by John Rowell
“Yes, yes. Mr. New York. The one who abstains. Courteously.”
“Yeah … you don’t want him, Jackson. He’s odd. And a loner. He’s always going off in the woods by himself. Nobody can figure him out.”
“Odd? Odd … What is that code for? Does that mean straight? He’s straight? Oh please.”
“Hmmm … well, none of us knows. But we have our suspicions.”
“Wait, don’t tell me,” I say. “New York is undecided.”
Thomas sighs. “Yes … undecided. Or, perhaps he just hasn’t cast his vote yet.”
We’re almost at the car; Jake and Wynn are already there. Jake is demonstrating what looks like a pas de bourée, which is nicely executed, even in flip-flops. Thomas digs in his dance bag for his keys.
“Really?” I say. “Imagine that. Undecided.”
He locates his keys, and then looks up at me, staring me straight in the eye with a sly smile.
“Yes,” he says, “but he’s courteous about it.”
At Thomas’s rustic little cabin in the woods (Perry calls it “The House That Les Miz Built”), we seven boys of varying ages and varying talents and varying claims to chunks of that elusive dream called “A Life in the Theater” can at least agree on one thing, though no one has brought this to an actual vote: we like men. We also like: vodka, gin, vermouth, wine, beer, and—God help us—the Patti LuPone CD currently playing on Thomas’s stereo.
“Oh, Patti LuPone Live!” says the chipper redhead Wynn, who is seated next to Jake on Thomas’s battered old blue couch, and who has, I’m starting to notice, an annoying/endearing habit of phrasing everything he says like a question. “Is this great or what? This is the concert Patti did when she still thought she was going to star in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway? And she goes into character as Norma at the end? And—”
“And she jinxes it,” interrupts Jake, besotted with both red wine and the lure of telling tales of musical theater misdeeds, “because then they snatched it right out from under her nose and gave it to Glenn Close.” They are like a comedy team, this little duo of Connecticut and North Carolina, completing each other’s sentences with breathless excitement, and then giggling. I’ve also noticed, and I’m sure Thomas has too, that as of five minutes ago, they’ve begun to hold hands. Earlier, as Thomas and I were icing glasses and slicing limes at his kitchen sink, he whispered: “I think Jake and I might be … well, you know. I think he’s interested, and I definitely am.” Which was fine with me, since I was all set to go about trying to seduce the gentleman from North Carolina. “Maybe I can win Wynn,” I said, as I poured an obscene amount of vodka into the drink I was making for him.
Now, with Jake and Wynn holding hands and chirping like little musical comedy magpies, it’s looking like Thomas and I are going home empty-handed, as it were. Both of us turn away from drink-mixing at the same moment to catch sight of Jake casually lifting his hand to smooth Wynn’s beautiful red hair, causing Wynn to rest his head on Jake’s shoulder and close his eyes.
“You mean,” says Kevin, from the corner where he’s sitting next to Duffy and Perry, though closer to Duffy, of course, “that Patti thought she was gonna do Sunset Boulevard on Broadway and they took it away from her?”
The rest of us freeze instantly. No one takes a sip of a drink, rattles an ice cube, or bites into a pretzel. The sudden suspension of conversation, perhaps even of breathing, is truly deafening. Sitting in a roomful of musical theater aficionados and not knowing the tale of Patti LuPone’s humiliating loss of the Norma Desmond role in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway is tantamount to being a scientist at a quantum physics convention who’s never heard that Einstein was responsible for E=mc2 .
Finally, I take it upon myself to break the silence and voice what everyone else is thinking, which is: “Should he be allowed to stay?”
Kevin looks confused, wearing the slightly goofy, slightly querulous look of someone who is slowly realizing, with mounting horror, that he has committed a gross faux pas. “Be quiet, Jackson,” says Thomas. “Of course he can stay. You can stay, Kevin.”
“You can stay, Kevin,” says Jake. “Connecticut says ‘yea.’” This sends Wynn into a fit of giggles.
“And North Carolina yields to South Carolina,” Wynn says, smiling at Thomas, even as he continues to rest his head on Jake’s shoulder.
