Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  If she hadn't sounded so desperate, I might have bullshitted her. But I knew Alistair well, and I recalled how he'd swept Anatole Lamarr off that Cape Cod roof deck before the lobsters were ready to eat, and how they'd reappeared later from some spare room in the tall house, looking flushed but by no means sated, and how Alistair had driven off to P-Town with Anatole for the rest of his stay on the Cape.

  "Send him to Paris for the weekend. Send him to the baths."

  Her answer was slow in coming. "Aren't... I enough?"

  "Wrong thinking. It has nothing to do with you. Do what I say and let him get it out of his system. He'll be okay for months!"

  "I can't do that," she said and changed the topic immediately, talking about inconsequential matters. Before I hung up, I'd said again, "Send him to Paris for the weekend."

  She hadn't. Hadn't been able to bring herself to. And now they were divorcing. I wondered if there had been some lurid discovery: Alistair and the groundskeeper, say—he had always gone in for the staff.

  "Doriot was everything I'd ever wanted," Alistair said now in a tragic voice. "Ever since I was a little boy."

  I recalled him in our suburban Long Island living room late at night watching old black-and-white movies, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette. I remembered his declaration about how he wanted to live in a Manhattan penthouse and be with clever and sophisticated grown-ups. He'd achieved that wish early on. Evidently he harbored other, even more ambitious, dreams I'd not heard of.

  "I'll never get over this failure! Never!" Alistair moaned.

  "Come on, Stairs. You got over the breakup with what was his name? Michael? This is hard, I know, but it'll pass too."

  "Speaking of him, the day I left Sainte-Anne-en-Haute, I found out Michael had died. Went down in that Cessna he bought with my money, somewhere over Santa Catalina Island. And guess what? I get back the property we co-owned on the Coast."

  "So you won't be destitute?"

  "Hardly. Also Doriot's family lawyers have worked out a substantial settlement. In fact, I'll probably be better off than I've ever been. Ironic, no? I didn't want it. Her father insisted. Turns out he liked me! The crazy bastard! He insists I stay in touch."

  "Well! You see? Already it seems—"

  He gripped my arm. "What's the difference how much it is or who likes me, Stodge? My life continues to be a series of unending failures! Disasters! I've still never succeeded at one single thing I set my mind to doing. The L.A. development? A shambles! The Santa Cruz property? In litigation for a decade. Well, now I get it back and I know well enough to let it run itself and to stay away from it. The gallery? A loss of money and a complete failure! My affairs? Catastrophes each and every one. Culminating in my marriage! Oh, Stodge, there was so much promise! So much fuck-ing prom-ise! What happened?"

  Even in the half darkness, I could see his eyes brimming.

  I began talking quietly to him, saying all kinds of stupid, irrelevant, unanswering things which I'd hoped would distract him.

  Finally he said, "Okay! Okay! Enough! Stop, stop!"

  And when I did stop, Alistair said, "You make the worst Pollyanna! I swear! You simply don't have the knack."

  People had begun to gather slowly in the Pines' "downtown": four waiters just off work confabbing; a man and a woman walking their dogs (the animals approached each other and were sniffing); a trio of "numbers" who had stowed their bags under the back deck roof of the Sandpiper and began to strike poses—apparently the last ferry was due any moment now.

  Alistair and I stood up, and he threw an arm over my shoulder and, to my astonishment, scratched his cheek against mine.

  "Thanks for listening to me. I swear I won't subject you to too much more Sturm und Drang in the future, although I'm afraid there will be some."

  "Whenever," I said.

  We edged past the waiters along the harbor walk. Alistair said, "I'm drunk and I want to go to bed. Walk me home?"

  I did, past the Blue Whale, the Pines Pantry, the row of parked boats, to the end, where Tom and Juerg had berthed.

  As I helped him onto the boat; Alistair did suddenly seem especially awkward in the way only alcohol can make one.

  "Years from now, when you talk about this," he began, quoting Deborah Kerr in Tea and Sympathy. "And you will..."

  "I will! And when I do," I interrupted, "I'll say that all the while we were wearing red rubber dildos on our heads."

  Alistair half collapsed with laughter but made it below deck.

