Dennis Savage stopped grouching and looked at me, thinking about it. Listen: “Holgrave,” he said, with the long
o
as in “hole” that most Americans would use.
“That’s not how he says it,” I told him. “He makes it sort of English. Hahl-grave. You know. The way they say ‘hamaseksyual.’”
Dennis Savage shrugged.
“Ray Holgrave,” I repeated. “It’s a rather elaborate name for a rootless kid, isn’t it? I mean, can you imagine a hustler named Holgrave?”
“You keep trying to turn him into some form of opportunist. Can’t you believe that there are people with flexible taste? A straight who can enjoy something on the side?”
“This is simple market research. I’m trying to figure out what defines a straight in terms of personality. What variables command an individual’s sexuality. Because it’s undeniable that Ray isn’t like us.”
“Aha.”
“Because he’s
trying
not to be,” I insisted.
“He isn’t trying to be anything—that’s his charm. He’s a perfectly styleless man.” Dennis Savage seemed so glad to have reckoned it out that I had to humor him with silence. But he went on, “Nothing has been added to him and nothing taken away,” and now I must speak.
“No one,” I said, “is perfectly styleless. Whatever you do, that’s your style. Your diction and grammar, for instance. Are you telling me the odd things he says don’t feed into a style?”
“What odd things?”
“‘Huh, lookit,’” I replied, in Ray’s vapidly blithe manner.
“Everyone else thinks it’s cute!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Especially Ray.”
* * *
It was rude of me, no doubt, to keep prodding in matters that were none of my business, but The Case of the Questionable Straight gripped me with its thousand riddles. The most arresting part of it all was the defiance of the traditions of gay sexual crossover, which emphasize mystery and menace—those dangerous men, again, lying in wait for the fluttery stone-age queers who covered the waterfront. What were those men, really? Latent? Committed? Tolerant? Hostile? Were they lovers who dared not speak their name, or reformers of the underworld observing an informal purge technique? What would they do? Lie back and let you go to town? Would they come along with you? Take your money and follow you? Want you? Knife you? Here was menace. But what was Ray? Innocuous, clean-cut. A sweetheart. Dennis Savage had, it seemed, domesticated the crossover.
And yet. Time after time, at Dennis Savage’s for dinner, or strolling with him and Ray through the Village of a Sunday, or in a cab setting out for a West Side brunch, the detective in me would come up for air and trouble. I would satirically test Ray with intellectual call-outs—the Odessa Steps montage,
Zuleika Dobson,
June 16, 1904, Rosebud, the Mapleson cylinders. Ray’s eyes—too big, too fully lashed, so pretty—would grow avid as he smiled at me. Was he aware that I was goading him to break cover or simply grateful for the attention?
“It’s not good when you get like this,” Carlo warned me over steaks at Clyde’s. “You make it feel as if knowing things is all that matters.”
“Come on, knowledge is power.”
Carlo got intent applying mayonnaise to his steak, which is apparently traditional, or at least ordinary, in South Dakota, Carlo’s point of origin and, to me, the most remote of all American provinces. Some states don’t have opera houses; South Dakota doesn’t even have Korean fruit markets.
“Origins,” I said, having been thinking of them, “are very telling. You can tell a lot about a person if you know his origins—region, parentage, class … Did you know Dennis Savage and the porn star Jim Packer were in high school together? Dennis Savage says, and you won’t believe this—”
“Jim Packer is a gringo?” Carlo’s term for straights. “I know that.”
“How?”
“I tried to take him home and he said no.”
“That’s proof enough for me,” I said, not joking. “But don’t you think a straight man in gay porn is a little pushy? I mean, we’re not talking of someone in a jack-off scene, or getting tongued here and there. I’ve seen him. He does every activity in the checklist, and he does it with the opulence of an initiate.”
“You don’t know what he’s thinking of, though.”
“Carlo, he was a CIA agent or something in this movie, and he had a spy tied down on a bed and he was trying to get information out of him, yes? Think of it. The spy looked like the swimming champ of Walt Whitman High School or something, but let’s move right on. And there’s our boy, straight Jim Packer”—only it’s not Jim Packer who’s straight, it’s Dick Hallbeck—“stroking the spy’s tummy and pubic hairs and murmuring sweet nothings about ‘the information,’ and am I supposed to … I mean, let’s face it, the spy’s cock was so rigid you could have plugged the hole in the dike and saved Amsterdam. And the look on Jim Packer’s face. I can’t believe—”
“
Do you suppose
you could talk about something more suitable to decent public gatherings?” cried someone at the table behind me.
