As for Seamus, perhaps because he was less of a literary man than Henry, he had a bigger heart; you knew that you could count on him for help if you got into trouble. Seamus had mysterious reserves of money, and had been slaving for the last dozen years on a Great Work reputed to be already seven thousand pages long, the manuscript of which he carted back and forth in boxes every time he made his weekday trundle from Manhattan duplex to Springs beach house. Yet more than as a writer it was as a muckraker that he was becoming famous, a deliverer of fire and brimstone speeches to which people didn’t want to listen but listened anyway. Few could as yet smell the incipience of ACT UP in the air, of those days when rubber-gloved policemen would hoist protesters from the pavement of Manhattan streets, and wizened veterans of Stonewall would instruct boys fresh out of Harvard in the proper way to position their wrists so that the plastic garbage ties the cops used to bind them would not cut any veins. Those who did, though, looked to Seamus as a hero. Others flocked to his speeches for the sheer masochistic thrill of them, as some of my sister’s friends had once flocked to a certain Chinese restaurant in San Francisco simply for the pleasure of being bullied and insulted by its waiter, Edsel Ford Fong. And yet I am remiss if I suggest that Seamus’s diatribes were gratuitous, or purely sadistic. On the contrary, his anger was as genuine as it was defensible: he was furious at the mayor of New York for failing to prioritize AIDS; furious at the FDA for its slowness in approving new drugs; furious at the smugly apathetic gay men who paraded obliviously up and down the East Hampton beach in Calvin Klein swimsuits even as their brethren lay dying in understaffed hospitals. Their anomie—which revealed itself even under the flattering light of ballrooms, at five-hundred dollar a plate AMFAR benefits of the sort to which Roy would later take me—stood out for Seamus as the greatest sin of all, evidence not only of callousness but collaborationism. For in those years no one wanted to take what he had to say seriously, even at the five-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners, where, thunderous before a mob of perfectly coifed, elegantly employed young men, he would thrust out his finger like a demonic preacher, and scream, “In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead. In five years half of you in this room are going to be dead, dead, dead." And though afterward, over cigars, everyone would make a joke of his pronouncements, or try to soften the edges of his rantings by recasting them as a purely intellectual strategy, “an attention-getting tactic, and possibly an effective one,” nonetheless the disquiet he had generated was palpable. In the end, of course, history did prove him wrong, though not in the way his enemies would have predicted: five years later, not half, but three-quarters of the men in that room were dead, for no matter how extreme Seamus’s vision might have been, the virus’s was more so.
AIDS was the fashionable charity in East Hampton that summer: few weekends passed without some expensive benefit, usually held outdoors, in moonlight or sunlight, at a lavish beachfront mansion or in a prizewinning rose garden. The chief purpose of these galas, so far as I could tell, was to provide the overmonied denizens of the region with a tax-deductible means of demonstrating their altruistic impulses without actually having to touch or talk to the disease’s “victims.” The entertainments on offer ranged from wine tastings to lectures on botany to performances of “The Art of the Fugue” by a string quartet, as well as, at one comparatively lowbrow affair (the tickets went for only seventy-five dollars a head), a performance by a theater troupe all the members of which had AIDS. Unfortunately, at the last minute the troupe had had to cancel because too many of the actors were sick, which left the event’s organizer, the pastor at a local Episcopalian church, in the unenviable position of having to come up with an alternative amusement on less than twenty-four hours’ notice. His idea was to pull together a group reading by local writers, in which he asked me to take part.
Of course I agreed. Eli was reading Dickens in Nora’s living room when the call came.
“Who was that?” he asked when I hung up.
“That nice minister we met on the beach,” I said, and told him about the reading.
Eli put down his book. “I don’t suppose I should be surprised that he didn’t even think of inviting me,” he said.
“Oh, Eli, I’m sorry—”
“Or that it didn’t occur to you to suggest that he might invite me.”
“I’ll tell you what, why don’t I call him back right now?”
“Don’t bother.”
“But it’s easy—”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” He threw down his book. “Jesus, don’t you see? It only counts if you think of it. You make Liza look like Mother Teresa.”
“Okay, I’ll prove it to you,” I said, picking up the phone. “Here, I’m going to call—”
“I told you no.”
I started dialing.
“Hang up that phone!”
“No, I’m going to—”
“I said hang up that phone!”
He stormed toward me. For a few embarrassing seconds we tussled with the receiver, until Eli pulled the jack out of the wall. “Jesus!” I cried. But he had slammed out the door, into the yard. “Oh, why couldn’t I have just asked?” I lamented, for in those days I was forever announcing my better intentions, in the vague hope of winning praise or forgiveness.
Even so, as soon as he was out of earshot, I plugged the phone back into the wall and called the pastor, who said he would be happy to invite Eli; indeed, the only reason he hadn’t done so in the first place, he explained, was that he hadn’t known Eli was a writer.
Hanging up, I hurried outside. “Eli,” I called, “I just talked to Reverend Davis, and it’s okay. He’d love for you to read.”
