by Marc Acito
“Fuck you, you fuckety fuckwad!” she screams, then smacks me in the shoulder with Eddie’s diary. She stomps to the door, undoubtedly disturbing my downstairs neighbors, the comparatively calm Crackheads. Pointing an accusatory finger at me, she says, “You’re gonna be sorry.”
Luckily, bash mitzvah work tapers off with the holidays, so I don’t risk running into her until January. In the meantime I’m still booked for corporate holiday parties, which provide multiple opportunities to seek inside information from imprudent drunks. Not for myself, of course. Once my credit card arrives, Natie invests my $1,500 in Pharmicare stock options, informing me that our investment won’t pay off until February, when our option comes due. But I still hold out hope for a lead so spectacular that Chad takes me out and gets just drunk enough to act on his heretofore unexpressed homosexual desires. I’m so horny it hurts.
My final chance of the year comes at a holiday party for the accounting firm of Hibbert & Howard. As the second-largest firm in the country (after I. J. Sloan, according to Natie), neither Hibbert nor Howard has spared any expense, renting out the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I tell Ziba what I’m doing, she insists on joining me.
“I need to scout locations,” she explains on the phone. “I’m in charge of my cousin’s twenty-first birthday party in April.”
“But you can see it anytime.”
“Not decorated. Oh, please, darling. With Kelly in rehearsals, I’m living like a nun.”
“What about your Arabian nights?”
“Oh, I’m so bored with being hip. I’d much rather do something with you.”
We arrive early because I need time to change into an Egyptian pharaoh’s costume. We walk down a long corridor past mummies, scrolls of papyrus, and charcoal gray sentinels, then turn a corner into the room containing the temple.
No, room is the wrong word. It’s like stepping into another world.
Naturally, the sandstone temple stands untouched, but uplighting casts it into high relief. I wish the whole world were uplit—it’s so much more dramatic. Hundreds of votive candles float in the surrounding moat, as if reflecting the starry night sky, which is projected two stories high on the museum’s stone walls. With black cloths masking the buffet tables, all you see is shimmering light, towering palm trees, and the temple. After all the garish displays I’ve witnessed this fall, I’m dumbstruck by the sheer eloquence.
I’m snapped out of my reverie by a voice that sounds like someone stepping on a cat.
“Edwid!”
Sandra dashes over, her brow fraught with worry, as if she doesn’t expect me to live to the end of the conversation.
“Thank Gawd you’re here,” she says. “It’s a disaster. First, I hadda deal with the coked-up photographer, and now…” She stops and stares at Ziba. “Who are you?”
“This is my friend Ziba,” I say. “She’s—”
“Perfect! That’s what she is. Oh, Edward, what would I do without you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Courtenay quit on me, the skinny bitch. She met a millionaire at the party we did at the Founders Club and now she’s engaged. Engaged! Twelve years I’ve been in this business and you know how many millionaires I’ve dated? Zero. My therapist says I’m not aggressive enough.” She peers over my shoulder. “Hey! You, next to the statue. You break it, you buy it.” She turns to Ziba. “The costumes are over there.”
“Oh,” Ziba says, “I don’t think—”
“No, please, it’s me who should be thanking you.”
“That’s not what I—”
“You’ll do fine, honey. Just slouch a little—men don’t like women who are too tall.”
The guests pour in like water from a burst pipe, and I’m immediately swept into the conversational current. I’m doing my usual hello-how-are-you-tell-me-corporate-secrets when I spy Ziba across the room, which is easy to do considering she’s five-foot-seventeen and dressed as Nefertiti. I walk over to her and, just as I arrive, she’s approached by a stocky, square-headed guy with a Guido pompadour that looks like it was blown dry in a wind tunnel.
“Nice costume,” he says to her.
Ziba emits a “thanks” like a puff of smoke.
“You know where it would look even better?” he says, leaning into her. “Piled in a heap on my bedroom floor.”
She gives him a Diana “That’s-Miss-Ross to you” look. “Do you know what I’d like to see?”
“What?”
