In Memory of Angel Clare

by Christopher Bram

  “Maybe. But he was my best friend,” Jack said quietly. “We knew each other twenty years, Michael. Friends become more than just friends when you know them that long. They become part of your mind, part of your reality. When they’re gone, it’s like reality has broken in two.”

  “That sounds very abstract and neat. What I feel is messy and real.”

  “What I feel is just as real, Michael.” Why did the boy fight him on this? Did he think grief was too valuable to share? A frail emotion that might evaporate if divided among others? “As real and painful as what you’re feeling,” Jack insisted.

  “No. It can’t be. Because I lived with him. I had sex with him.” Michael grew more vehement. “Having sex with someone bonds them to you in a way you wouldn’t understand. You don’t understand his movie and you don’t understand love.”

  You little shit, thought Jack. Don’t you know what I’ve offered to do for you? “I have sexual feelings,” he muttered. “I even fall in love. I loved Clarence as a friend. And not that it matters, but I even had sex with him.”

  Michael glared. “You?”

  Jack hadn’t intended to say that. Repressing other thoughts, he had let that one jump out. Why? “A long time ago, Michael. Fifteen years ago. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”

  Michael narrowed his eyes at Jack, as if trying to picture him with Clarence.

  “Only two or three times,” Jack apologized. But he had no need to apologize. “It was when Clarence first moved to New York and lived with me for three months. In this apartment, in fact. He’d been to Europe and had lived in D.C. a year. And I was just coming to terms with myself, so he let me experiment with him a few times. We discovered it wasn’t what we wanted from each other.” Jack remembered the first time most sharply, when he finished too quickly and had to work and work to get Clarence to finish, confused and depressed that the erect cock in his mouth and the naked body squirming in his bed seemed to have nothing to do with the Clarence who was his good friend from college. In sex, too, Clare could be a disingenuous tyrant. That was the first occasion when Jack irritably wondered if Clarence seemed gentle and benevolent only because of his inability to put thoughts into words.

  Michael took a deep breath. “I don’t care. Clarence slept with anyone back then. He even slept with Ben.”

  “And a thousand others,” said Jack, getting back at the boy for anyone. “Actually, he thought he was in love with Ben, until he realized what he loved was having sex with a guy. Ben was his first.” Jack was surprised Michael knew about Ben. He remembered being jealous of Ben that semester, without knowing exactly what was going on between him and Clarence.

  “But you were never in love with him, were you?” Michael said sharply.

  “No,” said Jack. “I wasn’t.” Which was probably true.

  “Then it’s not the same,” Michael concluded. “What you and I are feeling. Because I was in love with Clarence. And he was in love with me. I couldn’t care less you fooled around with him. I don’t see why you brought it up.”

  “I brought it up only because—I want you to know he was an important part of my life, too, and I have as much right to grieve as you do. You shouldn’t be jealous of us because we knew Clarence before you did.”

  “I’m not jealous,” Michael sniped. “I’m just sick of people telling me what I should feel.”

  “Nobody’s telling you what to feel, Michael.” Were they?

  The boy gave his head a shake, his curly hair quivering like jelly. “Why can’t people let me feel what I feel in peace?”

  “We do. We’re only offering sympathy.”

  “I don’t want your sympathy.”

  This time, Jack saw what to do with his exasperation. As gently as possible, he said, “Then maybe it’s time you didn’t see so much of us.”

  Michael cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “If we’re such an annoyance to you, Michael, if you think we’re always telling you what to feel, then it might be better for you to spend time with other people. People who didn’t know Clarence. So you wouldn’t feel they were forcing their sympathy on you. You should be meeting other people,” Jack said kindly. “People your own age. You’re not stuck with just us, you know. We’re not your family.”

  Michael’s brown eyes became wide and worried. He lowered the upturned nose that looked faintly piggish when his chin was raised. The arrogant boy turned into a frightened child. “You don’t want me around anymore?”

  And Jack realized with a start: We are his family. Michael had nothing to do with his real family. “No. Not that, Michael. We’re your friends. I was just saying we can’t be good for you. We’re a closed little world and you should get out a bit. Like you did when you went to Europe.”

  Michael looked nervously around, then looked down and saw his toe sticking out of his sock. He reached down and pulled the hole around so it wouldn’t show. He pulled his arrogance back around him. “You think I want a new boyfriend?” he said sarcastically.

  “No, I don’t,” said Jack. “But I do think it’s time you started doing things. Maybe some kind of job.” He hesitated. “Maybe found your own place to live.”

  “But I have my own place.”

  “It’s really Laurie and Carla’s.”

  “I don’t mind sharing it with them. They give me my privacy.”

  “Maybe they want a little more privacy?”

  “No. We’re fine,” Michael insisted. “And it’s Clarence’s apartment. I need to be there.”

  Jack made a face, wondering how to get around that belief.

  “You don’t think I really mourn Clarence, do you?”

  “What?” Jack couldn’t understand where that had come from. “Of course we do. We just feel it’s time you went on with other things.”

  “You think I’m faking it!” Michael said angrily. “You don’t think it’s real.”

