Two clerks had come up to the makeshift table, each holding a stack of his hardcovers, and they were very definitely standing there waiting for him. Roger said, “I’ve got to John Hancock these or this event isn’t kosher. Can you wait? Are you free at all?”
“Christ, yes,” Cap said. “You think after this long I’m going to let you go? You know, when I saw you’d be here in the newspaper, I tried all the hotels I could think of. No go.”
“I stay with friends in the hills,” Roger explained. “Off Lookout Mountain.”
“That’s what Karina thought. I wanted to have dinner and catch up.”
Karina: Cap’s wife, woman, girlfriend, whatever. When you were Cap Hartmann, there would always be a Karina.
“Cool with me. Can Karina join us?”
“She’s got business. A meeting with a client. She’s an attorney. You want to do this, yes?”
“Hell, yes! I can’t believe how great you look. How trim. How…young,” Roger said. It was true. But of course Roger could say it because he knew he looked trim and young too.
“I lived with a dancer for five years. Eugenia,” Cap explained, stepping away from the table so Roger could see how trim, how muscular his legs and torso were, how slender his hips. He looks like a ’mo, Roger thought. Full head of butterscotch hair with only a slight singeing of gray on the sides, only a few very shallow lines on his face, great skin, good tan: Cap was in as good shape as any homosexual of forty-five, Roger knew…And thank Christ for that!
“Give me ten minutes,” Roger said.
*
The large white elephant in the room during their hour-and-a-half long catch-up on the years over steak frittes at the glorified 1950s diner on Sunset was, of course, Trish Tanager. Cap and Trish had spent most of the three and a half years of college that Roger had known them in a famously passionate, famously difficult, and eventually famously broken relationship. Cap had ended it. Cap had graduated half a year early—or half a year late—Roger never knew which really, and before Cap had graduated, he’d joined the Peace Corps and broken up with Trish.
Leaving her utterly brokenhearted.
Roger knew to an iota exactly how brokenhearted, since Trish told him repeatedly for the next six or seven years. That’s how long they’d hung out together in Manhattan before she’d taken off for San Francisco and a totally new life. Even after she was gone, he and Trish remained in contact: postcards, letters, phone calls, gifts, her visits to her folks in uptown Manhattan, Roger’s less frequent visits out West, until he’d moved there, south not north. She told him about the breakup when she was drunk and when she was sober, occasionally when she was somber and almost in tears, and more often laughing over a joint of stuff they’d nicknamed Arthur it was so good, which they’d bought together, several kilos-full, and sold off slowly, cheaply, for good Karma’s sake, earning just enough money to be able to always smoke it free.
Cap had vanished, first into Peace Corps training at Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and then down to Namibia. There had been maybe four letters over two years to Roger, and then nothing, ever again. So Roger had inherited Trish Tanager. They’d gotten high together, gone to parties and Be-Ins and dance clubs and concerts together. They’d slept together once, not quite disastrously because it was so funny. But to the day they remained in contact. Roger had spoken to her by phone two nights before, as he was headed to the Bay Area and Sacramento next on his little book tour, and he planned on renting a car and driving upstate to see her and her third, or was it fourth, husband? Roger knew he couldn’t say a thing about Trish Tanager to Cap Hartmann, couldn’t reveal any of their decades-long life together without Cap—unless Cap asked.
Cap didn’t ask. Cap did, however, definitely want to hear about the others: the rest of their tight-knit, superior, overly literate “Hell Fire Club” in the English Department at Colgate. Roger had actually stumbled upon the three in a Russian Lit course, second term of his freshman year, when he arrived too late to sit anywhere but the back row of the room. It had taken him only that first class to realize that the three of them, Cap, Elliot, and Larry, already knew each other, and were already a group. He’d returned next class and sat in the back row with them, admiring Beatle-Paul-cute Larry Isaacson with his perfect complexion and almost blue-black helmet of hair. He’d slowly come to even more admire the masculinely handsome Cap Hartmann, And even, if non-sexually—he was definitely overweight, red-bearded, and dressed like a hippie—admire their leader, Elliot Dolgard, “the brains of the operation,” as he’d once joked to Roger.
