“Well, you turned out to be right about that,” he says. “Because the only thing I never thought about was whether it would ever matter what I thought. I only cared about my beliefs because I assumed my life would be full of opportunities to act on them. I felt that even after I dropped out of the race, you know. Even when I worked on Comment. I still believed my life would be some sort of, you know. Some sort of moral canvass.” He shakes his head. “I don’t get the sense you were ever under that impression.”
“I’m an artist,” I say. “I was born to be inconsequential.”
“So is everyone,” says Matthew. “If you’re really lucky, you might have a handful of chances not to be. And if you miss them, then your convictions will be of interest only to you. They’ll amount to a form of solipsism.”
“But you’re on television,” I say. “Everything you do matters.”
“God, I hope you’re wrong about that.”
“So make some new chances, then.” I am getting fed up with this. “You’re rich. You’re healthy. You’re alive, which is more than a lot of people can say.”
“Make some new chances,” he says. “Yes. I am trying.”
“With the gun stuff?”
“Partly that.”
“Well, why stop there? You should go back into politics!” I laugh. “You should run for president! You’d probably be elected in a landslide.”
Matthew frowns as though I’ve said something cruel, and I wonder if this is a thought he’s actually considered. A woman on the sidewalk pauses to goggle at Matthew through the window; her wispy-haired baby is goggling at me. I goggle back.
“It isn’t always clear, what it means to do the right thing,” says Matthew. “But we never get to know when it’s our last chance to try. And eventually, there comes a point when you’re grateful for the chance to make small gestures.”
“Is this what this letter thing is, then?” I say. “A gesture?”
“No,” he says. “As usual, I mean something else entirely.”
“Well,” I say. “I’m still listening.”
This moment feels magnified and strangely remote: I feel I’m staring it down through a loupe. At the window, the woman is still staring; Matthew turns to wave at her and she scurries away, mortified. He looks relieved when he turns around—because she didn’t want his autograph, I suppose.
“What do you want from me?” he asks.
“Nothing.” And maybe, in this moment, it begins to be true.
“Then why are you here?” he says. “I mean, really.”
The feeling in the room teeters for a moment—something like the suspense that spears through a subway station when somebody gets too close to the tracks.
And then I say: “I’m still deciding.”
* * *
—
Afterward, I head to the Rawhide.
I am searching, I think, for a dose of the invisibility I felt in the Mattie M waiting room. It’s not so easy to come by, even in New York. There are always looks: that flick of curiosity, that momentary advance-and-retreat of speculation. The partial uprising of an eyebrow followed by its brutal suppression. It’s been a while since I’ve been there, though in the old days we went all the time—usually as a last resort, like anything right around the corner. I wonder if the Puerto Rican guys still play dominoes outside on Saturday nights. We started going in ’79, I think: now this is a place that’s seen it all.
I push the curtains aside and enter caliginous depths: inside, it is always dark, and never the wrong time for a cocktail. Once, Matthew had told me long ago, this place had been a candy store. I order one drink, then another, and then I notice someone staring at me. He has bright, watchful eyes and a nose the right kind of crooked, and for old times’ sake, I follow him into the bathroom. We clutch at each other for some incalculable while until I drop to my knees. We wordlessly negotiate: no condom, and no further. We are mortal again, for a moment, as I unzip his jeans. And then, for another moment, we are not.
* * *
—
Ten years into the plague, and what are we left with?
We are left with images.
The shadowy men in the lots near the pier, the piano patterning of lights on the buildings just beyond.
The shivering, astral sheen of headlights on the East River.
Paulie taking an unabashed chomp of cheese in the park, a strand dribbling down his chin.
Paulie’s scarred saurian hands, his strangely unblemished face, as he lay, finally quiet, in his casket.
The countless times we’d asked him to be quiet—how we’d demanded, shouted, issued toothless ultimatums.
That single spoiled orchid he used to keep above the mantel.
The rust smell of the jail cell, that night we got arrested and first met Matthew Miller.
The way Matthew bent over Stephen, an expression of impersonal, unsurprised tenderness on his face.
The way he said, “I don’t think you’re ready to give up the ghost quite yet.”
The day nineteen years later when Stephen finally was ready, and finally did.
The way Stephen’s eyes dimmed and waned that night; the way they still wanted to come back to us.
The smell of Stephen’s Penhaligon cologne, back at the very beginning.
The bleach burn of the stranger in my throat—right now, right this very second—as I walk down Eighth Avenue.
I’ll never see him again, but that’s not saying much: to think that once it was a thrill, to lose a man you’d fucked to New York City.
* * *
—
Most of all, we are left with the counterfactuals. They come to us late at night, every night: the question of the iceberg, the question of the lifeboats.
If they had shuttered the bathhouses.
If they hadn’t shuttered the TB clinics.
If Rock Hudson had declared himself sooner.
If Jimmy Carter had still been president.
If Gerald fucking Ford had still been president.
If Matthew Miller had been the mayor of New York.
