In Memory of Angel Clare (29 page)

His attitude toward death changed from day to day, but always for the best it seemed. The few times death alarmed or frightened him, Clarence sincerely believed he’d live. When he was sure he would die, death felt perfectly acceptable. Lately, he’d been tending more toward death. It had nothing to do with the name of his condition, which the newspapers treated as an automatic death certificate—Clarence read only the arts pages. No, he was tired and bored and life had become one long sleepless night, a weary matter of duration with nothing to gain by living another year or even another ten. Was it cowardice? He sometimes wondered if he wanted to die just so he wouldn’t have to go through the exhausting ordeal of making another damn movie. He wondered tonight if he were really as comfortable with dying as he seemed. He thought he had touched bottom, without a trace of panic, without any terror of death. Maybe it was only a false bottom and terror would come later. Maybe he was too shallow to be terrified by death. Or maybe he was just too damned tired to care.

Death could be a very natural, private event. But there were other people. It was the presence of other people that complicated dying. They all kept looking at Clarence, as if saying, “Live, live, live,” like a pack of Auntie Mames. Or they looked at him guiltily, pleadingly, as if expecting something from him, a blessing or word of wisdom or judgment. They behaved as if their actions should be the most important thing in the world to Clarence right now. Couldn’t they understand he was in no shape to judge or care? He felt benignly, tenderly indifferent toward all of them, and guiltily indifferent toward Michael.

He was glad Michael had gone out tonight, but he wondered where he was. He had been joking about the Central Park blowjob, but wondered now if Michael were actually up to something like that. Maybe. Michael had become strange this week, nervous and uncomfortable, and he had said goodbye to Clarence when Guy arrived tonight as if he were guilty about where he was going. He
hoped
Michael was seeing someone else. He did. He should. It might make it easier for him to live with what he had inflicted on this kid, this stranger.

Who was Michael anyway? What was he doing here? Clarence felt he’d spent the last three years in an exhilarating tumult of schemes and work, then came home sick to find he had a new guest in his life. He barely knew this guest, at least compared to his family in Danville or his old circle of friends or even the people from
Disco of the Damned.
And yet, he was now completely dependent on this visitor.

No, it wasn’t quite like that. Michael was his lover. They had enjoyed each other’s company for three years. But Clarence never took his lovers very seriously. Sex was fun and romance a lark, and nothing was permanent but change. And yet here was this kid, this “chicken” Clarence had pursued simply to amuse himself, and circumstances had turned him into Clarence’s mother and father and keeper and prisoner. It was too absurd. If he were Jack, he would feel nothing but guilt over that. Clarence felt guilty, now and then, but he also felt grateful, resentful, and bitterly amused. If he had known things would end like this, he would never have taken the boy to the movies.

Papageno was playing his bells; soon he and Papagena would start “Pa-pa-pa-ing” at each other.

A key ring jingled outside the door down the hall. The door opened and Michael’s footsteps approached, somber or timid or guilty.

And Clarence’s next thought was that Michael should stay out until his song was over. It was a selfish thought. All his thoughts about Michael were selfish. But he had a perfect right to be selfish if he were dying. Didn’t he? Didn’t he? And when he died, he told himself, he could set Michael free.

“I
T WAS MORE LUCK
than anything I did,” said Laurie. “But when the stock market finally settled down again, none of my clients were hurt too badly.”

“I got to introduce one of the speakers, and it was beautiful up there,” said Ben. “The entire Mall, sun sinking by the Washington Monument, looked like a red and gold turkish carpet of gay people.”

“Another season of
Nutcrackers
and
Messiahs
,” said Livy. “An oboe is always on call at Christmas.”

They sat together again in Livy and Peter’s loft in SoHo. The place felt as big as a basketball court, half of it occupied by the worktables, light boxes, and canvases Peter used for his commercial art, the other half by the twin, alligator-long sofas, wing-backed chairs, and great oak table Livy had inherited from a great aunt. It was a High-Tech Victorian space. A conventional double bed off to one side was piled with overcoats and parkas. There were smells of lamb, bayleaves, and turpentine tonight. Everyone chatted and caught up with each other, drank wine spritzers or beer and smeared cheese on whole wheat bread, complained about the snow outside and laughed about the messiness of their lives, pretending everything was what it had always been.

