Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  George Giffen grinned at everything and talked endlessly, appearing to gain strength as Rinemiller lost ground. She could not imagine what had got into George. A success of one kind or another. Perhaps he was in love. My God. She could not begin to conceive such a possibility, but if this was what had happened to him she knew there would be only the single, sudden change and little else. What siren painter had got him fixed and immobilized for his first and only sitting?

  They sat talking, drinking gin. Only Giffen demonstrated enthusiasm for the moment. Ouida and Rinemiller exchanged some preliminary banter, avoiding meaningful glances at one another. At the first sound of cars on the drive they all three rose as with immense relief and moved out to the porch to greet the visitors.

  By the middle of the afternoon nearly everybody had arrived. The front grounds resembled an abandoned movie set, as if players and technicians had retired to a distant commissary, leaving their papier mâché stage props flapping in the wind. There were guests about, but most of them had either gone inside to drink or headed off round the back to play tennis. Luggage was piled on the front lawn; the grass was strewn with clothes and books and sporting gear. Someone had got halfway through the job of setting up equipment for badminton and croquet, and then given it up suddenly when no one expressed interest in playing.

  Roy staggered slightly with the light bags. He moved along the concrete walk, past the carnival litter. Harris glared angrily at Ellen from the front steps. He stood and watched them approach, popping his knuckles. Roy deposited the bags on the porch and sat down to rest. Ellen sat next to him and opened a small thermos.

  “Like a cocktail?”

  Roy shook his head, leaning back on his elbows, breathing hard. Ellen held the plastic cup toward Harris, who turned round immediately and walked inside. After a moment, Willie appeared and helped carry some of the parcels upstairs. Giffen cruised up and down the long circular front drive in the Alfa, ferrying people to and from the tennis courts. Ellen went riding with George, and Roy followed the others into the house.

  He found Ouida in the kitchen, overseeing the preparations for a picnic dinner. She looked up and said hello; she picked nervously over a turkey carcass.

  “Need any help?” he said.

  “No.” She peeled off a strip of white meat and nibbled at it, not looking at him.

  “Looks like my mother’s kitchen when her bridge club meets,” he said.

  There was no answer. He went to the refrigerator and found a bottle of beer. Then he stood next to her and said: “Are you still annoyed because I didn’t come out yesterday?”

  “No. I knew you were busy.”

  There was another silence. She wrapped sandwiches in wax paper and said: “What did you do last night?”

  “I went home to bed. Not much sleep the night before. Remember?”

  “Were you advised about my phone call?”

  “What call?”

  “Last night,” she said. “I think you were occupied. Shaving, picking your nails, something like that …”

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t advised.”

  “Strange … And she did promise to give you the message.”

  “What message was that?” he said.

  “Slipped my mind,” she said lightly. She turned away and carried a plate of sandwiches into the dining room. When she did not return, he looked through the door. Ouida was talking with her husband and Rinemiller. Earle Fielding was wearing white overalls. A parachute harness was laid out on the dining table. Roy walked through the kitchen and out the back door, heading toward the tennis courts.

  Cathryn Lemens sat in the deep grass next to the courts, watching the others. Harris and one of the girls had begun a doubles match with another couple. There was a great amount of inexpert smashing by the men; the girls lobbed the ball back and forth. Harris served with a twist and charged the net repeatedly. His male opponent took a savage swing; the ball whanged off the wood of the racquet and looped over Harris’s head. Harris and his partner stood with their backs to the net, watching the ball bounce. Harris turned to her and explained patiently:

  “When I rush, you fall back to the baseline.”

  “Where’s that?” his partner said, admiring his dark arms.

  The game resumed. Roy came over and sat next to Cathryn. She looked at him and said hello. She was a very special sort of girl, he decided, although it was impossible to determine whether she was worth a damn. It was difficult with all their women. Except with Ellen Streeter. With Ellen you could be fairly certain — she always flashed those warning signals: You’re going to bed with a thief, my friend, and there’s every likelihood of your pockets being picked over in the night. There weren’t many women so candid and unpretentious, so frankly corrupt, so willing to acknowledge personal ruin, as Ellen Streeter. He found this quality somehow exhilarating. Once he had believed that disorder and unrestraint were the hope of the world; then he had come round to thinking exactly the reverse — that carelessness in their private lives symbolized a general dereliction, a decline of the public ethic. But all such assumptions foundered on the hard-rock facts of Ellen’s misconduct. She wasn’t licentious; she’d come to him with her chastity relatively intact. It was something else with Ellen — it was her heart and head that were sullied. He wished he could understand half as much of Ouida. Confused, depressed, in love with her, he was nonetheless bewildered by the patchwork terrain of her emotions. He knew nothing, really, about the girl; he could only reason that whatever tortured aberrations came to the surface were the nearly direct result of her failed marriage. It would require more than well-intended advice from her cocktail party priests to save her from ruin. He wished he had not slept with her just yet.

