Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  Cathryn looked up in amazement. “Who’s Willie?” she said. “I don’t know any Willie.”

  Ellen Streeter came over and sat with them. Harris shifted his attention to Ellen, wondering if he ought to attempt, one last time, to seduce her.

  “Where’s Willie gone?” Cathryn said to Ellen Streeter.

  “Yeah — where in the world is he?” Harris said irritably. “We’ve been worried nearly to death about where Willie’s gone.”

  Ellen shrugged. Harris asked her who she was dating for the tennis tournament. She made a face, rolling her eyes, as if about to describe a female operation from which she was not quite fully recovered. “George Giffen,” she said.

  “Tell you what,” Harris said. “You help me find Willie, and I’ll take you home tonight and even to the by-God tennis tournament. Okay?”

  Ellen Streeter smiled, looking at Cathryn. Cathryn made a gesture of innocence. She said: “I only asked where Willie might have —”

  George Giffen came upon her from behind and placed both hands on her bare shoulders. “Hah, honey,” he said. “You gonna be at that tennis thang?” He massaged Cathryn’s shoulders, making her wince.

  “I haven’t a date,” Cathryn said.

  “You really ought to come,” Ellen Streeter said. “It’s the most glittering social and cultural event of the season. Last year, we —”

  “Don’t worry,” Harris said. “I’ll get you a date. I got a fellow in mind. He’s not here now, but …”

  “Last year,” Ellen continued, “we had what was called a Seated Drunk With Frictional Dancing.”

  “I got this young fellow in mind,” Harris said. He took hold of the pasteboard chart on which the pairings had been outlined. He wrote in Cathryn’s name next to Willie’s. Then he thought a moment and put in Ellen Streeter next to his own. Giffen looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “Ellen’s my date for the tournament.”

  “You don’t understand these things,” Harris said to him. “This is a mixed doubles tournament. That’s the whole point.”

  “It’s like free love, doll,” Ellen said, smiling at everyone.

  Night insects buzzed round Willie England’s head. They came piling in through the open windows of his second-story loft, seeking him out, feasting on his bare arms, cracking against walls and lightbulbs, banging window blinds and struggling in the turbulence of an ancient overhead fan. The fan stirred the air and flapped papers on Willie’s desk. He sat there typing, waving a hand in front of his face whenever the insects came near. He picked steadily at the typewriter keys, rising only to refill his glass of water or change a record on the phonograph. He had selected the music with great care — Benny Goodman, Rex Stewart, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Jelly Roll Morton — but he heard none of it, really. He was nearly finished with the issue of his newspaper, and his concentration was intense and absolute as the end came into sight.

  He was several days ahead of schedule, and the printers would be enchanted. It was the earliest he had closed out the paper in months, and everyone indirectly connected with his one-man operation could now count on a monumental weekend drunk. Especially the printers. He thought of them, tight in a roadhouse or cultivating gardens or making love to their wives, or whatever it was printers did in their spare time. Whatever anyone did. The printers were his connective, the last narrowing umbilical that tied him to grim reality. What the hell did people do in their spare time these days? He hadn’t looked lately, not in years it seemed: not since he had been plucked from the one dull world and set down in the other, infinitely more gorgeous sphere of politics and rebellion. They’d set him down in this other place — Rinemiller out front, inspired with the idea of a free and independent truth-telling newspaper reporting on the melancholy activities of corrupt officialdom, Rinemiller out front, with Earle Fielding and others like him not far behind, paying the bills. They’d thrust Willie into this glittering world, and the experience had been exhilarating. All he had to do was print the truth, like Rinemiller said, and he’d shaken the universe a little. As much of it as he could see, in any event; the trouble was that he was seeing less and less of it now. He wondered what in hell people were doing, all those people who didn’t drink beer at the Dearly Beloved, the ones not included in weekend tennis tournaments.

