“Beer’d be fine,” said Michael, telling himself he accepted the man’s invitation only because he couldn’t afford to go to a bar.
But the man—Clarence—did not seem especially excited Michael was coming home with him. He resumed talking about the movie, asking Michael what he thought of this or that, genuinely curious about what Michael understood and what had escaped him. He brought up the ambiguous ending himself, but the mystery for him was what it meant, not what had happened. “I’ve got this friend who’s a film critic who thinks it’s an anti-gay script that accidentally became homoerotic when they were filming it, that Marcello is supposed to be another evil homosexual. He thinks the director was concentrating so hard on making each shot beautiful he didn’t realize what he was doing. My friend thinks it’s all gorgeously photographed claptrap, but that’s just Jack. Who doesn’t trust anything that can’t be put into words.”
It was the man’s first mention of homosexuality, safely buried inside the mention of a friend who was a film critic. Michael pictured someone like Siskel and Ebert and was impressed. He expected the man to use the movie to talk about homosexuality, to make a pass at Michael, but the man began to talk about the poetics of editing against camera movement, whatever that meant, and sex became just a vague threat again.
The man took him to an enormous, old apartment building over toward the river. There was no doorman. Riding up in the elevator, Michael needed to make conversation.
“You know so much about movies,” he told the man, “you should be a director.”
The man smiled. “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”
Even as a joke, it was odd to hear an adult say that.
The man unlocked a door at the end of a hall and led Michael into a darker hallway. He turned on lights. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“My family wants me to be a doctor.”
The apartment was so big Michael wondered if the man were rich or maybe famous. But nobody famous would ride Amtrak, and the ill-assorted pieces of old and new furniture did not suggest money. Michael wandered deeper into the apartment while the man went into the kitchen to get beers. In an alcove at the far end of the living room was a wall covered with squares of paper. They were sketches laid out like the panels of a comic book, just the outlines of figures but very clean and precise. The first panels bore words: “Last Week at the A&P” and “A Film by Clarence Laird.”
“Just something silly I’m working on,” said a voice over Michael’s shoulder. “Uh, I was wrong about the beer. There isn’t any.”
He felt the man standing very close behind him. Michael did not step away or turn around. Without thinking, he relaxed his body when the man embraced him from behind, as if his body were relieved to have something to lean against.
A friendly pair of hands touched Michael’s front. Michael put his own hands over them, intending to stop the man before he went too far. But he liked the feel of other knuckles and fingers in his hands.
“Well, enough about movies,” whispered Clarence.
It was not yet nine o’clock when Michael left. Unlike the movie, he did not shoot Clarence afterward. He did not really feel like shooting Clarence. It had not been as awful or obscene or even as strange as Michael had imagined. He never wanted to do it again, but it had been interesting to be touched, different to be in bed with another body, exciting to have someone do to him what Michael always had to do for himself, until it was over. Michael walked back uptown to his dorm, immediately took a shower, and sat at his desk to study his chemistry. The phone number in the notebook no longer bothered him now that the business was finished.
Over the next few days, the need to picture naked men did not return. Instead, Michael began to think about being held and rubbed and things they hadn’t done that he read about in The Joy of Gay Sex the next afternoon in a half-deserted bookstore. Two days later, he telephoned Clarence again. There was an answering machine on the other end and he was too startled to leave a message. He wondered if the man needed a machine because he had so many guys calling him.
He called repeatedly the next day until he finally got Clarence in person. He asked if there was a movie playing somewhere they should see. Clarence said he was busy every night for the next week and never got home until eleven.
“I was going to be down in your neighborhood tonight,” said Michael. “What if I dropped by after eleven? Just for a beer.”
“Well. Sure. You can drop by.”
He did and they did and, this time, Michael didn’t feel at all bad afterward. He left with Clarence’s work number and called him two days later to ask if he could drop by around eleven that night. He brought The Joy of Gay Sex with him, having gone ahead and purchased the book that evening. If he was going to do this, he wanted to do it right. Michael couldn’t have a book like that in his dorm room, so he left it at Clarence’s.
(“He’s turned into a regular little night visitor,” Clarence reported to Ben. “Well, I can’t say I mind. I’m too busy doing pre-production on A&P to go out looking for sex these days. It just feels weird having a nineteen-year-old using you as a sexual convenience.”)
The routine became so regular it seemed to go on for months. Nights when he was going to see Clarence, Michael studied for several hours after dinner, able to concentrate better than before because he knew he’d be taking a break before eleven. His two or three hours with Clarence two or three times a week were a sweet, separate compartment in his life, a hidden compartment that had nothing to do with school or family or reality. The secret made him feel oddly happy about the rest of his life. He started running again—he had run cross-country in high school—going around and around on the indoor track at the gym, tuning up his body now that he had a new use for it. Michael walked around campus that month with a serene look on his face, like the dreamy look of a graceful dancer, his own arms and legs swinging clumsily beneath him.
(“No, he’s not what I’d call beautiful. He looks like an El Greco with a big head. Of course I’m being safe! You and your—He might be a selfish little pig, but I don’t want to chance harming him in any way. I don’t.”)
