Was it during that visit or another that Michael stood waiting for him in the door to the spare bedroom on Jack’s way out? It was always a shock that skin and bones could look gawky but healthy after seeming so sickly. Michael wore T-shirts with funny sayings and baggy gym shorts when he was home. Jack usually stopped by his room to ask if he needed anything, although Ben came by twice a week to help with the shopping. But this time Michael was waiting for Jack, and he whispered him into his room, importantly, as if he needed to talk about Clarence. Jack had tried several times to get the boy to share his feelings, without success. He sat beside Michael on the bed and felt very sad and sympathetic over what he thought he was going to hear. Instead, Michael read him a poem he had written, a thin complaint without meter about how he hated his father for being fat and working-class and obsessed with status. He wanted to know where to send it for publication. It was as though he didn’t know the man in the next room was dying.
He knew now. Or acted like he did. And Michael’s family had broken off from him, although Michael seemed more pleased than hurt by that. But Jack was furious with Michael for having been so oblivious when Clarence was dying, only to carry on now as if he were the only person on earth who remembered Clarence. Jack had known Clarence almost twenty years; Michael had known him only three. Jack tried to forgive and understand, but it was difficult when he was alone.
3
CONTINUING THIS BLOW-BY-BLOW (SO to speak) account of a tramp abroad, Vienna was all window-shopping, until I sat on a bench one night outside the Ratshaus—imagine building a house for rats—looking at my map when a big, kind, cleanshaven, shorthaired, thirty-ish Austrian kindly asked if I was lost and sat down beside me to tell me I should visit some of Vienna’s many churches. He pointed to them on the map in my lap, poking at the map until I began to notice—smart boy—how many churches were located in the vicinity of my penis. When I did not scurry off, he offered to give me a personal tour of the nearby university, which was closed for the night, if I was curious about Hapsburg architecture. He showed me a dark baroque courtyard where he groped me, a darker neoclassical vestibule where he kissed me, and a well-lit contemporary toilet where the rest is silence. So I’ve finally done it in a toilet, which was anticlimactic, so to speak, after the Englishman who carried his own roll of toilet paper in the Trocadero. Cut to: a smoky coffeehouse later that evening where an old man whose English was even worse than mine asked me if I was “a Christ.” He meant Christian of course but he was so sincere and I so polite that it was almost like chasing away the postcoitals talking with Jack in the caf after a night of forgetting the unrequiteds for Larry Breaststroke in a horny visit to you. (Please don’t show this letter or the other to Jack! We don’t want to spoil his innocence and I rather he not even know I was gay until he knows he is. And he is. I know it.)
Michael was wondering if he should go to Vienna after all, when he looked up from the letter and remembered he sat outside a house near Norwich, Connecticut. But he really felt as though he were still in Europe, still unmoored in the world and just passing through. His brief stop by the apartment yesterday had not been enough to make him feel he was home.
He had never been to this place and it was as foreign as a corner of Europe. Michael sat in a redwood chair on a shelf of lawn terraced a few feet above a country road, the lawn going back just a few feet before it ended against a rocky hillside scabbed with lichen and topped by scrub pine. Below, in the orchard on the other side of the road, checkers of shadow played over the long grass and collapsed stone wall. The long shelf of lawn was in the sun, but Michael kept to the shade of a tree at the far end, sweating in his white dress shirt and gray slacks. The house itself stood at the other end of the shelf, built into the hillside and looking very red, restored, and quaint. Ben and Danny were house- and dog-sitting for Ben’s sister and brother-in-law. Michael had arrived by train the previous evening and only now was getting to his real purpose in being here.
