Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  He still looked fine. His body was thicker, but not fat, and his hair was wavy and dark, greying slightly at the temples. I watched him cross to his lounge chair and sit beside a tall, skinny blond, with whom he began to talk comfortably. His eyes still flashed with lively humor.

  Screwing up my courage, I approached Leo Murray and his companion and introduced myself as Danny Murray’s boyhood chum. Leo’s face enlivened instantly, just the way I remembered, though his friend’s held some residual suspicion. As I asked for details of Danny’s recent years, however, Carl had to repeat most of Leo’s answers for me, and he began to warm to his role as go-between.

  I quickly satisfied myself regarding Danny’s progress and pressed on about Leo himself. He obliged me with the information that he was divorced, his kids grown, and he still worked for I. J. Murray, though the firm was much reduced by declines in the fur market. He lived, he said, with his sister. Carl, though obviously close, was apparently not Leo’s lover.

  I listened greedily. Leo Murray’s voice still darted wildly up and down, detached from the meaning of his words. But reading the constant flicker of emotion across his face, I felt the remembered impression of comprehending his message without actually making out his words. It was as pleasing a sensation now as then, a kind of private, prelingual communication, full of intimacy even in blazing sunlight beside a crowded pool. I sat talking long after there was anything left to say.

  Returning to my own friends at their lounges, I found myself making disparaging remarks—not about Leo, whom I simply described as an acquaintance from childhood, but about Carl. Cattily I described his skinny body, his pockmarked face, his lisping, pretentious speech. Slowly it dawned on me that I was jealous. Once again I had had to speak to Leo Murray through an intermediary. Once again he had chosen another to be his intimate. Why not me? Why was I again, unfairly, too late?

  SEVERAL YEARS LATER, on another pass through town, I was left with two hours to kill before my train left. It was an awkward space of time, not enough to call friends, too much to spend comfortably in a train station. I rented a locker for my suitcase and went for a walk.

  The train station stood alongside the financial district, and at early evening the sidewalks were already nearly empty. There was only one movie theater in this end of town, and my timing would be unlikely to permit me a full feature. At this theater, however, it mattered little at what point you walked in. I paid the high admission fee and went in to watch the grainy, scratched film with its mismatched soundtrack.

  When I entered, all eyes turned to survey the new arrival. The audience was all male, as I knew it would be. Men were seated at odd intervals throughout the small theater, occasionally in pairs. There was a cluster standing behind the back row of seats. A steady stream of individuals trooped back and forth from the lounges located at the very front of the theater, behind the screen.

  I watched the film for a few minutes, and the crowd. Then I took a walk through the lounge area. It was dimly lit. There were men standing within and outside both bathrooms. Some of the stall doors stood ajar. No one spoke. The shadowy figures passed in and out in silence, sometimes lingering, blending into deeper shadows. Back in the theater, the flickering light of the movie made the spectators’ closed faces superficially alive.

  On my second pass through the lounge area, I spotted Leo Murray. He was cruising the same way I was, moving slowly through the hallway, which was lined with slouched figures. He looked me full in the face, but I couldn’t tell whether he recognized me or not. His eyes were already wide, engorged with perception, before he caught sight of me.

  I carefully passed him two or three more times, doing everything possible within the conventions of this place to alert him to my presence. Reluctantly I refrained from planting myself in front of him, tapping him on the shoulder, or signaling him directly. I slowed to a crawl each time he approached; I eyed him sullenly. He simply moved past like a figure in a dream, at case in this silent world, his black eyes glinting, bottomless. We each glided along like the others, stopping sometimes to cling to a wall, otherwise floating past each other in the purgatory murk. Different stall doors stood ajar.

  At length I drifted back out to the theater. I took a seat as far as possible from everyone else and applied myself to the unwatchable movie. Some minutes later a figure joined me in my row. It was Leo Murray, watching the screen with a gentle, beatific smile illuminating his face. I moved over two seats and sat beside him. Like a spotlight on a pivot, he turned and flooded me with his smile. His eyes glowed, black and wet.