It wasn’t until after New Year’s that Livy and Peter had the old crowd over for dinner. Livy wanted to do everyone at once, but too much had been happening in the past months to get them all together. There had been Laurie’s stock market crash and Ben’s march in Washington and Livy’s seasonal work as a musician and Danny’s
Seagull.
And Michael, of course. His deed cast a shadow similar to the shadow cast a year ago by Clarence’s death.

Livy and Peter had been more involved back then. This time, Livy kept herself and Peter outside the crisis. Michael wasn’t Clarence, whom Livy respected as a perfectionist like herself and who had been a friend of Peter’s. She could not bear another round of hospitals and hand-holding, sympathy and strained advice. She wasn’t cold-hearted about it, simply practical. And she and Peter had drifted away from their gay friends over the past year. Livy tried to stay in touch with Laurie and Carla but had no reason to talk with the men. Peter tended to see only the people Livy was seeing. He preferred work to people anyway and was perfectly content to let Livy arrange their social life. Peter was terribly flexible. It was a joke among the others that if the right man instead of the right woman had come along, Peter would be gay instead of straight. He still thought about Clarence now and then, especially when he drank too much and wanted to feel sad.

Livy bustled about the apartment, happily dealing with everyone from safe inside her role as hostess. A stocky woman with little feet and salt-and-pepper hair, she was ten years older than her husband. She wore a long English country skirt tonight and blunt truths kept popping out of her mouth, as they were wont to do when Livy’s attention was elsewhere. “You know what Fitzgerald said,” she told them after describing her break with her old chamber group. “In your thirties you want friends, in your forties you know friends won’t save you any more than love did,” not noticing what a slap that was to Peter as well as her guests. Laurie glanced over at Peter, who smiled at her sheepishly. Everybody knew not to take Livy’s bluntnesses too seriously.

Ben and Danny sat on one of the sofas, Danny’s legs hooked over Ben’s knees to make up for the fight they had had on the way over. Carla sat opposite them with Laurie. Exhausted after a day of too many sessions, Carla was very quiet tonight. Laurie, Ben, and Livy did most of the talking, leaping from one subject to the next as if there were nothing else on their minds, although Laurie kept glancing at her watch.

Then they arrived.

“Michael!”

“Mikey, hello!”

“It’s good to see you, Michael!”

Like an insistent chorus of bells, they sang out his name when he came through the door with Jack. Ben and Danny rose to their feet, Livy leaned in from the kitchen, Laurie and Carla turned to look.

Michael’s cheeks and nose were bright red; snow still melted on his shoulders and in his curly hair. He directed a smile around the room, a faintly bashful smile that suggested a child sneaking into a cocktail party.

Jack was the one who looked uncomfortable, worried and ashamed as his eyes picked out this and that person without really looking at them. One would’ve thought
he
was the failed suicide.

Peter gave Michael a warm, intense look—full of concern, dinners past, and his and Livy’s failure to visit him in the hospital—while he took his coat.

Except for Peter and Livy, they had all seen Michael since the suicide attempt, but never all at once like this and always briefly, like visits to an invalid. They had not yet seen him “well.” One by one, they stepped forward to kiss Michael hello as he made his way toward a vacant stretch of the sofa. All attention was focused on Michael, with no clear purpose, like the moment in a production of a play or opera when a real horse is brought out on stage.

“Wine, Michael? Or beer? There’s bread and cheese, Michael. Great bread.”

And then, as if embarrassed by the absurdity of the attention they gave him, they suddenly pretended the horse wasn’t there.

“But Danny and I will be staying with his relatives outside San Juan.”

“That should be interesting,” said Livy. “Do they approve of you and Danny?”

“Are you kidding?” said Danny. “They adore my Puppy.”

Laurie watched Jack sit beside Michael on the sofa. They looked like a couple. Jack touched Michael on the knee and, without looking at him, Michael patted Jack’s arm, confiding something to each other in the private manner of a real couple. Yet Jack told Laurie they weren’t, not sexually anyway, although Michael had lived with Jack for almost three months now.

Ben thought it was proof of how, on a personal level, things always work out for the best. Danny gave it until spring. Carla found it a delicate situation but one that
might—
she was afraid to commit herself anymore—be good therapy for both of them. Livy and Peter found it curious. Only Laurie felt it was wrong, possibly dangerous that Jack and Michael were a couple, platonic or otherwise.

