Mario said, “I know how you feel, Bart. I guess we all do. But it’s just the way the world is, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it, unless you want to go back to that book you gave me when I was a kid. The Greeks, and their army of lovers.” Smiling faintly at Bart, he quoted words Tommy remembered hearing him say, years ago:
“‘Love and friendship are found in their purest form between men. In Sparta every boy of good character had a mature lover who was a teacher to him and a model of manhood’—oh, hell, I’ve forgotten the words. Something like, ‘Both lover and youth would rather die than act in any dishonorable manner in one another’s sight.’”
“You and your damn Greeks,” Bart said sullenly. “Yeah, I know the bit. The Greeks could do this, and the Greeks could do that, and the Greeks could do the other thing, and what in the hell good is that to me, now?”
Mario put an arm lightly, for a moment, across Bart’s shoulders. Tommy remembered that they had been lovers. Now he knew that they had been more than that: they had been friends. “Maybe that’s how you feel now, but you don’t know what it meant to me. It was you that said, when I went off to college, that I ought to be familiar with Greek literature. Don’t you know how this all hit me, Bart? Until then I thought I was the only one in the world, except for a few low-life types, degenerates, and I was going to be like that, no matter what. And then I met you and I realized there were—there were good men who were homosexual, that a man could be queer and still be—be honorable, and honest, and dedicated, and—and even an artist—” His arm tightened across Bart’s shoulders. “All that stuff about being an inspiration and a model of manhood. Christ, don’t you know how you looked to me then? Don’t you know, it took everything in those books—and more, too—just to help me get a little—a little self-respect together about what I was—what I am? Not to feel good about it, not to feel right about it, just to get me to where I could live with it.”
Bart stubbornly did not look at him. “You’re an idealist, Matt. I used to be, too, when I was your age. Only what good does it do any of us?”
“I don’t think you’ve changed all that much,” Mario said. “You’re right, of course. It would have been better if we could be as honest with those kids as we tried to be with—with each other. If we didn’t have to chicken out about it.”
Bart laughed, breaking the tension. “Yeah, I can just see it,” he said. “We set up the Greek ideal in all the high schools and colleges and assign each kid a big brother to look after him and teach him honorable ideals. And then try to convince everybody how honorable and idealistic we are about it!” But he smiled at Mario, and, as if he had forgotten that Tommy was there, tousled his hair as if Mario were a young child. “Maybe if more of us lived up to those ideals of yours, kid, the world wouldn’t be so down on queers.”
“Only that’s the point,” Mario said, very gently. “Where do you think I got those ideals in the first place? I got them from you.”
CHAPTER 12
It seemed to Tommy that he woke from confused dreams with the knowledge that he must get down to the practice room at once, that something terrible was about to happen. Without turning on a light, he went out of the room and through the darkened halls of the Santelli house, down the landing and the stairs, past the kitchen, and down the second flight of wooden stairs toward the old ballroom. There was no one else in the hallway or on the stairs and his feet made no noise on the floor, but inside the practice room there was a light, a dim greenish light which seemed to come from everywhere at once, and he saw Johnny on the rigging, swinging head down in the catch trap. And Mario was already on the platform, already taking the bar between his two hands. It was too late. All he could do was watch, on the TV monitor which was here at the foot of the rigging, as Mario swung out, and back, and out again, higher, and higher, and higher.
Johnny called to him, “You can’t wait any longer! You know you’ve got to get the triple back, or else you’re never going to amount to anything,” and Tommy cringed, hearing the contempt in the words.
Stella was beside Mario now on the bar, and Bart, beside Tommy, watching them on the TV monitor, said, “It is quite obvious, to watch them flying, that they are lovers.” But that didn’t matter now, because Stella was back on the platform, and Mario was swinging on the bar, back and forth, a restless rhythm, back and forth, building up height and speed, and Johnny was waiting for him, readying his swing, and Tommy knew he was going to attempt a triple.
He was going to attempt a triple.
He’s not ready . . . .
