“Fuck ’em! They stood by their mother. Anyway, that’s all I have if I pay off the Fire Island house. I’m not made of money; I told you I am a very minor millionaire, unless I get my AIDS movie going. I live from film to film.”
Marty had to guide Fred’s hand for the will but also for the transfer of the deed to Guy. A nurse was called in as a witness.
“Ceil and the boys are going to be spittin’ mad,” Fred said with a big grin.
“You’re right there,” Marty muttered. “I can hear the schreiing already. So long, Fred.”
“So long, Marty, don’t be a stranger. Come back and see me.”
“Will do. What about all your actors? They ever come to see you?”
“Those schwartzes? They’re mostly ashamed to have been in all those
Super Fly
movies. They want to forget about it. That was a different period, Marty. Do you have Guy’s address? For sending him the deed?”
“You wrote it down for me.”
The minute Marty and the nurse were gone, Fred said, “Are we alone? Good. Kiss me.”
Fred was chewing some of the gum Guy had brought him, so his lips were fresh and moist. But it all felt too much like a transaction to Guy—I’ll give you the house if you give me a kiss. Of course the house was worth millions of kisses. It was just Fred’s assumption he now had the right to a kiss that saddened Guy—everything in America was transactional!
Of course, Guy was the villain stealing the bread out of Fred’s sons’ well-fed jowls. There was more shrieking in the hallway—probably another surprise birthday complete with balloons and candles. But neither Guy nor Fred was curious.
Out of deference, since Fred was blind, Guy left the lights off as the night swept in; Guy felt he should share Fred’s darkness.
It was strange how content they were just holding hands, after all the agony of his love-grappling with Andrés, the constant anguish of trying to get another millimeter inside each other’s holes; it was kind, it was peaceful, it was companionable to just sit together like this. After all, Fred had come to the end and his last thought had been for Guy. He was a rough woodcut of a man, but the portrait was of a kind man even so.
Guy felt that his life was under assault and that Fred was doing something crucial to help him. Guy had a superstition that he could preserve his youth only so long as nothing touched him, so long as he remained immune to any intensity of feeling. But now his father’s death, Andrés’s looming plight, Fred’s blindness and imminent death—all these events were threatening to engrave marks on Guy’s face. Something (or maybe it was Nothing) had stunned him into eternal youth, into immobility and imperviousness, but now the ice was cracking, great glacier shelves were collapsing into the sea, a disaster was warming up—and soon he’d be just a shrinking iceberg, another weathered face, he would come to life only to die. He ran to the mirror to look at himself. Nothing had changed.
Another hour went by. By the last glimmer of daylight seeping down an airshaft and through the dirty window, Guy read a few articles out of
Variety
for Fred about the movie business. The slang and abbreviations were mostly unfamiliar to Guy. (“Is this English?” he asked, and Fred chuckled.)
Apropos of nothing, Fred said, “Remember that line: ‘I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled’? I always wondered what that meant. But now I know—you shrink as you get old and your pants are too long. And remember how gays are always supposed to be licking their eyebrows down, like this?” and he mimed licking his finger and pressing it down on his eyebrow. “That was always shorthand for saying someone was gay. But your eyebrows do grow long with age and a gay senior would worry about that.”
Suddenly two men came into the room, wearing cream-colored masks and gloves and blue hospital gowns and shower caps. They switched the lights on and one of them said, “Dad?” and he came to sit beside his father, who touched him and said, “Howie? What are you wearing?”
“Who’s this man, Dad?” To Guy he said, “Excuse me, but would you leave? This is a family moment.”
“Stay right where you are, Guy. This putz is my son. Why are you wearing all that junk, Howie?”
“For self-protection, Dad. You’re highly contagious, in case you forgot. A tear, a mosquito bite, a lick of saliva could infect us, then it’s curtains. Guy, is that your name? Scram!”
“How dare you, Howie? Guy’s my lover.”
“Lover?” the other man said, and laughed. He was shorter and rounder than Howie. “Some lover! So you’re the frog scumbag who infected our father, right? What’s he doing here, Dad—how did he get permission to visit? Family only. Nurse! Nurse!”
Fred said, “Don’t budge. These schmucks ignore me for months, then come rushing in for the money shot.”
