“But I thought you said Seamus’s whole point was that there is something you can do. AZT.”
“Oh, they say that now,” I responded prophetically. “Only who’s to say that in two years they won’t find out that taking all that AZT only makes things worse?”
So we argued. Every day I found a fresh reason to persuade Eli not to make the doctor’s appointment. I wanted to finish my new novel first, I said—my new novel, of which I had so far produced a total of ten pages. As for Eli, whenever I went into his study, I couldn’t help but notice that the glowing green diodes on his computer always spelled out the words “Chapter One”—nothing else.
Sometimes, when Seamus called, it was because he was lonely. “I’m all by myself,” he said one Sunday, near the very end of our stay. “I’ve been writing the whole day, I haven’t talked to a living soul in hours, I need company.”
As it happened, that morning at the Amagansett Farmer’s Market, Eli and I had received a spontaneous invitation from his former boyfriend Derek Wexler (twin brother of Gerald) to an afternoon party—“nothing big,” Derek had insisted, “just a few boys, a little get-together”—so we suggested that Seamus meet us there.
“Fabulous,” he answered. “Perhaps I’ll find the great love of my life.” (This was always his hope.) “What’s the address?”
I told him. “Sagg Road!” he remarked admiringly. “So is your friend handsome and eligible, in addition to being rich?”
“I’m not sure if he’s single. He’s in arbitrage.”
“How old?”
“A few years older than me.”
“Mmm, I’ll have to doll up. See you soon.” He put down the phone. We ourselves did not doll up; indeed, almost as a point of honor, we wore our usual ratty jeans to Derek’s house, which managed to be very swanky without breaking the rules of a rigorously minimalist aesthetic: the sort of house in which the rooms are referred to as “volumes.” In the living volume—essentially a shingled cube—the blond parquet floor stretched blazingly toward windows framing a great swath of dune and ocean. Mapplethorpe prints hung over Mies van der Rohe chairs in the dining volume—all a far cry from Mrs. González’s mansion with its samplers and sorting tables.
We went outside, into the back garden. Around the crisply geometrical pool a dozen shellacked young men in Speedos had been languidly arranged. “They might as well be wearing price tags,” Eli whispered, as he cast his gaze over the little clot of guests gathered near the bar. “Oh, there’s Derek. Derek!” He waved. Derek detached himself.
“Eli, Martin, so glad you could come,” he said as he approached us. Unlike most of his guests, he was frilly dressed, in an old-fashioned morning suit and cravat. Like Gerald (they were fraternal twins), he had black hair and blue, benighted eyes, yet his skin was smoother than that of his brother; indeed, it had that rubbery cast, that alarming angularity that I would later come to associate with face-lift victims. “As you can see this is nothing formal,” he continued, pressing Eli’s biceps as he took in our attire, “just a little spontaneous get-together with friends.”
A waiter interrupted, bearing a tray of champagne flutes, which made me wonder what Derek’s more formal parties were like.
We walked to the bar. Not far from us, on the lawn, stood three movie moguls of great repute and wealth, men whose names routinely appeared on annual lists of America’s richest citizens. Dimly I recalled Seamus having flayed them alive in Queer Times a few months back, calling them the “troika of death,” or something on that order, because they had neither contributed enough money to AIDS groups nor helped to bring any of “our stories” to the big screen. I nudged Eli. “Oh dear,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” asked Derek.
“I’m afraid we may have unintentionally committed a bit of a gaffe,” Eli said. “You see, when you said ‘a few boys,’ I didn’t think—” Vaguely he indicated the lawn. “What I mean is, we’ve invited Seamus Holt to meet us here.”
Derek blanched. “Oh my God! You’ve got to stop him!”
“But how?”
“Head him off at the pass! Go! Go! Hurry!” He pushed us toward the driveway. No doubt the velocity of his transformation from suave host to deranged harridan would have amused us if we hadn’t been its cause. “But how could we have known?” I asked Eli.
We got into Nora’s battered station wagon. “Which route do you think he’d take?”
“I assume the highway.”
Eli turned the key in the ignition. “Do you even know what kind of car he drives?”
