The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Bob said.

  She clasped his hand in hers. “I’m so sorry,” she said, then, lowering her voice, added: “Still, it must have come as a relief.”

  He frowned. Her face, arcaded by columns of ill-brushed hair, was fleshy with health. A curious mixture of solicitude and challenge enlivened her unctuous smile.

  “A relief?” he repeated.

  “Of course. Otherwise, think of all the suffering you both would have had to endure. Wasting, dementia. At least this way it was quick.”

  Bob let go of her hand. “Thank you for your concern,” he said.

  “Ralph would have told you, I’m not one to mince words. My husband always says to me, ‘Ronnie, shut your yap, it’ll get you into trouble.’ But I say, why beat around the bush when everyone knows it’s nonsense? Much better to be frank and open. Fellows like Ralph, they’re basically under a death sentence, just because they lived where they did and when they did. I don’t know if he mentioned it, but I sit on the board of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. It’s taught me to hold with the Greek view of death—you know, that it’s better for a man to be taken at his peak.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Well, I’m glad we’ve had this talk,” she said, and pressed a card into Bob’s palm. “I doubt there are many people you can be this open with, so please, if you need to vent, call me any time.”

  She left, floating out the door in a hazy effulgence of perfume. Bob looked at the card. GEORGE AXELROD, DDS, it read. And on the back: TUESDAY, 3/7, 2:30 P.M.

  That afternoon a small man with pale blond hair came into the bookstore. “So I’ve found you at last,” he said when Lizzie, the taller and shyer of Bob’s employees, led him to the front desk. “It’s so important that we talk. Could we go somewhere?”

  Bob was ruffled, bemused. He almost laughed. When the man spoke, his voice was oddly honeyed, as if he were making an inept attempt at a come-on. He was in his mid-thirties, Bob guessed, with watery blue eyes and the kind of boyish good looks that have a way of cracking as a person gets older. Close up, Bob could see minute lines around his eyes. His hair was thinning. He wore a beige trench coat over his suit, which was black, a white shirt, a red-and-blue-striped tie. In his right hand he carried a briefcase.

  “Excuse me?” Bob asked.

  The man laughed. “Oh, I haven’t said who I am yet. Sorry. My name is Ezra Hartley. I’m …”

  He glanced furtively over his shoulder, as if to make sure that no one else in the shop—neither of Bob’s employees, nor the lone customer browsing in the alternative medicine section—was listening. Then he leaned across the counter, so that Bob caught a whiff of his milky breath.

  “I met Kitty in Newfoundland. She told me about you.”

  Bob’s lips tightened. What was this? Some perverse effort of Kitty’s to fix him up with the only other homo among the crash relations? He wouldn’t have put it past her.

  “So Kitty sent you?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. I’m here completely on my own initiative. She just … told me about you. We got to be rather close, Kitty and I. Everyone did, in Newfoundland.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry I wasn’t there. It just didn’t quite—well, feel right.”

  “I understand. I tell you, it took a lot of courage for me to call up the airline, and say, ‘Look, I have a right to—you know—be there.’ But I did, and I’m glad I did.”

  “So I assume you … lost someone?”

  “I’m connected, if that’s the right word, to the children. The ones from upstate, who were going to Edinburgh. You know, the school trip.”

  Of course Bob knew. For days, both on television and in the newspapers, he’d been hearing about the children—about how they had raised the money for the trip themselves, by holding bake sales and car washes; about how, in this enterprise, they had been encouraged both by their parents, several of whom had also died in the crash, and their teacher, whom Peter Jennings had just named “Person of the Week”; about the eagerness with which they had anticipated the flight, which for many of them was both their first and last journey on an airplane.

  Exactly what Ezra’s “connection” to the children was, however, he appeared reluctant, at least in the bookstore, to divulge. “It’s curious how hungry, almost lustful, people get for details,” he whispered over the cash register. “Especially if there’s some horrible irony, like the person had just missed another plane. Or if he was famous in some way. Your Ralph, for instance—forgive me for using his first name, but I feel as if I know him—he was probably the most famous person on board. Or that woman who won the lottery. Imagine.” Ezra scratched his upper lip, on which there was a mustache so pale as to be almost invisible. “You win a hundred thousand dollars in the lottery, and then … But I’d really rather not keep on talking here. Couldn’t we go somewhere?”

