Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  The image he'd presented was so... was it tragically funny, or absurdly sad? I'd be damned if I could tell.

  "When was this?" I asked.

  "Some months ago."

  I wanted to ask, Was that when you were wounded? Since now I was sure that his lower left leg had scars on it. That was why he'd not taken off the pants leg or sock before, why he kept his leg wrapped in the quilt now, and probably why he was getting out of the Navy at last—because he might not have a choice anymore. Instead I said, "Sounds like you had some times there."

  I guess I expected him to tell me more, to continue on in that same tone of voice. Instead he darkened up and said, "It's over now."

  "The war?"

  That's what we—my friends and I, the doves, the antiwar people— hoped. Not what they—the Nixonites, the hawks, the gung-hos—were admitting. At least not yet.

  "The war too," he said. Then, "Let's not talk now, okay? Let's just listen to this."

  "Rossini's Torvaldo e Dorliska! Would I make that up?" Calvin asked.

  "Of course you would."

  "Bitch!" he replied, without emotion. "However, I did not. That was Miss Smith's choice. Either that or Donizetti's Imelda de' Lambertazzi. Go on, say it."

  "Say what?" I asked.

  "That ain't real either."

  "Who knows, girl! Donizetti wrote about a million operas. Besides the dozen or so we all know about, just this week I've heard of Torquato Tasso, Il Duca d'Alba, Poliuto, Maria di Rohan, and Linda di Chamoimix! But, are you ready, Leontyne? 'Cause, lucky you, the dish-mobile has driven up to your door."

  "What dish-mobile?" Calvin asked suspiciously.

  "I actually talked with Estelle this morning and finagled her recommendation out of her."

  Estelle Thunneman had been editor at the magazine before Calvin took over, and she remained the magazine's doyenne, still much beloved and respected among the staff. At least some of the staff. Calvin remained ambivalent.

  "Well?" he asked.

  I let it spin out: "Marschner's Der Vampyr."

  "Whaaat!"

  "Marschner's Der Vampyr," I repeated.

  "Get real, Hildegarde. This is Big Girl Stuff."

  "It is real. She's even got a recording of it."

  "Honey, Miss Estelle's been smoking banana peels again."

  "And furthermore, there's a soprano part in it with a tessitura that lies directly within Leonie Rysanek's range. It goes without saying that Miss Thing at the Opera will do anything to get Rysanek back. Anything! So, if she gets wind of Der Vampyr and wants to do it, you can believe it will get done. I don't care what else..."

  "Nurse!" Calvin called out. "Oh, Nurse! Hurry, please! This one's gone off the deep end!"

  "Just don't tell anyone what I said, Calvin honey, or you'll be eating fried chicken out of your ear like the Abominable Dr. Phibes. Understood?"

  "You've done wonders with the local poultry, Vulnavia," he misquoted Vincent Price from the movie. "Understood," he grudgingly admitted. Then, "By the way, I played pool until my fingers got bent. Where in hell were you?"

  It was the day after I'd met Matt. I was back up in my balcony office at Pozzuoli, allegedly on my lunch break, the Chronicle and the New York Times spread out in front of me: old habits die hard, and the latter did have the only crossword puzzle worthy of me.

  "Didn't I tell you?" I asked.

  "Tell me what?" Calvin asked. "And if this is going to be another story about seeing some boy who reminded you of that dead rock guitarist only six white people ever heard of..."

  "Better than that. I met an angel and got laid."

  "Laid?" he asked. "You ain't been laid in months!"

  "It's not been that long. Yes, laid. Laid! Relaid! And parlaid!"

  "Whooo-ooh!" Calvin's voice squealed into stratospheric tonal regions previously only approached by Mado Robin. "Tell me every-thing!"

  I told him everything.

  "If I were you, girl," Calvin said, when I'd come up for a temporary breather, "I would keep that angel away from every living faggot in town. And espexially away from that cousin of yours."

  Calvin even uses the x when spelling out the word in notes.

  "I know you don't particularly care for Alistair...," I began.

  "I don't particularly care for honkys who say 'Have a Nice Day' and girls with teased hair and dead-porcupine meat. Alistair, I plain hate!"

  "...but you don't think he'd seriously interfere, do you?"