The one called Howie, his black eyes flashing with rage over his mask, said, “He has no right to be here. Lover? The law doesn’t recognize same-sex lovers.”
“Howie,” Fred said, “we all know you’re a shyster, but the usual laws don’t apply here at St. Vincent’s. Sister Patricia is running the AIDS wards and she knows we’re all about to croak and she has the good sense to recognize real love as opposed to greedy so-called family love.”
“But the law—”
“Law, schmaw,” Fred said wearily. “I’m blind, so I can’t see if you’re all suited up, too, Buster, for your dad the hazmat.”
“I’ve taken the normal precautions,” Buster said primly.
“I suggest you reduce your risk pronto by getting the hell out.”
“What about your estate, Dad? You’re not leaving anything to this frog-slut, are you? We’re the rightful heirs and we’ll fight him tooth and nail.”
“Nail?” Fred laughed. “I guess you know plenty about infected nails in the foot business. I’ll give you ten to get out or I’ll call two big interns to escort you out. Too bad our last meeting had to be so acrimonious.”
“Dad!” Howie wailed indignantly. “We love you. Didn’t we come in all the way from Scarsdale?”
“Big fuckin’ deal. One, two, three—”
“We’re going to fight this, Dad, poor old demented man. They call it the Stockholm syndrome, the victim bonds with his captor—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Fred said. “You don’t know anything bout this ’cause you haven’t talked to me in two years. Five, six, seven—”
“He’ll never get a dime,” Buster said, “your scumbag so-called lover.”
“Eight, nine, ten!” Fred pushed the emergency button and the nurse came running.
“Yes, Mr. Fred,” a big Caribbean woman said. “What does my boyfriend want?”
“Helen, I want you to get these shmucks out of here. They’re annoying the hell out of me.”
“But darlin’, they said they’re your sons.”
“No, they’re just bill collectors.”
Helen said, “Shame on you, bothering a nice man like my little sweetheart, Fred. Now git!”
“Ma’am, we really are his sons,” Howie said.
“That’s funny, I never sees you befo’ and I been here the whole time.”
“I can get a court order banning this Guy creep and—”
“You do that, hon, but visiting hours are up, now git before I call for help.”
“And he can stay?” Howie pointed to Guy.
“He’s Mr. Fred’s special friend. Rules don’t apply.”
“We’ll see about that. I’m going right now to the district judge.”
Fred smiled. “I’d say, ‘Over my dead body,’ but I don’t want to rush things.”
“Dad,” Buster said. “Don’t you have any family feeling?”
“No more than you do,” Fred said coolly. “No, don’t touch me with your gloves and masks—just rush right back to your mother with horror stories of your demented dad.”
“Do you admit you’re demented?”
“Get out!” Fred bellowed.
“I’ve taped you saying that you’re demented. It can be used in court.”
The nurse, Helen, had gone off to fetch two orderlies in the meanwhile. “Would you boys escort these gen’men out? They’re bothering my sweetie pie, Mr. Fred, and visiting hours are definitely over.”
As the brothers were accompanied out, the lawyer shook a finger at Guy and said, “You’ll be hearing from us!”
Fred was laughing. “How did I beget two such miserable specimens? Come sit here beside me.” Guy complied and bent down to kiss Fred’s puckered lips.
In the courtroom the lawyer for the prosecution had a beautiful face, cruel blue eyes, and such a strong Scottish brogue that neither Andrés nor Guy could understand anything he said. Everything in the courtroom was dun-colored and outmoded, starting with the short balding judge in his creased black robe and with his grating Brooklyn accent, even his way of sucking up his nasal phlegm after every halfhearted remark—Guy agreed with Chanel that everything was fashion—the weather, the room, the people.
Guy was so fearful of what was to become of Andrés, but it was hard to think these common people would be deciding his fate. Perhaps it was because of his privileged (even fairy-tale) adulthood and his banal childhood and adolescence, but in France, where everyone could be bought, Guy kept thinking if he fucked or paid or befriended someone, he could make all this go away. The idea that his beautiful lover’s fate was in the badly manicured hands of these slobs (okay, okay, the Scot wasn’t a slob) infuriated him. He knew he was just a poor kid from Clermont-Ferrand, but suddenly he felt like a marquis by contrast and this trial seemed to be the revenge of the vulgar on the extraordinary. He was right to take Fred’s house; never again must he be poor or vulnerable. He must be armored against the assaults of the average with wealth and beauty and connections.
