Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Alistair wouldn't have a chance!

  "It's me," Alistair identified himself when I picked up the phone. "Is Matt there?"

  "He's at the Botel gym."

  "Good! I'll be right over. I've got something to show you."

  "Can't it wait? I'm getting ready to leave."

  "Taking a seaplane?"

  "It'll be at the harbor in a half hour. I wanted to stop at the bank and at the Pantry deli to get a nosh and—"

  "I'll go with you. Don't leave without me." Alistair hung up.

  It was nearly noon, Monday. I was alone in the house, more or less dressed and packed. Without Matt and Luis and Patrick, Withering Heights looked and felt empty. It was better outside, sitting at the little table overlooking the view of the Great South Bay. Except that now streaks of long, thin clouds had begun to scrim in from Sayville. I prayed they wouldn't thicken and cover the Bay until my plane had already taken off. Seaplane pilots didn't fly in mist, and the last thing I was prepared for today was the alternative—a three-hour ferry, cab, Long Island Rail Road train, and subway ride home.

  I was wondering whether or not to leave a note for Matt. We'd still hardly spoken, although we'd ended up making love early in the morning. Nothing conclusive in that, of course, nothing even indicative: it had become clear by now that Matt's and my physical contact led a life virtually independent of anything else in our relationship. We would not talk for a week and still screw like mad every night. A note saying what? What could a note say Matt wasn't already aware of?

  "You waited!" Alistair was huffing; he must have dashed up Sky

  Walk's steep hill to make certain not to miss me. "Here! Look at these!" He thrust a handful of typewritten pages into my hand.

  I glanced at the top one: the uncapitalized tide, "solstice," and two lines down, margin left, the continuation, "nightcall" was the title on the next page. The third one didn't have a title, but began directly with:

  first

  i unlace the shoes, then i take off my watch.

  unbutton the pants, the shirt comes out.

  the tongue comes out

  and then the air.

  i take the teabag of my brain out

  leaving the cup of blood to grow cold.

  i'm beyond glass now. i am hard on

  one side of the wind, on the voice you raise

  from lungs i gave you. now i

  give them up like a bird and rise.

  if absence casts no shadows

  then i am the sun

  whose only shadow is your skin.

  "This one must be new," I said. "Haven't seen it before."

  Alistair stared, openmouthed. "You know about them?"

  "Sure, I know. Matt's showed me about thirty over the years."

  "You know about them?" Alistair repeated. "And you've done nothing about them?"

  "I've admired them. In earlier days, I'd make suggestions here and there. These," shaking the other sheets, "used to have conjunctions until I suggested they be taken out and everything tightened up."

  "That's all?" Alistair insisted.

  "I've told him to send them out. I've given him addresses, names...."

  I didn't like feeling put on the spot in this way. I stood up, pulled my weekender onto my shoulder, and threw my lace-tied Stan Smiths across the bag.

  "Alistair, I will not be late! I'm walking along the surf."

  "I'll go with you," he said.

  When we reached the Ozone Walk entrance to the beach, I said, "I don't want to seem blase, and I know how exciting it can be when you discover that someone you like is a good poet. But... he just won't get them out where they can be read. Afraid of rejection, of not being understood. I don't know what all else is involved."

  "Whatever's involved? Don't you feel a responsibility to him?"

  The tide was ebbing but still strong. The sand looked roughed-up from the previous night: where the ocean had eaten into the shoreline, a four-foot cliff rose, twisting and turning as far as I could see in either direction. We could either walk along its crumbly top edge or down below, upon wetter, harder-packed sand. I opted for the upper level, Alistair for the lower.

  "Responsible? No. They're Matt's work," I said, attempting to keep my balance.

  "I don't believe this!" Alistair insisted.

  "Well! As Dorothy Parker said, 'You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think'!"

  "Very clever! Always finding the clever, the easy, way out!"

  "What do you want me to do with the damn poems?"

  "Publish them! You are a magazine editor!"

  "In Manifest?"

  "Why not?"

  "Between 'Tips from Mr. Leather Master' and the centerfold? A nineteen-year-old model/actor/waiter from Cedar Rapids who loves 'Rhoda' and wants to be president of his 4-H club?"

