Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "Where are you?"

  "About twenty miles south of you. I've been here since the spring. Rick, I have to ask you something."

  "Where's Neil?"

  "Florida. That's all over. Rick, I have to see you."

  David always began by talking as if he were in the opening episode of a soap opera. This had been true always, even when we were together, because his lonely years had been a child's years, high school and college, and he spent them in front of the television. He knew what people said when they loved and lost, or when they wanted something tawdry. The writer he moved in with in Hollywood usually wrote medical dramas. About alcohol and wife-beating and the like, where the doctors are mostly in the wings. But I don't think, to be fair, that David came by his manners in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. There is a feel for this sort of thing or there isn't. I was brought up to say what I meant, and it had to be something serious. I was given no more stories by my parents than David was, but I played the piano and go now to the opera. David was given a television of his own when he was fourteen. When he was twenty-two and I met him, he lied the way a fourteen-year-old lies. Now he was thirty and didn't think one way or another about it, I suppose, but I made a dangerous mistake and relaxed. By the time you are thirty, I figured, you can at least mean well when you lie.

  "Can you come down here?"

  "I can't," I said. "Someone's staying with me."

  "Bring him."

  "Her."

  "I mean her. OK?"

  "Is it very swanky and very pretty?"

  "Yes."

  "All right," I said. "Well come on Sunday afternoon."

  We said a good deal more than this, and we were gentle enough with one another. But he never said a thing about Mrs. Carroll, dead or alive. I had the impression, partly from knowing David and partly because of the way he didn't talk about where he was, that he had picked up with an older man, older even than I and very well heeled. I assumed he needed the sort of advice one needs when the closet is rainbowed with Gucci and Mr. Guy and the pool is warmer than the air. That was all right. Besides, Madeleine was in ruins and needed a day in the country.

  "Madeleine, we've been invited to the South Shore tomorrow afternoon. I gather the arrangements are first class. Do you feel up to it?"

  "Will they know me?" she asked absently.

  "Maybe not. Maybe they're autistic."

  "Sure. Let's go. When is my plane to LA?"

  "Nine P.M. It's not even an hour away from here. We'll be back."

  So we went. Madeleine had been with me for three days, and we both enjoyed them. She was the only houseguest I had anymore. I even found it a luxury to avoid the press, which she insisted on doing in the most flamboyant ways. She gave a single concert a year in Boston, and in thirteen years no one had ever succeeded in finding out how she got there and where she stayed. The Boston press has been slow about celebrity, though. There is no indication during any other week of Madeleine's extravagant year that there is a story to tell about her and me. Perhaps there isn't. Well, there is now, but in June, when she was just a day short of a flight home after thirty-two curtain calls in Boston, we had fallen into our old way of saying hello, calling ourselves survivors, and kissing good-bye. I see now we were not satisfied with that. Put another way, we weren't altogether sure we were surviving.

  "How old are you?" she asked me.

  "Forty-five. Do you know what you just said?"

  "What?"

  "'How old are you?' You used to say 'How old are you.' Don't you think the shift in emphasis is sinister?"

  "You're too sensitive," she said.

  Madeleine says she does not like my car, an old Chevy convertible I cling to in one of my few mild protests against the corporate inevitable. She says I live like a one-lamb-chop secretary who tidies through life without making a ripple. And she moves me when she talks that way. One year I took her with me to the store and bought a blue velvet sofa to please her, around which I made resolutions to pull things together, but it was delivered after she left and was a shambles the next spring when she blew into town again. I am moved to do something for her, not for me. Her years of private planes and sloops, the beach properties in Malibu and Puerto Vallarta, are behind her. She should live like a countess, but her career, like that of a high-roller financier, has peaked and valleyed. I don't blame her for preferring the days of the sealskin slipcovers in the custom touring car.

