The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  And then, somewhere in those hours, the red wine. And the shoes. And the beans.

  Did I mention that his nose had been broken—before he was killed?

  With his San Francisco friends, it wasn’t a question of what they themselves believed; it was a question of what they wanted other people to believe: a matter, it seemed, less of protecting Tom’s reputation than their own. After all, they had trusted him with their children. To have it revealed that Tom had been conning them the whole time, that in truth he was no different from any other faggot—this would have been too embarrassing. So they decided to take the line that the police and the journalists were wrong; worse, that they were homophobic, to assume that just because Tom had been beaten and bludgeoned to death, his killer had to be some lowlife he’d dragged in off the street. “Maybe those others,” his friend Gina told me over the phone, referring to the twenty-two homosexual men who have been murdered in Rome over the last decade, “but not Tom.” To Gina, the important thing seemed to be that his name never be added to that statistic; that the number remain twenty-two.

  “It had to be something else. What if he surprised a burglar?”

  “But nothing was taken.”

  “Or maybe it was someone he was having an affair with. A lover.”

  So was it better to have been murdered by a lover, I wondered, by someone you trusted, than by an immigrant you had picked up in the men’s room at the train station?

  That mysterious men’s room, where the urinals were divided by glass partitions—glass, of all things.

  Tom told me that. Not that he’d ever been there himself, he added: it was only from his friend Pepe, who frequented such places, that he garnered this intelligence. Pepe, according to Tom, spent much of his time in the park on the Monte Caprino. That kind of park. Only once had Tom accompanied him there, under duress, after a boring lunch party. He noticed the plants, not the loiterers. “Oh, that’s spleenwort—asplenium filicinophyta!” he told Pepe. “Wait here while I go home and get my Japanese pruning shears.” And Pepe waited, and Tom went home, and came back with his Japanese pruning shears. For a cutting.

  Soon a rumor began to circulate in San Francisco that he had been having an affair with a fellow English teacher, and that very likely it was this teacher who had murdered him. A lover’s quarrel.

  If this was true, I could well understand the teacher’s motives. Back when I lived with Tom, I too found myself tempted, on more than one occasion, to pick up a blunt object; to smash in his skull; to break his nose.

  Oh, he could be such a hypocrite! And he met a hypocrite’s just end. Like the hypochondriac who finally gets something fatal. In the angry weeks right after I heard the news, when Gina and her husband, Tony, and all sorts of other people were calling every night to talk about “damage control” (they actually used that phrase), a few times—just to horrify them—I said, “Come on, folks. What do you really think? Don’t you really think he got what he deserved?”

  Wool Street

  A few months before he died, I went back to San Francisco. I went to look at the house we used to own together. High on a San Francisco hilltop, the fog woolly, rolling across the sky in grand, sluggish banks. And this was appropriate, because the street on which we had lived was called Wool Street.

  Back then, the house was yellow. Now it was white. Pristine. There were Jaguars and Acuras and Jeeps parked along the curb: not the battered pickup trucks and Volkswagen Beetles of our day. For when we lived there, Bernal Heights was a run-down neighborhood, even a bad neighborhood. At that point, of course, I couldn’t have afforded in a million years to buy back our old home. Now that San Francisco was the dot-com capital of the world, even a funny, creaky little house like ours, with no backyard and a crumbling foundation, went for $700,000 or $800,000. Or more.

  A strange sensation, to be priced out of a place you once thought of as yours. But then again, one of the lessons of marble—one of the lessons Tom taught me—is that ownership of any kind is a dream.

  Were any of them still around, our old neighbors? Walking across the street, I peered at a letterbox: LOPEZ, it said. But it should have said, COOPER.

  Where was Dominic Cooper, whom I barely knew, but who sometimes waved to me, walking past with his dog? An Old English sheepdog, the fur on her head pulled back into a topknot so that it wouldn’t get into her eyes.

