Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “I didn’t either … It just happened.”

  “It was wonderful, Andy. It was the damndest thing I ever …” The old man hesitated. The two little girls were tugging on his trousers, embracing his legs. He staggered back for a moment and hoisted each child in his arms.

  “Hey, Grandpa!” the youngest one yelled into his ear. “Whoo-dya love?”

  “Who do I love? Why I love …”

  Andrea still stared at Neil; her face had gone all soft and inexplicably receptive; she managed a slight smile.

  “Whoodja love?” she said suddenly. There was a flash of white teeth and then the smile was gone again, and in a moment she looked on the verge of tears.

  His response was nearly automatic, so much that he anticipated the remark and reviled his own contemptuous soul before he had even got the words past his lips.

  “The Easter Bunny,” he said.

  She turned immediately toward her father and explained to him that she was going out for the evening. “S’all right,” the old man said, giving all his attention to the girls. He had long since reached a stage of resignation in which the cruel, irrational possibilities of children grown old were accepted as one might get used to brutality in all of life. Now he cared most — and almost only — for his grandchildren.

  “I’ll try to meet you later,” Neil said.

  “All right.”

  Their hands touched and clasped for an instant as she passed and headed toward her car. The instant was unendurable, inexpressible: blessedness and despair, early sorrow and old love and half-forgotten crimes. It was as if each had returned a scarlet nub …

  After a moment, they all moved inside. Dinner was on the table, and the four of them along with Emma sat for a time and discussed how it was with carrots and broccoli and pot roast and pineapple upside down cake.

  “Upside down cake,” the younger one sang.

  “But you’ve got to eat it right side up,” the old man said.

  The girls sat in their high stools, hugging the extraordinary rabbits, talking incessantly. Neil excused himself and wandered up the stairs to sleep. In the last moments of consciousness he felt he might have glimpsed a sudden truth, a revelation, some forgotten insight from his youth — the best in one and the worst in one, good money after bad, dereliction and desire … a harbor in morality … an inhuman social order … a meek inheritance, the meek inheriting, a general impatience with dullness … an unfathomable love for the Easter bunny. He formed the words on his lips … Love was not the natural condition of man; neither was decency … They were inventions, illusion; and what was needed was not so much cerebration or good intentions as convincing stage props … These veiled reflections must have meant something to him as sleep descended, but when he came awake later they seemed insubstantial as shadow, as Cherubim thread … ice crystals gone to moisture in the light of day.

  Fourteen

  IT WAS NOT A very good sleep. Or rather it was more the sleep of the standing-up, the ostensibly awake, a kind of mesmerized suspension between life and death, perilous and oddly stimulating.

  He was aware all the time of the children’s voices downstairs and Emma clearing the table and the old man herding the girls upstairs to bath and bed. But he was asleep all the same, and he could not really comprehend what was going on around him. He wanted desperately for just a moment to pull himself from the bed and go and give himself over completely, unequivocally, to the children. What had he ever given them? When had he ever really made the effort? He could not recall a time. The giving required a taking, and during those rare moments when he attempted to offer up some little piece of himself, he had never managed to get the girls to understand what it was they were supposed to be accepting. He wanted more than anything to make some gesture, shape some memorable event, invest, just once, enough of himself and his resources so that the moment might come back to the children twenty years from now, magically vivid and graceful and full of meaning.

  But he remained on the bed, perspiring a little through the clothes he had worn all day, asleep and wanting always to rise and say something, make a speech, or paint a picture, knowing without asking that his tongue was thick and cobwebby and that the blunt ends of his fingers were dipped in brine.

  Soon the house grew quiet with the last giggles of the children and the old man’s wheezing sleep-sounds. He looked at his watch and finally got himself from bed and began to wash. It was only nine-thirty when he left the house, and he reached the place of the party — now wildly and unpredictably underway — a little before ten.

