by David Gates
Finn McCarthy made documentary films. Or had until six years ago, when he was looking for a place to land and was approached by the college’s Department of Communication Arts. That was the year his film about children’s street games had been nominated for an Academy Award. He’d meant to show these children (filmed in Newark, Liverpool, Mexico City and Connecticut) as members of a savage tribe with alien customs and ceremonies; it had bothered him, therefore, that two of the three reviews he’d gotten had called it “sensitive.” For whatever reason, he hadn’t been able to get going on a new project since. It was his course load, his inability to travel. It was the too-comfortable life here: dinner parties with tolerant acquaintances in a tolerant college town. It was his house, the first he’d ever owned, which had needed everything done to it. It was James.
But at long last he had a new project in mind. Which would damn well not be called “sensitive,” either. And which would get him once and for all, at the age of fifty-two, out of the closet. (James gave him guff about that, but that was just James being James.) Finn had ignored the whole Stonewall business and everything thereafter; bully for them, of course, but. He was damned if he’d be ghettoized as a quote unquote gay filmmaker; anyway, his work wasn’t political. Lately, though, he was beginning to wonder whether avoiding the subject in his films—well, not avoiding, just not obsessing—hadn’t been a mistake, esthetically. When he looked at his old work nowadays (which wasn’t often), it felt impersonal to him. Put together to a fare-thee-well, of course. Surely there was a way to get closer in without being either confessional or, God forbid, polemical. Assuming he wasn’t too old to want to.
What he’d come up with was a film about the makers of gay porn videos. Which, if it worked—if he could get the time and the funding and of course the access—would be a sort of oblique self-portrait in addition to whatever else. His films had always been about subcultures: American Indians who worked building skyscrapers, a leprosarium in what was then Southern Rhodesia, country music fans. The children and their street games. But a subculture based on being homosexual and making films: how could this not end up being his best work? Or so he sometimes thought.
He’d gone so far as to begin collecting videos; he’d also written part of a first draft of an essay on the implicit formal conventions of film pornography. If he could finish this and get it decently published—he’d try Film Quarterly first, then Sight and Sound—it might help with the funding. The biggest problem, aside from outright censorship (the Mapplethorpe business still had everybody running scared) was that these days such a subject could only be a downer: even safe-sex porn had a “Masque of the Red Death” aura. Which was all to the good as far as the film was concerned. But it made the project a tough sell, even with his Oscar nomination. Which was now a long time ago.
Another problem was that James hated the idea: it would set things back twenty years, he’d said. “What if you were a black person? Would you make a movie about welfare cheats eating watermelon in their Cadillacs?”
Finn was flattered that James thought a film of his could have any impact at all in the world. “Hell, yes,” he said. “If I could get a grant from General Motors.”
James looked at him. “It’s not funny, man. You ever stop and think about where you are? You drive ten minutes outside this town, man, any direction, and you’re in fucking Bible country. They don’t like faggots out there, or haven’t you heard?”
“You’ve lived in New York too long,” Finn said. “I’ve never encountered the least—I mean, I don’t go to workingmen’s bars on a Saturday night, but who in his right mind does?”
James was still looking at him. “You are so blind, man.”
Finn had never seen him this exercised. And only once before had he called him “man.” When James first moved in, he’d gone down to the city for a weekend to pick up the rest of his things, and the weekend had lasted until Thursday. When Finn had gone to get him at the airport in Albany, James’s explanation had been so carelessly thin that Finn (who’d drunk a half-carafe of vile Paul Masson red while waiting in the lounge) had called him a slut.
“Listen, man,” James had said, “this slut was good enough for you when you picked me up at the movies.”
“I picked you up?”
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” said James. “You’re getting a live-in slut all your own, man, complete with checkered past. Just don’t push it.”