But all he could do was watch the two swinging figures, as he had done so many times when they were in the Woods-Wayland Circus, watch, them with anguished inner empathy, only for once his eyes were not on Mario, his consciousness not soaring outward with Mario. Instead his eyes were fixed on the shape of Johnny in the TV monitor, watching him with obsessed awareness.
Too slow. Pull up a little, your beat spot’s a little behind . . . . He felt his own muscles flexing, twitching, trying by inward concentration to adjust what he knew was wrong, to speed Johnny’s swing, push it forward from inside, even trying to breathe for Johnny. Now Mario was off the bar, spinning backward into the first turn, the second, now the third—Oh, God, he’s going to miss it!—the third, the third, in a nightmarishly slow-motion movement on the TV monitor, spinning backward, backward, coming untucked, sprawling down and open and backward, down and down, slower and slower, striking the net hard, the net bouncing him upward and then, like quicksand, drawing him in and down, lifeless, sprawling, broken, dead . . . . Tommy heard his own scream strangling in his throat, and he went on shrieking. “Mario! Mario! Doesn’t anybody hear me? Mario . . . Mario . . . Somebody, come quick! Johnny, Papa Tony, Angelo! . . . Mario, Mario . . . He’s dead . . . Mario!”
But there was no answer, no sound in the practice room, nothing but his own cries echoing from the walls, and on the TV monitor the form of Mario, in hideous close-up, broken, sprawled, unmoving . . . . His shrieks made no sound, had never made any sound, had never been there, had never been uttered. It was dark and he was sitting bold upright in bed, making shocked gasping, whimpering sounds.
“Tommy?” Mario said, confused, at his side. “What’s the matter, kid? Is something wrong?”
Slowly, in the sudden darkness and warmth, Tommy realized that none of it had happened. There was no TV monitor. Mario had not been lured against his better judgment into trying a triple with Johnny. That horrifying sequence of spin, and turn, and fall and fall and fall, none of it had been real. A dream, thank God, only a nightmare. He was still gasping with the unspoken, stifled, sleeping screams, but now, at the overwhelming awareness that Mario was here at his side—safe, unbroken, warm, breathing, alive—he was overcome. He clutched at Mario in the darkness, his breathing still shaky from the shrieks of his dream.
“Lucky,” Mario said, his arms going around him in quick concern, “what is it, kid? What’s wrong?”
But Tommy could only gasp, “You’re here, you’re alive, you’re not dead . . . .”
“Oh, God,” Mario said, pulling him roughly close. “One of those. Tommy, Tommy, it’s all right, you’re all right, you’re right here with me . . . . Come on, come on, it’s okay, get hold of yourself . . . you’re here with me . . . .”
Tommy, held in his arms, feeling his warm breath, feeling him miraculously alive, warm, unbroken, felt the tight gasping in his chest relax into long sobbing breaths. All he could say, confusedly, was “I thought I was downstairs—there was a TV monitor—you were lying there dead—”
“Okay, okay, it’s all right,” Mario soothed, holding him close. “You’re here, you’re awake now, you’re here with me. Here, you’re going to get chilled—come under the blanket. Come on, let me keep you warm . . . .”
Slowly relaxing against the warmth of Mario’s body, Tommy said with an uneasy laugh, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up. Only I didn’t know it was a dream. I thought I woke up ri
ght here and went downstairs . . . .”
“I know. I know. It’s okay.” Mario sought in the dark, an old gesture, to enlace his long and flexible toes with Tommy’s.
Tommy, slowly relaxing, was still overwhelmingly conscious of Mario’s warm body in the dark beside him, that he was really there. Really alive, warm, real, not that hideous sprawled broken heap . . . . He put his arms around Mario again and said, his voice muffled into Mario’s shoulder. “You’re still alive. That’s real. I have to keep telling myself.”
“I know what that’s like,” Mario said into the darkness. “That year after Lu had her accident, all us kids used to wake up screaming the house down. That’s when I got in the habit of crawling in bed with Liss. Angelo used to raise hell with us, but I used to keep dreaming she was the one who fell and got smashed up, and I just wanted to be sure she was okay—” His voice trailed off into silence. “And later, the year I was with Lionel, I used to dream I was back with Angelo again and he’d turn into Lionel on the bars, and I’d wake up in a cold sweat. Funniest damn thing. I liked Lionel, I trusted him, only these damn nightmares kept coming back!”
