CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Weeks after (barely) graduating from college, Jack moved to Greenwich Village with a very particular goal in mind: to have sex, lots and lots of sex. Vassar had been somewhat disappointing in that regard. At first, Jack attributed the lack of free and easy fucking that he had assumed would come with his student ID and highly coveted dorm single to statistics: A former women’s college, there were fewer gay men than women on campus. Then he assumed the problem was AIDS, which was cutting a terrifying swath through the gay community. But the gay population at Vassar seemed more angry than scared. Ninety miles south in New York City, Larry Kramer was sending up his clarion cry of outrage and the mostly well-to-do, mostly white sons and daughters of Vassar were complying—in spades. They organized, marched, protested, heckled, debated, and demanded. Outrage, Jack learned, was not an aphrodisiac; it was exhausting.
Jack wasn’t against activism precisely, but campus politics seemed trivial to him, almost laughable. It was activism of the easiest sort, run by idealistic youth barely out of their teens who never left the peachy enclave of their campus in Poughkeepsie. Enlightenment fueled by a heightened sense of mortality was certainly logical, but it also seemed blatantly self-serving in a way that infuriated Jack. Years later, he would experience the same intolerance about the surge of patriotism that swept through New York after 9/11—the run on American flags by people who would also confess in lowered tones how they’d recently put their place on the market while looking at houses in New Jersey or Connecticut or in their hometowns somewhere in the Midwest, “nobody’s flying a plane into the Gateway Arch.” True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it. But no. Suddenly at every public function his previously godless neighbors would stand with hands on heart to earnestly intone the Pledge of Allegiance and sing “God Bless America.”
“I wish Kate Smith had never been born,” Jack said at a dinner party one night, inciting a nasty argument about patriotism and its relative merits. The woman sitting across the table went on and on about the duties of civilians during wartime and in the face of terrorism until he broke off a piece of his baguette and threw it at her. He’d meant to startle her, shut her up, not hit her square on the chin. He and Walker had missed dessert.
The mini ACT UP protests at Vassar felt self-indulgent to Jack. How daring was it to stage a “Kiss In” in front of one of the most sexually diverse and accepting populations for miles and miles? It had all felt frivolous and half-assed and bloated with self-regard.
Still, when Jack’s best friend at college, Arthur, took a job with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and invited Jack to share an apartment on Barrow Street, Jack jumped at the chance. He would have preferred Chelsea, where the gay scene was a little younger, a little more hip, but Barrow Street was great. Barrow Street was classy in a way Chelsea wasn’t, historical, only blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Sure, he told Arthur, he’d be thrilled to volunteer at GMHC, was desperate to get to the front lines, do something that mattered.
But what Jack really wanted was to have sex. Not earnest, leftist, collegiate sex—sex that required far too much conversation and not nearly enough lube—but Greenwich Village, Christopher Street, drop your pants but leave on those leather chaps, mindless, mind-blowing, anonymous sex.
So it was with a certain karmic comeuppance, Jack would realize later, that mere months after arriving in the West Village, he would meet the love of his life, Walker Bennett.
WALKER LIKED TO SAY that he’d been born gay and middle-aged. He’d grown up in Greenwich Village; his parents were roving adjunct professors, self-anointed socialists who intermittently practiced open marriage and dabbled in bisexuality and refused the tenure track because it was nothing more than a union to protect the interests of the already-coddled upper class. When Walker came out to them in high school, it had all the Sturm und Drang of him announcing that he was switching from violin to cello.
Early on, Walker knew he wanted a different kind of life from his parents who lived paycheck to paycheck, collected furniture on the street the night before the bulk garbage pickups, counted coins in the sofa cushion to pay for take-out fried rice. After graduating from law school in the mid-1980s, he returned to the West Village, planning to work at the same corporate firm where he’d done his summer internship, only to find himself deluged by neighbors and old family friends, mostly gay men, who were suddenly getting sick and dying in alarming numbers and under mysterious circumstances. They wanted Walker to help them write a will or fight an eviction or understand their disability insurance. Within months, Walker had more work than he could handle, some funneled to him from GMHC, some from the prominent, often still-closeted gay business community. They trusted Walker. The premium he charged his wealthier clients allowed him to take on a lot of work pro bono, which he loved. After only one year, he was able to hire help, rent office space. Soon he was a neighborhood fixture: Walker, the genial, slightly overweight neighborhood attorney who would handle pretty much anything—even if you were broke, especially if you were queer.
