Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  "While you have at least two boyfriends at any given time. I know, I know. Lots of men and little taste. Let's drop the subject, okay?"

  "Okay. But I'll be at your favorite pool table," he tempted, knowing how much I enjoyed beating him at the game.

  "I'll try to make it by seven. Oh, and Cal, Agnes sounds like an absolute winner. They'll love it!"

  "Except where can one find two coloraturas with mezzo ranges?"

  "Surely you jest! Of course you might have to search a bit for a second coloratura bass. Come on, honey! It would fun to cast! Miss Thing at the Opera would make all sorts of enemies over it."

  "It would be fab, if they chose it," Calvin said, cheered again.

  "See you at Toad Hall." I hung up on that high note.

  And moaned.

  Walking through the mezzanine-level art gallery of the store at least ten minutes early and coming at me across twenty-five feet of open air was my boss, Pierluigi Cigna. Flanking him was the smarmy art dealer Vincent Faunce and my cousin Alistair. The three looked as though they'd just hatched some plan, which meant I'd spend most of my meeting with Cigna having to explain exactly why and how it was absurd.

  Yes, Alistair. I'd forgiven him for the Selective Service madness. Forgiven him, and moved to his elected city, where he'd returned himself early in '71 in an attempt to save his real estate business from his unscrupulous ex-lover. That had taken several years and many lawyers and lots of money, with this result: Alistair retained full partnership in the company, but what was left of the assets had been judicially frozen while the company completed its most recent project. Until the suit was settled, it could be thawed only long enough to pay off all creditors. Of course it wasn't that simple; I could go into more detail. Lord knew Alistair had, and sometimes still did whenever some new legal crinkle occurred. I'm just giving the basics he laid down when he applied for the art gallery job.

  Actually, Pozzuoli's had been open almost a year by then; the bookstore, that is, with all the foreign language departments, the magazine section, the record department. All that remained was that lovely blank undecorated space upstairs which led up to the administrative offices. I'd arrived by then. I'd been hired in Manhattan and boosted quickly up the ladder at the main Pozzuoli's—around the corner from the Plaza and the Sherry—and when the Genoan Goose (cigna actually means "swan," but...) offered me the position of store manager of what was the largest and newest and most glam... So I moved to San Francisco last November, knowing absolutely no one in town but Alistair, whom I'd barely spoken to in years, and I sailed into this new shop in the middle of this incredible hotel lobby and I did what anyone with any sense and a still unspent building budget would do: I decorated.

  Decorated like mad whatever was left to do in the store—the marble floors and ceilings were rose-red from Albania!—and when I was done there, on a somewhat smaller budget, I restored and decorated the bright, handsome, elderly four-room apartment I'd taken on Fell Street in the Haight (I know! I know!) within sight of the Panhandle, where the grass had sprung back from where it had been trampled into die greensward, the lawns were now occupied by neckers and occasional sunbathers and more frequently dog walkers, and the whole was completely bereft of flower children, although every once in a while a visiting drug dealer might be discovered standing on a curb looking around, stoned, evidently A Little Late and wondering Where Everyone Was (down in Laguna, in Venice, Key West, or Maui).

  In the near year I'd been here, I'd learned to like the town a bit, learned to hate the psychotic changes in the weather a lot (forty degree drops in temperature in ten minutes is not fun, ever!). I'd hired and fired at the store until I had a staff more or less useful if hardly to my wishes. I'd publicized the place with author appearance parties, evidently a new idea here, although the venerable City Lights Bookstore over on Broadway still managed to throw together a reading every half decade for Allen Ginsberg or Paul Bowles, flown in special from Morocco.

  Pozzuoli's own parties were more formal, more expensive, and infinitely more superficial. The books we feted were "written" by interior designers and flower columnists, by celebrity bridge players and experts on Calabrian majolica and Cretan faience. After much consultation, I'd fixed on a list and invited what was considered the city's "Arty Social Set." I stretched this group considerably with fakers, nouveaus, and snobs, stirred well with a handful of presentable gays, added a dash of media types, and guess what? It worked!