Lazlo was persuasive and showed reproductions of the blank paper Dalí had pre-signed, and he handed to the judge copies of papers on Dalí that Andrés had written for Rutgers. He argued that Andrés repented his misdemeanors now but that committing them had been so tempting because he was a desperately poor grad student who received nothing but free tuition and a $10,000 stipend in return for teaching three undergraduate sections of an art history lecture course.
The Scot took up each of Lazlo’s arguments; Lazlo had to translate, in a whisper, his brogue into ordinary English. The Scot said that Andrés had lived perfectly well on his stipend for two years and hadn’t even taken out a student loan. That he was a good student only made his forgery all the more reprehensible; he had diabolically used his Dalí expertise to facilitate his crimes. It was Dalí’s choice to exploit his own name. If he wanted to sell his signature, that was his right and far from an argument in favor of legalizing the forgeries of a greedy, cynical interloper.
The judge found Andrés guilty and handed down a sentence of three years in prison without parole. He said that Andrés’s crime was worse than that of his dealers (who’d been sent to prison for two years) precisely because of his skill and intelligence—and the training he’d received from a state-supported university. He’d learned how to forge works of art at the expense of the American taxpayer.
Guy noticed that the little judge seemed very jingoistic and Guy wished he hadn’t engaged a lawyer with a foreign accent and name, and he wished he hadn’t spoken to Lazlo in French. Americans could be very paranoid. They’d chosen a trial by judge over a trial by jury because Lazlo had thought the technicalities of the case would baffle ordinary citizens, but then again, maybe a jury would have pitied Andrés’s obvious youth and inexperience.
Andrés turned white when his sentence was read out, and he was immediately handcuffed and taken off by two policemen. Guy had foreseen a moment when they’d embrace, but that didn’t happen. Andrés was just led away. Guy turned to Lazlo and said, “That’s it? No more bail? He’s gone for good?”
Lazlo smiled a sad little apologetic smile. “Of course we’ll appeal.”
“On what grounds?”
“That the sentence is unreasonably harsh.”
“Do you think the judge hated us because we’re foreigners?”
Lazlo looked up through his bushy eyebrows and said, “No. Because you’re homosexuals. Handsome homosexuals. These Jewish family men are like that sometimes.”
Guy thought of Fred’s vicious sons, but then he remembered Lazlo himself was Jewish, and he seemed friendly enough.
Lazlo told him not to worry and hailed a taxi. Guy was suddenly alone at eleven in the morning in an unfamiliar part of town.
He took a cab home. This was the first warm day of April after a long and difficult winter. The pear trees on his block were budding, though they were the kind that never bore fruit. Sterile trees. New York trees.
He picked up yogurt and fruit at a deli. Lucie was coming over for lunch in an hour. The shopkeeper was friendly in a routine way—today, dailiness seemed obscene, an outrage when he thought of his poor Andrés in prison just for loving him too much.
It felt empty, the day felt bruised, the light looked vacant and assaulted, his street felt at once familiar and strange, as if he were seeing it after a hundred-years’ sleep. It was seldom he thought of himself as a single individual, whirling lonely through space, an unnoticed neural event pulsing somewhere in a minor, dimming universe, but today he felt alone and tiny and powerless.
He called his mother, which he did so seldom that he had to tell her right away that nothing was wrong, that he was just checking up on her, did she like her new Opel. He wanted to tell her about the terrible thing that had just happened to him but of course he couldn’t, she’d never understand, he’d have to explain too many things going back too many years, so he ended up consoling her all over again for her husband’s death. Because the telephone call and the renewed condolences were so unexpected, his mother sounded abashed and overly grateful, which left him feeling all the more empty when he hung up.
At least Lucie was warm and comforting. She held him as he told her about Andrés and they cried together. She was so fragrant and kind and gentle that he felt, guiltily, the shocking stirrings of desire. He never wanted to feel excited ever again, not over anyone. The very thought struck him as disloyal. Lucie sensed his discomfort and made popcorn and began to play with his hair, seriously considering if he’d look good with the wet look. She begged him to let her experiment. He could always just wash it out.