He riffled through the folder of letters in his lap—a motley assortment of different kinds of paper, all covered with the same perfect handwriting—and looked again at the sawtoothed sheet of notebook paper in his hand. Clarence’s letters weren’t what he expected. He wasn’t sure what he had expected during his lonely week after Paris, when he remembered Ben mentioning the letters and suddenly wanted to see them. Michael had no letters of his own, not even a postcard; Clarence telephoned the few times they were apart. But Ben’s letters were all from 1972, long before Clarence knew Michael, before Clarence really became Clarence. He didn’t even sound like Clarence here, the Clarence he knew, whose speech was full of unfinished sentences and desperate noises and thoughts he could express only with his hands. These letters had his headlong rush, but they were campy, which Clarence wasn’t, and they prattled about sex with a glee that was positively adolescent. Michael wasn’t disturbed by the amount of sex Clarence seemed to be having fifteen years ago, although he wondered if Clarence was actually saying he had slept with Ben. What disturbed Michael was that there was no mention of him. He was eight years old when these letters were written and such a distant past seemed irrelevant, but he felt strangely hurt that there wasn’t even a wish, or place, in Clarence’s thoughts for someone like Michael.
There was shouting inside the house: Ben and Danny were fighting again.
“You can’t go outside like that! What’ll the neighbors say?”
“Listen to the big radical! What neighbors?”
“People drive by on their way home, dammit!”
“You think two old hippies like your sister and brother-in-law are going to care who sees me like this?”
The tall house was implausibly compact, like the exterior of a house in a play, and every word was audible outside. The big white dog continued to doze on her chain by the door, a heap of angel-hair, already accustomed to the noisy fighting. Michael was accustomed to it, too, but he believed there was something flawed and cowardly about Ben and Danny for them to fight like this and still be together. He would never stay with anyone who shouted at him the way they shouted at each other. They had been on their best behavior last night and this morning, overjoyed to have a guest. They had been so sweet and attentive over dinner, teasing each other while they asked Michael about Europe, food, and men, that Michael had become worried they might ask him to join them in bed. Ben and Danny had a reputation for threeways. Now they were back to their old selves.
“Get off my case!” Danny cried. “You’re just bored because there’s nobody to make speeches at out here!”
“And you’re getting at me because you didn’t get any summer stock!” Ben snarled.
“I would’ve if I didn’t have to temp and provide this household with one decent income!”
“You’ll get your turn! What I’m doing right now just happens to be more important than your occasional flings with acting.”
“Important to your ego, fucker!”
“Fuck off!”
Boots banged down stairs inside the house. The screen door was kicked open and Ben charged out, arms folded tightly across his chest. Jesse, the dog, jumped to her feet and went wild with joy, thinking Ben was here to take her for a walk. “Cool it,” Ben told the dog, and stood there, breathing deeply and glaring up at a window. Then he saw Michael at the other end of the lawn, smiled sheepishly, undid his arms, and ambled toward him as if nothing were wrong.
“Well,” he said, touching Michael on the arm. “Great to be out of the city, isn’t it? Nothing like a little peace and quiet.”
Ben Slover was short, which surprised people who had seen him only on the local news or up on a podium. His auburn hair was combed back to show his receding hair-line, which was supposed to make up for the seriousness he lost when he shaved off his mustache last year. His upper lip looked very long, mild and flexible after being covered for so long. Clarence had a mustache when Michael first met him.
Standing beside the chair, Ben was reading over Michael’s shoulder. �
�Oh yeah. The good old days. What do you make of all that?”
Michael almost covered the letter before he remembered it had been written to Ben. “Oh. It seems like a very long time ago,” he said.
“It was. Back then it took some of us forever to enjoy what we were doing, although it didn’t stop us from doing it. Guilt and self-hatred. Your generation was spared all that. But now, we all have something besides ourselves to be scared of.”
Michael nodded solemnly. He wondered if it would be tacky to ask Ben if he had slept with Clarence in college.
“I’d be interested in hearing your perspective on those letters when you finish reading them,” said Ben. “It’s a good thing I brought them with me, even if I never got to writing my memoir of Clare. The best laid plans of mice and Ben.” He laughed and touched Michael’s arm again. Danny touched because that was just the way he talked to people, but Ben seemed to have to think about touching. “I was going down to the grocery to pick up stuff for tonight. You need anything? Toothpaste? Razor blades? Condoms?”