They continued like this for three weeks, then Michael went home for Christmas. His family showed him so much love and respect he felt he had betrayed them. He stayed in Phillipsburg two weeks, grew accustomed to feeling guilty, and began to miss Clarence. He missed sex, but he missed Clarence too. Not until he was away from him did Michael realize how much they talked, more than he talked with anyone else in New York. Clarence was a good listener. He was often preoccupied with his own thoughts about the movie he was trying to make, but it was good to have even a half-attentive ear in which Michael could pour his worries about classes and grades and future. Clarence talked about his difficulties too, with his movie and money. He had made other movies, short gay films that he never offered to show to Michael and that Michael was afraid to see. While he was home, Michael wondered what Clarence’s movies were like. His new film was to be a parody of something called Last Year at Marienbad and was supposed to be harmless enough he could show it to producers and get financing for a feature. Clarence wasn’t rich after all. He had inherited a rent-controlled apartment from a roommate, had had a few roommates of his own who moved out when they succeeded. The last one moved out only a month ago and Clarence had been too busy to find a replacement. Michael wondered what it would be like to live with Clarence.
The afternoon he arrived back at school, Michael immediately phoned Clarence at work. He asked if he could come over that night. Clarence said he was busy. What about the next night? Clarence said he was busy all week.
“I could come by even later than eleven,” Michael told him. “One o’clock or even two.”
“Well, to be honest with you, Michael. I met someone while you were gone. Nothing may come of it, but I want to keep my calendar clear until I know.”
“Oh. Okay.” Michael thought a moment. “What if I called back in a couple of
weeks? Do you think you’d know by then if you were free?”
“Maybe. Yes, call me in a couple of weeks.”
Michael hung up and walked toward his dorm. He always telephoned Clarence from outside, not wanting the guys in his hall to overhear his conversations. The day was sunny and frigid. Michael was pleased with himself for hiding his disappointment. But he was more than disappointed. He was hurt, heartbroken, angry with Clarence, angry with whomever it was Clarence had met.
He returned to his room and sat at his desk without taking off his coat. He had a single room, and the painted cinderblock walls and bare mattress disgusted him. He got up, went downstairs and outside to the pay phone, and dialed Clarence’s number again.
“Laird, processing.”
“I’m sorry to bother you again, but—did you ever think there was a chance I might be in love with you?”
“I considered it. And no, Michael, I don’t think you are.”
He said it so calmly that Michael was convinced. “Okay. I just wanted to mention that possibility to you. Goodbye.”
Michael returned to his room, took off his coat, and began to unpack his suitcase. The presence of his things did not make the room less bare. It was as desolate as the day he first arrived here and Michael remembered the awful months before he met Clarence. He went out and called again, this time from the telephone on his hall.
“What’s wrong with me, Clarence? Am I too skinny or stupid or ugly?”
Clarence sighed. “You’re fine, Michael. You’re too young, that’s all.”
“I can work on that. Just give me a chance.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to see you. Because I might be in love with you.”
There was a long, cold pause at the other end. “I’ll tell you what, Michael. Come by my apartment at eleven tonight, get rid of this homebound horniness with a nice quick fuck, and then we’ll talk about love.”
Michael hated hearing that word—the F-word. There had to be nicer ways to describe what he did to Clarence, but all he really heard was Clarence agreeing to see him. “Okay. I’ll be there.”
He arrived early, had sex with Clarence, and felt no differently afterward, only relieved to see Clarence again. They tried to talk about love, but even Clarence seemed uncomfortable with something so abstract, and talk ran to friendship and consideration instead. Michael was surprised a grown man could be annoyed, or hurt by little things he had done, surprised an adult could take him so seriously. He spent the night. He was disturbed to wake up the next morning and find another person invading the privacy of sleep, but the strangeness passed. It was Saturday and Michael didn’t return uptown to study but spent the day in the apartment, watching Clarence’s movies on his VCR. They were rough and strange and faintly erotic, without being the pornography Michael had imagined when Clarence said they were gay. How could something be gay without being sexually explicit? Clarence seemed pleased when Michael noticed the ways the camera moved in one of them.
They went out and ate dinner in a coffeeshop, then Clarence walked Michael up to Columbia. Michael liked walking familiar grounds with his “lover”—he tried the word to himself. People he barely knew saw them together, but Michael liked that too. He decided not to go back to his dorm after all, and they walked downtown again, buying the Sunday Times on the way and reading it in Clarence’s bed.
The next day, Clarence said he had work to catch up on and that Michael probably did too, but they would talk that night. Michael was glad to be alone again, yet it was a different kind of alone than before. He tried to identify exactly what made it different from what he and Clarence had before Christmas and all he could come up with was that he knew what he had, which was sex and friendship and—maybe—love. What pleased him most was last night’s walk with Clarence, between unconnected parts of the city, and himself, connecting one compartment with another with an ease he had not known was possible.