  "I do believe he'd not only seriously interfere, I also think he'd eat your eyes out! Without condiments," Calvin clarified.

  "Well, the funny thing is, you know, when we were kids, everyone said how much Alistair and I looked alike. And, frankly, since then, we've both just assumed he was better looking than me. But yesterday Matt passed him twice and he didn't even notice Alistair!"

  "Umm-hnnh!" Calvin said. "Your cousin is a Badly Burned Queen. And what does history, never mind opera, teach us about how Badly Burned Queens act? Honey, keep this angel to yourself. No kidding."

  An employee, Andre, was standing at the end of my balcony, a step down, with a hangdog look on his face, defining him as suppliant. What now?

  "Well, I can't simply lock Matt up. Look, Cal, gotta hang up. One of the peons is demanding another extension of largesse. We'll talk later."

  "You seeing him tonight?" Calvin asked.

  "Alistair? I see him every day. Why?"

  "The Angel."

  "He went up the coast for the day to Bolinas and Mount Tam. We're meeting at my place."

  "I sure do hope he's the one," Calvin said.

  I hung up—and inwardly I thanked Calvin for loving me so well.

  "Oui, M. Brun? Qu'est-ce que c'est alors?"

  Evidently Pierluigi had already made his decision in favor of the Faunce's further involvement with the art gallery, and done so without bothering to tell me—though I was store manager and he had, recall, promised.

  Following Andre's doleful complaint in wildly inappropriate English translation, I headed toward the elevator, aimed for the stockroom, where, allegedly, an entire section of Andre's French language stock had been "molested and dematerialized" (exact translation of what he said) by an invasion of so-called art.

  At the elevator, I rang and rang. I spotted the car coming and going up and down, but it was only when I rapped hard on the little window between and yelled at Faunce inside to stop and open it up that I began to get a full picture of what was really going on.

  Faunce was deep amid cardboard-and brown-paper-wrapper-framed somethings or others (we shall not dignify it by calling it art). There was no room for me even to stand.

  "As you can see," Faunce said, "we're full up."

  "Then empty out," I replied. "As you well know, this elevator is the only means of conveyance between here and the offices and the stockroom, and I can't have it out of order."

  "But...," Faunce began.

  I was already tossing things out of the elevator and onto die floor.

  "Wait! You can't..."

  It was only when he'd moved forward reaching for one of them that I saw my chance. He was half out the elevator doors, and I moved him a bit more, shut the doors, and descended to the stockroom.

  The doors opened up to a mess of more wrapped, framed works scattered everywhere. In the distance, at the end of one row of metal shelving, I saw Alistair's back in the midst of what had once been French book inventory.

  "Just leave them!" he said to me, without turning around. "It'll be another half hour till I can get to them."

  I let the elevator close behind me, and approached.

  "My French department is about to quit."

  Alistair whirled. He'd taken off his jacket, and his shirt had underarm sweat stains—evidently from labor: a most unaccustomed sight on him.

  "Alistair, I'm running an international bookstore for which I require a French department. I do not require an art gallery."

  "Pierluigi said I could take some of this
space."

  "Some is not all." "Well, as you can see, Faunce had more stuff than I'd anticipated."

  "I need my French department. Where is it?"

  "I've only moved these old leather binding things. Packed them up. They've been sitting here since Charlemagne croaked," Alistair said.

  Actually, he wasn't too far off.

  "Surely they can be put somewhere out of sight?" he asked.

  "Maybe you're right, and maybe I can make amends to Andre, but you still don't have room for all... this junk!" I gestured.

  Alistair sat down dejectedly, wiping his neck with his handkerchief. "That's for sure."

  Oddly, I felt sorry for him. "Well, concentrate on trying to put away what you've got here, because no more's coming down. I can't have the elevator tied up all day."

  Alistair sighed deeply. "He's got tons more."

  "He'll have to bring it later."

  "Tonight then!"

  It was Faunce who said that. He'd found his way down the rickety staircase into the stockroom and stood there with two or three more framed thingamabobs under each of his arms.

  "Tonight's no good," I said. "I'm leaving the minute I lock up."

  "We'll do it while you count the money," Faunce said. "Don't you have to count out the money?" he asked.

  "As you can see for yourself," I attempted to reason with him, "there is no room here for your stuff."