  “I know it’s real. Because I feel something like it. But I go on with my life, Michael. I write my dumb reviews and live my dumb life. You learn to live with it.”

  “You can,” Michael sneered. “But he was the only life I had. You were nothing but his friend. What I feel’s got to be ten times worse than anything you’re feeling. It’s got to be!”

  “Then go out and kill yourself if you feel so damn bad!”

  Jack could not believe he had said that. Confused by Michael, he had let his guard down and his anger took him by surprise. He should not have said that.

  But Michael looked very hard and contemptuous, invulnerable. “What do you know?” he sniffed. “You’re nothing but a silly old library queen.”

  Jack was feeling too guilty to take offense. He accepted the epithet with a shrug. Suddenly, both of them found it very hard to look at the other.

  “Speaking of which, I should be getting back to the piece I’m writing.”

  Michael nodded and scooted to the edge of the bed to put his shoes on. He avoided Jack’s eyes, nervously, not contemptuously, as if maybe he were feeling bad for what he had said. They had both gone too far. “May I quickly use your bathroom?” Michael asked the floor. “Certainly. Do you know where the light is?” Jack was back in the kitchen, standing over his typewriter, when Michael came out. Jack considered apologizing, but an apology might give too much importance to what he had said, which had been a nasty way of hitting someone with the limits of their grief, nothing more. Michael didn’t apologize either. They were politely formal with each other.

  “Thank you for letting me see the movie.”

  “Thank you for dropping by,” Jack said, opening the door for him. “Give my love to Laurie and Carla.”

  “See you later,” said Michael.

  As soon as Jack closed the door, the conversation began to run back and forth in his mind, Jack finding all the places where he had said the wrong thing. He was such a buffoon with people, where you can’t do another draft and correct your mistakes. He should have apologized for saying what he said. He should not
have said the things suggesting they wanted to drive Michael completely out of their lives. He should have given more attention to Michael’s sudden fear they thought he was “faking” his grief. Jack admitted the boy’s grief must be as real as his own, but exaggerated, or Michael wouldn’t be so defensive and insecure about it. The boy strained to love Clarence more in death than he had in sickness. Thinking that, Jack wondered if he too exaggerated his grief. Overdoing an emotion can make it bigger than life, easier to handle, and just a little ludicrous, like the emotions in opera. He wondered if he were exaggerating the importance of his conversation with Michael for the same reason. And yet, he continued to worry the encounter around his head.

  He came back to his confession of having had sex with Clarence, and stopped.

  It was probably the least of his mistakes, but Jack lingered over it for the sake of the memories underneath. The sex itself was no longer important to Jack. There had been a time a few months after Clarence’s death when he tried to use the sex to bring Clarence to life in his imagination, making love to himself with the memory in hopes he could fantasize a sharper picture of Clarence. All that ever gave Jack were his hips and thighs and hairless chest, a face as self-absorbed as when Clarence listened to music. No memory key or madeleine, sex led only into itself. What had been most important about the event, and valuable, were the moments leading up to it.

  Jack was the first of his circle to come to New York City, hoping to find an outlet for his love of literature as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. His mother lived only a few hours away in Trenton, but he felt painfully alone his first year in the city. He was overjoyed when Clarence telephoned to say he was moving to New York. Jack promptly told him he could live in his apartment until he found his own place. He had not seen Clare in their year since college, but he had heard the gentle hints from Ben and the rumors from others. He was excited by the prospect of confessing his own sexuality to Clarence.

  When they met in Penn Station, Clarence embraced Jack. It was 1973 and for two men to embrace in public seemed a bold, beautiful gesture to Jack. They went straight back to Jack’s apartment, picking up a six-pack on the way. By the time they finished the beer, they had told each other everything, from the guys they were ashamed of having fallen in love with in college, to their first awkward encounters, to Jack’s pathological shyness in bars, which left him horny and full of longing even now when he lived in Greenwich Village.

  It was Clarence who suggested they try it with each other.

  Jack had considered the possibility only from a distance. But for the long, deep minute while they stood apart beside the bed and undressed, Jack believed this was why he was overjoyed to see Clarence again, that this was what their friendship had been about all along.

  But it wasn’t. Now, remembering his foolish depression and annoyance while he worked to make Clarence finish, Jack knew for certain he had not been in love with Clarence. If he had, he would have enjoyed the work and felt very close to him. Instead, it had felt impersonal and messy.

  Afterward, Clarence understood perfectly what Jack was feeling, apologized and offered to sleep on the sofa. The next day they pretended nothing had happened and talked about movies and books, just as they had in Charlottesville. They didn’t try it again until a couple of weeks later when Clarence took Jack to the GAA dance at the firehouse—in two weeks Clarence knew more about the gay scene in New York than Jack had learned in a year. They came home drunk and horny, and this time, Jack was the one who proposed it. Clarence tried to make Jack do things Jack wouldn’t do; both were very apologetic and embarrassed afterward. Was there a third time? Jack couldn’t remember. What he did remember was his relief the nights Clarence went home with somebody and Jack had his apartment and bed all to himself. Nevertheless, when Clarence found his own place and moved out, Jack missed the regular presence of another person in his apartment. It was around then he adopted his first cat, Bathsheba.