(“I don’t know what I’m doing, Ben. I don’t feel romantic about him. We’re so different and he’s so young I really feel like I’m using him, not sexually but emotionally. I’m using him for something psychological, like surrogate fatherhood or time-warp narcissism, like I’d want to be with myself when I was nineteen, which is an appalling thought. I give it another month, or until someone his own age with the patience of Job puts the moves on him. Well, it’s a good distraction until then. But that’s why I’m a bit reluctant to bring him to Peter and Livy’s Saturday.”)
Not until Clarence invited him to a dinner some friends were giving did Michael recognize Clarence’s life had other compartments. He was bringing his separate parts together, and Michael accepted the invitation, although he was intimidated by the idea of a roomful of gay adults. He remembered what it was like to stand around, foolish and silent, with the smugly noisy men who were his father’s friends. Also, he was not yet over his discomfort about gay people.
A woman, Livy, met them at the door of an expensively bare loft downtown. There were two other women inside, apparently a lesbian couple, but the presence of women of any kind made an occasion more normal. A man with a beard and bags under his eyes looked up in alarmed surprise when Michael entered with Clarence. Another man jumped up from a deck chair, introduced himself as Ben, shook Michael’s hand, and grinned like they were old friends. There was a youngish Hispanic man who looked like the Hispanic gunman who’d begun to undress in one of Clarence’s films. A Southerner with a red beard handed Michael a glass of white wine.
Almost immediately, they were very friendly and interested, paying complete attention to the answers Michael gave to their questions about life and school. Even Jack, the alarmed one, became gruffly solicitous. When conversation moved on to other subjects, Jack tried to include Michael with muttered asides and quick explanations. Michael was surprised by how comfortable he became. They were adults and he was still young, but he suddenly found adults less inhibiting, perhaps because he was fucking one. But Clarence seemed equal and human here without sex, affectionately teased for faults Michael didn’t know he had, or hadn’t known were faults.
After two glasses of wine, Michael felt as at home among these people as he did with his own family. More at home, because this family seemed to think it perfectly natural that Michael and Clarence should be lovers.
5
JACK SAT AT THE typewriter in his kitchen, groping for peeves to turn into metaphors that could be puzzled together into something resembling reason.
He wrote two movie reviews a month for The Nation, one book review a month for the Voice, then occasional pieces for any magazine that would have him. Now and then, as a political gesture, he wrote under his own name for Christopher Street, although he had learned long ago that the so-called mainstream was serenely blind toward gay publications, like an old lady refusing to notice the dogs humping in her roses. Nobody noticed Jack Arcalli was gay except other gay writers, and they didn’t care. Gone was Jack’s hope of doing his bit for the community by “coming out” in print. Gone were his fantasies of cute young novelists jumping into his bed to get good reviews—although that would never sway someone as principled as Jack. No, half-visible and unacknowledged, he had to content himself with being just another phantom in the literary unconscious, an anonymous workman on the gothic cathedral of contemporary culture. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. The remarkable thing was that one could almost make a living from it.
This afternoon was a movie review, the poor, poor movie he had seen yesterday. Books were Jack’s real love—they stuffed the shelves and stood stacked like dull rainbows against the walls—but there was more money in movies. And he could slash a bad film to ribbons with less of the guilt that followed even a respectful mixed review of a failed novel: movies were made by banks, but a book was written by someone with a mother. Reviewing books, Jack fretted more over being wrong or sounding vicious. He didn’t intend to be vicious; it just came out that way. He cut even when he loved, and was startled by his own goblins of ph
rase. Who would think such a gentle, bumbling bear of a fellow could have such violence in him? Ashamed of feeling critical of people, Jack unleashed his criticisms on things.
As always when the writing went slowly, Elisabeth Vogler sat on Jack’s notes, judging his efforts with her glassy, tinsel-packed eyes. When the electric typewriter hummed to itself for too long, she opened her tiny mouth at Jack in a mute meow. He finally lifted her up, cuddled her soft fur beneath his coarse beard, then poured her to the floor.
“While male adolescents keen for our sympathy like cats in heat,” he typed, despite his resolution to ration the cat metaphors, “female adolescents are denied sympathy and reduced to bimbettes or lovely icebergs.”
That was for Laurie. Jack tried to let his friends enter his writing, hoping their interests would enlarge his stock of topics and observations. He included feminist remarks for Laurie, political comments for Ben, and technical details for Clarence, still. Jack wanted to stretch his ways of thinking. He often felt trapped by his habits of thought, by the very syntax of his sentences, just as he felt trapped by the neurotic personality that seemed to have hardened around him when his attention was elsewhere. Jack needed to change himself now and then, if only his prose. He liked to believe people could change—he wrote reviews to change their minds—but feared there was no changing anyone, least of all himself.
He stewed over the triteness of his last sentence, longing for an interruption, an interesting phone call, something to distract him. Then the buzzer for the front door blew through the apartment.
“Dammit to hell! Can’t people leave me alone!” He eagerly jumped up from the table and pressed the button to talk. “Who is it?”
“Me. Michael.”
Jack was stunned. He hadn’t expected Michael back so soon, or here. If Michael was here, then Laurie and Carla must have given him their ultimatum. Michael was here to share his mess of emotions. Suddenly, finishing his movie review was what Jack wanted most in the world. But he buzzed Michael in.
In Memory of Angel Clare Page 7
