I asked if he wanted anything but he said he was fine. What he was, I suspected, was broke. We’d shared rooms for a couple of months when I’d first moved to the city, but I was the one who’d ended up paying the rent. I hadn’t minded, though. Supporting Paul felt like being a patron of the arts. I went to load my tray with two coffees, meat loaf and peas, potatoes with gravy, and pie. When I came back to the table, I handed one of the coffees to Paul. “Here, I brought you a hot cup.”
“You’re a prince, Albert. Ha!” It was his favorite joke. “I swear I don’t know how you can eat like that.”
“Here, have some.”
“God, no.” Paul lit a cigarette and drank his coffee. “We’re opening Sunday night and I can’t afford to put on an ounce. Did I tell you the leotards are flesh tone? We look positively naked under the stage lights. It’s going to be scandalous.”
“I can’t wait.” I ate while he shared some backstage gossip. When I said I was too full to finish the meat loaf or start on the pie, he gave in to his hunger and took what was left. I hated how he starved himself. The thought reminded me of Felix Stern. I pictured him at his mother’s house for their Sabbath dinner, his stomach growling while she waved her hands over the candles like a vaudeville yiddishe mama.
“Are you listening to me?” Paul said.
“What? Yes, sure, the choreographer and the set designer in the wardrobe room, I heard you. Are you going to Antonio’s to see Jack’s show tonight?”
“Of course I am, and so are you, Albert. You know how nervous he is about headlining. We promised to lend moral support, remember?”
“I’ll be there.” Antonio’s was a step up from Polly’s, where Jack used to perform. “I hope he’s not planning to sing that new Gladys Bentley song in public, he’ll get himself arrested. What time?”
“He’s on at ten.”
“Good,” I said. “I need to rest if we’re going to be out all night again.”
“And get dolled up while you’re at it.” Paul pointed to my neck. “Change that tie, at least, it’s positively funereal.”
I’d forgotten all about it. “It’s not mine. Colonel Ruppert put it on me today. I wore a red one by accident.”
“Naughty boy, you. And he made you change it?”
“He said he didn’t want anyone mistaking his personal secretary for a window dresser.”
“Really? What does he know about window dressers?” Paul leaned forward and clasped my hand. “Don’t tell me he’s one of us? Oh, it all makes sense now. He isn’t married, is he? Doesn’t he live with his mother? And aren’t you always telling me how particular he is about his clothes?”
“Stop it, he’s a man of the world is all.” I drained my cooling cup of coffee. “I have to be more careful, though.”
Out on Sheridan Square we parted ways, promising to meet up at Antonio’s in a few hours. Walking home, I wondered if what Paul said could be true. The Colonel was famous for saying he liked women—as long as they were married to some other man. I’d always figured it was his appetite for autonomy, rather than an aversion to the female sex, that led him to avoid the institution of marriage. I supposed it was possible he might be partial to pansies, but he’d never given me so much as a sidelong look, let alone a lingering glance. I reviewed in my mind that business with the bow tie, searching for a clue I might have missed.
As I turned the corner I noticed a uniformed figure camped out on the stoop of my building. With deployments to Europe in full swing, there were servicemen wandering all over the city. This one had probably stumbled on my stoop, too drunk to get up again. I hoped he wouldn’t cause any trouble. I started climbing the steps. His fair hair caught the streetlight. It was the soldier from the ballpark. I stopped in my tracks. “King?”
“Don’t look so surprised. After all, you gave me your address. Lend me a hand, will you? I’ve been on these steps so long my foot fell asleep.” He extended his arm and I hauled him to his feet. “Say, can I use your bathroom?”
There was a public toilet at the entrance to the subway station in the square, but I figured I might as well do my part for the war effort by being hospitable. “Sure, come on up.”
He followed me inside, past my landlady (whose cardinal rule of the house was that no women were allowed), and up the stairs. My room stretched across the front of the house, its three windows each eight feet tall. At one end stood the bed and a nightstand adjacent to a dresser. Against the other wall was a clothespress that held my entire wardrobe of four suits and half a dozen shirts. By the window was a desk that I had set up as a bar. In the middle of the room, two threadbare armchairs and a low table sat on an old rug. I closed the drapes, the heavy fabric covering only the lower half of the windows. Above, the casements glowed from the streetlight outside. King looked around, approvingly. “I like this.”
“Bathroom’s at the end of the hall.”
“Mind if I wash up while I’m at it?”
I traded him the jacket of his uniform for a towel and a square of soap, hanging up his jacket and mine on the hat rack by the door. While he was gone, I took off the Colonel’s tie, detached my collar, and poured two glasses of whiskey and water. They were the same series of actions I might have taken after bringing home a stranger. I smiled to think how innocent it would all seem to King, who’d probably lost track of his buddies and was simply looking for a place to relax before shipping out in the morning.
He came back barefoot, carrying his boots. “Sorry, but my feet were killing me. We only got these issued a couple of days ago and there was no time to break them in.” He turned his ankle to show me the angry blister on his heel. “That’s not going to be any fun in the trenches.”
I winced, handing him a glass. “Here. Should I run out for ice?”
“Don’t bother. This is great, thanks.”