  "Why not?"

  "It's too lowbrow for Matt's work."

  "Then make it higher-brow. Commission artwork. Photos, maybe. What's the name of that guy who did those great photos last month? Maplejuice?"

  "Mapplethorpe."

  "Use some of his photos! Make a photo-poetry essay! Four pages long." "You really think so?" I asked.

  "Don't you think you owe it to Matt?" Alistair asked.

  Who knew anymore what I owed Matt? Or he me? I decided it was far safer to change the subject.

  "Did I gather from various hints yesterday that Horace Brecker's going to be staying with you?" I asked.

  "Ought to raise the fun potential a bit. Don'cha think he's cute? Actually, he is totally straight."

  "Perhaps. But you know my definition of straight: a man who doesn't suck cock regularly. Anyway, after a few weeks here at the Pines, he'll either give way somewhat or rape the first female he can lay hands on. What's the story with him?"

  "Had a woman friend for some years. But now he's career-building. They were kaput months ago. Stayed with us in France, and it was obvious they were waiting for someone to send them a telegram to confirm the fact."

  "I was surprised how much like Doriot he looks," I said, suspecting I was treading on dangerous ground. "By the way, you never actually told me what happened to lead to your splitting up."

  "Nothing actually 'happened.' She simply failed to grow in sophistication as I'd hoped."

  "In other words, she wouldn't let you screw the gardener?"

  "Actually I thought women were far more, you know, flexible, about these matters. Not old Doriot."

  We were at the co-ops, almost in the middle of the Pines now, starting toward the harbor, when I suddenly heard the loud rotor of a helicopter. It hovered oyer Ocean Walk, which separates the beachfront houses from the next line in, then it edged onto the beach, coming our way, descending fast.

  There weren't many people on the sand, but everyone cleared out as the police helicopter slowly revolved and dropped. When it landed, it blew sand a hundred feet in all directions. What was going on?

  Julio, one of the Pines' two-man police squad, could be seen now standing on the long walkway extending from Nick and Enno's house out to the beach. He was signaling to someone inside the chopper.

  A man in a white uniform popped out of the copter's side door and ran up the stairs into the house. Another man in white stepped out, half carrying, half hauling a metal contraption. Once he got it up the stairs, he and Red, the other Pines cop, kicked it open—turning it into a gurney on wheels—and rolled it across the deck to the sliding glass doors. They went inside too.

  In seconds they were out again, carrying someone on the gurney, one of them holding what looked to be a breathing apparatus.

  What the...?

  Enno came out of the house, talking fast to Rick Wellikoff. Enno had to bend his tall body to follow the gurney into the helicopter. The chopper rose with another blast of sand, hovered, spun around, then headed away over the co-ops to the Bay.

  I ran to the walkway where Rick stood with the policemen.

  "What happened?" I asked Rick.

&nbs
p; "They took Nick to Babylon State Hospital. Pneumonia! Spiking fever!"

  "Jesus! I hope he's going to be okay."

  "Phone here later and check in," Rick suggested. Then Julio and Red pulled him inside the house before I could get any details.

  "Pneumonia?" Alistair was as startled as I was when I reported it. "They haven't been doing ethyl chloride? I hear it freezes the lungs."

  "Unlikely. Nick and Enno are health nuts. Bee pollen. Vitamins. You name it They don't even use sugar."

  By the time we'd gotten to the little Pines harbor, the chopper was invisible. Alistair nodded toward all the wagons chained up in rows: the only way to move groceries or large objects in a community without roads or cars.

  "They look funny, don't they?" he said.

  "I came across on a ferry one afternoon earlier this summer with an insurance claims adjuster," I said. "Cute young guy. We got to talking. He'd come to check out the house on Black Duck and Bay that burned down. I told him all he'd find was a few charred sticks of foundation left in sand. He'd never been to the Island before. When we landed and saw all the wagons, he asked if there were many children here."

  Alistair laughed. "What did you say?"

  "I told him this was the Isle of Lost Boys."

  "From Pinocchio!"