“I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,” Eli answered tardy. But in the end, ambition—or perhaps a sense of duty—overcame his pride, and he agreed to participate. The event was to take place in Southampton, at the oddly un-South American mansion of an Argentinean lady who happened to be one of the pastor’s parishioners. Inside, the furniture was mostly Shaker, the decor Early American: quilts, frayed flags, evil-looking handmade dolls. A waiter in white gloves led us through the living room to the back garden, where the hostess stood greeting her guests. She had on a curiously countrified dress, a sort of milkmaid’s dress, very much at odds with her heavy black hair and Castilian accent. Meanwhile young men in uniforms were arranging plastic chairs in half-moons around a makeshift amphitheater and putting a photocopied program on each seat.
The waiter led us up onto the stage, where the pastor was chatting with those of the readers who had already arrived. Seamus was among them. Waving wildly, he hurried from his seat to greet us. “God, I can’t tell you what a relief it is to see some sisters,” he cried. “Amazing that at an AIDS benefit there should be so few homos—or perhaps they’re all too busy running around on that beach looking for a piece of dick!” He shook his head in disgust. “And how have you boys been getting along since we turned Main Street on its head?”
“Fine,” Eli said curdy.
“Martin, writing the great American gay novel I fully expect from you? I keep telling him,” he added to Eli, “that he has it in him to write it, if only he’d get over his obsession with stupid little picayune domestic details. I mean, whacking off in bed, for God’s sake—did Tolstoy write about whacking off in bed? Did Shakespeare?”
“Still, Seamus,” I said, “times have changed. And wasn’t the whole point of the sixties that it freed up the discourse on sex—”
“Sex, yes, fine—sex as an expression of love, as a metaphor for the nobility of our people ... but whacking off, and phone sex, and stealing straight boys’ underwear, that’s hardly the image we want to project, don’t you agree?” (Eli nodded vigorously.)
The pastor now approached us. “So glad you could come,” he said, offering his hand. “And have you met Mrs. González?”
“Not yet.”
“Carmencita’s an
angel to host the event for us,” he went on, smiling in that bland, rehearsed manner I recognized from outings with Kendall. “And now come and meet your fellow readers. Let me see—oh, we’re still waiting for Gloria. She’s never on time!” I smiled. Introductions were tendered. All of the other readers were women, poets and murder mystery writers. One of them I recognized as the lover of the fired lesbian from Delicious Delights; it turned out she was the author of a hugely popular series of detective novels for teenage girls. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise,” she answered gruffly. “By the way, Seamus, Lorella’s found an attorney. He’s talking big bucks. Millions.”
“Good idea. Get the bastard for every cent he’s got! Gay people have got to fight the power.”
At last Gloria, who was never on time, arrived. Gathering us around him, the pastor gave a familiar little speech about the necessity of sticking to the ten-minute time limit. Speed was of the essence, he warned, fixing his gaze on Seamus, because Mrs. González needed everyone out by six in order to prepare for a dinner party.
“Oh, no problem,” I said.
“I’d rather only read for two minutes!” barked Lorella’s lover. But Seamus said nothing.
Though only half the seats were taken, Mrs. González signaled us that it was time to begin. Gloria read first, followed by Eli, then me. After that it was Seamus’s turn. Unlike the rest of us, he hadn’t brought along a book or pages from a manuscript, which I suppose we should have taken as a warning sign. Instead he walked to the podium and began to talk extemporaneously. His voice was low at first, hardly audible, as he spoke of the four former lovers he had just visited in the same ward at Bellevue, the grim conditions of the hospital, his five hundred friends who were dead. Five hundred! This was a figure he threw out routinely, and that people tended to dismiss as yet another example of his hyperbolic style, though in fact it represented, if anything, an understatement: all that was questionable was his definition of friendship. For time would soon diminish the shock value of that number, as the list of the dead grew longer, and people built up antibodies against such bardic invective. “It abashes me,” he intoned, “when our paper of record will not report justly or adequately on the gravest crisis since the Holocaust. It abashes me when my gay brothers refuse to recognize that by fucking without rubbers they are collaborating in their own extermination.” (At the word “rubbers,” a flinch of discomfiture rippled through the audience.) “It abashes me when even you people, yes, even you well-intentioned, liberal-minded straight people, sit by and imagine it will never happen to you, never your sons, never your husbands. But mark my words. It will.” In the distance a dog barked. The pastor checked his watch. “I tell you,” he went on, “in that squalid city you all avoid four months out of the year, on the stinking streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, I’m seeing miracles. I’m seeing men who barely have the strength to get out of bed in the morning dragging themselves to city hall to protest the callous greed of our disgusting mayor. I’m seeing people for whom it takes everything they have to fight the virus finding somewhere the extra bit of energy to battle greedy pharmaceutical companies, and an inept and compassionless national bureaucracy, and a hard-hearted medical establishment! And not only for their own sakes, but for your sakes, the sakes of your thankless sons and husbands! You stupid, stupid, careless people, don’t you see we’re dying? In the city we’re fucking dying, in agony? And all the while you sit out here on your asses and do nothing!”