  I walked out to the final spit of walkway built into the Great South Bay. I knew it well. Seaplanes took off and landed from this little deck during daylight hours, bobbing upon the water like slightly larger and more elaborate versions of the balsa models I'd constructed as a child. I'd arrived at the Pines via this very spot yesterday at noon, and I'd be here again in less than twenty-four hours, awaiting a plane back to Manhattan. At the inner facing of the dock had been erected one of the harbor's two parallel safety lights, flashing yellow to define the narrow entrance at night, or in fog. Here too was one of the best viewing places in the Pines for sunsets, especially later on in the summer, in September and October. Matt and I used to come here often the first years we estivated on the Island, bundled up in high-collared sweaters against sudden chills, watching the sun descend into the bay waters like a huge time-release tablet of manifold tinges that slowly, inexorably dyed sea and sky in ever-changing, slightly mismatched colors. We'd speak in a hush for minutes afterward whenever we'd manage to espy that rare and wondrous spectacle—the green flash!

  We were seldom alone. Tonight, however, I was. Alone, in the rapidly drying air, watching the mist blow off the island and retreat to its hidden lairs within the water. Alone, left to consider what Alistair had said about failure, about promise.

  The truth was, I'd never been as goal-oriented or as ambitious or even as determined as my cousin had been almost from the first. With me, life's promises had been vague, gleaming with all sorts of wonderful possibilities, but always somewhere over the horizon. My way of getting there had not been the straight line Alistair had forged, with its sharp successes and equally sharp setbacks, but a more indirect approach, encouraged on the one hand by my slowly increasing belief in myself as I got older and saw what I was capable of, yet always tempered by an equal fear and lack of confidence and even more by a deep-seated distrust, not of myself so much as of my own destiny. If pressed to the wall suddenly with a gun held to my head and asked if I thought I would be someone, do something, I wouldn't have known how to answer, really.

  And still didn't. Sure, I'd had some excellent jobs. College textbook editor, manager of Pozzuoli's in Manhattan, then in San Francisco, editor of Opera Monthly, and now of Manifest, the fastest growing and most influential gay magazine in the country. Doubtless, I'd done far more with my B.A. in English (from a college by no means highly rated) than most of my coevals. Not to mention the sheer amount of writing I'd had published, not only in the magazines I'd worked for, but in others too, and in some gay newspapers. It was hardly the big time, hardly what my shy new friend Andrew Holleran (who wrote reviews for our mag) called "Big Girl Stuff"—not Time, not The Atlantic—but lately, whenever people of importance in the gay world were mentioned, my name always seemed to come up. By my position alone, I'd managed to become a sort of central switchboard for gay life in the country in all kinds of odd areas, from poetry to resorts to sex toys to fads and the latest party places. "Queen Control," Luis and Patrick and I laughingly called it—disparagingly. But at times—when a desperate person needed someone to talk them out of suicide, when someone had a sudden illness, an accident—what I knew, whom I knew, could prove awfully effective in mobilizing real help.

  None of us in the media, none of us in the so-called gay community that had developed in the decade since the Stonewall Riot, seemed to have any real program for what we were doing. Naturally we had a public agenda: sodomy laws were to be repealed, discrimination was to be ended, all that. But in o
ther, less defined, more ordinary, more social areas, we were experimenting with different things. This entire "gay" business was still so new, so unprecedented, how could we know what we were doing? We were just trying to do things right. Which meant not as heterosexuals did them, or perhaps not as our parents and teachers did them, and that sometimes meant being outrageous and sometimes meant being merely true to ourselves.

  That, of course, brought on a new fear, innate in the former one: that I'd already far exceeded my promise, already shot beyond the tiny bit my destiny had laid out for me, and was now dangling—unknowingly— over the precipice, with only a ragged shoelace to keep me from dropping into the abyss.

  Thus was I mentally torturing myself, when from behind, I felt the air close up to the exact height and girth and depth of... and at the same time I sniffed that peculiar yet specific combination of hints of body odor and leather and incompletely worn-off shaving lotion that could only be from... and in that very instant I felt slide up over my back and simultaneously across my left pectoral the insinuating yet proprietary caress of...