  In ten years in New York, in twenty years in Rome, and in a half century in Florence, a Pozzuoli shop had never been discovered in the black. The shop had merely been a display for the company's huge publishing empire (mags, books, and newspapers); profit had seemed rather beside the point. Thus, everyone was vaguely astonished when my shop made money. Triplets of Italian men in expensive gray suits would suddenly arrive, badly jet lagged, at our offices and would remain upstairs with our accounts for two days before leaving suddenly, still shaking their heads. Usually, the Genoa Goose managed to get word of them and would himself fly in—or up from La Jolla, where he was hunting out a new spot for a store—and accompany them back as far as the Atlantic. Which was fine with me since my Italian was Paleozoic in vintage and the Italians' English virtually nonexistent.

  It was after their penultimate visit that Cigna had okayed opening the art gallery. As the Manhattan shop did, it was to contain lithos, etchings, and drawings, most of them already framed and hung on the walls, along with some unframed ones in sets by the handful of chic contemporary artists like Dubuffet, Dali, and Hockney. Everything would be numbered, but only an occasional special set would be placed in the coffinlike glass display cases for sets smaller than ten. We sold no statuary or paintings, or anything famous, or old, or as expensive as the Fauves, certainly nothing controversial—the kind of thing a middle-level exec would get his wife for their anniversary: not a Major Investment.

  Alistair had been at the "book" signing party where I'd made the formal announcement that the art gallery would be open by the next party. Afterward, he'd taken me to dinner in his neighborhood—Pacific Heights at Broadway—and pumped me so completely about the art gallery I'd finally said, "You sound as though you want the job."

  "Want it? I'd kill for it!"

  "You're kidding! Alistair Dodge work for a living?"

  It wasn't the nicest thing to say. But his response was perfect.

  "I'm not desperate, you understand.... The tax concept 'operating expenses' is a wide umbrella and covers a multitude of sins. But I have to admit, I have been burned by this past partnership and have given serious thought to other areas, other lines of interest."

  "You'd be trained by the Bitch of Bari."

  "I met Giuseppina," Alistair said. "She can't be that bad."

  "If anyone can bring out her latent humanity, you surely can."

  "As it turns out, I know a deal about contemporary art. Had to learn quickly when my stuff began going out to be sold."

  "Poor Alistair!" I commiserated. "Why don't I buy dinner?"

  "Make Pozzuoli pay. You worked overtime tonight."

  "I work overtime every night."

  "How can you have a life?"

  "This is my life."

  "How ghastly! What about..."—Alistair looked around—"boys?"

  "I occasionally go to the tubs! The Ritch Street Baths," I clarified.

  "Oh!"

  "And an occasional bar. A few interesting ones opened south of Market."

  "You mean... Aren't leather bars dangerous?" Alistair asked.

  "Don't be silly! I used to go to Kellers and the Eagle in New York all the time. These places are no different."

  "Really? Near Hamburger Mary's off Folsom Street? We drove past one last month and..."

  "It's not what you think, Alistair."

  "I. blame myself for ruining you," he overdramatized.

  "Grow up, gir—" I caught myself. "Grow up, Alistair. It's not all pain and stuff. It's mostly attitude and costume."

&
nbsp; "You have a lovely apartment, a good job: you should have a lover."

  "I don't want a lover."

  "Surely you don't want to hang around street corners at three in the morning wearing dead cow and waiting for someone sleazy to come by and... do whatever you do?" He trailed off aimlessly.

  "Why not? I used to do it down by the trucks in the Village."

  But the way in which he was asking, his very manner of insisting, made me suddenly think, oh I know it was ridiculous, almost unforgivably absurd, but still... Could Alistair possibly be coming on to me? No! Impossible! Wait, it was possible! Stranger than strange, but possible. He was young and attractive. I was young and attractive. He was hardly a "sister," as Calvin had instantly become, despite the circumstance in which Cal and

  I had met. And yes, there was enough distance and tension between Alistair and me to... I don't blush often. I blushed then.