  It was a huge, spanishy house, nearly authentic, a restored farm outbuilding around which the city had grown many years before. It resembled one of the original missions a hundred miles farther south, but this quality must have been bogus — a success only for the renovators — for its history was just barely pre-Civil War and the earliest recorded occupants were German agrarian types. Enough of the farmland had been retained to give the place enormous grounds, front and back, freckled with small well-kept shrubs and shaded by huge pecan and flowering magnolia trees. There were cars parked up and down the street, on either side, and half a dozen of them, new and shining, clogged the main drive. Midway across the lawn he paused and looked back, sinking deep into the carpet grass. The cars were like people, or rather they reflected the tastes of the people inside: extremes of one kind or another. There were Alfas and Porsches and a single Carman-Ghia parked next to convertibles and Jeepsters and a couple of twelve-year-old Cadillacs. Even those bent on unpretentiousness seemed to have gone a little too far. The newer, conventional models were as spare and frugal and chromeless as might be found in a Government motor pool, and there were many machines that would be normally out-of-use, beat up and fading, windows splintered, fenders sagging, all of them in a stage of advanced and altogether chic decay, most of them driven by those young people who could put their incomes, earned or inherited, at five or six figures.

  There was an awful din coming from inside, and through the windows he could see the crazy circus-shapes of people drunk and dancing, singly and in pairs, talking, gesturing, moving from room to room, peering at bookshelves and record albums and into each other’s faces, poking at themselves and dancing partners, pouring whiskey. There seemed to be a great pouring of whiskey, in fact; nearly everywhere he looked through the window glass there was someone with a bottle and a paper cup, even a stunning girl, drinks in each hand, deep in exotic, hip-grinding meditation within a hula hoop. He stood staring at the girl for a moment, from the shadows, until footsteps sounded on the graveled drive and a younger man moved past and paused, struggling with a huge bag of ice.

  “Hey! Hey, Neil! Good to see you … Come on in.”

  He grinned and stood aside while Neil opened the door for him. Then they were inside and it was oddly terrifying at first, like walking too close to a locomotive when he was young.

  All the noise of which he had been conscious from the outside now seemed only a faint signal from a shrouded wood. Now it came to him in full force, in all its clattering, strident, bass-drum and leper’s bell fidelity. But unlike the experience with the locomotive when he was young, there was no sudden impulse to run or stand away. He paused at the door only a moment and then plunged, unaccountably happy, into the chasm of writhing figures.

  They were his friends, another kind of crème de la crème, the best of another order, and he had spent nearly all of his last ten years in their company, or the nucleus of their company: young people from his first years in the Legislature and the inevitable artist-types Andrea and John Tom had attracted, an irreducible blending of the two worlds, the best of the worlds — a hundred dime store Czars and Michelangelos.

  The hosts veered toward him from several directions. There were four of them, all of a type and long-time friends. He had been with them since college, and they had entered the Legislature at nearly the same time. Three of them were wealthy or comfortably well off, the offspring of villainous oil families in the
South and West. The fourth had poor-boyed his way to relative security as a full professor at the college. They had been living in the old house for years, scarcely changing in the passage of time, the moneyed three continuing to contribute their share of the rent even when they were campaigning in their districts or making periodic, not to say routine, voyages to other lands. Together, the four of them (with Neil now missing from their numbers) had once represented roughly one quarter of the hard-core Liberal strength in a legislative Lower House that operated with a membership of close to three hundred.

  They greeted him, all hands extended; they stood around, remarking with a good deal of enthusiasm about the events of the afternoon, slapping him on the back and shaking his hand for an interminable period of time. They exchanged equally coarse views on Owen Edwards. The story had been spread in the evening papers and by radio and word of mouth, some of it garbled and distorted, and Neil now proceeded as quickly as possible to put straight his part in the whole business of the luncheon. Fairly soon a crowd had gathered round and he began to feel stuffy and a little bored with himself.