  I placed a daring hand on his knee. The fabric of the slacks was thick, luxurious, elegant. His own hand danced across my thigh, and he turned toward me further. Then he spoke to me, only to me, and I dropped my head back and listened.

  CHOICE

  John Fox

  JIMMY ARBOOZ WAS HAVING DINNER with his mother Flo Arbooz in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue, five blocks from his building, a cab ride from Flo’s office. It was his neighborhood, a newly fashionable one. He was comfortable in this restaurant: the tables weren’t crammed an inch apart from one another. They were talking about work, their jobs. He crossed his legs; he liked his socks.

  They do this from time to time. The dinners are planned a couple of days ahead so that Flo can tell Jimmy’s father Dan Arbooz and Dan will know he’ll have to make his own supper in two days. He doesn’t mind this but she feels he ought to be forewarned.

  “Your sister isn’t going to marry Ted,” Flo said, bringing up the subject, rubbing her ear; she’d just removed a jade-and-onyx earring.

  Jimmy watched the other one come off; then he was surprised his sister wasn’t going to marry Ted.

  “She isn’t?” he said.

  “He reconciled with the wife.”

  The two earrings were on the table; he wished she’d left them on.

  “What wife?” he said. “I thought he was divorced.”

  “That was all a lie—they were just legally separated.” She was talking with extreme nonchalance, almost a monotone. Barbara was already once divorced, and now this. She took out a lipstick and pocket mirror; Jimmy was glad she was reapplying. Her casual manner was a front, but she was by this time so used to talking about her daughter in this way with Jimmy that it came nearly without effort.

  “Do you like my socks?” he asked her, wagging his foot up and around, not changing the subject.

  “Mm hm,” Flo said. She didn’t look at the socks—she’d already noticed them. They were a black-and-red checkerboard pattern. The other things on his feet were white patent-leather loafers he’d picked up in an antique shoe store on East 2nd Street. Flo didn’t think that wearing loafers and having a flattop in winter was such a good idea, but she keeps a tight rein on such opinions when they’re out in public.

  “Well, I hate to say I told you so,” Jimmy said. “I’ve said all along he’s a sack of shit.”

  “P.S.,” Flo added, dropping the lipstick into her huge pocketbook, “he’s got two kids, not one.”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes. He lit Flo’s cigarette. He felt badly for his sister.

  “I don’t know why she can’t find the right man,” Flo sighed, waving her own smoke away from her face. “But I’ll tell you something: Barbara would still be married to Steve this very day if Ted hadn’t come into the picture.”

  “Big deal. He was a jerk too.” What Jimmy didn’t say is that he doesn’t think Barbara is such a prize herself. “She must be a total mess.”

  “Be a little charitable,” Flo said. “You know what she’s been through, James.”

  Jimmy flinched slightly around one side of his mouth, and his cheeks flushed. He hates it when his mother does that— shifts alliances on him or scolds him on neutral territory or, as in this case, both. One minute they’ll be talking like a couple of sophisticates—friends—confidantes—and then suddenly he’ll feel as if he was eight and just got spanked. He also hates being called James. When he was eighteen, seven year
s ago, he announced that that’s what he wanted to be called from then on, not Jimmy, and not Jim. He thought James was elegant. His father and sister both ignored this request; now he wishes his mother had; he thinks it sounds silly, pretentious.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do know what she’s been going through.”

  She sipped her brandy Alexander. “Mm, that’s good.” She flagged the waiter and asked him nicely to put some more nutmeg in it. This made Jimmy happy. It wasn’t a gratuitous or boorish request; she just wanted more nutmeg. Jimmy watched the waiter to sec if he’d give his mother an attitude. He didn’t. There was no reason to; this was Columbus Avenue: waiters are actors, dancers and singers. Waiters are gay; they love fifty-year-old women with burgundy hair. His father would have gotten embarrassed and asked her what she needed more nutmeg for.

  “Is she still going to have Christmas dinner?” Jimmy wanted to know. Christmas was ten days away.

