Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Patrick was happy to oblige, and I was handed a freshly made pitcherful and appointed Aquarius.

  The other guests were gathered on the main deck that opened off the cathedral-ceilinged second-story living room and went three-quarters around the house—perhaps the best and most extensive view of all among the scattered, expensive, jeu d'esprit houses in what we referred to as "Corn Hole (actually Corn Hill) Estates," one of the Upper Cape's posher neighborhoods. I looked for and located Matt on the side of the deck that gives a phenomenal vista of P-Town. He'd brought the token straight couple from Wellfleet there and was talking to them (leave it to him!) with that intensity of interest he sometimes had that made you feel you were the last human on earth.

  Lest I embarrass him with my continued naked need for affection, I merely lifted the pitcher so they'd see it, then put it down on a table and turned in the other direction to watch the sun developing a fat red bottom as it descended into the enormous orange-speckled silver of Cape Cod Bay. Everything seemed to conspire to an absolute stillness and silence. Equally sudden a peroration of chatter from a local mockingbird broke the silence. I sighed for so much beauty.

  "Shall we ever eat?" a voice next to me asked.

  Alistair, leaning next to me over the terrace's little fence. He'd been at the beach all afternoon, long after Matt and I had left, somewhere out of sight, and, we'd assumed, up to no good. Now he looked splendidly healthy, with a casual splatter of fresh red-tan across forehead, cheeks, and nose, and pale streaks in his long dark-blond hair from where the sun had encountered his lemon-juice rinse.

  "Crudités and aioli are coming," I announced, filling his glass.

  "I've had crudités and aioli up to here!" He accepted the scarlet liquid, however, and sipped at it. "This is good! Well, what do you think?" "Boiled. Even if they do scream!"

  Alistair turned to me, puzzled. Then, "The lobsters! Of course they should be boiled!"

  I leaned over the terrace and shouted down—"Luis! Patrick! It's settled! Boiled!"

  "Only Brazilians know how to broil them properly," Alistair said.

  "You are the cleverest thing. No matter how arcane I get, you still understand me."

  "If after all this time I didn't, who the hell would? But no, dear, I didn't mean the lobsters. I meant what do you think about the manflesh upon the terrace here? Aside from your own totally scrumptious pussikins and the straight man who is off-limits and thus automatically intriguing, the question is: whom shall I have as an after-dinner mint?"

  "I thought you got laid on the beach today," I said, not bothering to ask the even more obvious question,

  "You know how it is: sometimes it just whets the appetite for more."

  I turned with him to inspect the other six on the deck. "Domingo, the Cuban, has skin like silk, and he can't get fucked enough."

  "Hmmmn!" Alistair purred. Then: "What do you know about the gaunt but athletic-looking one in the hot pink jams?"

  "That's Nils Adlersson, the novelist. Brilliant but erratic writer. Don't know shit about his sex life."

  "What do they say at the magazine?"

  "Seems our much hated editor in chief is hopelessly in love with Nils, so not an iota of dish has been able to freely circulate. It's unnatural!"

  "If the staff of New York's premier fag mag doesn't know about his sex life, he probably doesn't have one. But I'd bet that other one has a beer-can dick. Look at the way it bulges athwart the inseam in those shorts!"

  "Which one?" I asked.

  "The half-handsome, half-prissy one in the madras shirt and cream-colored shorts. He's a little stouter than I like as a rule..."

  "He's a lawyer, Luis told me. From the city. Staying at P-Town with Ian and Phillip."

  "He's got something swinging in there! Probably one of those big, fat, East-European..." Alistair all but hugged himself. "Just what the doctor ordered."

  "Didn't know yon were ailing, Miss Scarlett."

  "Duh vapors, chile. Duh vapors. Nuthin' but a li'l horse meat won't cure! Let's get a little closer so lean better check out his basket. Mother really doesn't care to be unpleasantly surprised ce soir."

  Matt looked up from where he'd been intently speaking to Al and Muffy Weisberg and closed one glamorously lashed eye in a wink, provoking an immediate smile from me. I brushed his back surreptitiously as I walked past. Alistair's hand was down by his side, gesturing me closer to the little group where Luis was just finishing a description of Nils Adlersson's book by saying, "It's really fabulous!"

  "Really?" Phillip asked. "As good as The Persian Boy?"