This, of course, was nonsense. Finn knew what it was to be excited by beautiful bad boys, but at his age he also knew better than to let any of them move into his home. To take a lithe, treacherous animal to bed was one thing; to wake up next to such a person was something else again. James’s good looks, in fact, had bothered Finn until he got used to them. (It humanized James a bit when Finn walked in on him spraying Right Guard into his Nikes.) In fact, after the first few days, Finn had been about to hint that it was getting time for James to go back to his sister’s house. He changed his mind the afternoon he came inside from mowing the lawn and found James in the darkened study. On the TV screen, the little black girls from Newark were jumping double Dutch. James looked up, saw Finn in the doorway, thumbed the remote and froze a little girl with her teeth bared and both feet in the air. “This is amazing,” James said. “How did you get this to be so scary?”
Finn dropped into his Zen pedagogical manner. “Just by looking at it.”
“Gol-ly, professor.” James looked back at the frozen image. “I wonder how you look at me,” he said. “I’d like to be looked at with kindness.”
“Of course, when I first saw it listed,” Byron Solomon was saying, “I was quite humiliated.”
“Why?” said Bill Whitley. “God, to be able to say you worked with John Ford.”
“Worked? I’m afraid that flatters the case,” Byron said. “At any rate, I nearly made a great fool of myself by calling them up and lacing into them about it. Jeannette, of course, talked me around. She said, ‘Good heavens, how were they to know?’ Because naturally, for mere movies I never used ‘Byron Solomon.’ Never sullied the great name.” He laughed. It didn’t sound bitter, and Finn wondered if that was even more depressing. “So she said, ‘How were they to know, for heaven’s sake?’ You remember how she was.”
“I wish I could’ve known her,” said Bill Whitley, apparently meaning it as a tactful reminder.
“God, yes, I can hear her now,” said Finn, throwing in a chuckle to boot, though in fact the imitation had sounded more like Marie Dressler than Jeannette; Byron Solomon, after all, hadn’t been much of an actor. Bill Whitley, like the other newer faculty, tended to treat Byron as if he were senile, which was terribly unfair. True, he had slipped a bit since Jeannette died. But the man had to be sixty-five: who didn’t slip? Really, Finn should have exerted himself more to find Byron a dinner partner. But one no longer worried about pairing people off for dinners, just as one no longer worried about going boy-girl-boy-girl at table, although Finn in fact had seated Carolyn between himself and Bill Whitley, and Deborah Whitley between himself and Peter Sykes.
“At any rate,” said Byron, “my curiosity of course got the better of me, and down I went. And you know, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. In both senses. I was on-screen for all of three minutes, and let me tell you, I was as bad a bad guy as ever chewed the scenery.” Finn had heard Byron tell this story before, in exactly the same words. “And do you know what happened?” Finn knew. “A rousing cheer went up! The house lights came on! And there stood my entire class, applauding. Jeannette, it seems, had called one of my students—Finn, you remember her, a Susan somebody? Lovely girl—who in turn had called the fellow at the theater and arranged the whole thing. Jeannette had been prepared to drag me there bodily if necessary, sick as she was. Well, let me tell you, it was like The Ed Sullivan Show. Toneet in air steeyewdio audience …” Even Byron’s Ed Sullivan was no good.
James was staring down at his plate through all of this, mixing together his turnips and mashed po
tatoes with his salad fork. Must he show his boredom so plainly? Finn had civilized him in some respects—he no longer drank Kahlúa, for instance—but his table manners were still an embarrassment. Not just the elbows, but the face hanging over the plate and the clumsy business of having to switch his fork to his right hand after cutting a piece of meat because no one had ever taught him to use his silverware properly. Well, that was a lost cause nowadays.
James began mixing in his cranberries, turning the whole mess gray. Finn leaned over to Carolyn and whispered, “I think your brother’s attention span has reached its limit. I should never have put him between Byron and Bill.” Before Byron had gotten the floor, Bill Whitley had been holding forth on Simon Callow. Which Finn couldn’t help but think was punningly appropriate, though to say so later to James would be a cheap shot.