  He watched Willie’s girl. She sat gripping her dark knees, following the desultory progress on the tennis courts. Don’t dump on old Willie, he said to himself. Then he repeated it aloud. The girl turned to him, smiling.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I hope you won’t give Willie a bad time …”

  She pulled off her white sneakers and moved her bare feet over the grass. The day was altogether splendid; the sky was vivid blue; a southerly wind stirred the tops of trees and tumbled thin white clouds across the horizon. Down the hill, below the courts, a Mexican laborer bent over a sawhorse, cutting wood for winter. The sound of birds came to them from a cluster of deteriorating elms. The tennis foursome left off playing to search for lost balls. Cathryn said: “I don’t give men a bad time. More often it’s just the other way around.”

  “Willie won’t be like that,” he said.

  “Some men seem compelled to dump on themselves if they can’t find a woman to do it for them.”

  “Not Willie.”

  She thought a moment, and said: “He’s too serious — and not serious enough. I mean he’s not so deadly intent on the immediate objective, as, say, Harris over there. But then it’s obvious how he feels. It’s all over his face. It’s very difficult for him to make serious let’s-go-to-bed talk. He’s jaded already, and for no apparent reason.”

  “He used to date Ellen Streeter,” Roy said. “You know her? She gave him the business night and day. It’s a kind of magic quality she has.”

  They were silent, watching the others resume the game. He asked her where Willie was.

  “He went off with that Giffen person,” Cathryn said.

  “In the car?”

  She looked behind her, toward the house. “I don’t think so,” she said. “… There they are …” He could see Willie and George Giffen moving across the higher ground. Willie waved; Giffen flashed his demented smile. They came directly across toward the courts. Roy lay on his back, watching the thin clouds soar past, listening to the sounds of the game in progress. They were all such amateurs, he thought. Risen out of innocence, out of grace, passing into awareness and a kind of hollow sophistication with hardly a corrupting experience — a genuinely horrific crime — come in between. And there were parall
els. You could trace the wornout course of their piddling derelictions right alongside their politics. It wasn’t enough; not enough to break through into awareness and good intentions; not enough, moreover, to stand away and point to how the public and private business ought to be carried on, clucking your distaste and disapproval. It was insufficient — in fact, it was ruinous. He wondered about the Governor. Had he somehow managed to transcend into some blessed state, passed them all, perilously close to the abyss until reaching a point of holy ground from which he could view the whole speckled landscape, viewing it without a tyrannizing emotion? At least he remained operative — old Fenstemaker — he knew what absolutely had to be done; he could engage himself and then withdraw without losing that commanding vision. Even when the vision itself was not as prettified as it might once have been. The truly able, it appeared, had only so much time to squander on disillusion and self-analysis. Then those destructive vanities were turned round and put to the business of doing what had got to be done. The truly gifted, as opposed to the merely clever, were too busy running things to be bothered. He thought briefly of his cat Sam Luchow, battling himself against a mirror.

  The two faces, Giffen’s and Willie’s, appeared upside down across the blue sky. Roy rolled over and said hello.

  “Ready for tennis?” Cathryn said to Willie. “I want to live like the idle rich. It’s what I came for.”

  “The tennis,” Roy said, “gives you only a glimmer of the whole sweet picture. I suppose you haven’t heard about the pigeon shoots?”

  “The what …?”

  “Pigeon shoots,” Willie amplified, “subtitled The Decline of Western Civilization … They come from all around for the pigeon shoots.”

  “They fly in from all over,” Roy said, “to shoot pigeons.”

  “Pigeons?”

  “Menace to society,” Roy said, nodding sagely, rubbing his chin.

  “Hundreds of pigeons,” Willie said. “Imported. Along with a full-blooded gypsy from Castile, Spain, or someplace, all dressed up in silk knickers and cummerbund, green-turbaned, like a Shriner’s convention — everything, all the trappings, except possibly a scimitar on his hip. He throws the pigeons.”

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Cathryn said.

  “It’s the God’s truth,” Willie said.

  Giffen stood around, grinning.

  “I couldn’t invent all this, could I?” Roy said. “Listen — this fellow, the gypsy, he throws the pigeons. Throws hell out of ’em, like a shot from a gun. Makes a living doing it, throwing pigeons … Underhand … This way …” He paused to demonstrate, and then went on: “He throws pigeons faster than those trap-shooting gadgets, and these birds are live — not clay — they zoom off like goddam rockets …”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “Rich man with a gun — my daddy used to come to these things — rich man stands in a circle with his shotgun, pretty near the pigeon tosser. When the pigeons are launched and flapping, he blasts away …”

  “Awful …”

  “It’s a sporting proposition,” Willie said.

  “The ones that are missed,” Roy said, “the ones that aren’t blown to pieces — they’re free to fly back to town and take up residence. Crap on the Capitol steps. The good life.”

  “Read your Gibbon,” Willie said. “There must have been a Roman Empire equivalent to all this.”

  “I refuse to believe it,” Cathryn said. “I just want to be rich and healthy — not depraved. Let’s all play tennis.”

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Willie said.

  “In five minutes, then,” Cathryn said, getting to her feet. “I’m going to the ladies’ room to freshen up. Put something on my head.” She started across the lawn toward the house, brushing grass off her backend. Willie turned and watched her part of the way; then he looked at Roy.

  “George just told me a fascinating story,” he said.