  “Yes, of course. Debbie!”

  His second employee, a languid girl with a nose ring and a rose tattoo on her left wrist, now separated herself from the stack of books she was shelving and drifted over to the register.

  “Could you take over? I have to go out for a while.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Debbie said, and replaced him on his little stool. He and Ezra stepped out onto the sidewalk. A wind had come up. Across the street a bulky man with a crewcut was walking into a bar that happened to be the oldest gay bar in the Village. “We could go there, if you want,” Bob said, pointing.

  “Oh, I’d really rather not. I’d really rather go to your apartment.”

  “My apartment? Why?”

  “Well, it’s just … I mean, we’re bound to end up there anyway, aren’t we?” Ezra smiled.

  “But why are we bound to end up there?”

  “Because of what I have to show you.” He indicated his briefcase. “It’s not something I can show you in public.”

  Bob stalled. Behind Ezra’s guileless lack of discretion, he was sure he could detect Kitty’s interfering hand. It all seemed a bit demented to him, this propositioning, no doubt an offshoot of the enforced intimacy that had been the apparent leitmotif of Newfoundland. Or perhaps he was wrong to assume that Ezra was propositioning him; perhaps, on the contrary, he was reading into this brusque request an impulse that could not have been further from Ezra’s intentions. For it went without saying that Ezra, as he stood there staring at Bob, appeared not only guileless, but childlike. Normally Bob was not, by his own admission, a libidinous man; in that department Ralph had always been the more high-octane of the two, which explained at least in part his habitual infidelities, to which he rarely owned up, but which Bob always learned about anyway, through Ralph’s habit of leaving little clues everywhere: condom wrappers in the bathroom, scraps of paper with strangers’ phone numbers on the kitchen counter. Men called late at night, then, learning that Ralph was out of town, hung up without leaving their names. And through it all, Bob had never gone looking for someone else, as Ralph regularly did. It had become a source of pride to him, his ability to resist the very impulses to which Ralph, time and again, proved so susceptible; only now, poised in this standoff with Ezra, something about the very oddness of the situation, their shared and mysterious link to the plane crash, skewed his perspective, made him suspicious … and curious.

  A moment of silence passed, during which Ezra looked up the block toward Seventh Avenue, across the street at the bar—anywhere but into Bob’s eyes. Finally he coughed, stuffed his left hand into his coat pocket. “Well?” he asked.

  “All right, we’ll go to my apartment,” Bob said. “Why not?” And he started off—walking fast, as was his habit.

  “I appreciate this. Listen, shall we take a taxi? My treat.”

  “It’s not far enough for a taxi.”

  The wind had picked up. Ezra buttoned the collar of his coat tight around his throat. “I should tell you, I’ve seen your apartment already,” he shouted after Bob, with whom he was having trouble keeping up. “I’m not ashamed to admit
that I’m an avid reader of design magazines. So I’d heard of Ralph Davenport long before the crash. He was very talented, wasn’t he?”

  “They say he had a way with books.” They had arrived at Bob’s stolid brownstone, up the stairs of which Ezra now trotted after him, to the second-floor landing. The apartment, when they stepped inside, was stuffy, overwarm. All the curtains were drawn. “I haven’t been here for a few days,” Bob said, pulling up a blind.

  Dust flew. “Wow,” said Ezra, gazing at an English Arts and Crafts card table that Ralph had bought in London the year before. “This is beautiful. May I?” He took off his coat, sat down on one of the library chairs. “You know, there was one woman on the plane—this isn’t generally known, because the family doesn’t want the publicity—and she was on her way to Switzerland, where her brother—I’m not making this up—had just been killed in a plane crash. A private plane.” He settled his briefcase in his lap. “Pretty extraordinary, that. In Newfoundland it became a kind of game, thinking up parallels. You know, a surgeon is performing open-heart surgery … when he has a heart attack. Or an ambulance is on the way back from a car accident … when a car rear-ends it.”