He was quiet. In the distance the dog was still barking. Anxiously we watched as he took a cloth from his pocket, wiped his glasses, looked out at the audience, and, seeing its members braced with worry, stepped back. “Oh, why bother?” he muttered, then reclaimed his seat.
There was a silence then. For twenty seconds or so it stretched out, until just at the point when it seemed about to implode, a lone set of hands started clapping. I looked to see whose they were—it was Eli—and hearing him, joined in. The pastor clapped next. Then Mrs. González clapped, and then the other writers, and then, very gradually, the members of the audience started clapping too, as if what had been holding them back was not outrage so much as some insecurity as to what would be the proper response to such an onslaught. Protocol thus absorbed the sermon, robbing it of its power to sting.
Afterward, during the reception, Seamus was timid. He hid in a corner of the garden with a plate of petits fours. “What did you think of my speech?” he asked when I joined him. “Did I go too far? Do they hate me?” His voice had verged into a whine of innuendo, as if by pleading his own immaturity he might avoid some punishment—a slap on the rear, or being sent to bed without his supper. Such vacillations, as I would soon learn, were typical of him. Publicly ferocious, in private he could reveal unsuspected caches of vulnerability, which was why, though he pined for love, and was constantly plying Eli and me with requests to introduce him to eligible men, whenever he actually found himself in the presence of someone on whom he had a crush he would be reduced to a stutter of anxiety: the great orator, to whom words came so easily at a podium, could not find his voice when faced with the object of his affection. He also detested being alone, and was therefore forever summoning me to his house, either for dinners with ill-tempered friends, or to listen to a chapter of his novel, or to excoriate me for what he perceived as the great inadequacy of my own work: my refusal to write what he called the “big gay book, the gay War and Peace, the gay Crime and Punishment.” (Seamus was partial to the Russians.) For he admired epic scale and superlatives and monumentality, whereas I—love child of the magazine and Stanley Flint—believed in concision, leanness, getting the maximum effect out of the minimum number of words. Muriel Spark and Raymond Carver were my heroes, and further back, the Forster of Where Angels Fear to Tread, the Ford Madox Ford of The Good Soldier. (But not Parade's End, heavens no!) I didn’t believe books could ever change the world, whereas Seamus believed that if they didn’t they weren’t worth writing. This was why it vexed him that I’d as yet written nothing about AIDS. “I mean, how can you not write about it,” he’d ask, “when it’s to your generation what Vietnam was to mine?”
“I have to wait for the right story,” I’d answer. “Remember what Grace Paley says, there has to be a long time between knowing and telling—”
“But we don’t have a long time—not anymore!”
“And anyway,” I persisted (for I had ceased to be so afraid of him), “once you start dictating to writers what they can and can’t write, you’re robbing them of their most essential freedom. What you end up with isn’t literature, it’s propaganda.”
“Oh, pooh! Writers are no different than anyone else. We all have social obligations.”
“My only obligation is to myself, to write the very best I can,” I retorted. For I was every day more in agreement with Flint that when one set out to satisfy other people’s requirements, the result would be mediocrity. Only by listening for that strange little voice, the one that spoke at the least likely moments (and from the most improbable places), could one hope to produce something that would last.
Once, when Seamus called that summer, it was to tell us that we needed to go and get HIV tests immediately. “But why?” I asked. After all, until recently he had been urging gay men not to have HIV tests.
“I just got off the phone with Fauci,” Seamus answered. “He’s convinced me—absolutely convinced me—that this new drug, AZT, is the ticket. And not only for people who are already sick: also if you’re positive but asymptomatic, he says, it’ll keep the virus at reasonable levels. The report will hit the papers later this year—he let me in on the results early, he said, because as you’re probably aware there’s every probability I’m HIV-positive. And so I want to get the word out, trumpet the news: get the test”
This phone call, needless to say, upset me considerably. After all, until now Seamus’s antitesting stance, his conviction that the test represented only a veiled effort on the part of the government to esta
blish an HIV “blacklist,” had given Eli and me the perfect excuse not to subject ourselves to what we both looked upon as an intimidating and gruesome ordeal. Though Eli’s fear, moreover, had at least a real world basis, deriving as it did from the knowledge that unlike me he actually had, on several occasions, been fucked without a condom, my own anxiety, despite its more hypothetical origins, was no less intense. For I had gone through too many weeks of awaiting, with my mother, the results of biopsies, ever to want to subject myself to that anguish again.
“What is it?” Eli asked as I put down the phone.
I told him. He mulled over the news for a moment, then said, “Well, I suppose it’s inevitable. I’ll call and make appointments—”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to have the test.”
“But, Martin, you said it yourself, given your history you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Exactly. So why should I need to be tested?”
“For the reassurance of knowing.”
“Yes, and what if I turn out to be positive? What reassurance is that going to be?”
“But you won’t turn out to be positive—unless you’ve been lying to me.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you been lying to me?”
“Of course not. I just—I mean, you know, there’s always the chance that you might have a microscopic cut on your finger or something—”
“You sound like Liza.”
“And then, if you find out you’re positive, there’s nothing you can do, and your life is basically ruined.”
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