  Dead, I supposed. Most of them were, our neighbors, either because, a dozen years ago, they were already old, or because they were faggots.

  Bad faggots.

  Tom and I were not bad faggots, so we remained alive. For the moment.

  Tom was the good faggot. He wrote children’s books that never got published. (Not getting them published—this was an essential part of being the good faggot.) He rolled his own pasta, and volunteered at an AIDS hospice, and never went to any of the bars or sex clubs for which San Francisco was infamous—oh no! Instead he lived with me. We had matching gold rings. We told people we’d met at a party in New York, when really I’d seen his dick before I ever saw his face, emerging inquisitively from under the partition between two stalls in the men’s room at Bloomingdale’s.

  Most of Tom’s friends were young marrieds. They trusted their children with him. Not only that, they made a fuss over how much they trusted their children with him. “Tom’s so good with kids!” they’d say. “He’s Justin/Samuel/Max’s favorite babysitter. When we go away, Justin/Samuel/Max loves spending the weekend with Tom.”

  In other words, not a child molester. To leave their little boys with Tom was to make a sally into that favorite West Coast game of More Liberal Than Thou. It was to flaunt their tolerance in the same way that a few years later, when they got rich, they would flaunt their immunity to greed. Not BMWs, not Manolo Blahnik pumps. Instead Birkenstocks, SUVs, and several million in stock options.

  It goes without saying that they never asked Tom to babysit their daughters. What would have been the point of that?

  He was godfather to something like eleven little boys, at least three of whom were named after him.

  And now all those Justins and Samuels and Maxes—yes, and Toms—they must be teenagers. I wonder if they remember the June mornings when he would take them to watch the Gay Pride Parade. Hoist them onto his shoulders. Their parents alongside, smiling at the drag queens done up as Carol Burnett or Debbie Reynolds.

  And of course, when the coalition from the North American Man/Boy Love Association marched by, all those clerkish men in suits and ties, what did his friends think? They never said a word. Instead they kept their eyes averted, until the NAMBLA guys had filed past, and there were safe, funny drag queens again.

  Our house on Wool Street could not have been more unassuming. Like a child’s drawing of a house, Tom used to say. It was situated as close to nowhere as it is probably possible to get, on a neutral hill near a characterless intersection somewhere in the midst of that vast anonymity of streets no tourist ever drives, and that San Franciscans call the Mission.

  I worked as an editor for a leftist magazine that was published by a foundation: a slick magazine to which rich people subscribed out of guilt, but did not read. Tom ran a catering business, and was devoted to the domestic. He could spend weeks searching for just the right toilet brush to match the bathroom fixtures. When I finished showering in the mornings, he’d sometimes wait until he thought I wasn’t looking, and then stealthily adjust the towels so that they draped in just the right way.

  Once the discovery of a food stain on the bedspread made him freeze in the middle of a kiss, mutter, “I’ll just be a second,” and pad off naked to the kitchen for spot remover.

  You see, this was San Francisco in the late eighties, and many of the people we knew had died.

  Two of our neighbors had died. And a Greek man who ran a deli. And the editor of the magazine I worked for. Even our doctor had died.

  So I suppose that was why we bought our little house, our “crypto-dream-house,” as Tom used to call it, qu
oting Elizabeth Bishop. By establishing and guarding this shelter, he must have hoped he could protect us both from the stained sheets and fouled toilets and soggy mattresses that are the necessary accessories of death.

  Later, when I saw the photographs of Saddam Hussein’s atom bomb–proof bunker, with its marble bathrooms and carpeting and candela-brums, I thought, yes, of course—something along those lines.

  People in San Francisco talked a lot in those days about “grief management.” Now I look back, and it seems to me that grief was managing us all that time: grief, the puppeteer, cool behind the curtain.

  When, I wondered, would grief pull off its mask, switch on the light, burst into the room in troops, like cops at a stakeout?