  "We can find room by tonight," Faunce insisted.

  "Tonight's no good," I repeated. "I have a date."

  "Call and make it later," Faunce said.

  "I'm meeting someone coming from out of town. No phones. No way to change it," I said, trying to remain calm despite my growing irritation with him.

  Faunce persisted. "There's always a way to call and change a date."

  The smug look, the whiteness of his pinched nose in the middle of that florid face, the particular slant of his porcine eyes—all of it, allied to the querulousness of his voice, decided me.

  "If I'd had a little forewarning," I said, controlling myself with every ounce of effort, "perhaps I could have—" "Why should you have to be told?" Faunce sniffed.

  That did it.

  "Faunce, this is not going to happen! Face it!"

  His face looked as if I'd just slapped it.

  "The world happens to not always move to our whims," I went on. "And my particular area of the world does not move to your whim. Is that clear?"

  "Pierluigi will hear about this!" Faunce had the nerve to say. "And you'll hear from him!"

  "It'll be the first I'm hearing about any of this shit! So I expect it will be accompanied by profuse apologies!" I said. "And you know how much Pierluigi likes to apologize," I added, letting that sink in. "Now, keep your so-called art off my elevator until tomorrow morning before we open. And do not," I turned to Alistair, "I repeat, do not harass any more staff. Or blood shall flow!"

  Behind me, as I rang for the elevator, I heard muttering.

  A few hours later, Alistair joined me up at my desk.

  "Very impressive!"

  "Don't start, Alistair."

  "No, really! I'm impressed! Who would have dreamed that you of all people would pull such a Margo Channing?"

  "It was hardly a Margo Channing."

  "When you left, Faunce was chewing nails! Face it, kid, your princesshood is over." Alistair lit a Tareyton and inhaled deeply. "Full regnitude has descended upon your shoulders."

  "Alistair, stop!" I said, but I suspected he was right about the scene I'd pulled.

  "You've made an enemy, you know," Alistair said. Then in another voice, "So tell me. This date? Not Mr. Beautiful from last night?"

  Calvin's talk had put me on guard.

  "The same."

  "We getting serious?" Alistair all but cooed.

  "We are having a second date."

  "We talking a September wedding?" Alistair asked.

  "He's a sailor!" I said:

  He shrugged. "Domesticity comes in all forms." "I'll settle for a few more dates."

  We talked a bit about Matt, Alistair eliciting a great deal more information about him than I really wanted to tell. But as we talked, it seemed that he was genuinely disinterested and genuinely glad for me— not at all bitchy or envious as Calvin had said he'd be.

  "Maybe you should be looking around for a lover too," I suggested.

  "I'm done with love!" Alistair said theatrically, and smashed out his cigarette on the desk ashtray so assiduously that little of it remained. "After what that son of a bitch did to me, I'll never let another man into my life."

  I hadn't known he was so bitter. He'd hidden it well.

  "That wasn't love, Alistair. That was business! Bad business!"

  "Business," he said very primly, "is what I'm going to concentrate on from now on."

  "Said like Roz Russell. You'll have to start wearing those pin-striped suits with wide lapels and little Robin Hood hats with enormous feathers."

  "You're joking, Rog. I'm not. Why do you think I'm doing all this with Faunce?"

  "I've been wondering."

  "Building a nest egg. A solid one. We may even go into business together later on. But I'll have my attorney devise a breakout clause which leaves anyone who tries to screw me so high and dry Mount Everest will seem like the tropics!"

  "Do you really think there's money in this?" I asked.

  "Some. But Vincent and his wife, Elena, know all the right people here in town, oddly enough. That's what I really want them for. To connect me up right."

  Odd was right. I would have thought Alistair far better connected than either of them.

  "Are we talking new sources of capital here or rich husbands?"

  "New capital! Silent partners! Rich husbands! Rich wives!"

  "Wives? Come on."

  Alistair defended himself. "I've had affairs with women."

  "Judy What's-her-name a million years ago!"

  "Since too," he said staunchly. "In Nob Hill circles, I'm a noted bisexual."

  "Fine. I'll dance at your wedding," 1 said, then added, "Me and Mr. Beautiful."

  "It's a deal! Meanwhile try to bear with Faunce, even though I'll do my utmost to keep him out of your way."