“Uh, nothing, thank you.”
Ben faced the house and shouted, “My reason for living! What do you want for dinner tonight?”
Danny’s voice hollered out, “Your balls on a plate!”
Ben turned back to Michael, faked a laugh, and went over to the dog, who sat there looking demented with her pale, ice-blue eyes and her tongue hanging out of her black lips. “How about a walk, Jesse Dog?” Ben unhooked her, snapped on her leash, and she promptly hauled him down the stone steps to the road. Bouncing along to keep up with her, Ben went up the road past Michael and out of sight.
Michael wondered about Ben’s mention of condoms, which could be a harmless joke, then the razor blades. Had he forgotten Michael’s state of mind?
The screen door squealed open. Danny came out, carrying a blanket and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and bright red bikini briefs.
The sight was obscene, or surreal. The colored underwear called too much attention to itself. The body was smoothly muscled, just enough to look naked, not discreetly dressed in muscles. With straight black hair and hairless olive skin, Danny Padilla looked Puerto Rican, which he was, but he spoke the accentless English of any New York actor. “Ah. Nobody here but us chickens,” he said as he tiptoed barefoot over the grass.
“I am not chicken,” Michael said curtly.
Danny wasn’t either. He was thirty, but being younger than Ben, he sometimes played “the boy,” just as he sometimes played the fishwife, the jaded queen, or even the street-smart Puerto Rican.
“No. You’re not chicken,” Danny replied. “You’re an old fart. Loosen up, Mikey. I was just joking.” He opened up the blanket and spread it on the grass. “I’m not letting this last gorgeous day go to waste. Screw the neighbors. You should get a little sun yourself, Michael. There’s plenty of room on this blanket if you’d like to join me.”
“Thank you, no.”
Danny shrugged and stretched out on his back, the pale soles of his feet spread apart and his crotch aimed at Michael. He pulled the hat down, peeked at Michael from under the brim, then sat the hat squarely over his face and lay perfectly still. In a few minutes, the curves and crests of his torso were shiny with perspiration.
Michael turned sideways so he wouldn’t have to look at Danny. He undid a few buttons on his shirt so he wouldn’t feel overdressed. Connecticut became very quiet and simple again. Michael resumed reading the letter where the ink changed from black to green.
That was my single encounter with Vienna sausage. The rest of my stay was nothing but art and beauty and three glorious nights at the Stadtsoper, which I know you don’t want to hear about, but on the night train to Venice yesterday—I’m in Venice now, can’t you feel the sunlight and water?—I shared a compartment with a pretty German boy with beautiful blond shoulder-length hair and shallow Tadzio eyes. Too young and shallow for my tastes, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but it was three whole days since I got kissed in the vestibule and I was so horny I could feel it in my teeth. When you consider I went twenty-two years without getting kissed anywhere—Anyway, I thought he was too young to offer a cig to, my usual ice-breaker and the chief reason why I’m smoking now, so I offered him a cookie, or biscuit as we call them over here, of which I had a whole pack. Cookie led to talk which led to many cigs (he smoked after all) which led to more talk which led to—Nothing yet. But he’s staying with friends of his family in Venice and we’re rendevousing (sp?) tomorrow morning in San Marco Square, unless something more mature crosses my path in the meantime. Tad’s (Tod’s) English is quite good but I don’t know if it’s good enough for him to read between my lines. He certainly should’ve read it in my eyes…”
Michael skimmed down to the bottom of the page, then on to the other side, wanting to see how it ended—the boy never showed up the next day—then jumped back to the sentences about the meeting on the train. Michael first met Clarence on a train.