  I thought it was going to happen one night in 1988. We were getting dressed for the opera when the telephone rang. It was Tom’s friend Caroline, and she was calling to tell him that Ernie, with whom he had once lived for half a dozen years, had died an hour earlier.

  “Vincent,” he said to me, putting the phone down. Nothing more, but I knew. I was in the middle of tying my tie, and I remember that I stopped, the tie hanging half-looped around my neck, like a noose, and without saying a word I walked over to Tom and held him, tightly, and then we just stood like that, me holding him and his body shaking, but he never cried, or said a word. And then we let go of each other; I finished tying my tie. And we went to the opera.

  The opera that night was a concert version of Dido and Aeneas. A famed soprano stood before us, resplendent in feathers and white satin, and sang Dido’s deathbed aria:

  When I am laid, laid in earth,

  Let my wrongs create

  No trouble, no trouble, in thy breast;

  Remember me, remember me,

  But ah, forget my fate!

  So grief sang, in her feathery gown. Bejeweled grief. Couture grief. And it seemed that she was looking at us as she sang, and what were we, after all, but two well-heeled faggots in the last decade of a century we had no assurance we would see the end of?

  Whose fate, in any case, would doubtless be forgotten?

  How can it be that I’ve neglected to say what he looked like? That is, what he looked like when he was still alive.

  Well, he looked like … the good faggot. Handsome, in a neutered sort of way. He always clipped the hairs out of his nose. His skin was unblemished, his nails tidy as the maresciallo’s.

  He was not tall. Gray streaks ran through his black hair—thick, dark hair, a fringe benefit of Italian blood. Whereas I was going bald early.

  Of course, the thing about Italian men is that often, no matter how handsome they are in youth, they age very badly. I suppose I should have been alerted to this likelihood the one time I met Tom’s father, who was a second-generation immigrant from Sicily. Although he wasn’t yet seventy, he had a face like a shar-pei’s. His teeth were yellow from smoking. Moles bloomed on his cheeks. Yet his eyes, his mouth, even his nose—these were Tom’s.

  It was only after we broke up that his looks really started to go—as if inheritance, after waiting in the wings for decades, had suddenly decided to step forward and stake its claim: I gave this to you, I take this from you. The blessing and curse of the genes.

  A year had passed during which we had not seen each other—he had just moved to Rome, I had just moved to Düsseldorf—when out of the blue, I got an assignment to work a film festival in Rome. So naturally I called and told him I was coming. He insisted on meeting me at the airport. When I stepped off the plane, a jowly little man ran up to me, holding a bouquet of violets.

  I blinked. Could this be Tom? Since we’d last seen each other he’d gained what looked like forty pounds. His hair had thinned in front, and to compensate, he’d grown it long in the back. He had a ratty beard.

  A few days later, while I was waiting to meet him near Torre Argentina, I got to talking with an old lady who came there to feed the stray cats. It seemed that she was one of a group of women—gattaie, they were called—who had set up a makeshift cat clinic down among the ruins, a sort of squatter’s hospital. The city was trying to evict them, she said, because many of the cats had feline AIDS and people were afraid of catching it. (“A ludicrous notion,” she added, “since they are separate diseases. But Italians are not very interested in facts.”)

  A cat approached—fat and white, blind in one eye. She picked him up and handed him to me. “We call him Nelson,” she said, “after the admiral.”

  I smiled at Nelson. His blind eye was clouded and milky, like a piece of Carrara marble. I stroked his neck and he purred. Then Tom appeared, waving at me from across the street. I put Nelson down. “My friend is here,” I told the woman.

  She peered. “Is that him? He’s very ugly,” she observed, in that mild, uninflected tone that a Roman adopts when he informs you—meaning no offense—that you’ve gotten quite a bit fatter since the last time you saw each other.

  Bidding her goodbye, I hurried to meet him. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got held up by one of my students. Pierluigi.” He groaned. “Those double names—Pierluigi, Piergiorgio—they’ll get you every time.”

