Walking the Perfect Square (26 page)

He laughed, “I suppose that should make me feel better.”

“That’s up to you, I guess.”

“I guess.”

I downed my coffee in one swallow. “So now you know how I got here, but . . .”

“You want to know about Patrick and me.”

“You could say I’m a little curious, yeah.”

He tamped his cigarette out in a crowded ashtray, lit himself a new one and braced himself with coffee. But caffeine and nicotine weren’t doing the trick. Jack’s yellowed fingers still shook terribly. “I don’t know where to start.”

I suggested he begin with Tina Martell.

Jack looked surprised and impressed all at once. None of the other investigators had even mentioned her name. But when he hesitated, what Jack saw on my face was impatience. “A lot of us have our first sexual experiences with women,” he said, confirming Dr. Friar’s information. “For me the experience was so antithetical to my being that it allowed me to finally confront my gayness and accept it eventually. But we all grow up in different worlds, Mr.—What should I call you?”

“Moe is good.”

“While in our bones, Moe, people like Patrick and me and the man who saw us together at SBNF might have a very similar sense of ourselves sexually: we are unique, as distinctive from each other as, let’s say, you and me.”

“Individual dynamics. Yeah, Jack, I’ve already heard this lecture,” the impatience crept from my face into my voice. “I want details, not paperback psychology, okay? Because, if you don’t give them to me, so help me God, I’ll march into that room and drive him up to Dutchess County at gunpoint.”

“Patrick,” Jack continued, “has been struggling since he was a kid to deny his sexuality. I did the same thing. But high school makes it almost impossible. Dances, class trips, proms, everything about high school forces you to deal with who you are, especially the stuff you hate about yourself. In his senior year, Patrick found himself profoundly attracted to another man, his art instructor. That was difficult enough to handle, but when the teacher made advances toward Patrick, Patrick freaked out.”

“So what’s this got to do with Tina Martell?”

“Patrick wasn’t stupid,” Jack explained. “He knew he was good-looking and he knew about Tina’s appetite for co—for boys. For Patrick, she was the path of least resistance.”

“She was easy.”

But unlike Jack’s dreadful encounter with the opposite sex, Patrick’s didn’t force him to deal honestly with his sexuality. Instead of seeing Tina as a tramp, Patrick saw her as vulnerable, someone he could manipulate. Naively, Patrick believed he could trade on his looks and respectability to exorcize his demons. Tina Martell would become his girlfriend and marry him eventually. Though he was a little vague on the mechanics of it, Patrick convinced himself he would transform her while she was transforming him. And when she got pregnant, he thought his plan was working out better than expected.

“Silly notion, but it just shows you how desperately inexperienced he was,” Jack said, staring mournfully at the bedroom door. “I guess you know that Tina wasn’t interested in playing house and had—”

“—an abortion. Yeah, I know.”

“You see, unlike Patrick, she knew what she wanted and what she wanted didn’t include Patrick and a baby and a mortgage. She probably didn’t even like him very much.”

“I don’t think she likes anybody very much,” I said, “including herself.”

Jack agreed about Tina. Most gay men, he thought, having gone through that experience with Tina, might have just chucked the whole transformation fantasy and gotten on with their real lives.

“You know, it’s like the denial our parents go through. When I told my father I was gay, he was eerily calm about it: ‘You just haven’t met the right girl,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Come on, we’ll go into Cincinnati and catch a Reds game.’ My mom was the same way.”

His attempt at transformation having failed, yet still unwilling to accept himself, Patrick was in a bad place. That’s when, according to Jack, the obsessive-compulsive behaviors started. The disease progressed just the way Dr. Friar had described it to me. When I asked Jack about walking the perfect square, he was again surprised and impressed.

“Patrick says his symptoms abated somewhat his freshman year at college. He immersed himself in schoolwork and student government. He tried to be social, woefully unprepared as he was. But even the best camouflage breaks down under prolonged scrutiny. He couldn’t suppress his attraction to other men forever. The strain of his attractions started getting to him and by his sophomore year, the symptoms were worse. He began to withdraw. I guess he panicked.”

“That’s panic, spelled N-a-n-c-y-L-u-s-t-i-g.”