It was Elliot who’d told him that Roger had made an instant life-impression on all three of them when, in class number three of that course, he’d corrected the professor just loud enough that the last two rows in class could hear it, by naming Pushkin’s true dueling assassin.
Leaving class that day, Elliot had turned to him and said in his flat Midwestern voice and with its insistent and always slightly offended edge, “How did you know who killed Pushkin?” as though this was utterly privileged information. To which Roger had admitted that he possessed an enormous fund of utterly useless, trivial knowledge: all the Indian tribes of North America, every eighteenth-century carriage built; insects of several classes and genera; all the constellations plus fixed stars of the first to third magnitude; and of course how every writer alive had ever died.
“Cool!” Elliot had responded, a bit less aggrieved. “You’ll fill in some gaps of our own totally useless, trivial knowledge. Join us for coffee.”
Roger had been two years younger than the youngest, Larry, almost four younger than Cap, certainly never as knowledgeable about film as Elliot, or about music and theater as Cap, or about poetry as Larry, one of whose ancestors was a noted seventeenth-century Yiddish poet. He’d always felt the baby among them: the one who spoke up least, who defended his point least well or aggressively in their discussions, and who followed their lead most often—usually Elliot’s, but whenever Cap and Elliot disagreed, he’d always found himself taking Cap’s side.
That was when Roger first met Trish Tanager. She’d been exceptionally pretty, physically voluptuous, seductive, flirty, sophisticated, and fun at what, seventeen? Very impressive. Meanwhile, Elliot’s “women friends” came and went, albeit they were always surprisingly good looking and with great bodies. And then there was Larry’s lifelong love, Loretta, encountered when they were high school juniors, and destined to be together ’til death did them part, by college already considered his “other half.”
“Elliot is teaching high school in some outer borough in New York!” Roger reported to Cap over more frittes than he ought to be eating. “Did you ever meet Caroline? Well, they’re still together. This I’ve heard from others.” Not saying that the “others” was mostly Trish, who actually kept up with Caroline. “I last actually laid eyes on the two of them at the premiere of Albee’s Tiny Alice.”
“That’s a while back,” Cap admitted. “What about El and El?”
“Larry and Loretta? I last saw them ten years ago in the rain in the middle of Abdington Square, while coming home from Balducci’s. They had a little sixteen millimeter set up on a tripod at the south corner and when I asked what they were doing, Loretta said they were quote filming yellow things, unquote. They got married and had a kid. I heard they’d moved out here to El Lay. El and El in El Lay… Haven’t seen them.”
Cap laughed and now was exactly when he should have asked about Trish Tanager but instead he said, “What a bunch! Just like bananas. But we had good times.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd, how I turned out to be a novelist?” Roger asked. “Remember how all we’d talk about was how the novel was dead, dead, dead, and the rest of the twentieth century would be all about film? And I go and become a novelist! Closest any of us got to film was some messes I wrote that never got made a few years back and El and El’s sixteen millimeters.”
Cap startled him by saying, “I write screenplays,” quickly adding, “got an option o
n one.” Then deprecating, “Karina did the paperwork for it. Who knows? It still might be done. And sometimes…” here he got all little-boy-shy the way Roger remembered him being, when flirting, “sometimes I sub in for a cameraman pal on pictures. Both of those just kind of happened! You know, because of friends of Natalie’s in the business.”
Getting a summation of Cap’s life since the Peace Corps in Namibia consisted, totally unsurprisingly to Roger, of women’s names and their periods of time together with Cap: First there had been Aurora, a Venetian he’d met in Otopoho. That lasted four years and had moved Cap from Venice, Italia, to Venice, California, where he’d remained ever since. Then there had been Ursula, a Swiss interpreter for the French Legation; leggy, literate, and nebulous. Four and a half years for her, followed by six with Natalie, a drama-queen actress/writer into Indy Prod films and fidelity: the latter never Cap’s long suit. Five more years with Eugenia, a Russian emigre jazz dancer who’d made a killing as one of the first Pilates instructors in the town. And now, going on four years, Karina, who despite her exotic name was actually a farm-bred American from Idaho, who reminded Cap of the girls he and Roger had gone to school with.