“But God help me,” Byron Solomon was saying, “if there’s a kinescope floating around of my episode of Judge Roy Bean. Also pseudonymous. ‘Law West of the Pecos.’ Now, that’s one I do not care to see revealed.”
“Edgar Buchanan!” cried Bill Whitley. Everyone but the Whitleys had heard this, too.
“Suppose I mobilize him to help me clear,” Carolyn said to Finn. “Meanwhile you can rescue poor Deborah.”
Deborah Whitley, whom Finn had seated at his left, had her golden, mostly naked back to him, leaning into her conversation with Peter Sykes. Who had filled his and Deborah’s wineglasses twice now, and was speaking too low for the rest of the table to hear. He made a fist, then stretched forth the fingers like a tenor hitting a high note. Muscles bulged in his forearm: Peter Sykes was a sculptor who’d spent the past three months working in an auto body shop to sharpen his welding skills. Deborah Whitley laughed.
Finn admired Carolyn for her civilized pretense that her husband was a bore, bending the unwilling ear of the large-breasted, precariously halter-topped Deborah Whitley. Carolyn’s intelligence would probably get her through until her looks began to go. Good Christ, one’s friends.
After dinner, Byron nodded off in Finn’s armchair; then his eyes flew open and he said he guessed he’d better toddle along. The Whitleys had brought him, but Bill looked so crestfallen—Finn was flattered that he was enjoying himself, but appalled by his bad manners—that Peter Sykes offered to drive Byron home. This jogged Bill into a belated sense of the decencies, and that was it for the evening; one couldn’t very well ask Peter and Carolyn to stay on with the Whitleys standing right there. Carolyn offered to help with the cleanup, but Finn wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d be glad to. Finn said they had things well in hand.
“Oh, don’t be such a macho man,” she said. “You’ll be up till all hours.”
“Well …,” said Finn.
“Shoo,” James said. “No girls allowed.”
“If you’re sure,” said Carolyn.
James rolled his eyes. “Ve vant,” he stage-whispered, “to be alone.”
Carolyn looked down at the beautiful wood floor.
After closing the door on all of them, Finn turned to James.
“There was no need to be brutal. Couldn’t you see she was upset?”
“What?” said James. “What are you talking about now?”
“Oh, come,” Finn said. “Even you couldn’t have missed what was going on at dinner. I assure you, your sister took note.”
“What, Stanley Kowalski and Little Bo Peep? Oh, for God’s sake. Parties are for flirting. That’s what they’re about. I mean, if there’s anybody there under fifty. Or wasn’t it like that back in your day?”
“This was a social evening,” Finn said, hating this tone he was being maneuvered into taking. “I don’t regard that as giving people license to hurt other people’s feelings.”
“Ooh,” said James. “Well I guess that tells me. The Queen of Feelings has spoken.” He walked into the kitchen with that walk Finn hated. That goddamn faggot walk, where the shoulders didn’t move. The fourth bottle of Montalcino—Finn also hated white wine—had only about that much left. He picked it up, glanced at the kitchen doorway and polished it off. What would the Italian be for À même la bouteille? He carried the dead soldier into the kitchen, not even looking at James (who fetched a loud sigh as he bent over the dishwasher), and on through into the mudroom, where he dropped it, clank, in with the green glass. All this environmental malarkey was accomplishing exactly nothing except to give a bunch of small people the power to tyrannize you when you went to the dump. Even grocery bags had turned self-righteous: WE RECYCLE, with the arrows going around. Finn hated that “we.”
On Saturday morning the phone rang while he was standing at the refrigerator eating cold stuffing with his fingers. “Hi,” said Carolyn. “I hope I’m not calling too early.”
“No no no, I’ve been up since seven-thirty.” Finn looked at his watch: eleven on the dot. “Didn’t you see me out back with my trusty wheelbarrow? That bloody sandbox is finally going the way of the swing set. This time next year we’ll have a backyard suitable for grown-ups, by Jesus.” He hated saying “we” to Carolyn, but “I” would’ve been even worse. “Did the O’Donnell children really play on that flimsy little swing set?”