  Not that she complains. She lives all right in her seventy-fourth year. (The figure is an approximation, of course. I am right about how old the rest of us are, but none of the rest of us has tampered with the evidence. That urge comes later in life, I expect, though it has been stirring in me too for the first time, on bright sunny days all summer.) I bet she makes fifty thousand a year, and she doesn't have to make more than eight or ten appearances. The recordings are reissued, and she has lately had a careful manager, an elderly queen in LA named Aldo who is a giant in computer softwares. I expect he turns to jelly when she sings

  I don't know who you are,

  I have no memory for men.

  Was it in Paris? No? New York?

  I've never been there at all,

  Is it as lonely as they say?

  The old recordings, the seventy-eights, sold seven or eight million copies altogether, but she had lousy contracts and managers who were bums and cleaned her out. They were not even her lovers, as far as I know. They were like baby brothers. She is taken better care of now. The audience is smaller but more intense, mostly gay, faithful as postulants, pandemonium-prone when she does the bridge for this or that famous song. There might be as much as a hundred thousand a year. But she doesn't make bids any longer at Swiss jewelry auctions, and that upsets and saddens the faithful.

  "You told me you didn't see David anymore," she said as we threaded our way along the expressway. "Why don't you put the top down?"

  I pulled over. She was not accusing me of hiding anything from her, but I think she was afraid I wasn't being honest with myself. She knew all about him but had never met him. David was the most important person from whom I hid the fact of Madeleine's visits. In June I would tell him my mother was coming for a weekend, and he fled gratefully from my apartment. If he returned and found a stray bottle of makeup, a stocking or something, he would throw it away with a shiver. Apprised of the fact that they belonged to Madeleine Cosquer, there is no telling how fanatically he would have souvenired them. David, unlike the Boston press, was as swift as a whippet about celebrity and gossip. He would have skywritten the knowledge that Madeleine holed up in his lover's apartment during the weekend of her concert.

  I was not being innocent in bringing Madeleine with me on my visit to David and his seamy sugar daddy. I knew he was going to faint with complexity when he met her. I didn't want to hurt him (though here I expect I am straining after innocence). I just wanted to break the set of his expectations about me. And Madeleine too seemed to understand that she was to be party to a showdown. For that reason as much as any, she had a right to ask about David. From all that I know about her life, I know she does not shirk a showdown, but she likes to be armed with the evidence to date.

  "I have nothing to do with David," I said, snapping the folded top into place behind the backseat. "I haven't seen him since the day he walked out. I don't think about him anymore, even to hate him and wish him dead. It's all over. But he does call me sometimes. And now he's in Boston again. I said yes. I could have said no."

  She was wrapped in a scarf and dark glasses and looked terrific because there was only the hint of Madeleine Cosquer in the shape of the head, and what it hinted at was how she looked in her youth, which lasted well into her sixties and which certain lights still caught. She looked at me as I got back into the car, listening for something else.

  "You're testing yourself," she said. "I hope I provide the right diversion, because nobody ever passes that sort of test. Maybe I'll sing."

  "I didn't think you sang a note anymore for unde
r a couple of thousand an hour."

  "You're being testy because I'm right. He's a bastard. I want you to come out of there alive."

  I don't know why Madeleine was being so loyal, and I don't remember mentioning David more than two or three times to her, and those lightly. In any case, David is not a bastard, and I expected that she would find him delightful as long as he didn't go idiotic about her celebrity. But I see that I am cornered into talking about David and me. I can do that. It will help to explain what has been so alive in David during this summer when he finally stopped running. It is I whom I would rather leave out, I know. But if I do that, I expect I would be trying to say, to believe really, that I have not been involved. And I am as guilty of having loved us all—David, Madeleine, Phidias, and Aldo—as any of us.