After Mario slept again, Tommy lay holding him, unable to relinquish the reassurance of the touch, of the reality of Mario alive in his arms, not broken on the floor of the practice room. After a long time he began to dream again, seeing images from an old book, a visit once to a museum, paintings on vases, athletes running, racing, hurdling, running naked with lighted torches. All that I am that is good is because he made me so. I bear his honor like a lighted torch given to me by the previous runner that I may carry it undimmed and pass it with its light undiminished to the next runner . . . . He half knew he was dreaming, imagining a world where honor and ideals rested in them high and precious because of their love. Gradually the dream slipped away into darkness, but even in sleep he clung to Mario’s hand.
~o0o~
At the entrance of the practice room Tommy hesitated, shaking his head in vague memory. The night before he had had some kind of gruesome nightmare, something about Mario falling, some nonsense about a TV monitor set up down here. He flung his shoes into the box, then climbed up into the net to check the ropes, carefully walking from one end to the other, bending to make sure the newly spliced rope was still in perfect shape. He paused at the foot of the web leading up to the catcher’s trapeze, suddenly remembering how he had watched Johnny on the TV monitor from behind the panel, waiting for the entrance, on the Flight Dreams sequences. Now, although he didn’t remember the details, he realized why the TV monitor in his dream had seemed important to him. The important one had been on the Flight Dreams set.
For the first time in my life I was watching Mario fly without being inside him while I watched. I was watching Johnny catching him, and all of a sudden I could see what Johnny was doing wrong.
Johnny’s a good catcher, but he’s not the right catcher for Mario. He can’t feel, from inside, what Mario is doing. And I can. Like when we used to do those old duo routines. That was what we had that was so special; somehow or other we can feel each other move, like we were both moving on the same heartbeat.
And I could feel from inside what Johnny was doing. Like I was trying to breathe for him, move for him. I’m starting to think catching, instead of flying.
Now all I’ve got to do is figure out how to talk Matt into it.
“Johnny had to go out,” Mario said, coming into the room. As always when Stella was working with them, he had put on his tights upstairs; all he had to do was take off his shoes. “I’m getting fed up with our wheeler-dealer manager putting all this stuff ahead of practice!”
Good, Tommy thought. That’s what I wanted to talk about.
“Be fair, Matt,” Stella said. “Johnny’s as good without practicing as most of us are with it.”
Mario shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t like to work that way. I remember reading about some pianist who said if he missed a day practicing, he knew it; if he missed two days, his friends knew it; and if he missed three days, the audience knew it. And I’ve got a three-year layoff to make up for, and so does Tommy.”
Stella laughed. “You can still say that after Flight Dreams? That was a triumph, Matt!”
“Maybe. But I still feel like I’ve got a long way to go. And Bart told me they wanted the Santellis for stock shots sometime in the next ten days or so, so every day we miss, I get upset.” He asked, “You want me to catch today, Tom?”
“No,” Tommy said, and Mario frowned at him.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Just no,” Tommy said. “No percentage in that. Waste of time. I don’t think Johnny’s going to be very reliable as a catcher this year, and it’s time we started working on that assumption and counting him out.”
“Look, Tommy,” Mario said, “we went all over this. You couldn’t hold me on the big tricks—”
“That’s a lot of—” Tommy glanced at Stella and amended, “Baloney. Matt, you’re still thinking of me as if I was the little kid you had to lift up and see if I was big enough to reach the fly bar. You’re doing just what you laughed at Bart for doing the other day! Stel, who’s taller, me or Angelo?”
“You are,” Stella said, unhesitatingly. “Not much, maybe, but you’re certainly as tall as he is.”
Mario swung around, confronting her incredulously. “What have you two got cooked up between you? Angelo’s a big guy!”