“And everyplace else,” Carolyn said. “Four of the little monsters. From sunup to sundown. Peter and I used to pray for a rainy day.”
“Ah, but sure and they were precious souls for Holy Mother Church,” said Finn.
“Listen, Finn?” Carolyn said. “There’s something—listen, James isn’t right there, is he?”
“Christ, no. Lazy little son of a bitch is still asleep.” The lumberjack mode, he felt, compensated for that “we.” “You want me to call him? It’s about time he—”
“No,” she said. “No, what I mean is, could I talk to you about something?”
“Of course.” He edged over to the kitchen table, watching the coils of the telephone cord stretch, and sat down. He put his hand to his shirt pocket as if pledging allegiance. Only the rattle of a matchbook.
“There was a message on our machine when we got home last night,” Carolyn said. Finn was scanning the room: damn it, his cigarettes were over there on the counter, far out of reach. “My father went in for some tests a couple of weeks ago. And now they want him to go back and have more done. And—you know, it just doesn’t sound very good.”
“Tests,” said Finn.
“See, he’s had, you know, rectal bleeding …”
“Right,” said Finn.
“And I just thought James ought to be told.”
“Right,” said Finn. “I agree. Do you want to, or shall I?”
“Well …” she said.
“I’ll be glad to,” he said. “I take it there’s been very little contact.”
“I guess it’s been a little better since—you know, since he’s been living up here. If anything, they’re—”
“Would you excuse me just a second?” Finn put the receiver down, wedging it between the heavy cut-glass vase and the dinette-style metal napkin dispenser so the tension in the cord wouldn’t pull it off onto the floor, then went over and fetched his cigarettes.
“I’m back,” he said, holding the receiver to his ear with his shoulder as he struck a match. “Carolyn, I’m very sorry to hear this about your father.” He took a deep, welcome drag and considerately raised the mouthpiece as he blew out the smoke. “We’ll hope it turns out to be nothing serious. And I’ll speak to James as soon as he comes down. Now, are you all right?”
“I guess,” she said. “I’m just trying to, you know, wait to hear something concrete and not panic until there’s actually something to panic about.”
“Good girl,” he said. “It’s a harrowing thing, I know. I went through this with my father.” Hardly a reassuring thing to say, on second thought. “I can’t honestly tell you that the waiting is the worst part”—Christ, he was getting himself in deeper—“but in your case I truly hope it will be.” He had extricated himself by inspiration.
“So do I,” she said. Then she
said, “I’m sorry about your father.”
“Oh, this was years ago. So meanwhile. What do you recommend? Should James go down there, do you think? Are you planning to go down?”
“No,” she said. “I think at this point all it would do is get everybody more upset. You know, people showing up like …” Had she been going to say like vultures? “Besides, Fort Myers isn’t all that divine in July. But I do think that if he would call or write—I don’t know, I just think it would mean a lot. If only for his own sake, you know? Like later on.”
“Right,” said Finn.
“I think he really is very ill. I just—something just tells me that.”
“I’ll go upstairs right now. And you’ll let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“I will. Thank you.”
“Ciao,” he said, and stood up to put the receiver back in its cradle.
“So what’s going on?” Finn turned: James was standing, barefoot, in the archway leading to the dining room.
“I didn’t realize you were up,” Finn said. “That was Carolyn. It seems your father has gone in for some tests, and they’re not certain at this point, what if anything, is wrong. But apparently your mother’s quite upset, and your sister seems to think it sounds serious enough that you ought to get in touch with them.”
“And say what?”
“I don’t honestly know, Jamie. That would be up to you.”
James went to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of seltzer and drank from it. “Sort of tests are we talking about?”
“Again,” said Finn, and spread his hands, palms up. A long ash fell off his cigarette, and he saw it shatter softly on the floor. “It seems to be some sort of colorectal thing.”