They ate a late dinner, just as they did in the city. Ben made his version of beef stroganoff, Danny made a salad, and they criticized each other’s method of preparation while Michael sat at the table and drank iced tea. They had offered him beer or wine, but Michael no longer trusted himself with alcohol: it brought his emotions too close to the surface. Music did that, too, but there was nothing classical in the boxes of records downstairs in the living room and the stereo below was playing safe, unfamiliar folk songs. The house had three floors staggered along the hillside with short flights of stairs between each level, an antique kind of split-level with low ceilings and no central hallway on the bedroom floor. To get to the guest room, you had to walk through Ben and Danny’s room, which was just five steps up from the kitchen. The cupboards in the kitchen had been painted with flowers by Ben’s sister, like watercolors in an old botany book, and there were hanging plants and potted ferns everywhere. When dinner was served, Ben and Danny immediately focused their attention on Michael again: Ben wanted to talk about the letters, Danny wanted to know what Michael was going to do now that he was back.
“Have you thought about returning to school?” Danny asked.
“What struck me most when I reread Clarence’s letters,” said Ben, “was his joy over discovering and exploring his gayness.”
They often did that to you, forcing you to choose one of them. Michael chose Ben, because talking about a future without Clarence might seem disloyal to his friends, and because med school or any kind of school was no longer a possibility.
“Clarence didn’t know he was gay in college?”
“Eventually he did. But I don’t think Laird even noticed he had a body until he was twenty-one, he was so wrapped up in music, art, and movies. Our generation had a gift for sublimation, Michael.”
“Except for you, you whore,” Danny muttered. “Who set up shop in the library tea room.”
“It’s true,” Ben admitted with a certain pride. “I knew what I liked and couldn’t understand people like Clarence or Jack Arcalli who took forever in accepting they liked sex with guys. I was a good example to them.”
When Michael tried to picture Ben and Jack at the University of Virginia with Clarence, and Laurie, who was there too, he pictured them as adults, only shorter, already knowing everything.
“But once Laird knew, it took him forever to enjoy it. Well, not forever, but a couple of years, which seems like forever when you’re that age, and a trip to Europe. He had to go to Europe to be gay. Before then, he might do things but, God, was he depressed afterward.”
Michael remembered his own mixed feelings after sex with the boy in Paris, but that was different. “He did things with you?” he finally asked.
Ben paused, then said, “Sure. Why not? Well, only two, maybe three times. We were just making do with each other. He was in love with some unattainable jock on the swim team, and I had the hots for a campus radical, radical for Virginia anyway. I was probably the first guy Laird ever did it with in a bed. But it wasn’t very good s
ex. It never is between friends. It almost wrecked our friendship, in fact.”
Danny sneered. “See, even back then you were bourgeois.” He leaned over and smiled at Michael. “For some of us, sex is just a conversation—”
“In a horizontal position,” Ben chanted. “Yeah, I know that now, but back then I needed love or fantasy, which are precluded by friendship. Uh, this was long before you, Michael. Clarence and I never did anything after college.”
That possibility hadn’t crossed Michael’s mind and he wondered why Ben felt obligated to say it. Maybe for Danny’s sake? He tried out the image of Ben and Clarence in bed and it meant nothing to him, gave him no jab of jealousy or pain that might have given him a sharpened sense of Clarence. Sex as sex seemed utterly unimportant to Michael, and he was scornful of Ben and Danny for dwelling upon it.
“Friendship never stopped me,” Danny purred. “It guarantees you have something to talk about afterward.”
Ben ignored him. “So those letters are a document of Clarence’s sexual awakening, his invention of his identity as a gay man during an age when you had to do it all yourself. Without any support systems or gay community. I was Clarence’s gay community, which isn’t saying much.”
“I’ll say.”
“But even now, even with the support and all, that kind of feverish sexual exploration is still the best way of defining yourself,” Ben continued. “Despite the current health situation. People could still connect with each other like that, safely of course. That they’re not, proves to me that AIDS is just a part of this new sobriety, which is really a failure of nerve. Gay men are just using it as an excuse to avoid the Dionysian, which is what really scares them. Nobody talks enough about J.O. parties.”
In Memory of Angel Clare Page 4