  “I get the drift. Oh, would you like anything to drink?”

  “Just water, thanks.”

  Bob fetched a glass from the kitchen, then sat down across from Ezra, in the second library chair. Ezra was smiling at him. He had his legs spread in what might have been a lewd way.

  “So,” Bob said.

  “So,” Ezra said.

  There was a moment of silence, almost of helplessness, during which Ezra’s fingers worked the combination lock on the briefcase.

  “You said you were connected to the children?” Bob prodded.

  “Yes, well, to their teacher, actually. The heroic history teacher, who taught them all semester about Scotland, and was taking them to Edinburgh.”

  At last he opened the briefcase, producing a newspaper clipping, which he handed to Bob. A heavyset man with a gray beard—the sort of man who always wears a cap with a brim, and was wearing one—smiled out broadly from a landscape of snow and trees.

  “Of course living as we did in rural New York State,” Ezra went on, “we couldn’t be as open as you and Ralph were. We couldn’t, for instance, have lived together. You see, Larry was divorced. He might have lost visitation rights with his kids, if anyone found out.” Ezra reclaimed the clipping. “I teach at the high school too, incidentally. Journalism. So that just made things more complicated.”

  He closed, but did not relock, the briefcase.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Bob said after a moment. “I mean, about Larry.”

  “I appreciate that, although as I’ve said about a million times this week, there’s really not much point to ‘Sorry,’ when we’re all in the same boat.”

  “True.”

  “I mean, Larry and I were together seven years. I moved to an apartment near his place just so I could walk over there. We couldn’t risk anyone seeing my car parked in his driveway at night. And then in the mornings, I’d sneak out early. We’d drive to school separately, always make sure to arrive at least ten minutes apart. When we took vacations, we lied about where we were going, we flew on separate planes and met at the other end. Seven years like that.”

  “It must have been difficult.”

  “It was. But let’s skip all that, because I didn’t just come here to get sympathy. What I came about—it’s the footage. I need some help deciding what to do with the footage.”

  “Footage?”

  Ezra nodded. As at the bookstore, he looked over his shoulder, perhaps to make sure that no unexpected stranger, no friend or domestic, was about to step into the room. Then he reopened the briefcase and took out a videotape. “To be honest, I haven’t looked at it myself,” he said, handing it to Bob. “I couldn’t at first, and now … I don’t know, I’d just rather not. Would you mind if I wait in another room while you watch it?”

  “But what is it?”

  “You’ll see. Where’s the bathroom?”

  “On the left.”

  “I’ll wait there.” He got up. “Call me when you’re finished. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so.”

  Patting Bob on the shoulder, Ezra walked to the bathroom and closed himself in. The lock clicked. Through the crack at the bottom of the door, Bob saw a light switch on; he heard the fan starting to whir.

  He glanced at what he held in his hands: an ordinary videotape, it seemed. Maxell. Sixty minutes. Although an adhesive tag had been affixed to its front, nothing was written on it. Did that mean that it contained what Bob, at that moment, suspected it might contain, that is to say, pornography, probably homemade, perhaps images of Ezra’s friend, the dead history teacher? No, not likely. Really, he thought, he was sinking further and further into salaciousness—had been, ever since Ezra had walked into the store.

  Finally he switched on the television, and loaded the tape into the VCR. Colors appeared—a Mondrian rainbow—and then a voice (Ezra’s) said, “Testing, one-two-three, testing, one-two-three.” A blur of motion filled the screen, before clarifying into a corridor. Whoever held the camera was walking in the midst of a crowd, everyone wearing red. “Here we are boarding the bus,” the voice declaimed, “on our way to watch Mr. Dowd’s history club embark on its historic voyage to bonny Scotland. This is Ezra Hartley reporting for PVTV: Porter Valley Regional High School Television.”