  "Oh, honey! That book's trash," Ian quickly put in. "You'll have to forgive Lip," he explained to the attorney and Nils.

  "What do you mean trash! I thought The Persian Boy was wonderful!" Phillip insisted. "I read it twice and cried both times!"

  "He also thinks Belva Plain should get the Nobel Prize," Ian sneered. "Lip simply can't understand why all those Third World Wogs keep getting it."

  Phillip was holding his ground. "What do you think, Anny?" he asked the attorney Alistair had expressed interest in.

  "I never read novels. Fiction is... Well, it's not fact, is it?"

  Nils's face set suddenly, but his mouth formed a crooked little smile.

  Phillip and Luis looked to Nils for contradiction and, seeing they weren't going to get it, began to sputter—"Oh, Anatole, you're just saying that! You can't mean it."

  "I do mean it! Lord knows I read plenty of nonfiction books. Perhaps twenty or thirty a year. Mostly history and biography. Then there's magazines. Aside from what I use for work, I've got subscriptions to [naming you can guess which eight of them]... You can't say I'm not up on everything. And after all, what's the point of reading fiction?"

  "To discover other points of view!" Alistair spoke up, moving closer to Anatole. "To find out how other people live. What they experience. What they think about what they experience. How they feel about what they think they've experienced. I'd assume that richness of detail and roundedness of experience would be invaluable to an attorney."

  Everyone had turned to Alistair.

  Who concluded his eloquent yet seductively presented speech by adding to no one in particular, "N'est-ce pas?"

  "I never thought of it that way," Anatole said, looking thoughtful.

  "Perhaps you were exposed to the wrong novels as a young lad," Alistair explicated in that same seductive tone of voice, as he quietly sidled between Phillip and Nils so he was at Anatole's side. "Perhaps you'll tell me exactly what you did read as a lad and I could..."

  The VIP lounge door loudly clanked open, shattering my reverie. Anatole stood arms akimbo, challenging me. The door clanked shut behind him.

  "Wally says the party at Alistair's was over an hour ago! And he says you were both there earlier."

  I sat up.

  "Are you going to tell me what is going on?" Anatole demanded.

  "Didn't Wally tell you? Is he out there?"

  "He's out there. And no, he didn't 'tell me'! 'Tell me' what?"

  I looked at my options and compared them to what I knew or suspected I knew of Anatole's humanity or lack thereof.

  "Alistair's sick." I let it out.

  Anatole was about to ask sick how and stopped himself. "Go on."

  "I thought in his condition, Alistair might be depressed being all alone after everyone left, so I said I'd return."

  For a minute I wondered if Anatole was going to buy it, or if I was going to have to spill the beans.

  "Not just diagnosed but sick," he clarified for himself. "How sick?" Exactly the right question.

  "He's been hospitalized twice." Then, to punch it home: "He weighs about a hundred and twenty."

  Anatole's comprehension and anger were immediate. His face darkened and reddened and clamped shut. "Doesn't he have anyone there?"

  "Always. But you know how close we've been. Since we were nine."

  Without losing a bit of his anger or ruddiness or clenched visage, An
atole relented.

  "I'll do what I can to get you out tonight."

  "Is Wally angry with me?"

  Anatole shrugged.

  "He is angry with me, I know. We fought earlier."

  Anatole turned and began banging for the guard to come.

  I went over to him. "Anny, how do I explain to Wally?"

  "Explain what, about Alistair's illness?"

  "No! He's asking all about Matt. What do I tell him, Anny?"

  Anatole got suddenly flustered. "How should I know?" He banged even harder. Then he said in an oddly calm tone of voice, "You know, when I first saw Matt Loguidice I thought he wasn't real. I never thought anyone could be that beautiful."

  "Even with his leg!" I added.

  "Even so. He was so beautiful... I wondered how you dared to make love with him," Anatole said, his face reddening as he looked away to some stashed memory vision. "I thought anyone who would even touch... someone like him must end up... I don't know, struck down by a bolt from the heavens or..."

  As he spoke, Anatole looked at me closely, as though assessing something in me he'd never considered before.

  I had no idea at first how to answer him. Then the turnkey arrived, and Anatole grabbed my shoulder hard, wordlessly consoling me or urging me on or... something! before he turned to leave.

  I found my voice. "Wasn't I struck by heaven, Anny? Weren't we all?"