I turned around to find four men glaring at me.
“This is a restaurant,” another of the four explained, “not a toilet!”
Carlo, who has done this a hundred times, got up and stood before them and said, with engaging mildness, “One of you come outside with me and settle it like a man or shut your mouths and mind your business. Because one more word out of any of you and I’ll pick
you
”—he chooses the most vulnerable queen of the lot; it’s always queens, by the way: clones don’t start these scenes—“and drag you outside and kick your junk in.” Then, paradoxically, he touches the arm of the man he addressed. “So keep your friends in line,” he urges. It never fails.
When he sat down again, we began to eat in silence, thinking over the themes. Clones and brothers and fighting and love. Emotional availability. And that really is New York right there: someone’s always got some idea to sell.
“Bud,” he finally said, “you surely have to stop measuring people.”
“I can’t stop. It’s my job.”
“A lot of porn actors switch back and so. It’s just work to them.”
“What about Ray, Carlo? His current assignment—would you call that work or fun? Would you call Ray an actor? Or a true story?”
He ate, considering. “I will sincerely tell you what is true,” he said after a bit, putting down his fork and leaning on the table. “Access,” he said. “So you’d best include that, while you’re scoring everybody up as gays or gringos.”
“Access.”
“Some people would call it chance. It isn’t, because this is something people get to do without consciously willing it. They … they
contrive
it. That means they don’t know what they want, but they know what they’re afraid of. So they allow themselves to get into the position of being near the thing that threatens them the least.”
He stopped, reached for his fork. I grabbed his hand. “No,” I said. “Go on.”
“Well. So, like.” He’s thinking; the talk comes out too fast in New York. Midwestern Carlo pauses to be sure of what he knows. “Why is it,” he asks, “that so many men who can’t deal with emotional involvements get into prison, where they either have to go without sex—which no one can do—or fuck men? Because when they get out, they go
on
fucking men, and they tell themselves it’s because they got wrecked in jail, or because men are easier to get ahold of than women.”
“Access…”
“But maybe it’s because it’s what they wanted in the first place. Not because they’re gay, but because they want sex without affection.”
“Emotionally unavailable…”
“They can always find a bimbo, I know. You know. Some women are as easy to take home as men are. But even those women scare them. They’re different. Hard. Funny. Something.”
He started to eat again, watching me, glancing out the window onto Bleecker Street, nodding, chewing. He’s no literato, but there are more stories in him than in all the writers I know put together. Maybe that’s why I like him so much.
“Carlo, you aren’t saying that you’ve run into men like that. Convicts? In our bars?”
“They don’t go to gay bars, boy. They wouldn’t know where to find them.” He grinned. “They go to other places.”
“Working-class bars?”
He nodded.
“They actually go there to pick up men?” I asked, scandalized and incredulous.
Our very scion of the Circuit regarded me with forgiveness for, as usual, my lack of scope. “You think you can’t take a man home from a Clancy’s or a Blue Ribbon Bar and Grill, like with a Schaefer logo in the window? You think everyone there is guys and bimbos?”
How does he know so much? I was thinking, for we were all young then.
“It’s a question of lifestyle, Bud. It’s not hetero and homo. It’s gringo and gay. It’s…”
“Culture.”
“Yes. It’s how you learn to behave. People tend to stay in their culture. They avoid other cultures.”
“So a homophobic hardhat,” I posed, “is what?”
“A gringo.”
“But if he secretly beds men?”
“He’s still a gringo. Straight is how you act, not how you feel. You truly should know that by now. Do you
feel
gay? Or do you wear the uniforms and attend the dances and keep in touch with the politics? And feel like a man? Men is all it is. Men. Boys. Kids. All this. And you and Dennis Savage. Eric, Lionel, Scooter, Kenny. And Big Steve. Remember him? And the people you didn’t see and the dancers at the Tenth Floor. All of us…”
“Carlo.”
“We’re all here.”