“Not tonight,” says Perry under his breath, prompting Thomas to throw him a daggery glance.
“Well,” I say, “I’m the official representative now from New York. And, of course, New York abstains, courteously.”
“That’s no fun, to abstain,” says Wynn, with a saucy lilt, suddenly lifting his head and focusing his pretty blue eyes on me. And I’m thinking: What? Now you’re teasing me? Excuse me, where have you been all evening, North Carolina? And is it your mission to flirt with everyone in the room?
“The thing is, Rhode Island,” says Perry, blotto from the one-two punch of three martinis and Duffy’s full frontal flirting with Kevin, “is … that there’s a lesson to be learned from the saga of Miss LuPone and Sunset Boulevard and how she jinxed herself.”
“What’s that?” I ask, playing George Burns to his Gracie Allen, Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis.
Perry looks lasciviously around the room at the young folk.
“Don’t count your chickens,” he says slowly.
“I think we’ll go for a walk,” says Duffy suddenly. “Come on, Kev, let’s go outside and look at the stars.”
“I thought that’s what we were doing in here,” says Perry, indicating Thomas. I think that like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, he’s been forced to admit a rather large defeat.
“Sure, man, let’s go,” says Kevin, looking suddenly quite relieved. And they are out the front door.
“Do you wanna … go out too?” Jake asks sotto voce to Wynn, though not sotto voce enough that the whole lot of us can’t hear it.
Wynn high-beams him back with those big blue eyes.
“We’re going for a walk, too,” announces Jake, redundantly. And, clutching their drinks, and each other’s hands, they, too, head out Thomas’s cabin door.
“Watch out for bears!” shouts Thomas, pleasantly.
“And then there were three,” I say, looking around from my deeply slumped position.
“Well …” says Perry. “This has been … enlightening.”
“Hasn’t it just?” says Thomas. He begins to pick up empty pretzel bowls and dead drink glasses.
“What are you going to do, Perry?” I ask.
He stands up, wobbly and flushed, but as determined as any Boy Scout, even an overaged one. Finally, like the foreman of a jury, he delivers his one-word proclamation:
“Compete,” he says. And he, too, finds his way out of Thomas’s front door.
“And then there were two,” I whisper.
“I had no fucking idea, obviously,” says Thomas, “that Jake and Wynn were interested in each other. Give me your glass.” He begins to drop in ice and pour Absolut. “Say when.”
“That’s a switch,” I say. “Earlier, it was like, sober up, sober up!”
“That was then, this is now.” He finishes making my drink, then replenishes his own.
The room is lit only by a few low-burning candles and the glow from a red lampshade on the end table. From the stereo, Patti LuPone receives thunderous applause for her final number, but then that, too, fades to silence.
“The lighting is very romantic in here,” I say. “You’ve done a great job with it. It makes us look years younger.”
“That’s a cold comfort,” Thomas says. “But thank you. Those of us who are about to turn forty salute you.”
“We’re still thirty-nine,” I say, lifting my glass and throwing my head back with pride, a drunk’s pride. “Here’s to still being thirty-nine.”
“Queer, queer!” he says. We clink. Then, slowly, he says, “My God, Jack. Thir-ty-nine … for-tee …”
“Well, don’t say them phonetically!”
I shout. “It makes them sound older. Say them quickly. Say ‘thirtynineforty.’ See? ‘Thirtynineforty.’ See how much more youthful it sounds when you say it fast like that? It takes years off the words.”
“You’re insane,” he says. “And you were insane when I met you a hundred and fifty years ago. God … I just realized we’ve known each other more than half our lives.”
I cover my eyes with the back of my hand to shield them from the truth. “Yes … almost as long as these … children … have been alive.”
“Exactly. What are we doing here? What are they doing here?”
“Don’t you know? We’re team teachers at the Days of Wine and Roses Nursery School.”
“Don’t berate the charms of youth,” he says. “It’s unseemly.” He gets up and peers out the window. “What do you think they’re all doing out there?” he whispers.
“Oh, you know, forging a new union.” I manage to hoist myself up and join him at the window. “Declaring themselves independent and free of the old ways. Which seems to be a theme of the evening.”