  "That's a deal," I said, and we shook on it.

  You see, Calvin, I told myself, you're wrong about Alistair.

  "If I lived this close, I'd probably come here every day," Matt said. We were just leaving the Japanese Tea Garden, slowly walking along a loop of asphalt embedded in lawn, headed for the front of the de Young Museum. We'd been on our feet for several hours, and I was beginning to worry about his leg.

  "I come here whenever I can," I admitted. "And did so more before I became gainfully, if tragically, employed."

  Matt looked at me in that way that showed he appreciated that I was "using" language (i.e., doing something with it) to please him.

  "I'm beat!" I added. "Let's stop."

  It was a late Sunday afternoon, and quite solidly sunny and warm for San Francisco. Despite the day, a school bus was lined up in front of the museum. We'd been inside earlier, looking mostly at the Oriental Arts collection ("Shoji screens for weeks!" Calvin said of his one visit. "And enough tans for every Madama Butterfly that ever trod the boards!") but we'd not seen any kids. Maybe an older tour group was using the bus. Now I dropped my jacket onto the lawn and fell atop it. Matt looked hesitant. Until I reached up and pulled him down next to me.

  "What's that?" he asked, just now spotting another building through the trees.

  I told him it was the California Academy of Sciences, "which no living human has ever willingly entered."

  Matt laughed. "You're funny."

  He put his head next to mine, as we looked up at the few small, dappled clouds. San Francisco is generally lousy for cloud watching, unless you maybe go to Land's End just before a major storm arrives. For high whites, the East Coast is superior, and the Midwest best of all. So while he watched clouds, I watched Matt.

 
I still couldn't believe he was here with me, next to me. Still couldn't believe he'd been with me nearly a week, or that he was so astonishingly good-looking. In fact, every time I looked at him, I kept finding new aspects of his beauty. The creaminess of the skin on the high insides of his arms. The massive, almost tumorous, solidity of his biceps. The extraordinary soaring architecture of his shoulder blades seen from behind. The seemingly Chinese delicacy and porcelain hardness of his clavicle. The tornado swirls of dark-colored hair around his navel, and their vectors south into a hurricane of pubic bush, then north and thinner, reduced to a virtual pencil line pointing toward each perfect areola surrounding a nipple atop his breastbone. The auricular curlicues of modestly fuzzed cartilage that composed his ears. The slight dimple at the end of his nose that could only be noticed close up, and which made it seem so much more defined from farther away. The astonishing definition of his upper lip, almost a line, and its cherrylike coloring, as though someone had applied lipstick in embryo and it had never rubbed off. The near-agate mosaic of his eyes, corneas mostly a silver-gray, but speckled lighter, a star-burst pattern at the center in paler gray, ice green, turquoise, sienna, amethyst, even lemon yellow. From the tiny perfect knob under his knee that connected the two long muscles running beneath his thigh down into the one that ran below his calf, to the nearly feathered tiny V's of hair that made up his sideburns, I'd never before encountered such an idealization of form, or, more impressively, such a lavish extravagance of detail! As though once he'd been shaped, his Creator had been so surprised, so pleased with the result, He'd come back again and again, dotingly, to touch up his Work.

  "You know what that little pagoda in the garden reminded me of?" Matthew asked, suddenly sitting up.

  It was fruitless to guess. In the few days, I'd already learned he might say virtually anything after an intro like that.

  "This wat—a Buddhist temple—in Danang," Matt continued. (See what I mean?) "The funniest thing happened when I went inside."

  "Oh?" I encouraged him.

  "Not funny, ha ha, but..." Matt looked at me. "You don't want to hear this."

  I grabbed him around the neck. "Kill and eat!" I threatened.

  "Well, okay, I'll tell you. But I warned you, it's really dumb... When we were stationed there, I used to go around Danang. You know, like a tourist, with a camera and all. I guess I shoulda been a little afraid. The VC were all over the city, as we found out once it was retaken. And there were incidents—delivery boys riding by on a bike who'd assassinate you, that sort of thing. But for some reason I never felt afraid in Danang. I'd leave the guys at a cafe or restaurant and go wandering on my own. I liked the place. It was more, you know, Asian to me than Saigon, which is sort of like Paris done up in neon and chopsticks.