For one thing, she hated Michael for what he had done to Jack. His suicide attempt might have been more than a selfish plea for sympathy—Carla said the depths of the cuts proved he meant to succeed—but to have done it to Jack, where Jack would be alone when he found him, seemed a gratuitous act of cruelty. If he had succeeded, it would’ve destroyed Jack. She had talked around that with Jack, and he already understood perfectly. Yet he did not hate Michael. Once when she went with him to visit Michael in the hospital, she heard Michael insult him, call him a fat pig and old fart, simply because he brought Michael the wrong brand of toothpaste. “He’s testing me,” Jack claimed afterward. “And it’s got to be difficult being around someone who’s made you look like a fool by screwing up your tragic gesture.”

Carla sat quietly beside Laurie, but it was a different kind of quiet now that Michael was here. Carla felt she had failed with Michael, failed to recognize an emotional breakdown that had taken place under her very nose. It shook her confidence in her own abilities. She blamed herself, which hurt Laurie and gave Laurie another reason to be angry with Michael, a more selfish one. She lightly touched Carla on the shoulder now, although she knew Carla wanted no sympathy for her failure and didn’t really need it. Even in failure Carla could be strong. She calmly watched Michael, as if trying to understand her error.

Laurie watched Jack. He lost some of his self-consciousness when conversation shifted to the new French film whose poster Peter had done. Jack caught Laurie watching him and threw more effort into an analysis of the decline of French cinema she had heard many times from him. Michael listened, as if genuinely interested in what Jack was saying.

Reaching for the bread and cheese on the coffee table, a hand stretched from the sleeve of Michael’s bulky blue sweater; there was a glimpse of wrist.

“The new Louis Malle film—was good.” Peter’s sentence struck a bump and he finished it but couldn’t continue.

The entire room was centered around the purplish T-shaped welt on Michael’s wrist, while Michael placidly loaded a slab of bread with brie then passed the bread to Jack.

“It was okay,” Jack said to deaf ears. “But nothing compared to
Murmur of the Heart
or
The Fire Within
.”

“Dinner should be ready shortly,” Livy said, too loudly to sound natural.

Michael glanced up, then glanced down at his wrist, but continued to prepare a piece of bread for himself. He finished, shook his sleeve over the scar, sat back, and ate.

“I understand you’re going back to school?” said Peter.

Michael nodded, swallowed what was in his mouth, and said, “Next week, in fact. It’s only one more semester, so I might as well do it.” He shrugged over it, like any undergraduate.

“You’re still thinking about med school?” said Livy.

“No. It never really appealed to me. That was just what my family wanted me to do. Quite frankly, I’ve seen the insides of too many hospitals to want to be a doctor.” He rolled his eyes and took another bite of bread.

He spoke with the same faintly affected phrasing he always spoke with, but he acknowledged what had happened in a matter-of-fact manner that sounded adult, even sane.

Jack looked at everyone as if to say, “See?”—even at Laurie.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine whatever you end up doing,” said Livy, and conversation resumed, including Michael without being dominated by his presence, all fear of saying the wrong thing momentarily dispelled.

“Right back,” Laurie whispered as she gave Carla’s hand a squeeze. She stepped quietly over to the window with her drink, as if wanting only to look at the snow crowding down through the streetlight below. She was uncomfortable with the cheerfulness that seemed a gloss over what had happened. The bright room behind her was reflected in the cold glass that looked out on a dark building.

Jack and Michael. Michael and Jack. Her sympathy could not follow Jack into such a strange place. Even if Michael were sane now, and she didn’t think he was, the dynamics were all wrong. Two mourners, two ex-Catholics, two masochists, with Jack the biggest masochist of the pair. It was all too stupid, sick, and Dostoyevskian for her to trust. A psychiatrist had treated Michael at the hospital and he was now seeing a good therapist recommended by Carla. But Laurie knew through Carla the limits there. They could unpack the misunderstandings, examine the guilt and soften the self-hatred that had been hidden behind Michael’s pride, air his emotions and teach him how to live with them. But there was something else there, or not there, that prevented her from feeling Michael was quite human. Jack, for all his faults, was very human. She feared she was losing Jack to something she was too selfish or sane to understand.