“You piled in a heap under the Queensborough Bridge.”
The man slams his empty glass down on the bar. “Bitch.”
Ziba turns to me. “This is a terrible job. Why do you do it?”
“For money.”
“Oh, that.” She looks around the room, her fingers twitching for the cigarette she can’t have. “Honestly, I don’t know why Kelly would want to date a man. They’re so tiresome. No offense.”
“None taken. Does she still want to date men?”
Ziba rolls her Cleopatra eyes. “She doesn’t know what she wants. She says she loves me, but she’s not sure if she’s gay.”
“She’s like Doug is for me.”
“Exactement. Except she doesn’t have a comically large penis.”
I hitch up my cotton kilt so that it sits above my pudge. “I guess it’s confusing for her. I mean, she’s so girlie.”
“What are you saying? That I’m not?”
“No, no. You’re just very…tall.”
“It’s the haircut, isn’t it?” she says, touching the cockscomb atop her head. “It makes me look too butch.”
“Not too butch.”
“I see. Just butch enough. Midbutch. Demibutch.”
“I didn’t say that.” I’m such a lousy liar. I’ll never get back into Juilliard if I don’t learn to lie better.
Ziba straightens her dress. “Excuse me,” she says, pushing me aside. “I’m being paid to flirt with the heterosexual guests.”
She slinks into the crowd, Delilah in search of a Samson. I go the opposite way, hoping to do some heterosexual flirting myself. Natie read in Fortune magazine that corporate raiders are rushing to buy out companies before new tax laws take effect January 1, so I pump the drunk secretaries for as much information as I can. But it’s hard to have a serious conversation when you’re enlisted to Walk Like an Egyptian while a band called the Bangles does a song by the same name. I tell myself that my willingness to do anything for a laugh (or a buck) is evidence of my outsize, wacky personality, but as I look around at all these well-dressed people with their suits and cocktail dresses and six-figure jobs, I feel less like the wily court jester than the clueless village idiot. After making a spectacle of myself, I go to the bar to get something to take the edge off my humiliation. Ziba joins me, this time on the arm of a guy who looks like he was the homecoming king in high school before his life went downhill and he took to drink; although perhaps I’m overanalyzing.
“Edward, thisss is Greg.” Her voice is thick and slurry, like she’s been gargling with cottage cheese. “He’s a paramedic.”
“Paralegal,” Greg burps. “And iss Craig.”
“In’t that whut I said?”
“No, you said paratrooper.”
They’re both shit-faced. Ziba smoothes her hair with immense self-satisfaction, a Siamese cat grooming itself.
“So, what does a paralegal do?” I ask.
“He works for me,” a voice says behind me.
I turn, and there’s a skinny, middle-aged woman who puts the pow in power dressing: Nancy Reagan red with NFL shoulder pads. Her thick eyebrows are brushed fashionably against the grain, contributing to a sense of menace.
“Judith,” Craig says, “meet Ramses and Nefertiti. Ramses and Nefertiti, this is my boss, Judith Utzinger.”
I smile at her, trying to win her over with my Southern charm. “Eddie Zander,” I say. “Right pleased to meet ya’, ma’am.” If I had a hat I’d tip it.
She reluctan
tly shakes my hand, then stares down her employee. “Ease up on the booze,” she says. “We still have work to do tonight.”
Craig gives a military salute. “Yes, sir. I mean, ma’am.”
She frowns, her eyebrows caterpillaring toward each other, then turns, cutting a swath through the crowd like a Western movie villain sauntering down Main Street.
“Wow,” I say. “She’s certainly a ray of sunshine.”
“She’s psycho. Lass week she hit me in the head with a yogurt.”
Naturally, this comment invites me to share Boss from Hell stories, of which I have many, courtesy of Irving Fish. As Craig leers at Ziba, I ply him with alcohol and various Tales from the Crypt, including the time Irving cut off my tie, all of which primes him for the crucial moment when I ask, oh-so-casually, “So what is it you’re working on?”