  Left alone, and even though I didn't want to, I was forced to remember Matt.

  "I've got it!" Calvin said. "We'll recommend Agnes von Hohenstaufen."

  "Agnes von who?" I asked. Where was that catalog? There it was! The little bugger! Under everything else. I grabbed it, opened it, began going through its pages. Slim pickings.

  "You mean you've never heard of Agnes von Hohenstaufen by Gasparo Spontini?" Calvin asked, delighting in his one-upping me. I knew he was at his office, not ten blocks away, over on Sutter Street. Even so, our Bell West connection made him sound like he was in the Antipodes, or Oakland! It could be worse. Last week we didn't have phones two entire afternoons. Would they ever finish building BART and screwing around Market Street?

  We were discussing the new opera production the director of the San Francisco Opera company was looking for. He'd come to us for suggestions, as we were the staff of the most knowledgeable magazine, local fan club, and general opera-going claque in town. Each of about a dozen of us was to come up with a suggestion for something different and wonderful and present it to him at a staff meeting in a few weeks. He promised to mount a production of one of our choices. I was only a part-time staff writer for the rag, but even so, through my friendship with Calvin Ritchie, its new editor and general factotum, I was as deeply involved in this selection as anyone else.

  "Never heard of it," I was forced to admit.

  "It was only Spontini's greatest success," Calvin emphasized. "You know Spontini's La Vestale, of course."

  "Naturally," I said, half lying: I'd heard of it, not heard it.

  "Agnes was the biggest hit of that year. Seventy performances! Bellini was said to have wept at the Parma premiere. The young Verdi, still a student, pawned his score of the Missa Solemnis to attend."

  "Miss Ritchie!" I warned in my best schoolmarm voice. "If you're making this all up, you shall be se-vere-ly chas-tis-ed."

  I slid over that catalog and went to the next. I was myself at work, at Pozzuoli's, San Francisco's most chi-chi bookstore and art gallery, cultural emporium really, located on two breathtakingly expensive and overdecorated floors of the primest real estate in downtown's newest hotel, with one entrance out on the Embarcadero, the other indoors, facing a sixty-foot rectangular bank of calla lilies growing inside the thirty-floor open lobby. It was late July 1974, and the Chronicle's national headlines were all about Judge Sirica and Senator Sam Ervin, and the shit finally hitting the Nixon Administration fan. Even Patty Hearst and the SLA were second-sectioned for the new dirt. We'd already just

  bypassed two admitted Constitutional Crises, and now it all seemed to be in the hands of those Fates that rise out of the mist and soil in the prelude of Götterdämmerung—of which, by the way, everyone agreed there hadn't been a decent production in this town since the days of Schorr, Flagstad, and Karen Branzell.

  Meanwhile, local news was spotlighting and thus busily pumping up the "Downtown Renaissance"—which is to say the construction mess from City Hall, the Opera House, and the rest of the so-called Civic Center building on lower Van Ness Avenue, and the subway extension along Market Street right to the Sausalito ferry—with an occasional editorial nod at the upcoming municipal election, sure to bring in an old Machine pol named Moscone as mayor, and our first gay city supervisor, some guy named Harvey no one really knew.

  Directly across from my little open-air balcony office at Pozzuoli, I noted a pair of scrumptiously garbed Japanese women looking at Monika's little shelf of bibelots. Their dresses were cut modern—Chanel? Saint Laurent? it was someone French—but used native fabrics: great pink peonies on a field of ashy silver for one, white-and-gray storks flying against a midnight-blue sky for the other. Industrialists' wives. They moved with the small-step shuffling, semi-awkward grace of geisha hostesses.

  "You'd love Agnes. So would Miss Thing over at the Opera," Calvin said. "It's simply spectacular! Set during the Hundred Years' War in Swabia, with scenes in the Alps and the Black Forest. There's an emasculated version, natch, but the original's in five acts, needs two, count 'em two, coloratura sopranos, each of whom has a great scena, and together a trio with the contralto. Oh, and there's also a light soprano trousers role. The male parts are equally juicy, with great arias and duets for—get this, Flora!—a pair each of tenors and bassos. And it has an all-baritone chorus in the... I think it's the third act."