The night Walker met Jack, he’d wandered into the raucous bar down near the Christopher Street pier on a whim. He usually preferred the quieter gay watering holes, but he’d had a long day. He was still in his work clothes, and as he made his way through the lively Friday night crowd, he spotted Jack, who was difficult not to notice, bare chested and wearing extremely short shorts, dancing by himself, ecstatically, to “I Will Survive.” Walker hated that stupid fucking song. Everyone around them was most assuredly not surviving. Two of his clients, both sick and quarantined at St. Vincent’s, had died that week, making six in just the last month. He needed a drink. He needed to get really, really drunk. As he approached the bar, Jack started waving at him, calling him over. Walker wondered if they’d met before. Was he a client? A friend of a client?
“Have we met?” he yelled at Jack, trying to be heard above the deafening, thumping disco beat. Jack shook his head no and looked Walker up and down. Then he leaned close to Walker’s ear; his cheek was damp and smelled of perspiration and some kind of too-sweet cologne. “That suit looks really uncomfortable,” Jack said, his voice hoarse from singing. He handed Walker a shot of tequila.
And in a move so out of character, so weirdly un-Walker-like and spontaneous and defiant and hopeful, Walker tipped back the shot, swallowed, put the empty glass on the bar, grabbed the back of Jack’s sweaty head, and kissed him full on the lips.
Jack kissed Walker back, then pulled away and grinned, and said, “How about we start the weekend by undoing that belt?” They’d been together ever since.
STANDING AT HIS AND WALKER’S BEDROOM WINDOW in Greenwich Village (technically the far, far west village; their building was as far west as you could go without living on a houseboat in the Hudson), Jack watched a Carnival cruise ship glide up the center of the river, heading to collect its passengers at Pier 88. He’d probably see the boat later that evening, being tugged in reverse until it reached the open harbor and could swing south. A cruise sounded good to Jack right now, anything to get him out of New York and to take his mind off Leo and his massive Leo-related migraine.
The afternoon was so cold that the bike paths along the river were deserted. The Christopher Street pier, across the way, was no longer the decrepit, free-for-all cruising spot it had been when he and Walker moved in, more than twenty years ago, a place you could go for an easy afternoon frolic or to sunbathe nude when the weather was fine. Giuliani had cleaned up the piers and transformed the entire waterfront into sanitized paths and miniparks for walkers and bikers and strollers. (“Fooliani,” Walker would say; he’d hated Giuliani’s particular brand of dictatorship almost as much as he’d hated Koch’s insistence on remaining closeted.)
Even scrubbed, the pier remained a gathering place for gay youth. No matter how biting the c
old, there were always a few hardy souls out, huddled, trying to shield their cigarette lighters from the wind. Jack wondered why they weren’t at school, if they were there because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. He envied the teens on the waterfront, hopping up and down to stay warm, drinking beer from a paper bag—no cares, no worries. What did you have to worry about at seventeen when you were young and untethered and in New York City? How bad could it be, really? Did kids even worry about being gay, worry about having to tell their families? He wished that was all he had to agonize about. He’d give anything for that to be the thing he needed to confess.
Jack took out his phone and opened Stalkerville. Melody had shown him the day they had lunch and although he’d made fun of it, he also hadn’t objected when she downloaded it to his phone and “connected” him to Walker.
“It’s addictive,” she said, “you’ll see.”
The whole thing perplexed Walker. “I always tell you where I am. I’m always at work or with you, anyway. Why do you need to check on your phone?”