  “Handsome?”

  “Mamma mia. And to make matters even worse, a Fascist. I mean, a major Fascist. ‘The man I most admire in the world is Jean-Marie Le Pen,’ he wrote in his paper. So naturally I failed him. And then his father called. And then …”

  “What?”

  “Well … it was all very tiresome.”

  We turned a corner, and went into a trattoria. In Rome all social occasions with Tom took place in restaurants. “I only just found this one last week,” he said. “It’s got the best pasta and chickpeas.”

  The trattoria was stuffy, narrow. We were led to a back table, far from any window. Tom ordered for us—pasta and chickpeas, naturally—and soon enough two bowls of soup arrived, carried by a handsome young waiter with whom he appeared to be on a first-name basis. The first name, in this case, being Enzo.

  “Taste that rosemary,” he said, his eyes on Enzo’s back.

  I tasted. Believe me, I know something about cooking, and no rosemary had ever come near that soup.

  After a while, the trattoria got busy. A crowd had gathered in the foyer, businessmen and neighborhood shopkeepers, all waiting for tables to open up, while Tom, with a kind of obstinate disregard, remained rooted to his chair even though we had long since finished our meal. The coffee came. He took a long time stirring in his sugar, then asked me about Düsseldorf. Did I have much of a social life there? Were my friends American or German? What was the food like?

  Something of a social life, I answered. I had both German and American friends. The food was … German.

  And my apartment?

  I leaned back. I was wondering when he was going to work up the courage to ask the question that was obviously on his mind—that is, was I “seeing” anyone in Düsseldorf—when Enzo appeared, and asked very sheepishly if we might mind paying up and getting out. As we could see, people were waiting.

  Tom’s neck stiffened. “What? You’re asking us to leave?”

  “I’m sorry, signore, but as you see—”

  “That’s hardly the way to encourage a regular customer, Enzo. Why, for all you know I might be a journalist, about to write a review of your trattoria for an important American newspaper!”

  Enzo spread out his hands. “Signore, what can I do? How can I vindicate myself?”

  Tom smiled. He pointed to his cheek. “A kiss,” he said.

  Straightening his back, Enzo laughed, as if in disbelief. Then he looked over his shoulder. Then he bent down and kissed Tom, very quickly, on the cheek.

  “Might he have misunderstood what another person said to him, if the other person were speaking Italian?”

  Of course, his claims to have no interest in “that sort of thing” begged the important question of what he was doing in that men’s room in the first place.

  “Well,” he said, “you know that whenever I’m in New York
I always go to Bloomingdale’s. And I was shopping for sheets, when nature called. Normally I would never have stayed, once I’d realized that it was that kind of men’s room. But then your socks caught my eye.”

  “My socks?”

  “They were all I could see under the door to the stall. Blue and red argyle. I liked them.”

  “So that was the only reason you went into the next stall? Because you liked my socks?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And if it hadn’t been for my socks?”

  “I would have left. You know I can’t bear that sort of atmosphere.”

  “But wait a minute … that means that our whole relationship—our whole history together—owes to the fact that you liked my socks.”

  “I guess you could put it that way,” Tom said. “Not that I ever would.”

  It is worth noting that when we had this conversation, we were looking at china. We seemed always to have our most important conversations while looking at china; even that first afternoon, after the men’s room, it was to the china department that we drifted, and in the china department that we told each other our names.

  “Oh, this is nice,” Tom said. “Hand-painted, too.”

  Because the carnality that had started everything seemed suddenly so remote, I glanced at his crotch.

  “The measure of a man,” I began.

  He blushed. “Oh, please. Do you like Aynsley?”

  “I’d like to do more with you. Preferably without a wall between us.”

  He picked up a teacup. “I know a place in London where you can get this stuff dirt cheap. Seconds, of course. Tiny flaws.”

  “I’d like to kiss you for about a month.”