The Marble Quilt (15 page)

He closed his eyes. The mistrust in which he had been wallowing since Ezra's visit horrified him. It did not fit the profile of a man who wore argyle sweaters, and owned a bookstore, and prided himself on the civility of his domestic arrangements. For his life with Ralph had always been the very model of civility. There was no surprise here: a craving for the refinements in which their childhoods—Bob's in a Dallas suburb, Ralph's on a series of military bases in California, Korea, and Germany—had been so singularly lacking was what had attracted them to each other in the first place. Thus their courtship had taken place in antiques shops. The first purchase they had made together was a set of Sèvres porcelain dessert plates. Even when they were young and poor, and lived in an East Village walk-up, they always had good furniture, Persian rugs, old hotel silver. For these things, above all others, mattered to Ralph, and if, on occasion, an urge came upon him to go out searching for sex of the seamier variety—an urge utterly out of keeping with his otherwise scrupulous habits—well, what did it matter? Squabbling was tawdry, like paper napkins. Much better to show a bit of tolerance, to laugh the matter off, to remain, at all costs,
civilized
.

Only once before had jealousy gotten the better of Bob. This was in the early eighties, when for a few months Ralph had entered into a sort of carnal tailspin. Every night he'd gone out at around eleven (they were still living in the East Village then), only to return at dawn, reeking of cigarette fumes and sweat and poppers. Then he would shower, while Bob lay quiet in their bed with its upholstered headboard, its four-hundred-thread-count sheets, its canopy of English glazed chintz (Roses and Pansies), pretending to be asleep but really listening for the water to shut off. Eventually Ralph, moist in his cotton pajamas, would climb in next to him, lie still for a few moments, then, with great caution, wrap his arms around Bob's chest and nuzzle his neck.

One morning during this period, as they were fixing breakfast in their tiny kitchen, Ralph started washing an orange. Where cleanliness was concerned, he could be excessively fastidious—when he ate french fries, he would leave the tips on the plate, like cigarette butts, rather than put anything his fingers had touched into his mouth—and now, watching him wash his orange, which he was going to peel anyway, Bob giggled. “What is it?” Ralph asked.

“It's just … you'll lick some stranger's asshole through a hole in the wall, but you won't eat an orange without washing it.”

Ralph put the orange down. Almost angrily he glared at Bob; he swallowed, as if swallowing back an impulse to lash out. And then he, too, laughed. He laughed and laughed.

Bob opened his eyes again, sat up. Had he fallen asleep? Behind the pillows in their beige cases, the headboard, made from a pair of Venetian gilt and painted gesso doors, creaked in reaction to his weight. Although he was alone, he was lying on the left side of
the bed; he had always slept on the left, just as Ralph had always slept on the right. Each had his own table, his own drawer, Bob's containing disorder (earplugs and magazine clippings and buttons and handkerchiefs and cufflinks), Ralph's only a first-aid kit, a flashlight, matches, and a few candles. On top of each table sat a red tole lamp hand-stenciled with fritillaries. To the left was the window draped in the beige linen
toile de Jouy
it had taken Ralph so many months to settle upon, and next to the window was the dresser, and across from the dresser was the desk, its drawers pulled open, its contents spread all over the carpet, as if a thief had been searching fruitlessly for jewels … Getting up, Bob quickly put everything back.

Streetlamps came on; instinctively he shut the curtains against them. In the morning, he knew, he would have to answer Ezra's scandalous proposition. And what would he say? From a financial perspective, it was true, Ralph's death had left him in a precarious position. The import of his will was no secret; it was identical to Bob's, both of them stating that if one should predecease the other, the survivor would inherit the apartment, whatever money was in the dead partner's bank account, and the cash value of his business. Yet so far—just as Ezra had guessed—Ralph's business hadn't earned much in the way of profit; the big money was supposed to come next year, when he completed the first of his corporate commissions. Nor was the bookstore alone likely to generate the kind of income necessary to keep up the mortgage payments on a large Manhattan co-op, purchased at the height of an economic boom. Their whole life, when you thought about it, had been provisional, based on the assumption that Ralph wasn't going to die—and this was odd, for in recent years his health had become for both of them a chronic, if largely private, worry. Ralph, for instance, was always feeling his glands. Whenever he
got a cold, an expression of grim stoicism claimed his face, only to give way, once he had recovered, to a kind of euphoria, as if getting over the cold meant that he was utterly safe: exactly the sort of reassurance the HIV test was supposed to provide.