“I don’t,” Jack said. “It’s just interesting to know I can. Creepy but interesting.”
And it was creepy, but Jack had to admit that Melody was right, it was also addictive—opening the screen and seeing the icon of Walker’s face appear and then the roaming blue dot—at the drugstore, at the grocery, at his office. Right now, he was at the gym, probably sitting in the sauna instead of exercising, thinking about what to make for dinner. Something about being able to see Walker move around during the day, seeing how connected their lives were, how small Walker’s world was, how much of it revolved around him—them—made the financial mess he was in feel even worse.
Jack didn’t think about this too often anymore, but he knew he was probably alive because of Walker. When he met Walker, all those years ago, in the midst of his freewheeling days in Chelsea, on Fire Island, in the bathhouses and the clubs, Walker had been the one to insist on condoms, to demand fidelity. Jack had taken umbrage at first; hardly any of the couples they knew were exclusive. They were young and out and living in the greatest city in the world! But Walker recognized what Jack refused to face then: men getting sick, being denied treatment, dying. Walker worked with the doctors at St. Vincent’s; he believed what they told him about prevention, and he scared the shit out of Jack.
“If you want to spend every morning checking your exquisitely beautiful body for sores that won’t heal or worry about every little cough, that’s your choice,” Walker had said in the early weeks, “but it’s not mine.”
Walker was scrupulous—condoms and fidelity were non-negotiable. “If you want to mess around, that’s fine,” Walker said, “just not while I’m in the picture.” Jack tried to resist Walker at first but found himself drawn to the man in ways he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. Something about Walker—his goodness, his compassion (and, okay, the size of his dick, Walker was huge)—was more compelling than sleeping around. It was one of the nicest things Jack could say about himself: that he had recognized the value of Walker. Before they moved in together, they’d both gotten tested and Jack didn’t think he’d ever been as scared as the day they went to get their results. They had collapsed into each other’s arms, weeping and laughing with relief, when they were negative.
Walker had saved his life. He was sure of that. And if that certainty created a certain inequity in their relationship, a certain kind of paternalistic vibe that, Jack could admit, was sometimes not particularly sexy, not very hot, if sometimes Jack resented Walker’s saintliness, his goodness and light and responsibility and needed to act out a little, spend money he didn’t have, very occasionally and very discreetly have a late night with someone who didn’t need to floss and brush and shave and apply moisturizer before dropping his pants, well, what of it? There was still a part of Jack that wondered what it would have been like if he hadn’t heeded Walker’s advice, had thrown caution to the wind and spent a little more time sleeping around before he settled down. Maybe he would be dead, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d be just fine—alive and better for the breadth of his experience. If Walker hadn’t kissed him that very first night, maybe he wouldn’t even be in this mess.
AT HIS SHOP, Jack opened the rolling gate and unlocked the door. He’d spent all week going through his inventory, trying to see if he had anything tucked away he’d forgotten about that he could sell to raise some cash, knowing the whole time he didn’t. He knew his inventory down to every cast-off crystal doorknob. Whenever he found something of worth—which he did frequently, he had an eye—he knew exactly whom to call to place it. It was rare for something of true worth to linger at Jack’s shop. His lucrative dealings were all private transactions with his longtime customers—designers, architects, and the esteemed ladies of the Upper East Side. The economic downturn had brought most of that business to a halt, too. Things were starting to pick up, but there wasn’t time for him to accumulate anywhere near the money he needed.
If Jack didn’t have a photo of the damaged Rodin sculpture on his phone, he would have thought he’d imagined the whole thing. Back at home after the aborted visit to Leo, it had only taken a few minutes on the computer to realize why it looked familiar, that it was one of the recovered pieces of art from the World Trade Center site that he’d read about years and years ago. The story was a tiny blip in the midst of all the coverage about the cleanup—how a damaged cast of Rodin’s The Kiss had been recovered and then mysteriously disappeared. Jack had paid attention at the time because of his very good customer who collected Rodin.
