He was weeping now, but he had leaned back and thrown his arms out along the top of the couch as if discussing a quirk in the plot of the latest movie.
“Jim says it’s been going on since the whole state was just forts and I expect it’ll keep going on till all the gays are dead and it’s just gringos and truck stops. I told Big Steve because he ought to know. And he was listening then. He untied me and put a blanket on me, and he went out. He hurt me very bad, Bud. Not just hitting me, though. Because I saw his eyes. And he was still mad when he came back, but he was lying next to me and holding me and that’s all. I heard his eyes. The preachers tell your parents if you don’t let them do you. He’s still mad now. They say you were a wanton with Jim and you’d best be separated. We hardly did anything at all. They say the devil’s in him. The devil’s in his cock. His cock is talking to him, leading him astray, man shouldn’t have a cock that size, that’s a nigger cock or something, you got nigger blood? And your folks start praying, and the preachers are telling this to the town, the shame all over the town. They even hear it at the truck stop, nigger cock. They’re waiting there now. I never hurt anyone, that’s what I told them. Let me do you, they go, I won’t say nothing. Never hurt anyone as long as I lived. Don’t tie my hands. It isn’t healthy. Some of those guys at the truck stop would do anything, but I wouldn’t. Jim did more than I did. I tried to tell Big Steve, it wasn’t hitting me, it was tying me up. He didn’t have to do that. He knew he didn’t. I thought Jim was giving himself black eyes for the attention. He didn’t have to. He said it was a blunder. See, he can’t say I’m sorry so he says he blundered. I told him I wasn’t going to be fucked anymore, I was going to be top from now on. And he said he wanted me to be happy but I’m a rat. There aren’t happy rats, are there? Because they know they’re rats. That’s why you always see them running around and hiding. Because they know people hate them. But people only hate them because they act like rats. Preachers are happy. Parents are happy. Jim was happy. He had his own devil. So we talked for a while, and then it was morning. This morning. I didn’t sleep last night. I said, ‘How could you tie me up like that?’ He said he’ll do worse to me if I don’t stop being a rat. He says everyone’s going to hate me because I’m a rat. And he looked at me the way those other guys did because I … they saw how easy I was going to be because I … wasn’t ever really tough like them, I only…” Suddenly he began to sob again. “I’m not a rat after all this,” he said, lurching to his feet, swaying, dropping the bottle; and I leapt up and grabbed him and told him to stop and took him into the back room and put him to bed while he whispered, “Get back, it’s over” every twenty seconds. And “Don’t tell Big Steve.” And “Did I stop crying?”
It took me quite some while to find the aspirin, because it turns out that Big Steve keeps it in the refrigerator. I brought two tablets and some water to Carlo, who was asleep; but I woke him up, explaining that he had to take aspirin to stave off a hangover.
“Later,” he said, turning over.
I almost threw the water in his face. “
Now.
”
He swallowed them dry, and said, “You won’t be mad at me, will you? I can only do one mad at a time.”
“I won’t be mad.”
He nodded. “The devil’s in everyone. Even Diana Vreeland. But why did he tie me up, anyway?”
“He tied you up because he likes you.”
He looked so sad then. “Everyone always liked me. My whole life. Because they wanted to pull my pants down. That’s why I got so big, Bud. At the gym. Why should Big Steve be any different?”
“He is different,” I said. “He tied you up because he loves you. You remember that guy you told me about on your way to New York way back there? The one with the little bowl of warm water and the soap? The one you said you loved? That’s what you are to Big Steve—only you’ve stayed that all his life. That’s why he tied you up. He wants to keep you in New York.”
“He went to Seattle for two years.”
“To try to forget you.”
Carlo looked at me. “Oh, Jesus hell. Did he tell you that?”
I shook my head.
“Then how…” He wiped away new tears. “How do you know?”
“Because I was in that movie. We all were.”
“I’m not a rat.”
“Go to sleep, now.”
“Don’t go somewhere.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, don’t go away yet.”
There was a bit of silence then.
“Did I say terrible things?” Carlo asked.
“You said … interesting things.”
“About Jim Fetters?”
“Somewhat.”
“Don’t go. Okay?”
“I’m just getting something to read. As long as I have to play watch and ward.”