  "What do you do when you're picked up off street corners in Folsom?" he suddenly asked.

  "Alistair!" I protested and blushed even more.

  "It must be something... you're ashamed of."

  "Drop! The! Sub! Ject!"

  "Or is it some intensely recalled memory?"

  "I'm getting up and leaving now, Alistair."

  "It's dropped! Dropped!" he assured me.

  We sat there a few minutes while my color faded, and I stuffed all thoughts of sex with Alistair deep into the file marked "To be looked at again—maybe never!"

  "It's all my fault anyway," he suddenly said. "Well, it is! I'm the one who brought you out, and I'm the one who screwed it all up. Well, not I, exactly, but because of who it was who... I mean if it were virtually anyone on earth but..."

  He couldn't bring himself to name Julian Gwynne, who, like Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and the astonishing Janis Joplin, hadn't managed to get into the new decade along with the rest of us. To his credit, my first boyfriend and first ex-boyfriend had at least been a bit original in his passing. He'd OD'd in transatlantic flight. Only when the cleaning attendants had broken down the jet's john door had he been found, beatifically smiling, an emptied needle trembling in a ravaged vein of each arm, with a third hypo shivering empty in his neck, barely an inch from his carotid pulse.

  I'd read about his death in the papers. But I'd not gotten details until Gwynne's loyal chauffeur "retired" back to New Jersey months later thoughtfully called to tell me. Naturally, I'd not thought to phone Alistair for details. He'd returned to California by then anyway and was deep in his own woes.

  Out of which I was elected to help him rise.

  Was I being naive in considering him for the job? Foolishly indulgent? Sure, a little of both. Magnanimous too. But I thought practical too. I'd begun studying Taoist philosophy and using I Ching by then, and all the signs seemed to point clearly toward Alistair joining me. Besides which, I needed an ally at the shop, someone to watch my back should things get hairy.

  So I hired him to run the art gallery.

  And this was where we were six months later: Alistair in league with the Genoan Goose and Fatuous Faunce. Not against me, but not quite with me.

  The three had stopped to confab on the step leading down from the gallery to the balcony opposite. The Asian women turned and looked at them, then quickly away, probably because of how good-looking two of the men were—not Faunce, he's a dog! Monika, meanwhile, had moved to the little table and begun wrapping the bibelots. I could see she'd phoned some credit card operator—doubtless American Express—for approval on the sale. She saw the three men and began to blush even more. I'd heard gossip around the shop to the effect that she'd at one time conceived the hots for our boss. In response to her blushing and sudden awkwardness, the two Japanese women snuck looks behind her, whispered behind big sleeves, and giggled, causing poor Monika even more consternation. On the other side of where the three men stood, Justin in the record department balcony changed the music from Rimsky to a guitar quintet by Boccherini—the Goose's theory was that the seriousness of the music was inversely proportionate to sales—and was writing up sales for the Scandinavian discophiles.

  I gathered together the art book catalogs and paper-clipped a note to them reading, "Holly! Help!" She'd know what I meant.

  I pulled on my jacket, straightened my tie, checked my shoes to make sure they looked vaguely polished, checked my face in the compact mirror the women kept in my desk drawer to check makeup, and strode off, headed toward the three conspirators by way of Monika and the Edo darlings.

  Halfway across the walkway, I stopped to look down and inspect the first floor of the shop, most of it visible from here. I checked the front cashier and saw that no obvious disaster had befallen while I'd been at my balcony desk. I contented myself that no browsers looked like thieves, and that Thea and Katja had seen me and broken up their gossip fest. I didn't see Andre, but I intuited that he was among his beloved French books. I moved on.

  And stopped again. There, below me, not twenty feet away, in the poetry section, holding a book in one large outstretched hand, while he turned a page with the other was—I would have sworn it—the Archangel Ariel himself, his wings folded up, hidden away somehow in a U.S. sailor's eyebright middy and thirteen-button "broad-fall" flap-front trousers.