No, Bob reflected, the problem with Veronica Feinbaum's ill-mannered remarks wasn't that they had been so off the mark; the problem was that in her contempt for the niceties, her devotion to the unvarnished truth, she had given voice to the very cynicism that the rest of their friends, out of respect for the dead, had left unspoken. Not an if, but a when: all of them—Bob too—took it for granted that one day soon Ralph would get sick. For the orange had its price. And though in recent years Ralph had made it his habit, when engaging in what he called his “extracurricular activities,” always to practice the safe sex that Veronica's beloved GMHC propounded, even so, the residue of those early debauches could not so easily be leached from the blood. Every morning when they woke up, Bob wondered, Will this be the day? He'd never admitted it before, but he had. He had kept his eyes averted from the future, grateful only for what didn't happen, for every blessed deferral.

Not far away church bells rang: six o'clock. This was the hour when flights to Europe made their departures, when taxis mobbed the terminals at JFK, and travelers in whom the mere prospect of the abbreviated transatlantic night had already incited a state of proleptic weariness and disorientation dragged their luggage through the snaky line to the check-in. Then would come the journey itself—he knew it well—the mask and the earplugs, labored sleep, a too early dawn. Under the closed eyelid of the window, light would creep, heralding jet lag and the stumbling weirdness of arrival. Many times Bob and Ralph had made that trip together. He recalled with a certain tenderness early
mornings in Paris, dropping off their bags at the hotel and then, because the room wasn't ready, wandering red-eyed and unwashed through the half-asleep city, stopping at a bar for coffee and a warm croissant and gazing at the brisk, freshly shaven Frenchmen as if they were members of another species … And had Ralph, in the same way, been looking forward to his first morning in London? Was he envisioning, just before the plane blew up, the monuments and museums through which he would lead his wide-eyed companion, or the restaurants he would take him to? The sushi bar at Harrod's? Or that Thai place on Frith Street he liked so much?

It didn't matter. His hotel room—long reserved—had gone unclaimed. Oh, no doubt the flight had begun as flights always do, with a stewardess standing at the front of the cabin and explaining the use of the life jacket and the oxygen masks. More inured to flying than his companion, Ralph would have ignored her implorations to consult the little plastic card mapping the emergency exits. But the companion—for some reason Bob was certain of this—would have studied it assiduously. “In the event of a water landing,” he would have heard her intone, all the while attending to the cartoonish plane, conveniently submerged just to the level of its doors; the passengers, resembling figures from a first-grade primer, making their orderly progress onto the slides; the slides themselves detaching, floating tranquilly out onto tranquil water, as if not only people, but fate could be trusted to behave, to follow the playground rules … yet when you thought about it, who had ever heard of a “water landing”? When in the entire history of commercial aviation had one taken place? In the world, planes blew up. People died. Their bodies were incinerated, or eaten by sharks. And though, for the first few days after the crash, newscasters would persist in avowing that divers were still “hopeful of locating
survivors,” well, everyone knew that this was just a gesture, made in deference to some outmoded protocol. You knew better than to believe that someone might actually be out there, clinging to a piece of wreckage, held aloft by a life jacket when in truth there hadn't been time even to put on a life jacket.

The apartment was now so dark that Bob could hardly see the furniture. Switching on the lights, he reached for his jacket, then hurried out onto the street and hailed a taxi. Past warehouses and department stores he rode, white brick apartment blocks and condemned tenements, until the taxi dropped him off amid the headachy neon of Broadway at night. The lobby of the Sheraton, when he stepped into it, was filled with airline pilots and cocktail music, overtired children, a chaos of perfumes and accents through which he pushed his way to the elevator. Up to the twenty-second floor he rode, then walked down a long corridor to a door marked 2223, on which he knocked.

Within seconds, Ezra answered. He had taken off his jacket and tie. His cheeks glowed, as if he had just been washing his face.