“Never got married. Never had kids. Actually don’t think I can make kids,” Cap added. “I haven’t been all that careful over the years. If I could make them, something should have happened by now. So of course that ended me and Natalie and me and Ursula and even though she says we can always adopt, will probably end me and Karina too.”
But before Roger could take advantage of that comment to ask him more personal questions, Cap said, “So tell me about this Mark you mentioned at the reading. He your guy?”
Roger looked into Cap’s pale brown eyes and told him: the fifteen-year-long relationship, still going strong, the two of them more bonded than ever; even though the writing was on the wall as Mark was beginning to be symptomatic; so who knew, Roger didn’t, how much longer they had.
“He’s a dreamboat, a doll, a Rhodes Scholar genius and a Bourgeois Prince par excellence. His family owned a department store in New England! Do I know how to pick them, or what? He was never was a tenth the slut I was,” Roger added, trying to keep it light, “so of course he’s the one who gets sick while I did everything with everybody and can’t get infected no matter how many times I try. The virus dies the minute it touches my body.” He illustrated by making the sound water hisses on a hot stove top.
“That sucks. But still, Rog, fifteen years! And you actually found your soul mate! Wow! So you’re three things none of us ever expected. A successful novelist. A total queer. And a solid husband.”
“Go figure!”
They spoke a little more about Mark and all that implied, and that’s when Cap looked at his watch, saying, “I promised a friend I’d tend bar for him while he’s off doing an audition. It’s a joint in Venice. Sort of beach shack. Kind of my hangout. Want to come by?…Free margaritas!”
Roger still felt their reunion was as annoyingly incomplete as a dangling participle. He had so many questions to ask Cap about the intervening years. And then he still had to say something about Trish, if he was going to be loyal to her, although that line about how lucky he was to have found a soul mate strongly suggested that Cap still hadn’t found his and was still looking, no matter what Trish had thought and what she’d told Roger all these years.
“I’ll go anywhere for free margaritas.”
They got into two cars and he followed Cap, zigzagging through L.A.’s west side surface streets, which later on he’d realize were some of the best rush-hour shortcuts around.
“What I said before?” Cap commented an hour later, behind the bar, bar apron slung comfily low around his hips, a mixologist who did this a bit more often than subbing every once in a while, a bit more like in his element, actually. “You being those three things we never expected that I said before? That wasn’t exactly true. Even though you were a lot younger than us, and even though you had to work your way through college and didn’t have much time for anything else, we still thought that girls were a lot more interested in you than you were in girls!”
“Who said so? It was Loretta, wasn’t it?”
Couldn’t have been Trish, Roger wanted to add. She believed no man queer enough to resist her advances.
“It was Elliot, mostly.”
“But you never thought it?”
“I did too…. Actually I thought you were too pretty to be totally straight.”
Roger was stunned. “What?”
“You’re a good-looking man now, Roger, very attractive. But you were a very, very pretty seventeen-, eighteen-year-old boy. Why did you think we went out to the Hamptons that weekend, just you and me together?”
“You had an invitation to a house there, no?”
“I had something. Not exactly an invitation. And we ended up sleeping on the beach. Don’t you remember?”
Roger remembered, all right. One of the questions he’d always wanted to ask Cap was what had actually happened that weekend so long ago when he was too naïve or too tied up in himself or just plain too oblivious to understand.
“What are you telling me here, Cap?”
“I thought I could maybe seduce you?”
Roger laughed. “You’re totally bullshitting me! It’s revenge for having to attend my reading.”
“Swear to God.” Cap put his right hand on his heart. “I even told Elliot we were going out there that weekend so I could bust your cherry.”