  I am forty-five, and I have lived in Boston during all of my adult life. I inherited some money early, more than was good for me, and I came to the city from my drunken, monkish home on the North Shore and began to make love. (I have to draw the line somewhere, so I am not going to drag my parents in, nor anyone else's. In one way, gay men are forever in the grip of their fathers' wishes and their mothers' lonely afternoons. More truly, though, they have no parents at all, or their parents are ghosts, like the children they never father.) That is all I really did for fifteen years. There was a time when there wasn't a man in Boston I hadn't slept with, though of course it only seemed that way. Of a certain kind of man—thoroughbred, beautiful, hard—I had my fill. I felt discriminating and in control. To be more accurate, then, there was a time when I had cruised every gay man in Boston and either slept with him or looked through him and let him know I was after better things. It didn't make me feel trapped or played out that I knew everyone who was gay and good in bed. I was alert and sexy every night about what might turn up in the bars I drank in, and I always took the first or second turn with anyone fine and ripe who did turn up.

  I make it sound as if I were always rid of love, and that is one way of putting it. But fifteen years lived in units of one or two nights go very quickly, like a string of weekends. Heady Friday nights, the calm and aimless hours of a long Saturday, and then the head-on rush to Sunday night, blank and pointless. We all fall into time. To understand how a gay man executes his fall into the day-by-day, one must try to see how wildly he falls in love with his own body, once it becomes his own. Sex is self-inflicted for so long, and a gay man burns to carry out in lust the years he lost to guilt and shame. Fifteen years seems long and tenacious, but in the end it really didn't take. David showed up.

  And for a few years, love won. It is not that David and I spent an uninterrupted time together. He ran away a dozen times, and he brought home half-wit numbers who fucked him in my bed. But for a few years the quality of the affection was steady in me. I mean that. And on the Sunday in June when Madeleine and I drove off to our new survival, on that perfect sea day when the Band-Aid-beige Chevy zinged along like a sloop itself, those three and a half years had been balanced by the five years since. Loveless and pure. My bed blissfully empty, like my mailbox, unlike my bank account. I believed I was testing David, not myself, and I believed I was doing it for his own good. It has not proven to make any difference because, as Madeleine says, these tests are all loaded, and so one feels guilty and lets the other fellow win.

  I met David on horseback at Sea Island, Georgia. I had driven down from Boston with two men I had met a few days earlier at a bad party. They were lovers, more or less, and they had taken me onto the terrace and brought from among their toys a vial of cocaine. Even aspirin gives me a headache; but I will go to considerable lengths, usually three-quarters of the way through a fifth of Dewar's, to wall myself away from a holiday of faggots. My head had an aerial view of things, like a kite strung out from my body. It seemed like a marvelous idea to pack us all three into my gleaming Chevy, put the top down, and head south on a real holiday. (I see there is bound to be an arc in everything. The fawn-colored Chevy was just bought, and it possessed its body as wholly as I did mine. But see, I am a man of reversals. The newer things were then, the less complicated they seemed. General Motors, far from being a bandit then, was more like the tooth fairy.) They wanted me to make love to both of them. The widowed mother of one had abandoned her Georgia house for even warmer waters because the dead father haunted its tiled halls in his banker's grays. The son did not suffer the same ghosts as long as he arrived armed with a lover and a stud.

  I don't care about the sea. I let them go off sailing by themselves during the day, and they were that much more ready to court me at night. I had a chestnut horse. I dressed in high riding boots ($200. Their gift. The boots must have danced in their heads while they sailed) and my beloved Levi's, and the feeling was very like being naked. Better even, like being naked in bed. The Easter sun was hot at midmorning. I rode north on the sand to the preserve at the upper third of the island; and when the houses fronting the water stopped, the jungle began in earnest. Pelicans flew low over the sea, and the herons perked their heads up in the marshes. There was talk of deer playing and chasing on the beach this far away, but I never saw any. Nor any people, until the morning I saw David standing naked in a foot of water, in a tidal pool.