Though it’s easy to overestimate this one. Matthew Miller would have confronted the same lack of federal funding and national public health infrastructure; he would have been bullied and bludgeoned by the same political forces, seen and unseen. It is unclear what a man of courage might have done in this context, and it is unclear whether Matthew Miller would have ever become one.
Still: one suspects he would have mentioned it. At the time, this would have been no small matter.
In politics, as in theater, timing is everything.
TWENTY-NINE
cel
Every night, still, Cel dreams of the woods. So it cannot be entirely right to say that it has been years since she’s been home. On a literal level it is true: the last time she went back was in November of ’89, right after Ruth died, and not long before Hal, his thankless missions finally completed, allowed himself to die as well. Cel was irrationally surprised by this. She had perhaps not entirely believed old Hal had it in him—death being the sort of enforced idleness of which he seemed congenitally, permanently incapable. But then, there was the matter of Hal’s death certificate, followed by the amphora of his alleged ashes once the UNH forensics students were done with him. Cel had to accept the truth of these things; she had not gone to see Hal’s body. She told herself he wouldn’t have wanted her to. More likely: he wouldn’t have cared. But there was no one to watch her bravely appear, no one to notice if she did not. And hadn’t she been through enough for one year? Elspeth assured her that she had, as she wept on a stool in the common room. She’d been through enough for one lifetime, said Elspeth, and Cel felt a secret, sequestered relief: an ignoble hope that she might, from here on out, be off the hook.
And so the last time she saw Hal
turned out to be the last time she saw everything: the house, and the woods, and Ruth—looking strange but not dreadful in the casket. They’d left it open, so that people couldn’t imagine things were worse than they were. Afterward, Cel and Hal moved through the house sorting bric-a-brac, aeons of detritus, with an abstract, half-feigned sense of urgency. What is this impulse to start moving things around when someone dies—to disrupt items that had sat in the same place, demanding nothing, bothering no one, for decades? A Whip Inflation Now pin, a rusted bottle of Brylcreem. There was not necessarily a point. And yet this was what was done, it seemed, and Ruth had always had a strange, intermittent regard for what was done. The way one organizes a bridal shower, the way one lays out a table—Ruth spoke of these rituals as ongoing, part of a pageant that continued somewhere without her and that she might, at any moment, rejoin. She had her fussy little flourishes, her inscrutable points of judgment. She’d hated the blue mohair couch Hal brought home, in a fit of what he’d hoped would be upward mobility. Though in fact they’d been aggressively downwardly mobile—even during a time (and really, it was the only time) when a lot of people were going the other way. It took years for Cel to realize this part: that where Ruth wound up was nothing like where she started.
But here, sorting through the house, is the evidence. Ruth’s teetering old piano, for one, which Hal will sell for lumber at a price gauged artificially high by pity. There are the prissy little things Cel finds in Ruth’s drawers: heavy, high-quality stationery; frilled linen with tiny blue flowers—these, it seems, are relics of something more than money. At the bottom of the drawer, she finds a collection of porcelain miniatures she remembers from her childhood. According to the lawyer, they would have been worth a lot, if there’d been a whole lot more of them.
“Well, you could say that about anything, couldn’t you?” says Hal. “You could say that about a wheat penny.”
“Not anymore,” says Cel. She is using what they both regard as her college voice. “They’re out of circulation.”
One of the figurines shows a little girl pulling a sled across a snowy field; another has a boy in a straw hat painting a fence—and this, she understands without even thinking, is Tom Sawyer. She stares as signifier merges violently, permanently, with signified. One of the figures depicts a tiny park done in crisp, crayon-bright colors: green landscape, blue river, red bridge. In the stream are boats shaped like swans: this, she’d always known, was the Boston Public Garden. Her mother had always promised to take her there, to see them. She stares at the little park in her hands. She admires the intricacy of the swans—their black beaks, their bowed necks. As a child, Cel had never really understood what a swan boat was, had always been a bit apprehensive about finding out. But now she sees what a child might have seen—the charming, fairy-tale quality of the park, those swans like cumulus chariots—and she understands finally that someone must have taken Ruth there as a child, and that she must have loved it very much, and that this hadn’t stopped her from throwing herself off a bridge thirty-one years later.
“Anyway,” says Cel. “That isn’t really what he means.”
“Oh no, Celeste?” says Hal. “Then educate me.”
Cel puts the figurine down. She doesn’t think she wants to take it with her.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she says. “He’s talking about something else entirely.”
* * *
—
On Friday morning, the VIP is back.
“You’re back,” Cel says, when she meets him halfway down the hallway.
“I came to drop this off for Matthew.” He is holding a package under his arm; Cel wonders idly if it’s a bomb.
“Oh,” says Cel. “Is this something you want him to sign?”
He shakes his head and hands Cel an envelope containing an object the size of an ear. Hopefully not an actual ear.
“Seems like you guys are in a bit of trouble around here,” says the VIP.