  "...dark and deeper than any sea-dingle/Upon what man it fall...," Matt quoted incompletely, if appropriately given where we stood, slipping his hand between my short-sleeved arm and polo shirt to emerge at my right nipple, which he held and gently kneaded. He'd pulled up so close behind me he completely blocked the lightly rippling wind from the west bay I only now realized had been a slight, unceasing annoyance.

  "Done with Thaddeus, already?" I asked.

  "Hardly," Matt said with a hint of a chuckle. Then, 'Tor tonight."

  Meaning who knew what, exactly. I didn't. And didn't want to know.

  In the semi-distance we heard the speakers from the Sandpiper go on, as the DJ began trying out his equipment for the night, using the instrumental version of "Fly Robin Fly." I remembered that Howard Merritt would be playing, with his cute lover Jorge—John Iozia's eponymous "My Favorite Cuban"—on the light board.

  From his greater height behind, Matt nuzzled into my hair.

  "Hark, my lord," he said in a stagier voice. "A galleon nears!"

  Against a storm-tossed night sky, the last ferry to the Pines emerged from the mist and presented itself, theatrically defined by its black silhouette and many tiny yellow lighted windows. It was surprisingly close.

  "I put him to bed," I said, meaning Alistair. "He's going to be here for a few days. So will you, right? I know you don't care for him. But try not to let him see it."

  Matt was making little popping noises, his lips against my left ear.

  "Matt?"

  "Umm-hunn," he murmured. "You don't think he'll like... foist himself on me, do you?"

  "Alistair's hardly the foisting kind. He's here with friends."

  Matt was at my ear again.

  "What's with you?" I asked.

  I'd assumed Matt was seeing Thad during the week. Could their relationship be—of all things—platonic?

  "Matt, you're... you're acting like a horny teenager."

  He snuggled even closer, binding me by the upper arms.

  "Matt?"

  "Fucka fucka fucka," he chugged into my ear as he dry-humped me.

  "Stop! You're tickling! Stop!"

  "Fucka fucka fucka." He continued chugging and humping.

  I tried to squirm away. Tried being mean: "Go say fucka fucka to one of your little numbers."

  "Nnnh-nnnm. You're the official lover. You gotta do it when I want."

  "Who says?"

  "It's the rules," he insisted. "You get the perks. Gotta put out."

  "What perks?" I laughingly demanded to know.

  "Endless perks. Social standing. The jealousy of a thousand queens a day. Endless perks and endless delight! Like in Handel."

  "In your dreams!" I scoffed, but as usual, his holding me, caressing me, bussing my ear, my nape, hell, even his voice were, after all these years and after all his efforts, still perfectly tuned erotic instruments to me. As I spoke, I heard, with only a bit of diffidence, my voice softening, felt, with only a hint of betrayal, my body begin to yield.

  It was at that moment of half-involuntary surrender that I noticed the lights do something from below deck on the yacht where Alistair was staying: go on or go out, I couldn't be sure which really, but change somehow; signaling to me that he was not asleep as I'd thought, not fallen unstripped into his bunk in a semi-alcoholic stupor, but awake, even alert, watching us, wanting us to know he was watching.

  "Lezz go, hnnh?" Matt insisted.

  "It's a long, long way to Sky Walk," I teased.

  But it wasn't after all that very long a walk, and we'd already had a few summers' practice in this sort of thing, so it just encouraged us in finding new ways to play with and taunt and sex-tease each other at every other crossing boardwalk all the way there, and even before we'd gotten to the branch-off to our house, we'd stripped off our shirts and belts, and by the time we'd made it inside the house, neither hurricane nor the End of the World itself could have stopped us.

  Some time into it in our bedroom, I lifted up Matt's head from just below my clavicle, where he seemed to be methodically love-biting an entire necklace of hickeys. "Wait! Shh! Do you hear something?"

  "It's the Pines! Remember! The house is twelve feet off the ground, swaying on wooden stilts," Matt replied, "I'll bet they can hear us in here too."

  "No, it's not that. The front door maybe."

  "Patrick and Luis. Going out dancin'," Matt said and went back to work on my love bites.