“Something Japanese. It’s blue. Don’t worry, I’ll recognize it.” We turned onto Sagaponack Main Street. Nothing passed us, however. Nor was any car remotely resembling Seamus’s to be seen at the traffic light on the Montauk Highway.
“Maybe he decided not to come,” Eli said hopefully.
“Let’s drive to his house and see,” I suggested. But when we got there, no blue car—no car of any color—was to be found.
Very haltingly, then, and terrified lest we should find bloodshed when we got there, we made our way back to the party, where that blue car for which we had searched in vain, the sighting of which anywhere else would have eased our racing hearts, sat snugly parked outside Derek’s sleek accretion of cubes. Eli switched off the engine. Almost lightheadedly we walked to the front door, which was open, crossed, once again, the exacting living room, and stepped into the garden. On the deck, price-tagged boys frolicked sluggishly. Some had taken off their Speedos. A few had jumped into the pool, where they were throwing a red ball back and forth.
We looked for Derek. He was nowhere to be seen. We looked for Seamus. Far away from us, near the dunes, he stood by himself, holding a beer, gazing out at the ocean. He seemed a very lonely figure, remote and elderly, especially when compared to his coevals, the “troika of death,” all of whom, no doubt, worked out with personal trainers, and spent an hour each morning at a tanning salon. Currently they were collected near the bar, enmeshed by a protective suite of admirers. Someone appeared to be telling a joke; in a few seconds I heard the laughter that is often the secret weapon of those best trained in social warfare.
Then Derek, from the kitchen door, made a summoning gesture with his fingertips.
We followed. “I’m sorry,” I said once we were inside.
“He must have taken a shortcut,” Eli added.
“Oh, it’s all right, think nothing of it,” answered Derek, who had apparently had a belt of something in the interval. “So far nothing’s happened. Still, it might be a good idea if ... you know...” He indicated Seamus with his elbow.
We understood. Patting Eli on the arm again, Derek went to talk with the “troika,” one member of which smiled at us as we strolled out toward Seamus. In his “dolled-up” outfit—purple shirt, tie-dyed bow tie—he looked both uncomfortable and disappointed.
“Sorry about this,” Eli said. “We had no idea—”
“When he invited us all he said was ‘a few boys,”’ I threw in.
“Oh, pshaw!” Seamus swatted the air. “Anyway it’s not your fault. It’s just that I was thinking...” He grinned. “Well, I suppose this is the price one pays for speaking one’s mind. Anyway, I should skedaddle. Or should I say scuttle? Scuttle’s more appropriate. Thanks for thinking of me. You were land...” His voice trailed off. “The thing is, I was absolutely convinced I was going to meet the great love of my life this afternoon, isn’t that ridiculous? And who knows? He might even be here.”
“I doubt it, in this crowd.”
Seamus, apparently consoled by this suggestion, kissed us both on the cheek, and left. Having seen him out, Eli and I made our way back to the bar. It was our intention to apologize one last time to Derek, then get the hell out of there; before we had a chance, though, a voice from the direction of the pool called Eli’s name. We turned. A giant of a fellow in running shorts and singlet, glib and thick-lipped and rudely handsome, was ambling toward us. “Eli, what a surprise,” h
e said, and then he was kissing him, while I breathed in the strongly masculine scent radiating from under his arms. His name, I soon learned, was Jonathan Horowitz; he and Eli had gone to college together; he was an in-house lawyer at Disney. “And what have you been doing all these years?” he asked Eli, throwing a brotherly arm around his shoulder. “Have you been here all summer? Why haven’t we seen each other? Oh, and how’s Liza? Man, when I got that invitation to her wedding, I nearly slung a clot. I always thought she was a dyke.”
“She is,” Eli said, laughing, and for a few minutes, in that rushed, catching-up way of classmates, they chatted about reunions and jobs, friends they had shared, teachers who had died. It seemed that Jonathan was renting a house in Watermill for the season, sharing it with his boyfriend, a wonderful fellow, we had to meet him. “Roy, come here!” he called. “I want to introduce an old pal of mine.”