“What do you—”
“Eat up, Bud.”
“
Access.
Listen—”
“You have to stop. You’re going to get yourself weird. The more you make rules, the farther you get from the truth. People aren’t rules, Bud. People are exceptions.”
“Ray is a gringo, right? But is he a hetero gringo? Could he be a gay gringo? Is there such a thing?”
Carlo speared the last of my broccoli and smiled.
“He’s naive, I know,” I said. “But is he clever naive? Or just naive? His eyes are…” Now Carlo was grinning. “What’s so funny?”
“Are you going to spend the whole summer doing this?”
“I won’t have to. Because nothing brings out the gay in the gringo like The Pines. Right?”
* * *
I was righter than I knew, but only by a fluke. As the summer began, Ray was still living with Dennis Savage, had found neither job nor apartment, and was going to serve as unofficial houseboy for Dennis Savage’s gang. Ray was also still the coolest cat in our set
or
the most accomplished mimic alive, to the satisfaction of everyone but me. At his first tea, I carefully watched him noticing the girls who come over from Sayville to dance. He stayed in character, did not overplay. He saw them as one who knew what he thought they were for and would request an audition again one day, but for now had to abstain out of respect for the man who was paying his bills.
“Beautifully judged,” I told him.
“Say what, now?”
“That, too.”
He smiled, as he often did when I teased him, and gave the tiny shrug that meant, “I don’t know what you’re referring to, but I’ll play along.”
So I decided to press him a little. Maybe I was in a mean mood. “I’m on to you, Jack,” I told him. “I’m looking and listening and you’re going to slip, aren’t you? I’ll be there when you do.”
“You don’t ought to be so tough around me,” he said. “I don’t do nothing to you.”
“If this were a movie, you’d be up for an Oscar.”
“Lookit?”
“I wish Olivier were here for this. He’d want to worship at your feet.”
He leaned over a touch, as if putting his ear closer to the words would render them intelligible.
“Oh, I love that one,” I said. “Harry Langdon as Hamlet, right?”
He looked at me: bewildered but trusting.
“Instead of looking for a punk handyboy job,” I went on, “why don’t you become an acting coach? I mean, Robert de Niro’s good, but you’re better.”
And did I see then, for a split second, a flicker of acknowledgment in those lovable eyes, a sign of the quick wit that knew the names, the notions I was throwing at him? But it fled so fast that Ray had squeezed my arm, said, “Catch ya later on here,” and moved away before I could assess it all.
Carlo wasn’t with Dennis Savage this summer. Some uptown gays had offered him a room in an oceanside palazzo rent-free, in order to improve the physical tone of their house. There I went after tea, to confess and be absolved of my vicious needling of Ray, to beg for advice in breaking the writer’s congenital habit of sticking one’s nose in. It was seven o’clock in the evening of the second Friday of the season, High Pines: yet the fabulous house seemed deserted, not only dark and silent but gloomy, as if Important People had seen unfashionable things inside and ordered it Closed. Could they all be having sex? I wondered, walking around to the back entrance at the dunes—rich gays made out like bandits in those preplague days. No, there was Carlo, standing in the middle of the deck, looking at the water.
He turned, saw me, and gazed at me wordlessly. He is the handsomest man in New York and, once you get to know him, the nicest; but when he gets moody nobody can do anything with him. A fierce wind was up; his clothes and hair were whipping around. I thought, If they ever make a commercial for The Pines, this is all they need, provided Carlo is willing to smile.
“I always forget to bring the right sweater at the beginning of the summer,” he said. “Then I get cold.”
“Why don’t you borrow something from your housemates? Where is everyone, anyway?”
He shook his head. Not important. When he’s like this—so beauty, too, is human, boys and girls—he concentrates on essentials.
“When I was growing up,” he said, “if I was worried about something and I went to my father with it, he would give me a switching. If I went to my mom, she would make me a plate of Cream of Wheat with maple syrup.”
“You must not have gone to your dad very often.”
“Sometimes you have to.”
He put his arms around me and we shivered together in the wind. “Now this is a study,” he said. “She prays for me. But I don’t know if it’s working. I sincerely don’t know. Sometimes I believe I can hear her, halfway across the continent.” He hummed a snatch of something. “Praying for me,” he said.