I visited the bathroom myself and returned to find him by the desk.
“You have your own telephone?”
“The Colonel had it installed when I told him there wasn’t one in the house yet.” I went to the dresser and got out a thin pair of cotton socks. “Why don’t you take these? Wear them under your wool ones. It might help.”
“Thanks. Kramer, is it?”
“Albert. And you’re Arthur?”
“Just call me King.”
We sat opposite each other in the armchairs. Though his eyes held mine, they were devoid of the knowing gaze I searched for. He lifted his feet over the low table and asked if I minded if he put them up. I said no, of course not. A flap of skin waved from his heel. It was such a little injury, but it got me thinking of all he was about to risk. I didn’t want him to look at me the way that man at the newsstand had, wondering what I’d done to dodge the draft.
“I have a heart murmur,” I blurted out.
“Lucky you. Think I could borrow it?”
A current of seriousness ran under his joke that betrayed how scared he was, and rightly so. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid to go to war. To lighten the mood, I said, “What, the socks aren’t enough, you want my heart now, too?”
He laughed. “Too bad you don’t have a spare.” He held up his glass. “Cheers.”
We each drank a little too fast. When I asked if he’d ever been to New York before, he said he’d never been farther than Milwaukee until his division went down to Camp MacArthur in Texas for training. I lit a cigarette and gave it to him, then lit one for myself. He settled back in the chair, resting the glass on his thigh. “We wanted to make the most of our shore leave in the city, but I’ll tell you, wandering all over Manhattan has worn me out. It must be nice to have a cozy place like this to come home to.” He yawned and rolled his shoulders. “Makes me want to curl right up for the night.”
Though I assumed he didn’t mean it that way, I added a touch of flirting to my response to test the waters. “You’d never be comfortable in that chair until morning. We’d have to share the bed.” A quiver of panic crossed his face as he glanced back at me. Afraid I’d
gone too far, I added, “Too bad I have to go out later, though. My friends are expecting me.” I couldn’t very well invite him to Antonio’s, and I felt I’d done my patriotic duty getting him off the streets for a while. If all he was looking for was a place to flop for the night, he could go get a room at the YMCA.
He drained his glass. “How about one more for the road?”
“Sure, one more.”
“Listen,” he said, after I’d handed him a fresh drink. “Can I tell you something?”
If he weren’t so handsome I might have become impatient, but there were worse things than looking at King while he spun some tale. “Go ahead, I’ve got some time yet.”
“Okay. So, the night before they put us all on the train for New York, this doctor came in to the mess hall to give us a lecture on the evils of prostitution, right? He had these pictures on a strip of film, not a motion picture, just stills, but they were horrible, huge on the wall like that. Syphilitics without noses, shriveled dicks covered in scabs and sores. Those pictures had us cringing, I can tell you. He told us, whatever you do, be careful of the women in New York.”
I wondered now if that’s what he was after—a recommendation for where he could find a clean girl. Remembering his wink as he held out the Colonel’s business card for my address, I supposed to a farm boy like King any New Yorker seemed a man of the world. In fact, I could point him in the right direction. Everyone in the Village knew where the Raines Law hotels were, though I couldn’t guarantee the women he’d find there would be clean.
King helped himself to another cigarette. He took a deep drag then leaned forward to tap it into the glass ashtray on the table. “Now, most of the guys I was training with had never so much as kissed a girl, and they’d been talking big about how they wanted to be real men before they went to war, you know? So on the train, our sergeant, who’d been to New York plenty of times, started telling us about pansies. He said they were men who were like women on the inside, and you could do whatever you wanted to them, the same as you’d do with a woman, even some things women wouldn’t do, and it was safe, because they weren’t women, you know? And this one friend of mine—he grew up on the next farm over to my grandparents’ place—he just couldn’t understand how a man could use another man for sex, so the sergeant started explaining it, you know, in detail. He said most pansies didn’t even want to be paid for it. They just did it because they liked it.”
Now I understood what King expected as he lounged on my stoop. But what had tipped him off? I wasn’t dolled up when he met me. The red bow tie was hidden in my pocket. I cringed to think it showed on my face. It was one thing to catch the eye of a man on the street and decide, over drinks or a show, what we wanted from each other. Handsome as King was, I resented his assumption that a wink was all it took to get me into bed. As he sat there in his uniform, broad chest rising with quick inhalations, thick leg bouncing up and down, I recalled stories of pansies who’d been savaged by the rough men they’d brought home. To be safe, I put on a scowl and lowered my voice. “Why are you telling me this?”
He blushed and stared at his hands. I noticed they were shaking. “Because you said I was handsome.”
When did I say that? Oh yes, to the Colonel at the ballpark. How had he understood? “Sprichst du Deutsch?”
He shrugged. “Jeder in Milwaukee spricht Deutsch.”
I hadn’t known everyone in Milwaukee spoke German. “And that made you think I was a pansy, because I said you were handsome?”
“No, you don’t understand.” He looked at me, the blue of his eyes leaping out from the black and white palette of my vision. “It’s because I realized, when the sergeant was talking, that’s what I am.”