  "Peter Pan... Give me the poems, Alistair. I'll publish them."

  "You're a doll! Now, don't forget! Friday afternoon at three on the dot, we meet at Klinger's!"

  "I know I'm going to regret it," I moaned.

  "I don't believe this is happening!" I turned to the Grunt in panic. "Say it's not! Say something!"

  Bernard looked me as straight in the eye as he could, given his squint. "It's happening. I could have predicted it. It's your own fault."

  "My fault?"

  "Your fault!" he insisted.

  "Because I tried to cooperate with Harte? Because I tried to accept and accommodate her?"

  "Because you didn't kill her and scatter her body in ash cans around the city when you had the chance," the Grunt said.

  I stared at Jersey Joe, spread-eagled by thongs and pushpins on the wall above our publisher's desk. Joe wore a silver bathing cap. A black racing suit wrapped his lower torso. Six fake Olympic medals were splayed upon his considerable, stuffed chest. His button eyes were inscrutable behind solarized water goggles.

  Mad and amusing as this was iconographically, it could in no way compensate for the past ten minutes of my life. I'd sailed into our monthly update meeting, at which editorial staff and publisher laid out and discussed a rough "book" of the next issue. This meeting had been attended by myself and the Grunt as well as by Sydelle Auslander and our art director, whose increasing interest in Eastern mysticism had led us to refer to him as "Swami Powell" or, more simply, the Swami.

  For a while, the meeting had gone well. Harte found Sydelle's feature on "Biker Dykes" a strong follow-up to my lead story on the fire at the baths. Those were followed by my interview with Isherwood—third of my "Homo Authors of the Past." The two commissioned pieces—the one a report on gay resorts in the Pacific, the other a humorous essay on how to be openly gay on your college campus and still have fun—for this, our "Back to School" issue, were deemed okay. The centerfold was a recent also-ran for Playgirl and of high quality, though his rep in Waikiki was pure diva. Our news items—what was "hot and breaking" concerned the Greenwich Village protests over the filming of the movie Cruising with its sure-to-be-negative gay images, the recent success of the movie Alien, which forever changed how one thought of tummy aches, and Tennessee Williams's revision of his Summer and Smoke, called The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, starring Blythe Danner and Frank Langella, just aired on public television. Then we'd come to the four-page layout the Swami, the Grunt, and I had put together last night using some Mapplethorpe photos in our files and six of Matt's poems.

  I thought the Grunt's choice of typefaces excellent. I thought the Swami's layout equally classy. Alistair was right: the poems and photos looked so good the entire issue now edged a bit toward the higher-browed.

  "Gee," Stephen Forrest Harte, our publisher, said, looking at the layout, the most childish of looks upon his already childlike face. "What's this?"

  "Surprise!" I said.

  "Poetry?"

  "Good poetry," the Grunt—Matt's biggest fan—said.

  "Gay poetry," I added. "Mandate's already run poetry by—"

  "Saw it! Nice photos! Do we own them?" Harte asked Swami.

  "Pub rights only. He keeps all originals."

  Harte had gone back and forth, back and forth, page after page, reading the poems. He'd finally looked up and had been about to say, "Fine, next!" when Sydelle Auslander spoke up.

  "I realize it isn't my place to be concerned with the image of the magazine," she began,

  "Of course it is," Harte responded, falling into the trap. "It's all of our place. That's why we all attend these meetings."

  "Well, then... I personally think that publishing those poems will open up the magazine to attack. Especially our editorial policy."

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

  "Why is that, Ms. Auslander?" Harte asked.

  "It would be different if we published poetry on a regular basis. But we don't. To have these suddenly appear, so lavishly produced, with everyone knowing the nepotism involved..."

  I'd nurtured this viper at my breast, encouraged her....

  "We've got to start publishing poetry with someone's work, no?" Harte took the role of devil's advocate. "Loguidice's seem as good as any."

  "They're fine. But everyone will know they've been published because his lover's the editor," she said.

  It was at that moment that our harassed advertising director barged into the meeting with a major crisis he had concerning a large client of the magazine, who hated the latest placement of an ad by our art director. Swami and Harte rushed out to confront the advertiser; and, sensibly, Sydelle excused herself before I could leap up from my chair and tear out her throat.