  Then grass. A parking lot. A school bus, teenagers posed in pairs and clusters, some drinking Cokes. Inside the bus, more children mugged before the camera. “Hey, I hear those guys don’t wear anything under their kilts!”

  “Now, kids, no more of that—”

  A huge face filled the screen. “Tigers rule!”

  “Approaching the airport, you can see the excitement building on these kids’ faces. Let’s see, who shall we interview first? Nadine Kazanjian, class of 1988 valedictorian, how are you doing today?”

  A dark-eyed girl smiled. “Fine.”

  “Is this your first trip to Europe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re excited?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you most excited about seeing?”

  She looked pensive. “Well, I guess probably it would have to be the Tower of London, when we stop in London. Or Edinburgh Castle.”

  “And what are your future plans, after you get back from Scotland?”

  “Well, in the fall, I’ll be enrolling as a freshman at SUNY New Paltz.”

  “Tigers rule!”

  “Shut up, please, Peter, I’m conducting an interview. Have you decided on your major yet?”

  “I was thinking history.”

  “Is that thanks to Mr. Dowd?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You like Mr. Dowd?”

  “Uh-huh, he’s a great teacher.”

  “Tigers rule!”

  “Peter, I told you—”

  A sudden break, then, almost a rupture. In the next scene the kids were at the airport, checking their bags. Ezra’s camera panned back, and suddenly all the red made sense: the children were wearing identical sweatshirts, red sweatshirts, that said PORTER VALLEY REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL CLASS TRIP, 1988. Underneath was a drawing of a tiger wearing a kilt.

  On to the gate. “Everybody together, I want a group shot!” Ezra shouted, and the man with the cap (Mr. Dowd; Larry) gathered them in, along with three pairs of parents. Thirty people, more or less. One girl was very beautiful, red-haired, with intense green eyes. Behind her the boy who had shouted “Tigers rule!” once again shouted “Tigers rule!” He had pimples on his cheeks. To the left, nearer Mr. Dowd, Nadine Kazanjian (already, on the news, Bob had heard about Nadine Kazanjian) put an arm around the shoulders of a short black boy whom Bob also recognized, for there had been a feature about him on CBS: he had suffered from a congenital heart defect.

  Bob did not close his eyes. He did not flinch. He was horror-stricken, yes—it wen
t without saying—yet: he could not have turned away even if … even if at that moment Ralph had come storming through the door, dripping wet, as he had in one of Bob’s dreams a few nights earlier. For these faces—he felt as if he needed to study them, if for no other reason than to see if there was anything besides innocence in them, some knowledge, some foreshadowing of their fate. It occurred to him dimly that when he had wondered if Ezra were peddling pornography, he hadn’t been so far off the mark; only this was pornography of a scarier and more insidious kind; this was closer to a snuff film.

  It was then that he saw Ralph. At first he wasn’t sure—just a figure passing in the background. Immediately he aimed the remote control, rewound, moved forward again, this time in slow motion. Behind the mob of children and parents a figure moved, wearing a jacket Bob would have recognized anywhere, for it was Ralph’s favorite jacket, a brown leather jacket he’d bought years ago, when he was still a student, and that was now patched on both elbows. With the hypnotic grace of a dancer, Ralph crossed behind the students, glanced briefly at them, then sat down. He carried two bottles of water.

  Two.

  Someone was sitting next to him.

  Again, Bob rewound. The figure to Ralph’s left was blurry. Bob couldn’t even tell if it was male or female; only that Ralph—very distinctly—took one of the water bottles and handed it to … whom? This friend. This unsuspected companion.

  Again, a break in the footage. The children were now handing in their boarding passes, waving wild goodbyes as they headed toward the gate. One by one they disappeared, as into a pair of jaws. “Well, that about wraps it up,” Ezra said. “In two weeks’ time, we’ll be back to record the great homecoming. In the meantime, for PVTV, I’m Ezra Hartley. Goodbye, kids, and good luck.”

  The footage broke off. Hissing confetti filled the screen. Like a wakened dreamer, Bob started; stood; turned off the VCR. In the bathroom the fan still whirred, though the light had been switched off.