  “No, hell no … I didn’t flatten him or his nose. Our suits weren’t even rumpled. I just grabbed him on the behind — and I shouldn’t have — and shoved him out of the ballroom and into an elevator … Hey, where’s Andrea?”

  “Not here yet. What’d he do? What’d he say?”

  “Nothing … Meek as a … Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Andrea.”

  “Not here yet. Bunch of them got started late for dinner. Say —”

  “Where can I get a drink? I don’t want to talk about this stuff. I want a drink. And move around and look at people. There was a girl with a hula …”

  He got through the crowd and poured a drink for himself in the pine-walled kitchen. It was real pine; you could smell it. Two students, a boy and a girl who looked to him like high schoolers, stared and smiled and then moved into another room, singing a song from an old New Faces album someone had played for them that evening for the first time. They seemed very young; no one ought to be that young, he thought. And no one ought to grow any older — none of them. The parties in this ancient, creaking house would go on endlessly, as they had for ten years now, the young faces appearing from weekend to weekend, passing in the dim light and vanishing into somebody else’s old age. Not theirs. God knows not his. They had all reached mankind’s natural condition: long in the tooth and innocent in the head, poised on the brink, falling but never quite fallen into wisdom and decay.

  He swallowed half his drink and added more water and whiskey. A girl of about twenty-five came toward him with a guitar slung round her neck. “I want one of these,” she said. She was very tall with a nice figure and a tall girl’s slump. Or perhaps it was the guitar pulling her shoulders down. She gave him a depraved look.

  He searched for a glass or a paper cup in the shelves above the double sink. The floor was wet from the ice sack, and after he had served the girl he stepped outside and found an old washtub. He got the thing in both hands, and when he turned he saw that the girl had followed him. She stood on the back steps, staring moodily round the yard. Then, without warning, she strummed some flattish chords on the guitar and began to sing.

  “Sandpiper, housewren, cock of the walk, where do you fly when the Lady Bird calls? Feathers and foodstuffs, mountains of chalk, through bosky dells and evergreen malls … Ca-ree … ca-raaw, ca-ree … ca-raaah, out in the glen, jiggers of gin …”

  She groaned on insensibly, moving the guitar from side to side in a sawing motion. None of it was comprehensible to him. He thought about the words “jiggers of gin” and “out in the glen.” Was that what she had sung? He would never be sure. He stood a few feet away from her with the washtub in his arms, wondering what in the world to say.

  When it was ended, finally, the girl seemed to unhinge herself; her eyes came back into focus and she looked at him as if examining a questionable piece of merchandise.

  “Very nice … Very pretty,” he said. “Where is it from? The song.”

  “I wrote it,” she said. “I’ve composed many folk songs.”

  “Oh … you write folk music … Compose, I mean. Well. That … must … be …”

  “They’re poems in the beginning … I write them as poems and then a suitable melody …”

  “Very nice. Lovely …” he managed to say. “Shall we go back inside?” He held the door for her. She shrugged and moved past him, swinging perilously close to his vitals with the guitar, striding on into the pine kitchen and out of it. He stepped inside and hoisted the sack of ice into the tub. Then he took his glass and went into the front rooms.

  “I try to get through the day saying as little as possible. So far I’ve managed with two expressions — ‘Scotch and soda, please’ and ‘How gross’ …”

  “There are some other expressions he uses,” Neil said, “but they’re almost always inappropriate for mixed company.”

  Stanley and the girl from the bookstore looked up at him. They were sitting alone together on a couch. A phonograph across the room was at nearly full volume, and the three of them had to bend down toward each other to talk.

  “What did you say?” Stanley asked.

  “We saw you come in,” Elsie said, “but there was such a crowd around we couldn’t get through.”

  They moved over for him. He sat next to the girl, with Stanley on the other side. Conversation was virtually impossible for a few moments against the record music, but someone pressed the rejector button and soft voices of Mariachi singers filled the room. They sat quietly and watched the couples dancing.