“I guess.” He means the letter, she figures. “I mean, the thing about Mattie is that there’s no one he won’t talk to.” She eyes him. “Or maybe you know that.”
“I like that line of defense,” says the man. “It’s very classical. Retroactively casts a flaw as a strength.”
Cel squints at him. He is slight and a little paunchy—nervous-seeming energy, receding hairline. Smart, strangely soulful eyes. Not, she thinks, the usual viewer. “I guess you’re probably a writer,” she says.
“Is that what you’re trying to be?”
“No.”
“Not the stage, I hope.”
“I’m not really trying to be anything.”
He scoffs. “Of course you are. You’re, what, twenty-four? And you live in New York City.”
“I might move,” she says.
“Don’t tell me. California.”
Behind the VIP, a giant red promo poster is approaching on a lorry. Cel wonders where it’s going and if the man wheeling it even works here—he’s wearing overalls, so she’s going to assume that he does.
“Well, nobody’s trying to be anything out in California,” says the VIP. “So you will fit right in.”
Cel says nothing. She can hear a different sort of silence start to bleed, then clot, into the pause between them, and then the man laughs.
“Well, good luck out there,” he says. “And don’t let anyone tell you the golden age of cinema is over! Remember the golden age of anything is always right before you got there.”
“I hear that a lot around here.”
“I bet you do.”
There’s a lateritic turn to the light: can it possibly be evening already? But no, it’s only the bright red promo poster blocking a window while it’s wheeled off to wherever. The VIP, Cel notices, is turning and walking away.
“Hey,” she says, and he stops.
“Yes?”
“Was Mattie a good lawyer?”
He laughs again. “Was Mattie a good lawyer,” he says. “I can tell you I had zero complaints about his lawyering.”
“I can’t imagine Mattie as a lawyer. Or a politician.”
“He was highly regarded as both, if you can believe it. Some people thought he was a sort of political genius. A real working-class Kennedy. He even had the crypto-Catholicism down.”
“Isn’t everybody the Kennedy of something, though?”
“No.”
“Just like everywhere is the Paris of somewhere?”
“No, not remotely.”
“We read his mail, you know,” says Cel. “Ever since the—well, recently.”
The man shrugs. “There’s nothing in there to read. It’s just a recording of our conversation. I thought he might be interested.”
Cel nods. The promo poster, she sees, has been abandoned by its minder. It leans against a wall, an enormous sideways Mattie giving a perfectly horizontal thumbs-up.
“Mattie as a Catholic!” she says. “It’s impossible.”
“I didn’t say he is anything.” The VIP puts the is in quotes. “And impossible isn’t saying much, these days.”
“I guess not,” says Cel. “The other day someone told me that there are more people alive right now than have ever died.”
Was that really just the other day?
“I don’t think that can be right,” says the man. “Everyone I know is dead.”
* * *
—
Cel listens to the tape right away, of course, as the man must have expected that she would. The conversation is muffled and confusing, but several things are evident. First, it is clear that Mattie has no idea he is being recorded. Second, it is clear that the man thinks he’s engaged in some sort of aggression, though its precise nature is unclear. In terms of what is literally said, it could be worse. Mattie’s contempt for the show comes through, which isn’t great, but there’s no men
tion of Ryan Muller or the letters. What mostly emerges is a sort of oblique lecture about AIDS—anfractuous, high-minded, fairly one-sided, and not at all unlike the kind of thing Mattie used to do on Comment: this means no one will pay attention. More ominous is the conversation’s subtext: it is screechingly obvious to Cel that Mattie and the VIP were lovers once, though it’s equally obvious that they currently are not. Though there have been rumors about Mattie for years, an actual outing would be another matter—likely to be a fatal blow to the show at any time, and right now, of course, forget it. The problem isn’t so much that the cultural conservatives would go off the deep end—when it comes to Mattie, they’re pretty much already there. And the show’s viewership is obviously not exactly squeamish about nontraditional lifestyles. But evidence of Mattie being gay would make him one of the guests; viewers would no longer trust him to navigate them through the underworld, or to bring them back again safely. So yes, Cel thinks: documentation of Mattie’s sexuality would be a very, very big deal. It would certainly be highly lucrative, as blackmail or as news. But if this is blackmail, why does the man leave their past together implied? And if this is an item he’s trying to sell to a tabloid, why did he bother giving them a heads-up? And if it’s meant to be a public service announcement, some kind of arty comment or critique—well, it just isn’t. Or if it is, Cel doesn’t get it.
She plays the recording again, trying to listen for what the man wants. Mostly, he just seems to want to talk to Mattie—to let him know he’s angry at him, still, after however many years. This is his agenda; the interview is the pretext. If there’s another scheme he’s meant to be prosecuting here, he is clearly very bad at it, and it is very likely not his own. So who is really behind this conversation?
Scott.
Scott. Well, sure.
Cel mourns, briefly, for all the jokes she’d thought he’d laughed at.
* * *
—
Cel gets drunk, then tells Elspeth.
The Spectators Page 30