I laughed as the whole uncomfortable situation finally made sense. He wasn’t looking for a place to flop, or even someone to fuck. He just wanted someone to put a name to his desires. I remembered what it had meant to me, when I started coming up to New York from Princeton, to find myself among my own kind. It was funny, though, how confused he was about how it all worked. “You’re no pansy, King, take it from me.” I didn’t mean to dismiss his confession, but one look at him was enough to see he was a normal man.
“No, really. Listen.” He crossed his legs nervously. “I always knew there was something different about me, but no one could ever tell me what it was. I thought maybe I could talk to you.”
I looked more closely at his trembling lip, his shapely brows, his hand resting limply on his crossed knee. I thought of Jack, how in his street clothes he looked like a quarryman. It was only after he got dolled up for his show and started flapping his hands and singing in falsetto that anyone could see he was a pansy through and through. I supposed it could be the same for King. I reached over and placed my hand on his leg. “It’s okay, I’m the same way, you can talk to me.”
He sighed with relief. “I was hoping so, but I couldn’t tell. You just seemed so nice.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-one. Why, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three.” So close in age, yet such a gulf in experience. I’d never been the older, wiser one. I got up, taking his glass. “Let’s have another drink.”
We talked about ourselves for a while then. He told me about spending summers on his grandparents’ farm, helping his opa plow the fields and his oma milk the cows. He told a story about having to tie up his dog so it wouldn’t follow him down the road when he left for training camp, how he could hear it howling from a mile away. We talked about the war, too, I suppose, though I’m not sure either of us was paying much attention to the words. His limbs relaxed as his nerves melted away. I decided there were worse things than relinquishing my bed to a soldier for the night. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d slept in one of those chairs.
“Up for another one?” I asked. “I’ve been mixing them weak.”
“Sure.” I took his empty glass and went over to the desk. King came up behind me, his chin bumping my shoulder. “I’m so glad we met. For so long, I thought I was the only one.”
“You’re not, believe me.” I turned around. “I’m meeting my friends at Antonio’s, why don’t you come out with me? You’ll see how many of us there are.”
“Can’t we just stay here?” He placed his hands on my chest.
I think I stopped breathing. “What are you doing?”
“I want to know what it’s like, before I ship out. I thought you could show me.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Everyone knew two pansies couldn’t be lovers. Paul and I had tried it once when we were both soused, but it had fizzled, each of us waiting for the other to make the decisive move. I couldn’t imagine even attempting it with Jack.
“At least let me kiss you.” King circled his hands around me, his thumbs pressing into my ribs as his fingertips met behind my back. He could have broken me with that grip. That’s when it hit me: King was no pansy. It was only his age, his inexperience, that made him think he was like me. As soon as he understood what it was all about, he’d realize he was as normal as any man who preferred a pansy to a girl.
“One kiss.” I didn’t know why I was being so coy.
He smashed his mouth into my teeth and poked me with his tongue until I turned away. “I’m sorry. I’ve never done that before.”
“I can tell. Here, let me show you.” I put my hands on his face and brought our mouths together. This kiss went on until his knees sagged and a groan rose in his throat. I knew then we wouldn’t be going out that night.
I pushed him back so I could unbutton my shirt. He took his off, too, and the pants of his uniform, while I stepped out of my trousers and pulled off my socks and garters. I unbuttoned his wool union suit from neck to groin until it fell to his ankles. Naked, he looked like a picture out of Physical Culture magazine. I took his hand and led him across the room to the bed. As we lowered ourselves to the mattress, he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s okay, I
do.”
I started at his earlobe and slowly, slowly moved down his body. Every touch of teeth and tongue was a revelation to him. By the time I arrived at his swollen sex, I knew he wouldn’t last long. I took him in my mouth all at once. He climaxed quickly and I sucked him dry until he was soft. I figured he’d soon be ready for more so I lingered there, but King had other ideas. He reached under my armpits and pulled me up alongside him.
“Now it’s my turn,” he whispered, tugging at my cotton shorts. I reached for the tin of Vaseline I kept tucked under the mattress, but to my surprise he didn’t turn me over. Instead, he began to repeat my performance, doing everything to me I’d just done to him. I knew it was his inexperience that made him believe he owed me this. I should have stopped him, but I’d never been reciprocated before. I allowed myself to imagine that he was bringing me out, that this was my first sex experience. By the time I climaxed, I almost believed it.
I opened my eyes to see King’s concerned face hovering over me. “Did I hurt you?” he asked.
“No, why do you say that?” He wiped tears from my cheeks. I hadn’t realized I was crying. “It’s nothing, I’m fine.”
“Good.” He kissed me, then his stomach growled and we both laughed. “Did I forget to tell you I was starving?”
“I’ll go see what we can do about that.” I pulled on some clothes and snuck down to the landlady’s kitchen to swipe a loaf of bread and a heel of cheese. We made a picnic with a couple of wrinkled apples I had in my room. Afterward we lounged in bed, drinking and smoking, the glass ashtray balanced on his abdomen. He yawned.
“What time do you have to be back?”
“We start boarding at six. If I’m not on the pier by five I’ll do the crossing in the brig.”
Bachelor Girl Page 7