  He sat thinking about all the world’s dull people. He swatted insects and examined page dummies and decided it was not such a bad issue he had put together. Nothing that would send anyone to the penitentiary, like last year, but good minor league reporting all the same. What disturbed him now was that he was still going through the old motions, laboring like the elephant of the year before and producing, instead, one tiresome mouse after another. Perhaps all they needed was a new cast of characters or one last big-time villain? They were running short of evil, and it was becoming more and more difficult to find any significant amounts of muck to rake. He thought about the good old bad days. There had been a time at college when he had dared invoke such multiple disasters as to bring about oddly beneficial results: stirred a controversy and got his picture in Time Magazine and been given a year of study abroad.

  But all that had passed, passed dead away. He’d lost his first newspaper job for printing a wirephoto of Sugar Ray Robinson in dancing clothes, surrounded by a dozen white (white as could be!) chorus girls. He’d got another job soon enough, but he’d never regained his vision, his cheerful libertarian’s optimism; not, at least, until Alfred and Earle and the younger politicians came round to buy it back for him.

  He shoved his chair away from the desk, conscious for the first time in more than an hour of a cigarette in his mouth and music coming from the phonograph. He rose and washed his face in the open lavatory. He was drying himself when he heard the commotion outside, in the parking lot next to the old office building. He looked through one of the open windows but could see nothing. A car horn honked and someone yelled: “Willie! Hey Willie!” Harris’s voice was high-pitched, impatient. Willie squinted in the darkness and could see the outline of Harris’s automobile. He shouted hello.

  “I’ve brought you a love gift,” Harris yelled back. There was the sound of a doorslam, and then the car pulled away. Someone remained on the gravel below. “Who is it?” Willie called out, and Cathryn Lemens answered: “How do I get up there?”

  He directed her to the fire escape and waited in the window to help her up the final steps. She dropped down from the window ledge, looked round the deserted loft, and brushed thin strands of hair out of her face. “You’ve got me for a tennis partner if you like,” she said.

  Earle Fielding bent down over the small boy and listened to the whispered protests. Earle tried hard, but understood none of it; the child wheezed and groaned and rolled over in his sleep, turning his back on the father, and whatever it was he might have been attempting to communicate was lost altogether on Earle. Earle straightened up and looked about the room, picking out familiar objects of the child’s world, illuminated in the half-light coming from the hall. He shuddered a little, nostalgia gripping him for an instant; he struggled with an emotion compounded from desire, from an overwhelming sense of loss, of failure. He wondered when it was that everything had started going haywire for him, and whether, given another chance and all the intelligence and common sense in the world, he could make anything from the shambles. He walked down the hall to Ouida’s bedroom, thinking about this.

  “He looks good,” Earle said. “The boy looks real good.”

  “He’s neurotic,” Ouida said, brushing her dark hair at a dressing table. “He’s sweet and bright enough, but he needs a man around. He misses you.”

  “Perhaps he needs a brother or sister,” Earle said. “Let’s have another baby.” He smiled, not knowing what he meant by his own remark, unable to judge how Ouida might take it. She did not seem to take it any perceivable way. She looked up at him sharply, questioningly, and continued brushing her hair.

  “I don’t think so,” she finally said.

  “H
ow’re you feeling?” Earle said. “You all right now?”

  “Yes,” Ouida said. She stopped brushing and looked at her face in the mirror. She applied dabs of cream on her forehead and on either cheek.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here,” Earle said. “You pregnant when I left?”

  “If I wasn’t,” Ouida said, “I didn’t waste any time getting into trouble.”

  Earle flushed and paced round behind Ouida, watching her rubbing the cream on her face. “I mean I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said. “If I’d known, I would never have left town.”

  “I was all right,” she said. She began pinning her hair on top of her head. “I had some friends looking after me.”

  “Who?”

  She looked at him and smiled.

  “My legions of lovers, Earle,” she said. “They were lined up at the hospital entrance, donating blood.”

  Earle sat on the corner of the bed, smoking his cigarette. “It’s no goddam joke,” he said. “I talked to the doctor long distance, you know that?”

  Ouida shook her head.

  “He said you could’ve died. He told me that on the phone.”