  I heard the sound again. Of course, Matt might have been right. One heard every kind of noise with these houses. Maybe it was just Marcy, getting up to go to the bathroom.

  "What if it's a thief?" I asked. Matt seemed oblivious in his lovemaking.

  "We don't have anything worth taking."

  "What if it's a rapist?"

  "Too bad for him," Matt said. "I've got first dibs."

  "So I see. What is it with you tonight anyway?" I asked.

  "Hold on a sec," Matt said, and came a second time.

  He kissed me gently, lifted his body off me, and lay next to me, his long, well-muscled body all but purring, lightly vibrating the entire mattress.

  "Now, what was your exact question?" he asked. "Are you telling me that I've got to make up excuses for screwing the man of my dreams?"

  "Well, you are here on the Island all week. I'd just assumed..."

  "Assumed what? That I'm fucking everyone all day long."

  "Something like that, sure."

  "Well, I'm not. I've got standards, you know. A reputation."

  "Said," I said, "in the exact tone of Little Lulu."

  "Which is?" he asked.

  "Snooty, yet unable to completely pull it off."

  "Oh? Little Lulu from the comics," Matt said, ignoring the rest of my explanation and going off to ask, "Do you remember Mr. Myxtplqztrx?"

  "Sure. From the sixth dimension. Weird, little weasely guy in Superman."

  "He wasn't that weasely!" Matt said.

  "Sure was! Cross-eyed. Hair went off in all directions..."

  "I sort of liked Mr. Myxtplqztrx's bowtie. And his little suit."

  "That's not how his name was pronounced," I said.

  "The point was, I thought, that his name was unpronounceable," Matt corrected me. "At any rate if Mr. Myxtplqztrx were out here in the Pines, that's who I'd screw around with!"

  "And here I've been, fool enough to think you loved me for my body."

  Matt groaned heavily. "Aaaah! I'm bushed!"

  Unsurprisingly. By the clock, we'd been fucking for an hour and a half.

  "I guess I won't go out either tonight," I said. "Harte's in L.A., so I have a break. I know what! I'll get up early and make a big breakfast for my honey and for my feminist guest. I'll rush down to the harbor for the Sunday Times and fresh scones. It'll all be ter-rib-ly civilized. Ter-rib-ly Architectural Digest."

  Matt hoisted himself into a sitting position. And sighed. "Piss."
>
  "No, thanks, I'm Ml."

  He was too exhausted even to laugh. He got off the bed slowly and stood up, swayed left slightly, caught himself on the door joist, went into the john, and urinated loudly.

  When he came out again, he held a razor and a fresh emery board and tossed, them onto my lap. "C'mon boy, get up and work. That's all you're here for, you know! That, and because you're a fair piece of poontang!"

  He lay down again heavily and began to push his denims off his legs. I crawled to the far edge of the bed and pulled them completely off. I removed his boots, the one regular one and, far more gingerly, the other one, with its built-in plastic construction. The socks. And the special nylon stockings over the foot. It looked swollen tonight, and while I knew it didn't—couldn't—hurt deeply, I knew he felt the skin, and so I was extra careful pulling down the nylon. I lightly shaved the area so no hairs could treacherously turn inward and fester, used the emery to rub off dead skin, and covered the foot with antibiotic talcum all over. I moved to his other foot and felt at the clipped-back-to-skin toenails and filed them back even more, so he wouldn't scratch himself in his sleep and unknowingly infect himself. I reached down and did the same to the nails on my own toes, so that I wouldn't, in my sleep, next to him, be the agent of harm. I gently massaged his foot—the foot—trying not to let any feelings show through my touch, at the missing toes, at the unhealthy plump softness and potentially fetid flesh. Just to be fair, I massaged his other foot too. And finished by pulling the sheet up his legs.

  "Matt?"

  "Thanks, babe. Come up here, yeah?"

  "Okay. But first... about Thaddeus.... You're not..."

  Matt was sleepy but still strong enough to pull me up next to him.

  "I'm not what?... I told you I wasn't screwing with Thad."

  "You're not... you're not falling in love with him, are you?"

  His head had rolled over on the pillow. It swerved back to stare.

  "Why are you doing this?" he asked—accused, really. "We were having such a good night and you—"