Jack didn’t know what to do with the information he had. He could do nothing, of course. He didn’t care about the security guard in Stephanie’s house or the statue, really. He could call someone at the 9/11 Memorial Museum that was under way and tip them off, anonymously or as himself; maybe there was a reward, maybe he’d get some press and it would be good for his business. Or, and this option was the one he was trying—and failing—to resist, he could approach Tommy O’Toole and offer to broker a sale for a sum of money, Jack was certain, so significant that Tommy wouldn’t be able to refuse. And Jack’s sizable commission would solve his immediate financial problems, release him from whatever Leo might or might not do.
He went to his little back office and printed out the photos of the sculpture from his phone. Jack had asked around and his friend Robert knew someone, some guy named Bruce who worked in the shadier places of art and antique sales. “I used him once,” Robert said. “He’ll know what to do. Tell him you’re my friend.” It didn’t hurt to ask, Jack thought. It never hurt to gather information and know all the possibilities. Before putting on his coat, he took out his phone and the card stowed away in his pocket and dialed the number. “Hey,” he said to some guy named Bruce. “I’m Robert’s friend. I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Leo was home alone, sitting in Stephanie’s tiny second-floor back room, the space he’d appropriated as his office, trying to work out his pitch for Nathan whom he was finally scheduled to meet with later in the week.
Out the window, the bare January trees and leafless shrubbery allowed him full purview of all the neighboring yards to the side and the rear. He could see straight down into the kitchen of the brownstone directly behind Stephanie’s, the layout just like hers but reversed—the rooms a little more colorful, maybe a little shabbier. A spindly blonde in black jeans and a baggy red sweater was arranging an array of sliced fruit on a plate for two little boys bouncing and swiveling on breakfast stools at the island counter. The boys were the same size and coloring, twins probably. Leo wondered when twins had become as common as the common cold. He thought of Melody’s daughters who, he dimly remembered, were a happy accident. She probably hated that people assumed she’d had some kind of fertility treatment, that she and Walter didn’t get credit for two of his determined sperm successfully penetrating two of her enterprising ova. That type of thing would drive her crazy. He watched as one of the kids across
the way shoved his brother off the seat and out of sight, presumably down to the floor because the mother raced over and bent down and when she stood the boy was in her arms, his legs wrapped around her waist, his face buried in her shoulder. He could see the boy’s shoulders heaving, the mother stroking his back and mouthing shhh, shhh, gently rocking him back and forth. In the house next to hers, a middle-aged man walked through his kitchen with someone who looked like a contractor. The contractor was pointing at the ceiling molding with an extension of measuring tape while the homeowner nodded. Back to the right, red-sweater mom opened her back door and dumped a plate of fruit peels into what he guessed was a compost bin. He found the tableau behind Stephanie’s house endlessly entertaining. He could sit and watch all the quiet lives of aspiration play out for hours. It was strangely soothing. Brooklyn was growing on him.
Though Stephanie hadn’t been kidding about the drugs or borrowing money (not that he was using any drugs at the moment; not that he needed to ask for money), she’d been a pushover about the sex. They’d spent most of the power outage in bed, undressed, making their bodies sing the old familiar tune. “You can stay until you find a place,” she’d said a few days later.
Victoria finally shipped Leo his belongings, no more than a dozen boxes; he didn’t want much. It took leaving his life with Victoria to understand how much of it had been constructed by her (using his money) in a way he didn’t miss and certainly wasn’t eager to re-create. The relentlessly neutral palette with splashes of dark brown or black (“It’s like living in a gigantic portobello mushroom,” he’d complained to her once), the spare modern furniture, the sterile metallic Italian light fixtures, her quirky (and as it turned out nearly worthless) taste in a handful of upcoming-but-still-wildly-pricey artists—he was ecstatic to leave it all behind. Aside from recovering the years of his life he’d spent wooing, winning, and then regretting her, all he wanted from Victoria were a smattering of personal belongings and a few boxes of old SpeakEasy files. He unpacked the clothes he needed and stored the rest in Stephanie’s basement. They were calling it temporary.
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