  "Is there a full score of this unknown masterpiece in existence?" I asked, sweeping that book catalog off my desk and onto a chair, and moving on to the next one—a few more titles, but Holly would have to look at it later. She knew more about art books than I would in a lifetime, despite my title.

  "Not only a fall score," Calvin said, "but, Divina Angel Cake, a recording!"

  "Leontyne!" I gushed back. "One is impressed!"

  Monika had arrived to help the Japanese women. They looked like serious buyers. Good. My reign at Pozzuoli's had already been marked by profits. It allowed me to get away with setting my own hours, my own style of management, and quite a bit else.

  "In fact," Calvin went on, "I've heard a reel-to-reel tape!"

  "No! I've just made jizz stains all over my chinos!"

  "Wait'll you hear it! Pirated off a radio program by some ditzy French number: the ORTF direct from the Aix-en-Provence Festival. It was a Franco-Italo production, put together by the great impresario de Bailhac in 1936. And, Margery Daw, get this cast: Ebe Stignani and Germaine Cernay; Fedora Barbieri with Hina Spani in the role of the messenger; Lauri-Volpi and Georges Thill parted against Pinza and Marcel Journet! Have your feet left the ground yet?"

  I had to admit, Calvin had me gasping. "Who conducted? God?"

  "Close. De Sabata!"

  "May a human person hear this recording?"

  "If said human person promises to recommend it."

  "Nice try, Dalmatia. I'd have to hear it first."

  "You honky twat!"

  "Watch your sass, Miss Ritchie! We're not in Oakland anymore."

  "Okay, you can hear it." Calvin paused. "And what, if I may be so bold as to ask, was your choice?"

  "Donizetti's Emilia di Liverpool."

  "All I know of Emilia is the cavatina and rondo Sutherland sings."

  "Sang!" I clarified. "She couldn't negotiate that cavatina today if her vocal chords were wearing ice skates."

  "True enough, girl! Her coloratura is a shadow of its former glory."

  "I was thinking of Caballé doing it."

  "She's no slender child," Calvin said. "Never was. Odd that you should mention Monsterfat Cowbelly. Herself sang the title role of Agnes
in Rome a few years ago. Muti conducted. Bruno Prevedi, Antonietta Stella, Sesto Bruscantini. Don't know who else was there."

  "How do you know all this, Dorothy?" I asked.

  "One has sources," Calvin replied enigmatically.

  The Japanese women were buying the bibelots. Good idea. Monika half turned and saw me and began to blush as she always did whenever the amount of money involved was too high for her down-to-earth Wisconsin Methodist morals. On the other side of me—on the far balcony, in the record department—Justin was standing talking to three male foreigners—Swedes or Norwegians, given their clothing, especially the blocky sandals and socks they wore with pale-colored jackets. He was playing what sounded like a two-piano piece by Mendelssohn I'd never heard before, so I caught his attention and sketched a question mark in the air. He held up an album cover: Rimsky-Korsakov! Imagine!

  "There is a score for Emilia," I said, having looked it up. "But the only recording I know of is duets sung by Delia de Martis and Aureliano Pertile in the early thirties on the Italian Victor label and a baritone scena by Apollo Granforte. Execrable sound and a ten-second dropout. A Preiser LP."

  "I'll ask around for more of it. If the girls here at Opera Queen don't know of a full recording, it don't exist."

  "Thanks, Cal." I finished marking and threw over the last two catalogs. My meeting with my boss was due in ten minutes. God only knew how long that would drag on, Pierluigi pontificating about his expansion plans.

  "If, however, Emilia is chosen," Calvin said, snickering, "the scenery must show the 'mountains of Liverpool' in the background, exactly the way the tenor aria puts it. So, meet you at Toad Hall as usual?" Cal asked, mentioning our favorite hangout on Castro Street, the up-and-coming gay area in town.

  "Don't know when I'll be able to get out of here tonight."

  "You work too hard. Or is it lust for die Grossmägtige Italiener?"

  "Pierluigi? Grow up! Marian A! It's all I can do to keep from barfing in his presence."

  "Are you quite certain? One cannot help but note," Cal said, "that since this particular woman of color has known you, you have not had a single' boyfriend—indeed not a man beyond a one-night stand:—in what is close to a full year! Which, for a lad considered not unattractive by many, and indeed hot by several—although admittedly demented— numbers, must be considered, at the least, vee-strange."