Roy turned. I couldn’t help but smile. He had changed little in the year since I’d last seen him; indeed, in his pressed khakis and white polo shirt, he might merely have been the vacation version of that well-heeled gentleman about town, that paper doll, who not so long ago had carried me out of a dreary cafeteria and into a New York utterly remote from the one in which Eli and I tarried ... Yes, there was something that seemed always fresh-minted about Roy; even when he was drunk or exhausted, he gave off an air of mercantile newness and possibility. If Eli was the ancient teddy bear whose rips and stains endow him with an ever-increasing pathos, Roy was the shiny toy robot each child feels he will die if he doesn’t get for Christmas. His smile was bright, too bright: I wanted to squint against it, and bask in it too. “Martin!” he called, bypassing Eli, whom Jonathan Horowitz was holding out to him like a fisherman with his catch, “I can’t believe it’s you!” And taking my hand, he embraced me lightly, guyishly, but also with tenderness, filling my nostrils with a scent of limes that shook the past awake as brutally as smelling salts shoved under the nose of a fainting victim.
“Oh, you know each other?” Jonathan asked.
Roy nodded. “And you must be Eli,” he went on, letting me go. “What a pleasure finally to meet you. I’m Roy Beckett, by the way—Martin’s biggest fan.”
He winked. Eli regarded him with clinical dispassion. Later I wondered whether, with the grasping memory of the jealous spouse, he had been holding on to Roy’s name ever since that topsy-turvy afternoon in Florence when Lise Schiffrin had asked me about “my handsome friend”: Roy, royalty, king of hearts. The name itself roy-led the dark waters of his dreams withs its ad-royt-ness. Even the shape it imposed upon the lips was enough to give me away: the shape of a kiss.
We stood, then, the four of us, partners in an uncomfortable little square dance, while under our feet poles of habit and security shifted and the ground gave way. Roy asked about my new book: I told him it was coming out in a few weeks, then added clumsily—as if somehow it might soften the retribution I was expecting—“Eli’s got a novel coming out, too. It’s terrific, better than mine.”
“No it’s not.”
“Oh really? That’s great. I can’t wait to read it.” Roy felt in his pockets. “Say, has anyone got a pen?”
“I do,” said Eli.
Roy was pulling a business card out of his wallet. “I want to give you guys my number in Watermill,” he continued. “Thanks”—he took Eli’s pen—“in case you have any free time over the next few days.”
“Roy’s taking a week’s vacation,” Jonathan explained. “He doesn’t have to drive back to Manhattan tonight like the rest of us poor slobs.”
“Oh, how funny,” Eli said, “I’m planning to go into New York tomorrow morning myself.” He punched Jonathan lightly on the cheek. “Well, Jon, at least we won’t have to worry about the little women being bored, will we?”
“No, we’ll have to worry about them not being bored.” They both laughed. Roy gave me his card. A grimace of distaste had crossed his face. Not twenty-four hours later, in his bed, he’d be telling me how much it irritated him when men referred to themselves or each other in the feminine. For now, however, the manful way he reached to shake my hand seemed comment enough. “Good seeing you, Martin. And Eli—great to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
Then he and Jonathan disappeared, once again, into the party. In their absence, suddenly, Eli and I seemed to have nothing to say to each other.
“Well, ready to go?” I asked him after a minute.
“Whenever you are.”
So we bade our farewells to Derek and climbed into the car. We did not speak at all on the drive home. Almost as soon as we got there, Eli went to let out the dogs. I was just preparing a speech of self-defense, in which I would point out how unreasonable it was of him to resent an infidelity that had never taken place, when he came out of the kitchen. “There’s a message from your father,” he said. “You’d better listen.”
“Really? What is it?”
I followed him back into the kitchen, where he pressed the play button on the answering machine. “Hi, Martin,” my father said. “I’m sorry to be a pest, but I thought I should remind you that today is the anniversary of your mother’s death, and if you haven’t done so you ought to light a Yahrzeit candle. All’s well here. My best to Eli.”
A click. I sat down at the table. “Had you forgotten?” Eli asked.
I nodded. Stealing up behind me, he rubbed my shoulders, as weeks earlier he had rubbed Nora’s. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “it’s okay. The A&P should still be open. We can buy one there.”
