

“It really is lovely here, Perry,” I tell him, suddenly realizing, in my rush to get a drink, that I hadn't paid the proper weekend guest homage to his new digs. “Your place, I mean. Very Merchant Ivory.”

“Do you like it? I hope so. It's only taken me forty-nine years to get a house of my own.”

“Worth the wait. It's beautiful.”

At this moment, Duffy, another specimen of beauty, appears in the doorway. He strikes an open-armed, welcome-to-my-home hostess pose; very Loretta Young, but that's another reference I resist making. Which is just as well; I wouldn't be able to stand hearing him say: “Hey, who the fuck is Loretta Young?” I probably shouldn't even know myself.

Suddenly he turns surly. “Where's
my
cocktail?” he brays; he's gone from Loretta to Bette Davis in the bat of one elegant eyelash.

“Just sit down, sweetness, and I'll mix it for you,” Perry says.

“Thank you. Now Jackson,” he says, turning to me, “who is this friend who's coming to visit?”

“Thomas.”

“And who is Thomas?”

“He's my oldest friend, actually.”

“As old as Perry?”

“Jesus,” Perry moans. He hands Duffy a Cosmopolitan. “Drink this. It's a potion to turn you back into a human being.”

“What I meant,” I say, “is he's been my friend for the longest period of time. We're the same age. Twenty-eight.”

Perry does a double take worthy of Jack Benny.

“Oh. And he works with you at the magazine?”

“Duffy,” Perry says. “I've told you all this. Thomas is an actor. He's in the show we're seeing tonight. Don't you retain any information that's not about you?”

“In a word, no,” Duffy says, but then he winks at me, which makes his remark only a tad less obnoxious. “Continue.”

“I've known Thomas for … I forget. We met doing summer stock when we were eighteen.”

“Twenty-one years ago, for the record,” Perry says, under his breath and over the rim of the wide-brimmed glass.

“Ah …” Duffy says. “So Thomas is still an actor, and you're not.”

“Something like that.”

“You gave up the business too, like Perry did,” Duffy says. He reaches out to stroke Perry's cheek and flick his fingers through Perry's thinning, brush-cut gray hair.

“Don't remind me of my actor days,” says Perry. “I've blocked them.”

“I wish I had known you when you were an actor, Perry,” he says. “I wish you were still in the business. Then we could go on auditions together.”

“As what?” Perry says. “A father-son act?”

“Ooh. Don't let Jackson know all our secrets.”

“I don't miss auditioning,” Perry says.

“Nor do I,” I say.

“Oh, I love it!” Duffy exclaims, setting his drink down. He stands and thrusts his arms up into what I recognize as the patented, internationally known
Evita
pose. “I absolutely
love
auditioning. You should see the faces behind the table when I go into ‘Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.'”

And before anyone can suggest otherwise, he begins to sing it, full-voiced, just as I glimpse Thomas coming around the corner from the driveway. Instantly, Thomas freezes in place as soon as he catches sight of Duffy in mid-performance; he stands at the edge of the house and waits. Thomas is far too polite to interrupt another actor's audition.

I give him a tiny, surreptitious wave just as Duffy goes into the second verse, and he gives a little one back to me too, while he leans against the house, watching. I watch Perry watching Duffy; he is transfixed. Duffy, oblivious to everyone but himself and his voice, continues his number. I notice from the corner of my eye that a lone deer has wandered into the far end of the yard. It too stares at Duffy with an incredulous expression.

As Duffy wails a line—something about Evita being immortal—I discreetly pour more vodka into my glass, and sip, and wait. Many musical minutes pass. Finally as Duffy descends into the third verse, I can't help it, I put my drink down and call out, “Thank you.
NEXT!
”

Duffy stops suddenly. Still holding his dictatress pose, he snaps his head around at me, glaring; Perry's eyes go wide, then he reflexively checks in with the bottom of his empty martini glass. Thomas, still waiting politely at the corner of the house, seizes the moment with his infallible actor's timing.

“Well, hello everybody,” he says cheerfully, and saunters up to the patio.

“Ode to Beauty,” by Jackson Williford Cooper:

Everywhere I look in Connecticut, I see beauty. Beauty, beauty everywhere! Perry's new house (his new
old
house), a white, 1885 Victorian two-story with a wraparound porch and a red front door, is beautiful. The sloping driveway that winds between two large framing oak trees beside a yard bursting with red, yellow, and white summer flowers and bright green grass is beautiful. Perry, a few weeks away from turning fifty, trim and energetic, a newly bleached white-toothed smile, and a high forehead under a short shock of blondish-gray hair, watery blue eyes behind white-gold wire-rim glasses, is beautiful. Duffy, Paragon of Chelsea Youth, with his bleached-blond hair and sharp, kelly green eyes, a gold earring in not one but both ears, a lean, taut body created by God but improved upon at 23rd Street Fitness, is … yes, the sweet little jerk is beautiful. And Thomas … well, Thomas has physical attributes, too: he's tall and trim, with dark, Apollo-like curly hair, which once hung shoulder-length during his
Les Miserables
days on Broadway. It's shorter now, and the newly-appearing flecks of gray only add to his allure. But for me Thomas's beauty lies in the fact that he's been my friend for almost twenty years. And that's beautiful. Of course the vodka tonic in the frosted tumbler that I'm currently clutching in my right hand as I sit parked in an Adirondack chair on Perry's terrace—well that, too, is beautiful. Beauty all around me! Beauty, beauty everywhere, and
lots
of drops to drink!