  “I don’t think it was all that serious,” Ouida said. “I felt fine.”

  “I would’ve come home then, but he said you were being released. I would’ve called you, but I didn’t know what exactly I could say.”

  “Your friends waiting for you at the hotel?” Ouida said.

  “I love you,” Earle said. “I think I really do love you — despite everything.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What?”

  “Despite everything …”

  “I mean our troubles. Why we can’t seem to keep the faith in any sense of the word.”

  “I kept it,” Ouida said. “I think I’ve kept it a long time.”

  “You have to expect that in men,” Earle said. “Men are going to go off on a bat of one kind or another. It’s inevitable … You have to expect it.”

  “You have to expect it with women, then,” Ouida said.

  “You’re a grown woman — you ought to act like one. You’ve got a child. You ought to have a couple of ’em.”

  Ouida did not answer. She began to undress. Earle watched as she pulled stockings off her dark legs and slipped out of her skirt. He continued watching dolefully until she stepped behind the closet door. In a moment she was back in view, wearing a gown. “I’m going to bed,” she told him again.

  “Who’re you seeing currently?” Earle said.

  Ouida giggled and rolled over in the bed, her face away from him. “George,” she said. “George Giffen. I see George nearly every night.”

  “Who is it?” Earle said. “Who the hell is it? I know there’s someone special. I know you pretty well by now. I can read you like a goddam book, you’re so transparent.”

  Ouida rolled back over and looked at him, her eyelashes wet, face trembling.

  “Well who’s it been with you the last three months? Or the last year? Or half the time we were in Europe? Or the month in Cuernavaca? You started this libertine business, Earle. You started it — exulted in it. I didn’t. I never did.”

  “All right,” Earle said. “I take full responsibility. I started it. I suppose it’s up to me to end it then. So let’s end it.”

  “The way you’ve been wandering off and coming back again — I’d think you’d abandoned any right, any capacity even, for starting or ending anything.”

  Earle was silent for a time. Finally he said: “Should I stay here tonight? You think it would be good for the boy for me to be here when he wakes up.”

  “For a change. Sure. He might not recognize you … Stay anywhere you want … Goodnight.” She rolled over again, pulling the covers up over her head.

  Earle sat on the edge of the bed several minutes, finishing his cigarette. He kicked off one shoe and debated with himself. He might, he thought, go sleep with the boy. Or make a bed on the front room couch. He thought about sleeping next to Ouida, wondering if everything could be miraculously resolved by morning. He thought about the others at the hotel suite and realized, with relief, that he was wide awake and nervous and in no condition for sleep. He slipped the shoe back on and walked through the apartment, rattling Alfred Rinemiller’s car keys in his pocket.

  They were still talking politics in the hotel suite. Rinemiller, Huggins and Giffen sat together, attempting to work out the problems. Earle Fielding’s guests had gone through four of the whiskey fifths; Earle was still nowhere in sight, and they were all a little crazy drunk.

  “What we really need,” Rinemiller was saying, “is some new faces at the state level. A young people’s ticket for Governor and Lieutenant Governor and on down the line. We do all right in the House — not too badly in the Senate — but we haven’t elected a single man at the state level … Same old hacks moving up every year.”

  “Young man’s ticket,” Giffen put in.

  “Might even run a nigger,” Huggins said. “Let’s run a young buck nigger.

  “You ought to run for Governor, Alfred,” Giffen said.

  “Not me — I had Earle Fielding in mind,” Rinemiller said.

  “You ought to run,” Giffen repeated. Huggins was silent, thinking about running a colored man for Governor.

  “Earle’s the natural for the race,” Rinemiller said. “He can afford to spend a hundred thousand, put on real campaign.”

  “You run with him, then,” Giffen said. “You and Earle make perfect young man’s ticket. Governor ’n Lieutenant …”

  “I wanna get a nigger in there somewhere,” Huggins said.

  Harris brushed past, dancing with Ellen Streeter. Harris asked Ellen how about it. How about what? she wanted to know.