Roger laughed again, utterly amazed. Finally he commented, “If I had any idea, I would have agreed in a heartbeat. Close as we were. You being the handsomest guy I knew and all!”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you weren’t exactly out then, I don’t believe!” Cap said, swirling away to help a customer who’d just alit at the other end of the bar.
When he came back he added, “And also, by the time I got around to the attempt on your bod, too much had already happened. I was much too distracted…”
He made the guy a nice-looking Gibson—people still drank Gibsons?—handed it to him, got paid, and returned to add, “Don’t you remember the couple who gave us a ride that we ended up hanging around with? The redhead who looked so much like Trish, whom you should recall I’d just a few weeks before stopped seeing? The humongous, crew-cut blond F.B.I. agent, with the fat roll of fifty-dollar bills?”
He remembered, all right. How could Roger forget?
*
Mostly it was the light. And all that space.
The train stopped at Hampton Bays after hours of chugging along during which Roger stood—vibrating; then, once they’d gotten separate seats four rows apart, had attempted to read—a convoluted Borges story, and given his exhaustion from the past week of final exams and studying, instead slept. So when Cap awakened him, smiling, “We’re here!” he’d could just about concentrate on getting his duffel and himself out and onto the platform.
Most of the other passengers disembarking knew where they were going and stepped unhesitating into waiting or weeklong parked cars or into a little jitney. Once the train left, he and Cap were in the middle of nothing: a small wooden station, couple of carved columns holding a schedule board, an overhung hip roof that would protect from a moderate but probably not from a thundering rain. Cauliflower fields stretched across the other side for miles to the horizon, already budding, glints of pearl amid the green, faintly reeking of brassica. On this side, the gravel turnabout and parking lot marked out by painted gray, ground level, two-by-eights led to a beat-up shack of a commuter diner, vintage mid-1950s given its adverts. Brown dirt rapidly changing to sand everywhere else Roger could see.
But there was also the light. At 7:03 of a Friday evening in late June it was an intensely soft sky, a vast blue velvet curtain powdered with talc. Everything else around was incredibly close to the earth compared to the city they’d left, the sparse buildings, the bird-bitten chokecherry bushes, even the single, wind-tormented tree he could make out over a rise
of dune. It was very clean, as though scrubbed by sand-abrading breezes, and so fresh Roger could smell the ocean already. Spacious. He realized now that before it had been only an idea, them coming out here, but this was exactly what he needed: space, cleanliness, light. Needed it all badly.
The skinny old guy the same shade of the linoleum floor with a badly twisted right ear at the little railroad diner who fed them reheated coffee and hand glazed donuts for them said the town was another mile or so down that road, over there! The street Cap had mentioned wasn’t far off, easy to find.
Once Roger was awake and they were ambling along the road, toward what even he could see was eventually and not that far away, the ocean, he suddenly felt invigorated.
Cap hadn’t offered but vague information about where they were going: the summer place of a family of a friend of a friend, or something like that; and that there were certain to be some alcohol, grass, and girls there. His friend liked to party. They might have to double up, or sleep on the floor. That’s why Cap had a roll of sleeping bags, one for each of them, bouncing against his own light, shoulder-strapped luggage.
The plan was they’d hang out there tonight, maybe go into the “town,” or what it consisted of, alone or with some of the folks from the house for dinner, and hit the bar scene. From what Cap recalled from a few summers before, that would mean crossing the bridge across the Shinnecock Bay onto a long sandbar where the nighttime commercial area had developed. Next day they’d do the beach. It was the best beach he’d ever seen, Cap enthused, as good as those in the Caribbean.
Roger almost didn’t hear the rest. He wanted beach. He needed beach. For a Long Island–raised boy, its southern shore beaches already had spelled out long long hours, days, weeks, months of contentment, fun, and rest. Just get me to the beach, he thought: I’ll take care of the rest.
They found the house after at least two miles and a half of walking, although admittedly on a sanded shoulder of a two-lane road, and slightly downhill all the way. At least Cap thought it was the house. It didn’t fit the description. It looked shuttered up. Maybe the others hadn’t come out yet? Were on later trains? No they’d been here all week, Cap recalled.
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