Given that the avenues in Manhattan are numerical, one could reasonably assume that they begin with First. But beyond First, tucked along the river between Fifty-third and Fifty-ninth, lies Sutton Place, a neighborhood so exclusive I hadn’t even heard of it.
Chad lives in a postwar building, the kind with a glass-fronted lobby, which I now enter carrying a pizza. The doorman looks up, one of the uniformed members of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“Hey, how you doin’?” I say, imitating any number of Zanni relatives. “This is for”—I consult a name I’ve scrawled on the outside of the box—“Severson.”
The doorman picks up a phone. This is an idiotic idea. I mean, Chad’s probably not even home. But I’m determined not to lose my last chance this year for a one-on-one encounter.
“Good evening, Mr. Severson,” the doorman says into the phone. “Your pizza is here.”
He looks up at me. “He says he didn’t order a pizza.”
“Damn. Musta been some kinda mix-up.”
He talks into the phone. “Sorry to bother you, Mr—”
“Hang on, hang on,” I say. “Ask him if he wants it anyway. Tell him it’s from Zanni Pizzeria. It’s a merger of pepperoni and sausage.”
He relays the message like it’s a colossal bother. After a few mm-hmms and uh-huhhs, he puts down the phone.
“You can go up.”
Twenty-one
Thank God there’s a mirror in the elevator. Without it I wouldn’t have noticed the Egyptian eyeliner still on my eyes. Please note: If you ever have occasion to line your eyes in the ancient Egyptian fashion, nineteen floors is just enough time to smear it all over your face. I look like a mime who just got dumped.
I walk down the hallway, which is carpeted like a hotel, and ring Chad’s bell. He opens the door, wearing nothing but a towel and a smile. “You caught me coming out of the shower.”
Volumes of poetry have been written to describe the kind of exquisite beauty now on display before me. Chad’s body is muscular, but not intimidatingly so, and is coated lightly with peach fuzz, as if he’d been doused with gold dust. The remaining moisture from his shower coats his tawny skin like he’s been decoupaged for an extremely gay crafts project.
“Come on in,” he purrs, his voice like a Burt Bacharach song.
The apartment is smaller than I expected, and barely furnished, with parquet floors and a sliding glass door onto a narrow terrace. Chad leads me past one of those flying-saucer lamps hanging in an empty dining room and to a black leather couch, which faces a television the size of a bank safe, flanked by a pair of stereo speakers like sentries.
“Just move in?” I ask.
He shoves some papers off the glass coffee table and I put down the pizza. “Nah, I’ve been here seven years.”
There’s nowhere else to sit, so we place ourselves on opposite ends of the couch. Chad opens the pizza box and, after taking a moment to blot it with a napkin, grabs a slice. All I can think about is how he’s naked under that towel.
“You’re tan,” I say, displaying the rapid-fire wit for which I’m renowned.
“I was in the Cayman Islands.”
“You were just there in September.”
He pulls on the end of the slice with his teeth, like a dog playing tug-of-war. “It’s the only place I can really relax.” Oil dribbles into the ledge between his lower lip and his chin. “So whaddya got for me?”
Two words: Hard. On.
I start my story with a Paula-style, “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away,” preamble, partly because I want Chad to know how tirelessly I work for him, but also to prolong the conversation so I can track the progress of a drop of water as it journeys down his breastbone, through the ridge of his abdominals, and finally wells in his navel. Even if he is gay, he probably wouldn’t be interested in me. While some people might consider me short, dark, and handsome, Chad’s out of my league. If it weren’t for his crooked nose, he has soap-opera looks. But that doesn’t stop me from mooning about him like a junior high girl lingering by the lifeguard station. I hear myself blather on about Ziba’s cousin’s birthday party and the Temple of Dendur until I finally tell him what I learned:
“Hibbert and Howard is being acquired by I. J. Sloan.”
Chad’s green eyes flash like traffic signals. “Are you sure?”
“The deal’s going through in the next couple of weeks. They’re working on it right now.”
Chad leaps off the couch. “Yeah!” he shouts. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about.” He leans down and grabs me by the shoulders. “Oh, Edward, baby, I could kiss you.”