  “These parties haven’t changed any,” Stanley said.

  “Not a bit.”

  “I mean really. Not just these parties — but all of them. I used to sit and watch the ones my parents gave back … well … way the hell back. No difference. Everyone’s still exceedingly clever …”

  “As opposed to being profound?” the girl said.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever known any profound people,” Stanley said.

  “To be opposed to, he means,” Neil said.

  “You think everything is imitative?”

  “No … But the form’s the same. Not the manner or the spirit exactly. There was the kind of queasy sentimentality that characterized so many things in the thirties and wartime forties — all the enlightened and supposedly significant work in art, politics, the theater — a kind of patriotic, prayer-meeting fervor combined with a men’s room snigger. That stuff was pretty bad — look back and it seems awful, as garish and obvious as women’s shoulder pads, double-breasted suits and collars that didn’t button down. But who’s to say whether it’s really any different — or any worse — than this ersatz sophistication and existentialist gloom it’s been supplanted by?”

  “Very nice, Stanley. We’ll put it in a speech.”

  “I don’t understand any of it,” Elsie said.

  Stanley looked at the girl. “It’s because you don’t know the passwords, the catch-phrases. That’s what I mean. Those wisecracks are different, but I don’t know about the substance. We’re still wandering around ready to laugh or cry before a sentence is half out of somebody’s mouth …”

  He turned his attention to Neil. “What about the campaign? What’s the plan?”

  “We’ll just use the wisecracks, the old jokes,” Neil said. “The same ones — only on the television. We could do it in our sleep. No sweat … No sweat at all. Don’t even tax your brain. Big Daddy’s goin’ to handle everything. He’s already rung for the butler.”

  Stanley was silent for a moment and then said: “I heard something this afternoon I meant to tell you …”

  Neil was on his feet. “In a minute. I’ve run out of whiskey. Can I treat the two of you?”

  They shook their heads. The girl was uncommonly beautiful. Her hair hung down along her shoulders, dark and undistinguished except for an altogether exciting quarter-piece of earlobe w
hich shone through on one side, milk-white and sculptured looking. She gazed directly at him, and for a moment he was certain of a promise, for whatever advantage he might wish to take of it, but then he could see that Stanley himself was entirely wrapped up in the girl. It would explain his long, compulsive discourse a few minutes earlier, all of it gone for nothing against the girl’s uncomprehending gaze. Nobody was getting through; it was that business all over again: thick-tongued and ill-equipped; what they needed was an English-English dictionary. How, then, had he himself got through to the girl on at least one level? Elementary. Elemental. The basic gland persevered. He turned away and went for another drink.

  One of the four householders, the professor at the college, was talking on the telephone. He had just set the receiver down as Neil walked by. He turned and said: “That was Andrea.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well not anything, really. I mean it was Andrea’s party. They’re just finishing dinner — should be here shortly, half hour at the outside.”

  He walked into the pine-walled kitchen and made a fresh drink. He was conscious of strange sounds from the backyard, and he bent over the sink and peered through a small window out into the darkness. In a few seconds the moon was clear of the small clouds that had been covering it and the grounds were suddenly bathed in purples of many shadings. The sound persisted — a low, sustained moan, of no particular distinction or emotion, followed by clipped, elegant, high-pitched chants suggesting an absurd and deeply suffering Noel Coward. Then there were those familiar guitar chords and he could see the girl standing beneath a half caved-in grape arbor. There was someone beside her, or rather moving about in the shadows in back of her, and after the two of them had taken several staggering steps in one direction and then another, finally emerging from the cover of the arbor, he could see she was standing with her back to a young man, who was reaching round her from behind, pushing his face up against the nape of her neck and fumbling with the impedimenta of beads and guitar in front. There was a long silence, interrupted by several dull, unintended thonks on the guitar strings, and then a longer silence as the two nuzzled each other in that oddly torturous back-to-stomach embrace.