  “She said she was. Which I think is a good idea.”

  He agreed for stiff-upper-lip reasons, but he wished she’d decided to cancel it. He hates going to his sister’s. “What do you want for Christmas, anyway?” he asked, this time deliberately changing the subject.

  “Oh,” Flo said. “Oh! You know what I would love to have?”

  “What.”

  “But it’s very expensive.” She named a new, very expensive French perfume.

  “Oh yeah, you mentioned that at Thanksgiving.”

  “And your sister won’t get it.”

  “I know she won’t.” He also knew that Barbara does all of Dan Arbooz’s Christmas shopping. On Thanksgiving when Flo dropped the hint about the perfume—which she first smelled on a promotional insert wrapped in cellophane and enclosed with her Macy’s bill—Barbara pointed out that Flo had at least a dozen bottles of perfume on her dresser that were all full. Half-full, Flo had said. She likes perfume but tires of the scents and enjoys getting new ones.

  They rehashed Barbara’s divorce and her now-canceled second marriage plans. She told him about who on the block dropped dead and who got engaged and who’s moving to Maryland and who had a second child but shouldn’t have because they seem so unhappy. Jimmy inhaled cigarettes deeply and exhaled a lot of smoke expressively while he listened to some of what she said. His mother should know by now that he doesn’t want his ear bent with this stuff when they go out, and he often suspects from her flat tone that she no longer cares about neighborhood gossip anyway, but the only aspect of his life either of them feels comfortable discussing with the other is his job, so she often has to hold up his end of the conversation once they’ve exhausted the details of Barbara’s life. He smokes cigarettes in restaurants with her but never at his parents’ house nor his sister’s. He never addresses her (Mom, Ma, Mommy) when they’re in public together. He sees no resemblance between them—he is hawk-faced like his father, she is all mouth and jaw —and he sometimes hopes people thinks he’s a gigolo.

  A minute later he had tuned her out completely and the following speech was batting against the backs of his teeth: You expect me to have charitable feelings and get all involved in conversations about divorces and canceled marriages and babies but my life is a total blank to you and Daddy. I’ve been through worse than her but you don’t want to hear about it—the thought of it is too disgusting. I broke up with a man I lived with for four years, twice as long as her marriage, but it’s unmentionable, the breakup, the whole relationship. For all I know I could have AIDS. I could be dead in a year.

  “I’m not going to Barbara’s on Christmas,” he suddenly blurted, interrupting her in mid-sentence.

  “Why?” Flo said once she’d caught her bearings.

  “Because I don’t feel like looking at her being all miserable and nervous.”

  “I don’t think that’s very nice of you, James.” It wasn’t a conscious attempt to instill guilt; she was just thinking of her daughter’s feelings. “I think it’s good for her that she didn’t cancel it,’’ she said, reaching for her pocketbook.

  “Well, I’m not going,” he said, infuriated, and Flo got up to go to the ladies’ room. He undressed a few waiters and a few flirted with him. He particularly hoped they thought he was a gigolo. He tamped out Flo’s cigarette and lit a fresh one for himself, recalling the one and only time he ever smoked in his parents’ house—he was still living there—five years ago, in the basement, in the dark, when he told her he was gay—he’d gotten drunk first—and she asked him if he was sure. He said that was like asking him if he was sure he had arms and legs. She thought there were ways of changing, she said. He said he didn’t want to change. She didn’t understand this. He said it was part of him, like his heart. She asked him if there was anything she had done to cause it. No, he said; definitely not. No one “caused” it. He was born that way. He said this so she wouldn’t feel guilty but now he believes it, most of the time. They talked for an hour, chain-smoking, his father asleep above them. He said it was up to her whether or not she told him; he said he didn’t care. She said she didn’t know he smoked cigarettes.