In the front room, I nosed into Big Steve’s five-inch shelf, settling on
The Silmarillion
—Tolkien is one thing Big Steve and I come to terms on.
“Read me from some of that,” Carlo said.
“Carlo—”
“Just till I sleep. Please, Bud.”
“‘There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar,’” I began, thinking that, if I hadn’t left Pennsylvania, I would never have found myself sitting on a bed in which Beau Geste lay listening to me read fairy tales as he slept off the direst drunk of his life. A uniquely metropolitan pastime. When I was sure he was asleep, I put the book down, and listened to him breathe for a bit, then left.
* * *
I never did get to talk to Carlo about Barry, to put it mildly; but Barry left my employ to live in as Arnold Lavery’s houseboy. Just as well, that, for Carlo was in no tone to consider protecting reckless kids in an age that dishonors respectable clones. Our set tried to rally Carlo, but he resisted, out of fear, I imagine, that we would talk him down. Get back: he did not want to be soothed. He may well have moved in with Big Steve precisely to hop himself up, to force his own issue upon himself.
I was saddened. Yet he was right in a way. For it is the newcomers who recall to us the explosive truth that veterans live very near to the idea of fate: the Barrys and Little Kiwis who put the Carlos in perspective. What unites us, all of us, surely, is brotherhood, a sense that our friendships are historic, designed to hold Stonewall together. It is not rebellious sex habits that define us as much as the rebel coterie itself, the act of not bothering to adjust to gringo procedures. It is friendship that sustained us, supported our survival, and friendship that kids need more than seductions by Big Steve Bosco. For—not to put too fine a point on it—the difference between Barry and Little Kiwi is the latter’s friendship with Dennis Savage, and Little Kiwi instinctively knew that, and so he held back on the touching till he was sure he had a friend. Barry, however, doesn’t share that concept, that feeling of particular need—and where Barry is going, he’ll not have many friends.
Carlo, who had more friends than anyone I know, left for South Dakota quite suddenly, just as the summer was getting under way. He did not call, and heaven knows Carlo doesn’t write: my doorbell rang, without a summons from the doorman, because Carlo had just been to Dennis Savage’s, and now it was my turn, and then South Dakota’s.
As if making up for his demonstrative plaint at Big Steve’s, he was taciturn, yet almost like his old, easily carried self. He smiled a few times, if adamantly, and when I offered him coffee he said he had to keep moving.
“Could I have your address?” he asked.
“Carlo, you’ve been coming here for over a decade.”
“I don’t know the number. I just know where it is. I thought…” He was looking out the window at the site next door; one crew was attaching the curtain wall, another setting down the wooden forms for the concrete on the second-floor roof. “Another shirts-off day in New York.” He turned to me. “I thought I might send you a letter.”
I went to my desk to write down the data; when I was at
Opera News
ten years ago, we all got business cards, which I never used. Over the years, they’ve made ideal note stubs. I pulled one out, and, as I marked it up, Carlo said, “Look.”
“Oh, her,” I replied.
He was gazing at one of the workers, who, for several months, had been coming around at various times of the day to stare into my apartment. Perhaps he was fascinated by the thousands of books and records in view, or trying to figure out what the hell I was doing in by day when I should be out working like him. Who knows? Maybe he was entranced by my Bemelmans.
“He’s kind of cute,” said Carlo.
“Under the hardhat he’s bald.”
“That’s not his fault. Sweet bod.”
“Lugging things around all day will do that to you. Here.” I gave him the card. I had included my phone number in case of emergency.
“Have you ever spoken to him? On the street.”
“Never saw him on the street. Maybe he never
goes
on the street. Every time I look up, almost, he’s standing there looking.”
“He’s sort of like a smaller version of Big Steve, isn’t he?”
“My God, Carlo, you look … the way you used to look. Just now, like this. Carefree.”
“Wave at him, Bud.” Carlo pulled me to him, turned me to face the site, and the two of us looked out at the man. “He’s lonely. How old is he? Thirty? Thirty-five? Italian. Lives with his folks. Never married. Dates when he has to. There are always those poor neglected girls who are glad to get any date at all. In between, he wonders what he wants. What he has a right to. Catholic, so everything he dreams of is forbidden anyway. But he looks in here and he senses somehow that you know what he wants. You can tell him. He doesn’t know why, but he
knows
that you’re clued in. That’s why he stares at you. Help him.”