“Hmm … I think it’s probably more like a gay Midsummer Night’s Dream. Young lovers running around the woods like nymphs and sprites, undressing and cavorting.”
“Exactly. Yes. A bunch of fairies and one old jackass.”
Thomas sits back on the arm of his chair. “Poor Perry,” he says. “Poor, dear, cuckolded Perry. What’s to become of him?” He collapses back onto the cushion.
“Thomas,” I say. “Do you remember that night in Mildew Manor, so very long ago, when I got sick out the window?”
He groans. “Lord, child. I’ve never seen anybody throw up more violently in my whole life. I had to go out and hose off the ground the next morning.”
“A belated thank you, then, for taking care of me.”
He smiles and lifts his glass in my direction.
“What I remember,” I say, “is that you were rubbing my back. And I was thinking, God, Thomas is so great, and … and … so sweet, handsome, such a good friend … all of that … of course now it seems like the perfect porn film setup, both of us there, alone, just in our briefs. The next shot would have been your hand sliding down my back …”
He laughs. “Yes. Summer Stock Boys.”
“Except—not to sound ungrateful at this late date—but I remember thinking, what if one of the dancers were rubbing my back? Chris, or … whatever their names were. I would have been so turned on.”
“Oh God, yes. And it’s true. If you had been Chris, I would have gone for the gold, baby.”
“Ah. Then it would be Chris sitting here right now instead of me.”
“Wrong. He would have been on to somebody else in a month. We were eighteen! Please. I’m glad it’s you sitting here.”
“But … can you imagine if we had ended up lovers instead of … this … we could have saved ourselves a lot of time. And money.”
“Time, money, bad dates … and all those lovely two- and three-month relationships through the years …”
“Especially those.”
He gets up for more ice.
“Thomas,” I say, “speaking of good old Mildew Manor … do you have any idea whatever happened to good old Lee?”
He turns around holding the ice bowl, and looks at me for a moment with a blank expression. “Lee. God, that’s amazing. For a second I almost couldn’t remember who you were talking about.”
He brings the bowl over to the coffee table and sits back in his chair. A candle burns itself down into its little self-made valley of red wax, and dies.
“Old Lee,” he says. “Old Lee was exactly the same age you and I are now, you know. How frightening is that. God, I wonder what did happen to him.”
“No doubt he’s probably still choreographing Damn Yankees somewhere and trying to seduce the chorus boys.”
“Oh, Jackson. You’re drunk again, Precious. You’re drunk, and you’re mean. But it’s OK. You’re safe here with me.”
We sit quietly, drinking, staring into the corners of the room; every now and then we glance back at each other, just to check in.
“What made you think about Lee?” he asks, after a few minutes.
I look into those big, searching brown eyes for a long, held, exquisite moment. “Oh. I don’t know,” I tell him finally. “Just crossed my mind, that’s all. But, look, he’s already gone. Poof!”
He smiles, and looks down.
I hold up my glass. “More vodka, please, Precious,” I whisper, lifting my foot to his knee and giving him a gentle kick. He pours, without a word.
Laughter comes from somewhere outside. I keep looking at Thomas, but he’s staring off now, lost in the thought of … something. More and more laughter floats in through the window, laughter that might have once been described in a Jane Austen novel as “gay.”
“Ah, listen to the fairies,” I say, holding the icy tumbler against my cheek.
“Yes,” he says, dreamily. “Well, here’s my Ode to Youth: fuck youth.”
“I wish we could,” I say.
“Alas. Maybe someday.”
“Perhaps … but then again … perhaps not.” And we clink glasses.
Then we sit quietly for a while, saying nothing, just drinking, and more sounds of laughter and crickets and rustling leaves filter in from outside … and then the scent of honeysuckle and mountain laurel, ushered in on a breeze which blows the threadbare red silk curtains against the frame of a dilapidated old window where a boy in his underwear leans out, while another boy, also in his underwear, stands behind him rubbing his back, just rubbing, gently, gently, and that same hand moves from my back to the hand that I now have dangling across the arm of the chair, and Thomas takes my hand in his, and squeezes it, and then holds it, for what feels like a long, long time.