  Sex and friendship. Jack couldn’t decide if the sexual possibility—or obligation—intensified friendships between gay men or simply got in the way. There was no sexual edge in his friendship with Laurie, which might be why they sometimes took each other for granted. And Michael? What kind of sexual memories did he have of Clarence? They had probably had sex so many times the specifics were obliterated, and Michael seemed like one of those people who replace memory with stock phrases and generalizations.

  Jack was standing in the door to his bedroom, feeling there was something else he should be remembering now. Then he remembered. He telephoned Laurie.

  She wasn’t home, so he left the message on her machine: “Jack-o here. Michael came by and I tried to make a start on things, but botched it. No harm done, I think, although I spoiled the cover story about you needing his room. Details at seven. Or whenever you get in. Bye.”

  Why did they coddle and fret over Michael like this? It was ridiculous. The boy was overly sensitive yet oblivious to the point of invulnerability.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, Jack found himself rereading what was in his typewriter. He became interested again, undid the top of his trousers, and retyped the page, working in the sentence, “Requited love can make you stupid.” It was too good a line for the movie being reviewed, but he didn’t want to lose it.

  6

  LAURIE PLAYED BACK JACK’S message on the answering machine and groaned. She had seen Michael’s overnight bag in his room when she came in, and Jack’s message was yet another reminder of what they had to do. She wished Jack had succeeded and solved the whole business without them. At least he tried. Hoping Carla would get home before Michael did, Laurie sat at her desk in her alcove and began to sort out the reports and fact sheets from her briefcase before she changed back into her real clothes. The front door clicked open and shut. There were delicately heavy heel-toe footsteps down the hall, and Laurie’s heart sank. The footsteps paused outside their bedroom door, resumed again, and disappeared in the living room carpet. Laurie swung around in her revolving chair to receive him.

  “Back so soon from Connecticut?” she said as he came around the corner.

  Michael stopped, then took another step forward. He looked as peculiar as ever to Laurie. Boyish and tall, he seemed ashamed of his body and tried to keep his movements very small, almost prissy. He wasn’t effeminate, so the effect was just odd, like a basketball player whose body has been possessed by the spirit of somebody’s maiden aunt. If Laurie had a body like that, she’d enjoy flinging it around.

  He seemed more solemnly serious than he had been two days ago, when he’d been solemnly overjoyed to see Laurie and Carla. But in his hand he held a floppy paper cone full of white flowers. “Here,” he said, holding them out to Laurie. “I thought you and Carla might like some carnations.”

  Laurie took them, suspiciously pulled back the paper, and looked, wondering why. “How thoughtful,” she said. Michael was usually so thoughtless, she wondered exactly what Jack had told him. She should have called him as soon as she heard his message. “So? Did you have a nice time with Ben and Danny? Did you get to read your letters?” She found it difficult to think clearly with a clutch of flowers in her hand and looked for a place to put them. The flowers were dripping, and her desk was covered with annual reports. She lobbed the bouquet into a nearby chair.

  Michael watched the flowers hit the chair. “The letters were okay. Ben and Danny fought the whole time I was there. I don’t understand why Ben stays with Danny.”

  “Love is strange,” Laurie said automatically. In fact, she thought Danny was the best thing about Ben. That Ben stuck by someone who constantly pricked his pride and pretentions proved he wasn’t completely swallowed up in self-importance. Laurie even liked their method of staying together by forever breaking up. It seemed such a dramatic relationship, almost existential.

  Michael continued to stand in front of her, apparently waiting for something.

  She wanted him to leave so she could call Jack. “When did you get back?”


  “Around noon.”

  “That was a quick visit. What’ve you been doing since you got back?”

  “Walking around. Dropped by Jack’s for a bit.” He seemed to watch her to see how much she knew.

  “Jack have anything to say?” It was like digging a story out of the ten-year-olds Laurie used to teach.

  “Nothing much. He was working. I dropped by just to watch Clarence’s movie.”

  “Oh.” Laurie hated that movie and thought even Jack took it too seriously. “Well then. I guess that gave you a lot to talk about.”

  “Nothing interesting.” Michael was rocking a foot inside his left shoe, ready to leave but still not taking his eyes off her.

  “Good then. Welcome back, Michael. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some paperwork to finish here. You probably still have some unpacking to do.” She had to talk to Jack. He could be either devastatingly blunt about things or so subtly tactful not even his best friends understood what he was getting at. Laurie suspected he had been too subtle with Michael, and she needed to find out exactly what he had said.

  “Unpack? Yes. If you say so.” Michael began to turn around.

  The front door opened and closed again. “Pooty! I need you!” Carla sang.

  “In here!” Laurie shouted. She smiled at Michael, expecting him to leave, but he only stepped aside and stood there, waiting again now that Carla was home.

  The whole apartment rattled as Carla ran jokingly through the living room, hollering “Home!” as she swung around the corner and—stopped dead at the sight of Michael. She straightened up from her pounce position. “Michael,” she said crisply. “You’re back.”

  “He brought us flowers,” said Laurie, pointing out the bundle on the chair. “What kind did you say they are?”