  In an unexpected dimensional shift, his eyes moved to the other page, tilting his head suddenly in another direction, and now I could see the single huge black curl falling across his Alcibiadean brow, the total roundness of those large dark eyes, every tanned plane of that amazing head.

  I felt a sudden burning in my breast and recalled that St. Theresa of Avila had written of being struck in the heart by the blazing dart of Divine Love, and the paradox of enduring such Sweet Agony. So shocked, I had to lean against the walkway railing.

  The sailor must have caught my sudden motion in his peripheral vision: he looked up suddenly, and dimensions shifted again. His direct gaze was so intense it was as though someone had suddenly pulled the blazing dart down through my torso and out of me again via my urethra.

  My head spun, but I managed to get to the far wall, where I found a seat and dropped my head between my knees, glimpsing Daliesque visions of his individual facial features as they fled and cavorted and chased one another through a Palladian cathedral of pastel-hued clouds.

  "You okay?" It was Monika.,

  I was able to look up without feeling total nausea, so I sent her back to her customers.

  "They're gone. We were done," she protested.

  I still shooed her away. Alistair took her place.

  "That time of month?"

  "Go away. Fuck off. Die," I said with no emotion.

  "You'd recover in a second if you knew what Fate just dropped onto the floor of the shop. Down in poetry. The. Most. Beautiful. Young. Man. A sailor... You've seen him!" Alistair suddenly said, intuiting something. "In fact, if I'm not completely gaga..."

  "You are! Completely gaga!"

  "...said lovely is the cause of this sudden attack." •

  "Lunch," I corrected. "A touch of food poisoning."

  "...said Heloise to Abelard. If I were you—and to quote Tom Eyen: 'Who of us is not each other?'—I'd go after that sailor. Or I will go after that sailor."

  "At your own risk," I threatened.

  "All I know is that life would be too unfair if he managed to escape two perfectly good queers without being in some way molested," Alistair said.

  "I have a meeting with Pierluigi."

  "I'll stall him. C'mon!" Alistair urged. "Up and at the lad."

  "What if he's not..."

  "I'll tell Pierluigi you went to the boys' room." Alistair was pushing me toward the stairway. "Go! Will you!"

  I managed to stumble down the stairs to the main floor, hid myself under the edge of the balcony, where Alistair had returned to Faunce and the Goose, fooled around straightening out a volume or two here and there among the gardening books and something new on bargello, and sort of wandered nearer the sailor, half circling him all the while,
ready to flee at the slightest sign of disinterest.

  From this close, he was taller than I'd expected. Six feet, almost six one. Big shoulders. Incredible deltoids, biceps, buttocks, and thighs outlined and simultaneously gripped by the tight cut of his sailor suit. I found myself thinking that the term "animal grace" had been coined just for him. He was still holding the book in his hands, reading it. I tried to make out the cover and thought it might be a recent anthology of poetry. He shifted his pose in place, and it was like continents gliding across the surface of the planet—and that Michelangelesque face!

  Just as I was thinking I can't possibly do this, he peeked over the top of the book at me. Almost inhumanly silver-hued eyes set in a bed of black lashes.

  "Hi," I said, held my breath, and moved to one side of him, adjusting various books on display that didn't at all need adjusting.

  He half smiled. Surprisingly small teeth. Was about to say something.

  "You're fine where you are," I said, about to pass by. Understatement of the century.

  He put down the book. It was the anthology.

  "I should probably buy this," he said in an even-toned baritone. "And not just stand here reading it all." No accent at all. Certainly not from the West or South. Yet not from the Bay Area.

  "No problem," I said, trying to move away, yet magnetically held by his field of attraction. At that moment, I realized I would have said 'no problem' if he'd demanded to remain where he was and behead passing customers. Then, in a flash of unexpected poise, I added, regarding the book he'd been perusing, "It's supposed to be a good sampling."

  "Is it?" he asked, so intensely naive and questioning I stopped about a tenth of my fidgeting.

  "It's supposed to be better than the Oxford Book of American Poetry. Of course this one has English poets too."

  "What about this Auden? He considered English or American?"