Seeing Bob, he smiled without surprise. “I'm glad you came,” he said.

“I wanted to return the tape,” Bob said, “only I seem to have forgotten it …”

“Never mind about the tape,” Ezra said, and, leading him through the door, closed it behind them.

After that Bob gave in to strangeness. He accepted that the terms of his life had been altered radically, perhaps irrevocably, that from now on he was going to be a citizen not of the familiar world, but of an off-kilter landscape rather resembling the villains' hideouts in the old
Batman
series, shot with the camera atilt so that children would
believe the Catwoman and the Joker and the Riddler actually lived in lopsided buildings, urban Towers of Pisa, where the floors slanted up or down or swayed like a seesaw. At least the past, for all its coarseness and sorrow, had been part of a fluid traffic, enviably unremarkable and thus passed over by television's greedy eye. Here, on the other hand, dog collars washed up on Newfoundland beaches. He lived not in his own apartment, but with Ezra, on the twenty-second floor of the Sheraton. They had their dinner naked, room service club sandwiches the crumbs of which got between the sheets, all the while observing with a certain detached wonderment a battle to purchase the videotape every bit as fevered as Ezra had predicted, with Bruce Feinbaum, Veronica's husband, acting as referee.

Only forty-eight hours had passed since they had taken the tape to Veronica. While Ezra hid, once again, in the bathroom, Bob watched it through with her, the two of them perched on leather library chairs exactly like the ones in his own living room, although here the television was hidden in a Shaker cupboard instead of a Tuscan bread chest. This go-round, the children's death march did not appall him as it had before; even Ralph's brief apparition did not appall him. Instead he watched, fascinated, as an apprehension of the tape's import gradually stole over Veronica's face, opening her mouth and pulling her eyebrows taut and painting her skin first scarlet and then a dyspeptic gray. If she noticed Ralph at all, she chose not to mention it. Instead, as the tape broke off, she seemed to be struggling to compose a response in keeping with her self-appointed role as a woman immune to sentimentality.

Later, at her husband's office, she told Bob and Ezra about a legend she had recently encountered in her Greek class, in the hope that sharing it would allay any feelings of
guilt they might be suffering. “Cleobis and Biton,” she began, “were the sons of Hera's priestess at Argos. And one day when she was supposed to perform the rites of the goddess, the oxen that usually took her to the temple didn't show, so her sons harnessed themselves to the chariot and dragged her there themselves. Five miles. Into the mountains. When they got to the temple, the priestess was so grateful to the boys that she prayed to Hera to grant them the best gift possible. And what did Hera do? Knocked them off. Killed them, in the prime of life. That's the Greek view of death.”

“Funny,” her husband said. “When you got to the end, I thought you were going to say that Hera killed the mother so the boys wouldn't have to drag her all the way back. Which is, I guess, the Jewish view of death.” And he picked up the phone.

Afterward Bob and Ezra went back to the Sheraton, where they spent most of the day having sex. Intermittently they would take breaks to eat, or watch television, or answer Bruce's phone calls. Progress reports came about once an hour. “We've got an offer of sixty K,” Bob said at five, “but I can tell from her voice, they're prepared to go higher.”

By six they had gone higher. Ezra ordered champagne with the club sandwiches. Because the windows did not open, their room had begun to stink. When the bellhop brought the food, his nose twitched. Ezra only laughed. Gratification made him giddy. He could not seem to get fucked enough. As for Bob, never in his life had he felt so horny; it was as if Ezra had tapped into some cache of libido he hadn't ever suspected himself of harboring. He was a tiny man, Ezra. He had tiny feet, a tiny penis. He was in no way Bob's type. Still, when Bob fucked him, he felt as if he were breaking through the shell of the known universe. Somewhere near the ceiling there floated an undiluted pleasure, toward which the vessel of his body flew unpiloted.

When they weren't having sex, they talked about the future. It went without saying that Ezra would never return to Porter Valley. Instead, he said, his plan was to settle in Manhattan, using the money from the sale of the tape to buy himself an apartment. Once he was fixed up, he would look for a job teaching at a private school. Then he would live quietly, his phone number unlisted, in case anyone from Porter Valley should ever decide to hunt him down and shoot him.