Jack shook his head in resignation. “It was Tina Martell all over again. But there were cracks in his fantasy this time, even early on. He started seeing a therapist at school, a Dr. Blum.”

“I didn’t know that,” I confessed.

“You mean there’s something you didn’t know?” Jack feigned shock. “Anyway, it was while Patrick was seeing Nancy that we met. Katy brought him in a few times. Of course, I didn’t know who Katy was then. I can’t say what it was exactly, but I was drawn to him. He’s god-awful handsome, but that wasn’t it. Maybe I’m just a sucker for wounded men. I don’t know.”

“He talked about his . . . um, his—”

“God, no,” Jack laughed. “But one knows. Blacks can spot a light-skinned brother or sister trying to pass as white. I spotted him. That’s all.”

Jack said he cultivated a grudging friendship with Patrick, being careful never to discuss his own gayness. Soon, Patrick began to frequent Pooty’s without Katy. And when he did, Jack would play the patient bartender, listening to Patrick’s complaints about his unfriendly roommates and his relationship with Nancy. Then at the end of March or in early April, something changed.

“He started coming in a lot, a few times a week,” Jack said. “I didn’t think it was the beer or the jukebox. It’s quite a haul from Hofstra to the city and back again. He cut his hair short and flirted with me a bit.”

Just as Bear’s revelation about SBNF had hit me, I was floored again: “Holy shit! Caligula’s! There was a couple that—Nancy ran. He stayed. You mean he . . . he let—”

Jack confirmed what I hadn’t finished saying. “For Patrick it was the perfect setting to finally take the—to experiment. Being there with Nancy was like work for Patrick, a chore. When she ran home, it was like being given a day off. He was free of her. Have you ever been to a sex club?”

“Like Caligula’s? No.”

“I don’t prefer them myself,” Jack was quick to say, “but the atmosphere inside them can be quite intoxicating.”

“That’s weird,” I said.

“What is?”

“Nancy Lustig said something like that to me. She said it was amazing inside Caligula’s; raw and sweet and dangerous.”

“So after years of trying to hold himself back, Patrick finally let go. I think the fact that there was an approving female presence made it easier for Patrick. And the anonymity of it helped. No one knew who he was. No one cared about how much political clout his old man had or felt sorry about Francis Jr. getting shot down. With no audience to play to, he . . . well . . .”

“I think I can understand.”

“One night with an anonymous man at a club didn’t transform him any more than humping Tina in the back seat or forcing himself on Nancy in her dorm room had. It was the beginning of an arduous journey. Patrick being Patrick, though, he retreated into his old fantasy. Now, as symbols go, Nancy took on mythic importance. The part of Patrick that stubbornly refused to acknowledge his gayness invested everything it had into poor Nancy. And if she hadn’t become pregnant,” Jack supposed, “the entire charade would have collapsed under its own weight.”

I pointed to the bedroom. “Did your boyfriend tell you what he did when she turned down his marriage proposal? How he dislocated her—”

“Can’t you understand what he was going through?” Jack pleaded defensively. “Years of denial and self-recrimination and false hopes came crashing down all at once. You can’t believe he meant to hurt her.”

“I don’t know Patrick,” I said. “I know of him. Even now with him ten feet away from me on the other side of a door, he exists to me only in other people’s words. He’s a handsome face on ten thousand posters. That’s it. He’s as much a myth to me as Nancy was to him. If he wants forgiveness, tell him to go to confession.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack apologized. “I love him. He’s very real to me.”

“Fair enough.”

“After she had the abortion,” Jack went on, “Patrick turned to me for help. But it wasn’t magic. He wasn’t ready to come out to his family and his symptoms had almost taken on a life of their own. Even as he became more comfortable with himself, he couldn’t seem to get past the tics.”

Just then I noticed a small, framed illustration of what looked to be a Chinese character with a red rose running through it. The long stem of the rose was skillfully woven through the black strokes which conspired to create the character. I recognized the PMM in one corner.

“Do you like it?” Jack, happy to break the tension, was eager to know.

“Very much. I think I recognize it, but I’m not sure where from.”