“He always looked big to you,” Tommy said. “Face up to it, Matt: He taught you to fly when you were a little kid, and you still think of him that way. I bet I weigh six, eight pounds more than he does. Damn it, start looking at me the way I am now, not the way I was when I was fourteen years old! I weigh a hundred forty-five pounds, and my shoulders are broader than yours—try putting on one of my jackets! I could throw you four out of five times, wrestling.”
Mario said, “You’re getting me all mixed up.”
“No,” Tommy contradicted roughly, “I’m trying to straighten you out! Johnny wants to quit anyway; he’s never going to be a catcher for us, so it’s time we quit kidding around. We been looking all over hell’s half acre for a catcher, and here I am, so let’s work it that way. If Johnny wants to manage the business end, okay, that’s fine, more power to him.”
Mario still looked doubtful. “I guess we could try it, and see how it works out. What do you think, Stella?”
“Johnny doesn’t want to fly. He doesn’t want to at all. I don’t know why, but he doesn’t—he can’t even understand why I want to. He’s been going along with it because he doesn’t want to let you down—he says he owes that much to the family—but he really wants to get into management.”
“So let’s quit fooling around and get to work, then,” Tommy said.
But as Stella was climbing the ladder, Mario put his hand on Tommy’s arm.
“Tom,” he said, “look at me, straight. Are you doing this because you know I hate catching? Tell me the truth or I’ll break your neck. And don’t think I won’t be able to tell!”
Tommy swung around to face him. “Before God, Matt, this is what I want to do. I’ve started thinking about catching, all the time. When I watch somebody flying now, I don’t watch what he’s doing, I start thinking how I’d handle catching him if I was in the catch trap. I’m just not a flyer any more—I don’t think like a flyer.”
Mario’s face suddenly, incredulously, lighted up from within. “Hey,” he said softly, delighted, “if it’s like that, maybe this is what we’ve been working for, all the time, only we didn’t know it. Let’s try it, Lucky. Let’s try it!”
He turned and went to his own end of the rigging.
To Tommy, swinging in his own trapeze, lowering himself for the first catch, it seemed all of a sudden that everything around him was sharper than usual, as if everything had new bright edges. This had happened to him a few times before, but never while he was catching. Now, deliberately, for the first time since Mario had sent him up, rebellious, to learn to catch th
e younger girls, he began to examine precisely what he was doing. Not, this time, treating it as something he must master, but examining each movement, somewhere within himself.
Carefully he timed the swing. Stella was on the bar now, coming out, swinging; she would make one more backswing before crossing . . . . Only after he had flexed his chest muscles, pushing his own swing higher, did he know consciously what he had done. Automatic; it’s built in, now, the timing. Dimly, with peripheral vision at the very corner of his eyes, he saw her braced over the bar; his hands were out for the meshing wrist grip even before he told them what to do. Her wrists locked around his own, his hands aware of her thin bony wrists in their muslin tapes. She felt so light, so fragile, the weight of her body hardly sufficient to add enough momentum to their swing. He made an extra push to thrust them higher as he tossed her back into the air, with the thin line of the fly bar crossing, cutting his vision. Automatic, clockwork, heartbeats ticking off as he saw Mario on the bar, sensing inside every fragmentary muscular cue . . . Slow down, back a little or he’ll overswing on you . . . all below the level of consciousness. If he waited until he saw Mario doing these things, there would not be time enough to alter what he was doing himself; it must all be inside. Now, forward to meet him at the nearest point, braced and relaxed, the unendurable strain, release . . . their wrists had locked together without effort. Before his fingers were aware of it, he sensed pain, stress—That’s the wrist he’s broken twice—and infinitesimally shifted his grip to focus the pressure away from the weakened point of the old break. Mario, deep in the almost-hypnotic tension of flying, had not been aware of the pain, or its release. Then the quick shifting turn, and the flying line of the bar—no need for a call; the reciprocal hand-wrist grip released at the same instant. How did they do it? Small shifts of muscular pressure, too faint for either of them to sense on a conscious level?
It works. Somehow, it works.
The Catch Trap Page 71