  Giffen looked pained. “Come on, Willie, I don’t want this to get around. I wasn’t supposed to talk about it.”

  “You told me — now tell Roy.”

  “I wasn’t supposed —”

  “For God’s sake, tell him. Or I will.” He turned to Roy. “George had lunch and dinner with an eminent lobbyist yesterday. They spent all afternoon together.”

  “Who’s this?” Roy said.

  Giffen mentioned the name. Roy sat back and listened. Giffen told the story, breaking off the narrative now and then to moisten his lips, making periodic exclamations … “Ain’t that somethin’?” … “I couldn’t believe it … Such a crazy damn thang to ask a fella to do …”

  “How much was his offer?” Roy said.

  “Five hundred.”

  “And you gave him a definite, categorical no thanks?”

  “A what?”

  “You told him no … Positively.”

  “I threatened to bash his goddam face in,” Giffen said, “if that’s positive enough.”

  “That’s positive, all right,” Roy said.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Giffen said in wonder. “For that little old vote of mine …”

  “So what else you tell him?”

  “Nothin’. Just that — and go to hell. Then I went ridin’. I must’ve ridden around half the night thinkin’ about it. Drove out here first thing this mornin’. I could hardly sit still. I had to tell somebody …”

  “So you told Willie,” Roy said.

  “No — I told Alfred. This mornin’.”

  “Oh, Jesus …”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’d have done better telling your priest.”

  “My priest?”

  “What did Alfred tell you?” Willie said. “Tell him what Alfred told you.”

  “He said not to talk about it with anyone. He said it might get me in trouble.”

  “Well he’s mistaken,” Roy said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Giffen said. “Can’t see how it would get me in trouble when it was him that got out of line.”

  “Exactly,” Willie said.

  “Let’s think about this,” Roy said.

  They sat thinking. In a few minutes Cathryn returned. She sat next to them and tied a scarf round her head. “I believe you now about those pigeon shoots,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “There’s a crazy man in the house — what’s his name, Fielding? — says he’s going to jump out of an airplane …”

  Fifteen

  THERE WAS TO BE a jump. Ellen Streeter came down from the house, carrying a tray of iced drinks — something cool for pressing against their foreheads, she said — to repeat the story of Earle Fielding’s jump. Someone was playing “Imagination” on the piano inside the house, playing it from memory with a great flourish of missed or off-key notes. Presently, someone else began shaking bean-filled gourds; the tempo increased as still another joined in with bongo drums. They could hear all this from where they were sitting, next to the courts; even the players left off with their game for a moment to listen. They all imagined there would be dancing in the main room of the big house. Roy wondered if Ouida was in there helping make the music. He could see her with the castanets she had bought in Majorca, prepared to join the dance, clomping her hard heels against the terrazzo floors.

  It was fantastic, Roy decided: somewhere there were people who refused to be corrupted. He looked at Giffen sitting next to him: beet-nosed, pock-marked face, a ruin of mentality who still, all the same, simply could not be bought off. Or was it that Giffen had no emotional attachment to money? Could he have been tempted by something else? A girl, higher office, a more expensive sporting car? No. He thought not. Somewhere in George’s church-haunted past the basic right and wrong of things had been drummed into his consciousness. In his narrow world there were moral delineations one did not question. Those preachments stayed with you through the years. Except for the proud individuals who had cut themselves loose from all that, enlightened, got religion of quite another sort. Then you
could no longer rely on instinct alone to keep out of trouble. It was the first shifting about of intellectual furniture that set them free; the trouble was once they had begun using more of the head, abandoning the computer-machine data that had been fed to them like pablum during childhood, they had to keep thinking. And there was no determining where that would lead them.

  There was old Fenstemaker. Could he be — had he been — corrupted? He hadn’t time; too busy tending to things. He could corrupt, all right — Roy had heard, had felt that call girl’s song — but he himself, old Fenstemaker, was incorruptible. Fenstemaker hadn’t a selling price; he sold things … people … but never himself. There was a point in Fenstemaker’s code beyond which existed neither profit nor pleasure. He’d developed his own set of values; there seemed no one like him, anywhere, for weighing ends against means.

  Ellen Streeter lay in the grass and hummed to herself. The music from inside stopped abruptly and a half-dozen persons came charging out the door in a run. Roy watched them pile into the cars: Rinemiller, Earle Fielding, Huggins, some others. Ouida stood on the porch, waving goodbye.

  “There they go,” Willie said.

  Ellen got to her knees and waved. “Earle’s says he’s going to hit that pasture over there,” she said. “Shall we walk over?”

  “It’ll be a while yet,” Giffen said. He looked after the retreating automobile, almost wistfully. “Rinemiller’s flying the plane … I wonder if he could teach me …”

  The tennis players gave up their game to come sit on the grass overlooking the small pasture where they could witness Earle’s descent. They chatted for a quarter of an hour, until the small plane came in sight, circling overhead.

  “I don’t like this wind,” someone was saying. “See out there — it’s beginning to kick up.”

  Roy had turned to look at Ouida on the porch when he heard a scream of pleasure from one of the women and someone else shouting, “… There he goes … There he goes …”