  “You know,” Harris said. “I could really lose my head a little over you, El, but you never give a man a chance.”

  “What chance?” Ellen Streeter said. “You’ve got your chance.”

  “I mean there’s got to be more … Got to be … I’m that kind of person. For a relationship to mean anything at all to me, it’s got to be adult … mature.”

  Ellen looked at him puzzled. “Adult …?” she said.

  “I can’t be serious about a woman otherwise. I got to make love. It’s a dirty habit I picked up long time ago.”

  “It scares me,” Ellen said. “It really does. Always has.”

  “You’re thirty years old, El.”

  “Who says I’m thirty?”

  “You do. Two years ago when you told me you were twenty-eight. When I was tryin’ to lay you couple years ago.”

  “I’m not thirty yet,” Ellen Streeter said.

  “Twenty-nine, then,” Harris said, holding her close and speaking into her good-smelling blond hair. “How ’bout it? You can’t go through life this way. You’re missing out!”

  “You make it sound so pretty, it’s a real temptation,” Ellen said.

  Huggins wandered by, two girls on either arm. “We’re gonna run a Negro man next Governor’s race,” he was saying.

  Rinemiller continued to sit with Giffen. He puffed his cheeks and rubbed his eyes. “I could do it, George,” he said, breathing heavily. “I know I could. Earle and I could put on a great campaign.”

  “I know you could,” Giffen said, attempting to nod his head but succeeding in a mere lateral movement of the eyeballs.

  “I got friends all over,” Rinemiller said. “All over. All kinds. Not just liberals — fatcats, conservatives, too. Businessmen. Captains industry. Could put together real tough little co’lition. Unbeatable. I know this business, by God … I know politics if I know nothing else. And people like me, you know that? Like me right off. Make friends ev’where I go. Can’t esplain it — just a quality I have.”

  “That’s true,” Giffen said. “There’s that quality …”

  Earle Fielding arrived, flanked by two bellboys carrying fresh ice and soda. Earle’s appearance seemed to give the party renewed vitality; people attempted to get h
old of themselves, straightening mouths, tightening jaws, laughing a little. Earle moved across the room and handed over the car keys to Rinemiller.

  “We got it all figured, Earle,” Giffen said. “We gonna run you and Alfred for Governor and Lieutenant Governor next year.”

  “And a black man for Attorney General,” Huggins said.

  Earle smiled. Someone handed him a drink. He hoisted it as in a toast. “Throw the goddam rascals out!” he said.

  “Yeah!”

  “Yah!”

  Rinemiller excused himself and went into the bathroom. He stood over the toilet bowl and blotted at the perspiration that had flashed across his forehead. He thought about money, standing there weaving over the toilet bowl, wishing he had only half — a quarter even — of Earle’s. He decided, standing there, realizing that he was somehow, incredibly, not going to be sick, the future almost automatically suffused with limitless opportunity, that he really should work on Earle Fielding about their running together. If not next year, some year soon. Earle was a good and valuable friend and one hell of a fine politician. No one better. Too bad about Earle and Ouida, he thought.

  He turned and lurched out and lay down for a few minutes in one of the vacant bedrooms, holding his head. Presently, he turned over and reached for the telephone. He dialed the number, and on the third or fourth ring Ouida’s voice came on.

  The child, he thought. Oh Jesus I hope I didn’t wake that boy. Little Ole Earlie.

  “Ouida,” he began, “I hope to Jesus …”

  “What …?”

  “Ouida?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you, honey?”

  “Fine … Who …”

  “You think I could come over see you? I need to talk.”

  “Who … Alfred? Is that you, Alfred?”

  “This Alfred, honey. You think I might cover over an’ visit?”

  “The two of you? You and Earle? You want to spend the night here?”

  “Yes … I mean no. You and mean … Me … Is what I me. Sit talk few minutes. You’n me. Always felt … Had a special feeling … That time we kissed … Remember? That time? Had feelin’ ’bout … Didn’t wake the boy, did I?”