  "What do you suggest we do?" I finally asked the Grunt.

  "I could have forgiven her anything else," he said darkly.

  "Bernard?" I asked. His voice sounded so odd.

  The Grunt looked up. "For all my talk, I could have, would have, really forgiven her anything else. But to do this... to Matt!"

  His tone of voice reminded me of those women in British telly movies, at the moment they slip a fatal convulsant into the kiddies' marzipan.

  "We'll get over it, Bernard! Matt doesn't know I wanted to use the poems. He needn't ever know."

  "It's actually better this way," the Grunt went on in that same I'm-fine-it's-all-of-you-who're-bonkers tone of voice, "because now I see it all writ large and what I merely suspected about her is all too clear. She is Evil incarnate and must be destroyed."

  "Now, Bernard, slow down. I'll handle this. You must do nothing."

  "I must!" he insisted.

  Before either of us could do anything, however, Harte and the Swami returned to the office. The disaster of losing a major advertiser had been narrowly averted, and the triumph in this achievement made it all the sweeter, even for someone as allegedly "egoless" as our art director prided himself on being of late. To my surprise, Sydelle did not slip back in their wake. But then, why expose herself so needlessly? She'd done the damage already. That was soon evident.

  "Okay, so we're close to a frozen September issue," Harte said.

  Neither the Grunt nor I wanted to ask what that meant in terms of Matt's work. Which left the Swami to ask, "And these pages of poetry and poems?"

  Harte looked up. "Sorry." To Powell: "What else do you have for here?"

  Naturally Powell had what I'd shoved aside, which Harte eagerly approved. And our meeting was over.

  Two hours later, Harte called me into his office.

  "Roger! I'm worried about you. About us?"

  "It's Friday," I said. "I didn't lunch. I leave in five minutes."

&
nbsp; "You didn't scream. You didn't throw a fit. You didn't remind me of all you've done beyond the call of duty for the magazine. You didn't even threaten to quit, which you do whenever your wishes are thwarted," Harte said. Then corrected that to "Hell! Which you do monthly, whether your wishes are thwarted or not! I'm worried, Roger. Should I be worried?"

  "In fifteen minutes," I said, "I shall be meeting my cousin at Georgette Klinger's, where we'll begin preparations for the society event of the summer, the most lavish and most publicized party in the history of Fire Island Pines. Compared to which, Forrest, your magazine, your decisions, your staff, and yourself are as though grains of sand in a sunless sea." I mimed the casting of sand upon the office floor and washing the grit off my hands.

  "It's a matter of professional ethics, Roger. You know that?"

  I pivoted a perfect one hundred and eighty degrees on a single heel— having practiced in four-inch wedgies all week—and threw open the door to exit.

  "I had no choice!" he wailed.

  "However," I spoke over my shoulder, à la Betty Grable in the famous World War II pinup, "should you wish to have any editorial staff come next week, I strongly suggest you obtain the services of two very large and experienced bodyguards. One to lock in the Grant. The other to watch over Mizz Auslander."

  "What do you mean any staff?" I heard his voice rise. "Roger! Roger! Don't do this to me! Ro-ger!"

  "Five minutes, Miss Stanwyck!"

  Alistair was knocking on the door of my "dressing room," the larger guest bedroom in his house on Tarpon.

  "Can I look?'' I asked Bebe, who was still fooling with my hair.

  "Momentino!" He held my head in place. "I still think you should have the fall wig. But...!" He pulled back to look at me, even—I swear— put his thumb up as Lautrec might have done, and sighed. "Okay!"

  He spun me to face the vanity's mirror.

  I don't know what I expected to see: some ghastly, some-wonderful transformation; a revelation, I suppose. That's what Luis and Alistair had insisted I'd see. Instead, I saw myself. Cosmetized to the nines and dressed expensively, and more feminine than I could ever have imagined looking. Still it was me, Roger Sansarc, no matter how cleverly Bebe had frosted and combed my hair for a swept-up-off-the-neck effect: me!