I stop breathing.
Instead he shakes me, grunting with pleasure, his perfect teeth as white as the towel I wish would fall from his waist. His eyes crinkle when he smiles, the wrinkles suddenly appearing like starbursts. He releases me. “Okay, you’d better go,” he says, pacing the floor. “The doorman’s gonna notice how long you’ve been up here.”
“Oh, right.” Those of us without doormen don’t think of these things. The only people who’d notice anything in my building are the Crackheads downstairs or the guy across the street with a colander on his head.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’d love to hang out, but in my business I can’t risk anyone gossiping about my personal life.”
There’s that phrase again. As much as I relish the role of the private paramour, I’m getting fed up with the whole love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name thing. If I’m going to put up with the constraints of being the secret love, then I’d actually like to have some secret lovin’. Instead, I wait while he goes into the bedroom without me to get my hundred bucks.
“When this deal comes through, we’ll celebrate,” he says, patting me on the shoulder as he hands it to me.
The hair on my neck stands on end. “Okay,” I say.
Wuss.
I go back to Wallingford for Christmas and discover that my childhood home has been transformed into Little Managua: Multicolored blankets drape over couches; folk-art masks of parrots and toucans hang on the wall; you can’t even pee without being watched by a statue of the Blessed Virgin. You’d think I’d mind feeling like a tourist in my own house, but I’ve seen this play before—with the original cast. When Dagmar moved in she transformed the place into a SoHo gallery, with hardwood floors, track lighting, and her scary black-and-white photographs.
No, it hasn’t been my house for a long time.
Milagros’s family has joined us for the wedding: her cheerful parents, Ignacio and Perpetua, with whom I communicate solely through frequent nods, smiles, and an English-Spanish dictionary, making me feel even more like a tourist; and her younger brother, Fernando, who was a university student until the war with the U.S.-backed contra rebels forced him to quit school. As if the Che Guevara T-shirt weren’t enough of a hint, he quickly informs me that Ronald Reagan is a war criminal.
He and I get along just fine.
Al and Milagros honeymoon in Miami, and I return to the city, where I find a postcard from Doug. It’s a picture of the ship, the Caribbean Destiny. On the back he’s written:
Hey, buddy,
The ship is AWESOME. You should work here. They’ve got party motivators. See you in April.
Doug
P.S. Have you read? Made me think of you.
I dissect each word with the care of a Talmudic scholar. “Hey, buddy,” for instance, firmly establishes the I-like-you-but-not-that-way boundary, as does the friendly promise to see me in April. Clearly, all is forgiven, and that is the best Christmas/birthday present I could get. Reading between the lines, I decide that meeting party motivators on board helped him realize that he can fraternize with homosexuals without fear of molestation.
What’s maddening is the postscript. No matter what I do—hold the card up to the light, examine it with a magnifying glass—I can’t figure out the smudged title. It appears to be about eight or nine letters, but it depends whether it’s one long word or a few short ones. What could it be? The Iliad? Ragtime? Catch-22? None of those would make Doug think of me. Neither would Emma, Jane Eyre, Saint Joan, or Lolita, although they’d certainly make an interesting poker game. I briefly consider Pygmalion—Doug and I have something of a Henry Higgins/Eliza Doolittle relationship, but it doesn’t seem like something you’d find on a ship. I just hope it’s not The Plague or The Dead.
I obsess about the smudge the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s, ruling out the Greeks (Lysistrata, Antigone, Electra, Medea) and Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello) on the principle that Doug would assume I had already read them and therefore wouldn’t need to ask if I had. And why would he be reading the Greeks or Shakespeare anyway?
This is what happens when you have too much time and too little company. Natie’s off skiing with Ziba and her Persian posse, or, to be more accurate, keeping her company in the lodge. (When asked what kind of skiing she prefers, Ziba replied, “Après.”) Willow’s visiting her family in California, and Kelly’s so beaten up from Starlight rehearsals she has to nightly soak her bloody, swollen feet in a bucket of rubbing alcohol.