  When he reached puberty, and for a couple years afterward, he kept dreading the moment when his father would bring up the subject of girls; it never came, and Jimmy’s reaction went from relief to bewilderment to resentment. His sexuality— whatever its nature, the mere basic fact of it—remained unacknowledged until that night in the basement when he dropped his bombshell on Flo, and also disclosed, while he was at it, that he’d been smoking for years and that he would do so in the house from then on. Fine, Flo had said, blasted, nodding at the floor, like the mother of an abducted child quietly acquiescing to the ultimatums of kidnappers. Jimmy didn’t realize that she would have cut off her right arm for none of it to be true, so a few times in the weeks following he attempted to talk to her about the way he was in real life, as he put it, in an indirect breezy manner, but it clearly made her uncomfortable and it quickly became an untopic, an unfact, verboten. To this day he doesn’t know if she ever told his father or sister—although he assumes that even they must have figured it out by now—and he never smoked in the house again.

  He had Flo to his apartment once, shortly after he moved into it after splitting up with Dean six months ago, and made a point of not removing a “Swimmers & Surfers” beefcake calendar from its prominent position on the refrigerator. She seemed unfazed by it, but Jimmy knew that she’d become an expert at veiling her feelings by then, so during cocktails he kept trying to think of a pretense for turning it over, and by the time he served coffee he wanted to tear it off the refrigerator and ram it in a drawer. Flo understands her son’s need for love and companionship; she has even grown to accept his wanting it with another man. What she can’t see is the sex part.

  They’ve continued to meet for dinner, but always in restaurants like this one, where he was still stewing in his juices when she returned from the ladies’ room, and he could plainly see that she’d removed her girdle.

  Startled—amused—he quickly uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. He chuckled. He leaned forward, beaming, and clasped his hands on the table.

  “What is it?” Flo asked, smiling right at him, having no idea what he’d reacted to. He flushed; he flexed the tendons in back of his knees—right, left, rapidly back and forth. Flo can be a charming and amusing person, but Jimmy tends to forget this because he’s usually carrying her around in the back of his neck, part of a tight muscle that gets massaged every two weeks at a health club. “I’ll call you later in the week about Christmas,” he said sheepishly.

  “Oh. Fine,” she replied, cupping her mouth, yawning elaborately. It was her pleasant, “time-to-call-it-a-night” yawn. She got a cab to the Yonkers express bus and Jimmy wandered around the neighborhood.

  He stopped along the avenue and joined a small crowd watch a street comedian do an imitation of a roach stuck and writhing in a Roach Motel. He laughed out loud. He bought a pear at a fruit market and ate it as he walked. This was to look casual and health-consci
ous. He passed the custom-frame shop he manages, dark and gated. He wished it were lit and open and that he was in it and that it was the next day, even though when he’s there he wishes he were someplace else. He paused in front of a bar on the next block but didn’t like the way he was dressed for this place so he kept going. He wasn’t going to go home, change, and come back, either. He knew what it would be like: he’d lean against a wall and watch a porn video on a TV suspended above the heads of a small group of regulars who’d be carrying on a lively conversation at one end of the bar. About ten other men, alone, would be scattered around in various attitudes, watching the video, acting, like Jimmy, as though that’s what they’d come in for, and only occasionally copping rapid fish-eyed peeks at one another. Jimmy’s furtive bar attitude is exactly the same as it was before the health crisis, when it was due to his fear of rejection and his need to reject; but now in addition to that he has no way of knowing who has AIDS, plus he figures if he seems too cruisy he might appear promiscuous, and therefore that much more likely to have contracted it himself. He swears that if they were to find a cure tomorrow he’ll suddenly be all gregarious and chummy.

  In order to get into his building he had to climb over four Hispanic men—beer-bellied, sweaty even in the cold, drinking out of paper bags—whose enduring presence in his gentrifying neighborhood riles him. They’re there day and night, yabbering away and laughing, and he always wonders what they could possibly have to talk about since they don’t do anything and don’t go anywhere. He calls them Hispanics, though. It’s the correct thing to call them. Like “physically challenged,” not handicapped. Like “gay,” not homosexual. Like “person with AIDS,” not AIDS victim.