“Can we?” Bad Jew that I was, I had no idea how easy (or difficult) it was to buy a Yahrzeit candle; indeed, I had only the vaguest conception of what a Yahrzeit candle was, though dimly I could recall my mother lighting one twice a year, on the anniversaries of her parents’ deaths, a glass cup of wax glowing on the ledge behind the kitchen sink.
We drove to the A&P. Because East Hampton still cleared out at the end of every weekend in those years, there were at most half a dozen cars in the parking lot. Inside, only a single checkout lane was open. While Eli stocked up on groceries, I headed for the kosher section, where amid the chilly freezer-bum smell emanating from the ice cream cases I found, just as he had promised, a cache of Yahrzeit candles for $1.99 each. When I picked one up, dust blackened my fingers. Here it was, a thick cup of wax into which some uncaring thumb had pressed an aluminum wick like a sequin. Homely and crude. And not for the first time it startled me, the ease with which Judaism transforms its mystic symbols into commonplace, even drab commodities: not only Yahrzeit candles, but the matzoh in its bright red and white boxes, so remote from the Old Testament’s “unleavened bread”; the lumps of gefilte fish in their cloudy juice, in big jars the labels of which listed as ingredients carp and pike, though my father had once told me that gefilte fish combined every fish in the sea. Of course there was no truth to that; the legend spoke more of his fancy than any tradition. Yet it had stayed with me over the years, from Passover to Passover, those dinners at which, being the youngest, I always got to ask the Four Questions ... And then after dinner, in mimicry of the egg hunts of Easter, we would search the house for the piece of matzoh my father had wrapped in a paper napkin and hidden, pirates avid for the prize, which was not much of a prize really, only a few of those weird jelly candies, shaped like slices of orange and lemon, and of which, along with matzoh and gefilte fish, the A&P kept an ample supply ... I threw my Yahrzeit candle into the cart and went to find Eli, who was in the fruit section.
After that we loaded up on apple cider, milk, yogurt, muesli, Pepperidge Farm cookies, Listerine, and cottage cheese, and got in line. Ahead of us a heavy man with a gray-flecked beard was smoking a cigar. Eli coughed. “How gross,” he muttered, just loudly enough to be heard.
No response. The man took another puff, exhaled. Eli coughed a second time. Nothing. He jabbed the man in the back.
“Excuse me.”
“Yeah?”
“Would you mind thinking of other people
for once and not smoking that disgusting thing in a public place?”
The man, who was taller than Eli by a head, turned and gazed down at him. “What did you say?” he asked, laughing a little, as if he couldn’t quite believe his ears.
People looked. “Eli—” I whispered.
“I said, why don’t you put that thing out? It’s gross and selfish.”
“Yeah, and why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
“Yeah, and why don’t you stuff that fucking cigar up your goddamned fat ass, asshole? Just get it out of my face.”
“What, you own the fucking store, buddy?”
“It’s disgusting—”
“Just answer my question. You, own the fucking store?”
“Eli, don’t.” I pointed to the Yahrzeit candle.
“Oh great,” he said. “Great.” Suddenly he was bearing down on me. “Goddamn it, Martin, sometimes I wonder why I even bother. You won’t support me when I try to defend myself. You are so fucked up. This whole thing is so fucked up. Excuse me.” He pushed at my cart. “Excuse me.” The other people in the line stepped out of the way.
Then he was racing off, jumping the barrier at one of the closed lanes, flying out the automatic doors. Strangers gawked. Shaking his head, the man with the cigar said, “Goddamn queer.”
I waited. What else could I do? With a curious delicacy the cashier rang up my total. “That’s twenty-two sixty-three, honey,” she said, her voice smug with what sounded like pity as I paid, took my bags, and hurried outside. Eli was already in the car, his brights trained on the supermarket doors. I loaded the groceries in the back and climbed in.
“Eli,” I said.
“Shut up.” Brights still on, he turned onto Newtown Lane. A man crossing the street cursed us. Eli gunned the engine, hurtled to a stop as the light on the comer of Main Street switched to red.
“I’ll only say this once. I can’t bear you anymore. Tonight I’m going home to my mother and you’re not coming with me.”
I started to cry. “How can you say that when I don’t even have a mother?”
Martin Bauman Page 44