Carlo waved.
“Now you,” he said. “Give him a chance.”
I waved, too, but the man stood there frozen, just watching, as he always did.
“He’s shy,” said Carlo.
“He doesn’t know what we’re doing,” I said. “We might be making fun of him.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“How would you know a thing like that?”
“I can always tell.” His grip tightened on my shoulders. “Bud. Don’t see me out. I want you to go upstairs after I leave. The kid himself was crying before. Wave once more to him, Bud, with me, together.”
We waved.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll report to you on what it’s like. We’ll think about some things. You won’t tell anybody what I said to you downtown, will you? Big Steve is really so truly sorry.”
“Carlo—”
“No, Bud.” He was holding me so I couldn’t turn around. “Look, he’s watching us as if we held his secret of life. There’s always something somewhere else. I’m going to let you go, and I’m going to leave, and you’re going to stay here, just like this. Okay?”
I nodded; the worker in the hardhat, fascinated by our melodrama, was still watching us.
Carlo let go of me, moved, crossed the room; I heard the door click open, but just then the worker waved at me, and by the time I turned Carlo was gone.
* * *
No one’s irreplaceable, I told myself, as we went on with our dreams and dreads and brunches, which, on a really vital Sunday, may be formidably combined. But in summer the urban brunches dissolve in deference to the Island dinners—which can last even longer than a brunch.
I decided not to take a share this year, but Dennis Savage had finally gotten into a neat house on the ocean, in a reputable section of The Pines, so I guested. Each summer, old friends cross paths at the ferry, or the Pantry, or walking on the beach, and comparing the tones of the various years is an available topic. This year was generally thought unsuccessful, the weather boring, the ocean pugnacious, “and,” as everybody pointed out, “no one’s getting anything except older.”
True enough. Pacing through the no-man’s land between Pines and Grove, one would still run into the odd devotee here and there, never saying die in their come-hither poses, or even a nude or two. But where once one might have thought, “I should pause and collect that,” now one wondered, moving right along, if the stranger had come out of a time machine from the 1970s. Anyway, there was less roaming now, especially in those old haunts; folks stayed buttoned up in their houses, and at night sometimes one had to strain to hear that former symbol of Pines in plenary session, a blaring stereo. Many people even avoided the beach on the sunniest days. They would lie around on their decks looking relaxed and content, but as you walked by you heard them tensely badgering each other.
When a grouchy wind assaults The Pines, Dennis Savage, of course, flies in the vanguard, and he was at me from the moment I set down my valise. Little Kiwi, however, was in a merry mood, though he would grow silent for a few minutes whenever Carlo’s name came up; and though, more generally, The Pines as a culture tended to daunt him. Sending him to the Pantry for an item or two was like urging the Wicked Witch of the West to take a bath. He feared he’d be kidnapped if he dared the harbor alone. What he really wanted to do was stage little extravaganzas on the walkway that joined the two sections of the house’s upper story. For anyone else, the walkway was a means to get from a bedroom to the bathroom. For Little Kiwi, the walkway was a stage.
I had scarcely arrived before he called down to me to sing “I Love To Walk in the Rain,” an old Shirley Temple number that I had put on a cassette for him and which he played repeatedly till the neighbors threatened to mace Dennis Savage’s apartment.
“I’m not in the mood,” I told him.
“Sing it for him, you beast,” said Dennis Savage. “He’s been waiting all morning for this.”
I started singing, in several of my favorite keys, and Little Kiwi dashed into the bathroom and promptly came back in a hooded yellow slicker and a Japanese parasol that belonged to one of the other men in the house. As I sang, he capered.
“Very nice,” I said, heading for the fridge. Dennis Savage barred my way.
“He’s not done yet,” Dennis Savage said, through his teeth.
I sang some more, as Little Kiwi passed along the walkway, twirling the parasol. “Keep going!” he cried, darting into the bedroom to tow his dog out by the leash.
“It’s Astaire and Bauhaus, the lovable Hollywood team!” he explained as he danced. Bauhaus had apparently been snoozing and was not happy to enter a musical revue. He whined and grumbled.