He rolled up the right sleeve on his now very wrinkled white shirt to reveal a replica of the illustration tattooed on his forearm. Patrick, he said, had one just like it. He didn’t know what the character translated into in English, but they liked to think it meant forever.

“The rose was Patrick’s doing. It’s woven in there like that to show that love is part of the fabric of eternity. That’s what I like to think it means. Patrick says it’s just a rose.”

“You were telling me about his symptoms.”

According to Jack, Patrick had stopped seeing Dr. Blum months before his crisis with Nancy. Even during the time he saw the shrink, Patrick made little progress. And, as far as the obsessive-compulsive problems, talking therapy alone didn’t really seem to be of much use. Jack did some research and found a psychologist at Mount Sinai who had had some success treating obsessive-compulsive neurosis using an integrated program of behavior modification, drugs and traditional therapy.

Patrick took a few summer school classes at the New School to justify his being in the city. He scheduled his therapy sessions around his classes.

“Sounds expensive,” I commented.

“I had some savings and the tips at Pooty’s are good.”

“Is the treatment helping?”

Jack lit another Marlboro. “Not miraculously. It’s like peeling the skin off an onion one thin layer at a time. Don’t misunderstand, there’s been a lot of improvement and some of the intensity of the behaviors has quieted down. But it’s not as if
Patrick’s conquered it. It’s more like he’s made a working agreement with the disease.”

“Then I’m confused. I guess I can understand everything up to a point. But if what you’re saying is true, then why the disappearing act? He must know what he’s putting his family through. Does he know how many people from his home town bus into the city every goddamned day chasing his ghost around?”

“He knows, Moe.”

“Then why all this?”

Jack said: “You’re asking the wrong man.”

“But you won’t let me talk to—”

“Not Patrick.”

“Who then?”

“His father. Go talk to his father,” Jack sneered venomously. “Maybe he can clear up your confusion.”

I explained to Jack that I knew a little bit more about Francis Maloney Sr. than he might’ve expected and that I had my own reasons to want to rip his head off. “But so far, Jack, you haven’t given me reason enough to not pass Go and collect my two hundred dollars. Over the years, I put cuffs on a lot of people I had sympathy for.”

Jack clamped his hand over my wrist. “Do this one thing for me. Go see that bastard and if you can’t understand what drove Patrick to this, come and get him. He won’t run. I swear on my life, he won’t.”

“I’d like to help you, but—”

“Friday.” Jack let go of my wrist, shot out of his chair and leaned his head against the bedroom door. “Give us till Friday.”

“What happens on Friday?”

“We’ve talked about it for weeks. Even if you hadn’t found us out, we couldn’t go on like this much longer. Even in a community that treasures it privacy, you can’t keep a secret in perpetuity. It’s time to end this madness. Come Friday evening, Patrick’ll walk right down the front steps and take a cab to wherever you wish.”

I was skeptical. “To Missing Persons?”

Jack did not hesitate: “If that’s what you want, I’ll deliver him personally.”

“What I want is for him to come with me now and get this over with.”

“Please, Moe, give us a few more days to get ready. Coming out under the best of circumstances is difficult enough, but he’ll
have a lot more baggage to deal with than even you’re aware of. Please, we’ve come this far. What’s another few days?”

Fragile. Handle with care. Dr. Friar’s metaphor about antique china popped into my head. “I must be out of my fucking mind.”

Jack embraced me, tears welling in the corners of his eyes. He kissed my cheek.

“Easy, easy!” I panicked slightly, pushing him away. But seeming to understand my discomfort, he smiled at me sympathetically. “I didn’t agree to anything yet. I need to know this is what Patrick wants,” I said, pointing at the door.

“Oh, he does. He—”

“Not good enough. Patrick,” I talked loudly at the raised panel door, ignoring Jack completely, “I need to hear you say you agree to this. Regardless of what happens between now and Friday, I want you to give me your word you’ll show up at Katy’s loft by 8:00 A.M. Saturday. No bullshit. No excuses. No nothing. Do I have your word?”

His answer came quickly: “Yes.”

“Okay,” I turned back to Jack. “Gimme his coat.”

Jack looked confused. “What do you want his coat for?”