WILDLIFE OF COASTAL CAROLINA
Friday, 10:30 A.M.
The all points bulletin that I have to share with the citizenry of my town of Duck Island this morning is this:
“I, Talbert John Moss, have decided to end my self-imposed exile of nearly two weeks in which I have stayed in the bed mostly day and night. I am up and walking around now, and I am ready to be myself again. I know you all will be gladdened and filled with joy over this fact. Some of you anyway. Thank you to everyone who prayed for me during my exile, and thank you to everyone who brought food to my doorstep, especially the barbeque and the ham biscuits, the iced tea, and the two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. Much appreciated. I will see you soon. Love to all—or at least to many, T.J.”
I think I might even call up our radio station WAVE (this is the beach, after all) and ask them to read my statement over the air just like that. It’s hard to know how they’d take it, though; they don’t exactly have Rhodes scholars and Mensa candidates working over there. As is always the case, I fear my words could be misinterpreted by persons lacking a sense of humor, not to mention a sense of irony. Lacking both a sense of humor and a sense of irony is something that, in my humble opinion, applies to about 95 percent of the citizenry of Duck Island. It’s as if at some point—some point before I got here, of course—a horrible epidemic like bubonic plague came along and wiped everybody’s senses of humor and irony clean away. The Humor and Irony Plague, I believe it was called, the one that hit poor old Duck Island, in the mid-1970s, or thereabouts. That’s my theory, anyway; they ought to consult with me before they next update the North Carolina history textbooks; I have a thing or two I feel should be included.
But I guess somebody around here has a sense of humor, because this morning my alarm clock radio (set to WAVE) woke me up with this: “Now here’s a song being sent to Talbert Moss from a secret admirer who wants to say, ‘Talbert, I love you, and I hope you’ll be feeling better soon.’ And so do we, Talbert, buddy, so do we. Now here’s Miss Dionne Warwick singing the ‘Theme from Valley of the Dolls.’”
And I’m thinking: Valley of the Dolls? It is my favorite movie, after all. And, come to think of it, I have been kind of acting
like Patty Duke’s character in the movie, Neely O’Hara, because in order to stay in the bed for almost two weeks, I have had to drink the occasional Amstel Light and take my share of Extra-Strength Sominex, and the cumulative effect of that did start to make me feel like some boozy, blowsy ol’ Hollywood starlet who lays up in the bed all day and night, weepy and hagged-out, insulting people all around her in foul-mouthed and unrepentant ways, eventually refusing to take any calls or visitors …
So I listened to the song, with Dionne singing all about getting off this ride, getting off this merry-go-round, all that carnival imagery that I think is intended to imply dizziness and a feeling of being disoriented, and I certainly started to see how that applies to me. I got to thinking that was a pretty nice thing for somebody to do, actually, to call up WAVE and dedicate that song to me because they cared enough about me to try to help me get up and get out of bed. The more I thought about it, the more I decided it really was a sign that I needed to get up and get moving again. A sign—yes. If not from God, at least from Dionne Warwick, and everybody knows how connected to the psychic and spiritual worlds she is.
So I was really taking in Dionne Warwick’s message, really feeling it in my bones, really thinking how it just might be the thing to jump-start me. But then I heard the newsman come on with this: “There are still no leads in the disappearance of Donny Tyndall, the six-year-old Duck Island boy who was reported missing two weeks ago—” and then I had to snap the radio off immediately.
That was just so not what I wanted to hear, though I wasn’t surprised to hear it.
Donny. Little Donny … when I first found out he had gone missing, well, that’s about exactly when I decided to go into exile. It was just more than I could take, the thought of something bad happening to Donny. He was—and still is—my friend. And I knew things weren’t too good for him, really, so I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked, but still … that news made me sick to my stomach with nothing but pure fear. I’ve always felt that if you’re afraid of something that much, then it almost has to come true, so you’d better try real hard to beat that fear back and increase your odds for some kind of happy outcome, which is why I got out of bed this morning. After all, my laying in the bed wasn’t doing Donny or anybody else a bit of good, and I know I should be doing my part to help find him. I repeat—Donny was, and still is, my friend. No matter what.