  We came around a spit of land where the view was blocked by a high tangle of rushes. He was about a hundred yards from me, facing away, and he didn't hear us approach for a long time. I have thought long about the length of that moment. I have extended it in my head, the coming together of the rider and the shipwrecked boy, and slowed it down until it is a set of stills. Only the horse moved, and David and I were frozen there, hanging back as long as we could in separate spaces. I don't know how to tell it offhandedly. I was, after all, caught unprepared for the end of my fifteen years. And yet I didn't think of turning back because there wasn't enough time. That is the long and the short of it, but how do you figure it? Every spring when I go to see Casablanca in Harvard Square, I think about how long Bogart and Bergman hold each other's eyes on the edge of the tarmac. It gets longer every year. That is what I mean.

  Burnt and brown, his hair gold and stiff with salt, he seemed nearly a sea creature—ambiguous, amphibious. Something in him rose out of the water in the morning to bask in the sun, and something else detached itself from the jungle and came down to cool its heels in the surf. What brought him back to earth was the luminous band of flesh that girdled his ass, where he slung himself into a bathing suit on those days when he could not cavort like a wild boy. The body's whitest flesh, withheld from the body's turn to summer until the body's dreams and needs uncover it. I can't talk about this. I think: if I can bring it into words, I can know exactly what he was and put him to rest in me at last. But he has always been for me a creature of two worlds. My cock swelled against the saddle because of the given of David's flesh, the full white curve behind and then, as he turned, the reach and sway of his own cock. That was as it had been for fifteen years. But the clash of myths, the sea-god taken by the cowboy, aroused in me the will to break the mirror that two men who couple become. Be something with me, I thought as I came up to him. What I called love was measured in minutes. When David turned and squinted at the sun that rode toward noon behind my head, he tipped me over into the world of years. I have lasted so long, I thought. But for all that I had held out, now I could not go back.

  As I rode closer, we looked hard at one another and established right away what sort of men we were. He walked out of the water to meet me, his eyes still locked on mine, a half-smile coming and going on his face. When we met, he brushed his shoulder against the horse's neck and reached his hand up and drew it along the front of my thigh, letting it rest on my knee.

  "I thought this island was exclusive," he said. "I thought you had to sit on a corporation to live here. Unless you're married to someone who does."

  I leaned my bent knee away from the horse, and his hand dropped between my leg and the horse's flesh. I watched his cock begin to lift.

  "Do you sit on a corporation
?" I asked.

  "No," David said. "And I'm not married."

  "Then I guess we're both stowaways on this island."

  "Good. We'd better stick together and make a plan. There may be bounty hunters."

  I dismounted and stood facing him. I pulled him close, and we rubbed against each other. Then he undid the buttons on my pants, licking at the hair on my chest. As he slipped the Levi's halfway down my thighs, he reached his hand around my cock and held it out tense, so that the pressure of his holding it doubled the heat of it as it swelled. Then he dropped to his knees and began to suck me. I gripped his head in my hands and brought myself farther and farther in as his mouth went up and down and he opened his throat. Then he pulled back, shook my hands from his head and, grabbing my wrists, fell back into the sand. I came down hard on the beach next to him, and we kissed and groped until he pulled back again.

  "Get naked," he said. He lay back and put his hands behind his head to watch me. I had to stand up to take my boots off; and as I hopped on one foot, I looked up to see the horse cropping at the marsh grass. I threw one boot down and began to pull at the other. No more than a moment could have passed. But this time when I glanced over to the horse, there were deer all around him. Perhaps a half dozen, their eyes riveted on me to see what I would do. I couldn't believe they had come so close, fifty feet from us, without making any noise. And I remember being happy and wanting to laugh that they and the horse stood the same ground and caused one another no trouble. I held them there as I took off my pants, or they let me think so. It is probably the only time I have ever slipped off a pair of Levi's in front of a waiting lover without making some show of it. I tried to think of what to say, to tell David to sit up and look, when just as suddenly they leapt away in a single motion and were gone into the woods. So I looked down at David and saw, falling to his side again, that the time to tell it would have to wait.